Dragon 15, year 8690 of the Grand Wulin Era,Alexander Grandstar

As I walked around the shelves, I noticed that the techniques were organized in a pretty meticulous way, such that a given shelf would gave very specific things on it. It was organized pretty meticulously first by the technique Tiers and grades: Mortal, Soldier, Earth, Heaven, and Mystic, Low, Intermediate, High, Peak, just like weapons, but higher tier techniques were much harder to find that higher tier weapons. They were also sorted by what type of technique they were . Body Refining, Mana Refining, Weapon Techniques(this included things like punching techniques and kicking techniques, as the body could be seen as the one weapon that you’d always have, no matter what) Alchemical Formulas, Weapon Refining Techniques, Formation Diagrams, Enchantment guides, and all sorts of other weird stuff, like techniques on how to create mana projectiles and other manifestations, as well as Spell Formulas. They were also sorted by what, if any elemental affinity a technique had.

I walked over to the shelves that held the Mana Cultivation techniques , and checked various books. Each technique manual had a formation in it that would check how compatible a cultivation technique was with you. Until now, I’d just used the basic cultivation technique everyone in the sect that didn’t have some sort of weird special constitution or illness used, and generally it worked well until you were about to break through to the Mana Sea stage.Doing a bit of checking, I found that while different cultivation techniques suited me to different degrees, my elemental affinity was extreme for almost every element, almost to the point of forming an Elemental Body. It was really weird for me to have this many affinities this high, but I assumed it had something to do with the way I was born, which i’d been told wasn’t the default way humans were born. Whether that meant I was a homunculus or something else, I planned to ask my parents later.

These affinities meant that I’d get the most benefit from multi-element techniques. The benefits there would be that I had more Mana available than others who used cultivation techniques of the same tier, all my individual element spells would be stronger, and that i’d more easily be able to use spells or techniques that drew on more than one element. However, due to my several affinities, I’d take more damage from most forms of elemental attack than someone who was exclusively attuned to one or two elements to a high degree, and my training speed, while still fast, would be slower than someone who had affinities similar to mine in only one or two elements. There were other benefits and negatives, but I didn’t really have enough knowledge to understand those yet.

I ended up choosing the highest tier technique that had all the affinities I possessed, the Existence Sutra. It was a Peak Earth-Grade technique that required high affinities in the Fire, Water, Earth, Metal, and Wood(both the nature-planty side and the wind-lightning side) elements, as well as the powers of Space, Time, Yin and Yang, Destruction,and Creation. Fortunately, my affinity for all these things was both high and perfectly equal, so I could cultivate it. It even had a Movement Technique built in, though the technique would be a bit hard to cultivate and wouldn’t work very well with a different cultivation technique.I injected a little bit of my mana into the manual’s formation, and it showed that I matched and even exceeded its requirements by glowing with a bright light that cycled through a bunch of colors before disappearing.

I went to the shelves containing Body Refining methods. Body Refining methods are a weird combination of exercise technique, a way to nourish your body with mana and external materials, and cultivation, making your body tougher, stronger, more flexible,increasing your endurance, speed, mana storage and usage capacity of the body, the control you had over your body and similar stuff. Elemental body refinement techniques were either meant for people with low affinity, to increase theirs, or for people who’d achieved an Elemental Body, to harness that power better.

Seeing as neither of those problems affected me, I looked for a non-elemental Body Refining technique that would help me with the many factors I needed to improve in an equal and balanced way. I needed one that would optimize my body for the Path of the Warmage, so it had to be one with as few drawbacks and weaknesses as possible. I couldn’t use say, a technique that would make my body incredibly strong, but would make me slow, or one that would give me a body well suited to a Warrior, but would make my spells weaker. I saw a few techniques that caught my eye, but they all either had fatal weaknesses, had requirements I either didnt fit or didn’t want to fit, used resources that I couldn't get, or would do weird stuff I didn’t want to my body.

I eventually settled on a Earth grade technique called Versatile Warmage Body that had all the requirements I wanted in terms of thing like flexibility, agility, endurance, strength, and so on. The only weakness was that it required one to learn both Enchanting and Alchemy, as it required you to be able to add enchantments to your body, as well as alter them,and alchemical medicines to help nourish the body and to prevent weird things that might happen when cultivating the technique. I figured that since I was learning both, this would be pretty perfect for me.

I then decided I should get a Martial Art technique, one that has kicks, punches, and the like!

I was looking for Martial Arts that were infused with both the elements I had affinity with and that contained concepts related to them, like sharpness for metal, vitality for wood, explosiveness for flame, and so on. After searching through numerous manuals, I found one.

It was in several books,arranged across all the tiers from Human to Mythic! The Five Elements Martial Technique had been created by a terrifyingly powerful warmage who specialized in close combat, and contained fist, palm, and leg moves that suited what I need, and the first layer of the martial art was a peak Human tier martial art,suited for the peak of the Misty Sea realm and the early Mana Sea realm.Whenever I cultivated a layer to perfection, I could move on to the next, and each was most suited to a different realm of cultivation! Many of the techniques within listed ways they could be applied to weapons once I’d learned to use them, so I figured this was what was most suited to me.

As for a spear technique? I figured I should pick the easiest thing first, as I already at least knew a bit about normal, non-mana infused fistfighting, but had no real knowledge of spearmanship beyond books. I chose the most popular low-grade Human spear technique, the Military Spear Codex ,as it was the one that was supposedly the most easily learned, well balanced, and least flawed technique among the foundational spear techniques, and you could easily fuse insights about the elements and other things into it, as it wasn’t very complicated. It was also pretty suited to the type of spear I used, as it contained some sweeping and slashing moves.