| Purchased: Learning Ability Upgrade (D) | -4,500,000 AP

| Remaining AP: 484,120

Shen's learning ability score increased by 8—plus an extra 0.8 from this Title—just shy of doubling. He already had over 8 times the average mortal's learning ability, and doubling it pushed it to more extraordinary lengths still.

The world opened to him.

Shen had thought he had reached the optimal point of qi input versus output before. Now, he realized that while his output was good, there were still ways to use Combat, Flow, and Zephyr to improve it even more.

His footwork and spear art also benefited. He understood much, much better how to go from one movement to another, how to attack in patterns that made no sense to him previously, how to push more of his Concepts into everything he did.

But it was his cultivation that benefited the most from it. Shen had just mastered Flow, and though it had given him many ideas on how to cultivate better, the extra learning ability seemed to have broken through some sort of threshold. He suddenly understood his cultivation method much better than ever before. How qi became his, was compressed, and entered and nurtured his body and soul.

Shen pulled qi from the surroundings into his core and willed it to become his. It obeyed and turned almost instantly. Then he pushed the energy into his body and soul, and not only did it travel faster, but it was also better absorbed. Both his passive and active cultivation speed became at least five times faster than before.

A lot went through his head as connections were simply created between things he previously thought were wholly separated. It was like suddenly finding the missing link between heaven and Earth, like discovering gravity and how it kept the world rotating around the sun despite having never even noticed that the planet pulled things toward it.

And now, it was time to use all of that to bring death upon his enemies.

Shen took a deep breath, released a short burst of qi for each of his Concepts to feel reassured by feeling them again, then rushed to the closest gnoll.

Even as he moved at Mach 6 speed, his movement improved slightly every few feet. His agility gave him a base speed that his footwork and Concepts added on, and it also provided him with a fast reaction speed. His learning ability found and let him correct even minimal mistakes at thought speed.

On the one hand, a higher learning ability gave him a lot of processing power. On the other hand, when dealing with things he was already familiar with, he also quickly reached their maximum potential.

When Shen reached a gnoll at almost Mach 7 speed—after multiple improvements—he had become the fastest he could on D-rank unless his footwork's next levels had some secrets to them, and he leveled them up before reaching C-rank.

That was a skyrocket pace to the peak. Shen felt that his learning ability would fill a much more crucial role when he started dealing directly with Laws, which were alien to him—well, it was called learning speed instead of thought speed for a reason.

Shen didn't stop when he got close to a gnoll. He was surprised not to feel any monolith affecting him but guessed it had to do with the mana stream affecting even those beyond the immediate damage range.

He crushed through the first few rows of gnolls without ever stopping.

Armor and flesh turned into bits an instant before dissolving into light.

It was strange to kill like that. It made him think about how little life was worth. This went beyond killing them easily; he was ignoring their presence altogether. They just became a non-factor. He ran fast, and they were killed due to that simple action.

Unfortunately, Shen took a point of damage for every three or four gnolls he went through. The agility stat made his body resistant to its own speed and some impact, but his D+ resistance wasn't enough to completely nullify great external shocks at such incredible speed.

As much as the free AP was nice, Shen felt bad for not using the opportunity to improve himself in everything he could, so he forced himself to stop after he had lost fifty HP.

Although he stopped, the experience of killing by running had been enlightening. Shen was a spearman. He had been using the abilities of one, the martial arts of a clan of spearmen, and he had grown up seeing people using spears. He had once felt one with the spear but had never done it again. Now, he went one step further.

Now, without any weapon in hand, he became the spear.

It was an exotic and illuminating experience. Shen realized many inefficiencies in his fighting caused by his techniques' limitations. The issue, he acknowledged, came from the fact that his Skills were created for fighting people of similar power or stronger. However, they didn't adapt well to dealing with weaklings.

That was an honorable choice to make, but at the same time, it limited the spearman. By finding more effective ways of killing the weak, like going through them, one could get ideas on dealing with stronger foes. Using the previous example, or more specifically the damage he took while killing like that, Shen noticed for the first time how his clan's martial arts were notoriously lacking in any moves that contained mutual destruction. There were a few such techniques, but the martial arts pursued absolute perfection most of the time. If you had to get hit to deal damage, your technique was lacking, and that was it. There was no alternative other than to "git gud," as Alicia would put it.

Shen shut down the pang of guilt he felt when he thought about her before it could surface.

Back to the issue at hand, he had o admit that a technique that promised to solve all problems if you got good enough at it sounded much better than one that relied on mutual destruction. However, sooner or later, warriors would see themselves in a situation they couldn't deal with by using even flawless techniques. They would then develop their own way of sacrificing something for a less terrible outcome on the fly, which would be ineffective.

Also worth noting was the Eternal Empire's average cultivator body was different from Shen's Guardian body. Back then, you could bleed to death, or some injuries might take too long to heal, potentially leaving a warrior out of a fight or a long war. Caring for their body was crucial. However, a Guardian's health was just a resource that caused death if it reached 0. It was arguably a bad idea to have it at 100% all the time, as it was a freely recoverable resource, and thus it was a waste of health regen.

Shen could tell how that line of thought might bring dangerous habits, but another thing he had over the cultivators of his time was the learning ability upgrade. Muscle memory was a thing, but he felt it was harder to lose and easier to gain or change. It felt hard for him to make a stupid unconscious decision in a fight when he could think so quickly. As long as he also kept seeking perfection with his skills, finding ways to exploit his health points would be an intelligent decision.

The worst argument against learning how to better use HP as a resource was time. One could only do so much with their limited time in life. However, his higher learning ability also took care of that, and he could merely prioritize flawless technique instead of completely ditching a fighting style that might benefit him.

This was an excellent opportunity to adapt his fighting style to contain moves that expected him to lose HP here and there for a better chance at an attack, so Shen did just that.

His aura and Foundational Qi turned his hands and feet into sharp blades—which was actually painful and dealt a couple of points of damage to him, but it was bearable—and he started killing.

A swing beheaded a gnoll, a thrust destroyed another's brain, a hook impaled yet another's head, and a somersault bisected four of them. Shen became a tool of destruction in the most literal sense. That gave him a new, much more intimate understanding of what the Spear was.

It was ironic, really, how he had claimed to walk the Path of the Spear for so long yet had kept himself so separated from it.

A spear was a weapon, pure and simple. It served a primary purpose: dealing damage. Its secondary purposes, like how or when it was wielded—or even not wielded but threatening to get used if needed—were based on how much damage it could deal; a broken or dull spear scared no one, so it couldn't fulfill any purpose by itself. Even as a decorative piece, a broken spear only served if it had some higher meaning, historical or emotional, for its past glory, not for what it could still do.

So Sharpness was the most fundamental of his Fundamental Concepts for the Spear. Of the three, only it pertained to the spear itself, what it was, its primary purpose, and not how or for what reason it was used. War and Combat came as an extension of that. Yet Shen had focused on War so much more that he had mastered it first, and Sharpness had been the last one.

That didn't matter to his killing efficiency, as all three Concepts had mixed together, and he now used them equally in battle. However, the shift in perspective was vital for him to understand himself better.

Being War or Combat incarnate was necessary but not as crucial as being Sharp. Metaphorically and emotionally speaking, the three Concepts had different applications. Sharpness differed significantly from the other two, and being mentally Sharp was way, way different from being mentally at War or in Combat all the time.

That hit so true to Shen's latest circumstances that it physically hurt. The very same robustness one could find in War or Combat had caused Valentine to take revenge on him and the gnolls to use the orb on him—thus leaving him naked and weaponless. He considered that determination to be a core part of himself, yet actually went a little against the core of the Spear, Sharpness.

Shen frowned.

Then again, he had not thought of being his Path incarnate when he made the decisions. War and Combat hadn't mattered; honor had.

Shen... wasn't as much a Spear as he thought himself to be, was he?

He had believed himself to be a guided Spear, yet now he understood once and for all that, despite physically using his body as a Spear right now, his Path was definitely not the Path of the Spear. It was the Path of Feng Shen. He was himself, part of a whole, yet unique in his own way.

The realization was like being slapped in the face and struck in the gut at the same time. It felt like waking up from a pleasant dream into a world of harsh truths.

The Spear was his most important link to his clan, yet he had to admit that he was a completely separate entity walking an entirely different Path from them all.

He found his clan's techniques lacking all the time but kept clinging to them. He found himself being different from the Spear all the time but kept thinking of himself as walking its Path. He saw himself as a cultivator but used the system to become something so different from his contemporaries.

Shen was a cultivator spearman. Yet he was also different.

He was his own self, and it was time to accept that.

The acceptance came like cutting the umbilical cord to something comfortable yet illusory. It gave him a feeling of inner emptiness that was eerily similar to what he had felt when he recovered from Valentina's spell. He recognized it now as a sense of gain at the cost of a loss, an intimate bittersweetness that was hard to put into words.

Part of him called that growing up. He wasn't sure if he liked it, but that was who he was. He would take it no matter the consequences—as his more intimate inner core, his honor and truthness to himself and his Path demanded.

Paradoxically, in becoming one with the Spear, Shen found he had never been truly one with the Spear.

And he was fine with that.

It felt like an enormous weight was released from him. He felt more in sync with himself. It might've been only an impression, but he thought he was thinking even faster now. Not understanding and accepting his true self had been unconsciously dragging him down in ways even his learning ability couldn't detect.

Shen felt truly free at that moment.

Absolutely free.

Boundless.

The Concept, which was nowhere near completion, was suddenly mastered. Paradoxically, its true meaning in the Laws of the Spear was that it refused to be limited by any Law, which had resonated with Shen's enlightenment.

How could something called Boundless be bound by Laws or even small things like being close or far from being mastered? It bypassed the process of understanding the Concept because it couldn't be limited by it. It was Boundless, a paradox itself when it belonged to a Reality with boundaries.

When the mastered Concept of Boundlessness entered his aura, the aura range expanded tenfold from a hundred feet to a thousand. It permeated everything that Shen was, and he became about ten percent better in it all, including his learning ability and the way minds grew on rank-ups.

Shen felt himself expanding in a much more complete and fulling way than he could explain, maybe because the effects were so spread, or perhaps because it came from such crucial self-realization.

The almost Mach 7 speed that he had thought he wouldn't improve on soon became Mach 8 just like that. The improvements in his agility, how well he used it, and how well he could use his Skills compounded. That only added to the feeling of Boundlessness, and Shen laughed in sheer glee as he killed his enemies with abandon.

His aura was now at forty-percent effectiveness. He was faster, stronger, more resistant, and smarter than he had ever been.

He felt truly Boundless.

Gnolls turned into light at a ridiculous speed as he perfected his techniques. The monoliths started working again, but he didn't care. Shen was a Spear-yet-not, something else, something more, and he found his purpose in the honorable carnage.

Killing weaklings of his race wasn't honorable, but decimating traitors that would invade his planet if given a chance was, and he lost himself in the sensation for what felt like hours. He reached a new peak quickly, the best form of his current self, killing easily, quickly, effectively, with little to no waste, a perfect, unstoppable—

Suddenly, the eight orbs floating above the castle disappeared from where they had been.

They instantly appeared all around Shen, locking him in place with strong pulls from all sides.

A thousand gnolls in mismatching weaponry and armor appeared all around him as if they had always been there, ten of them releasing auras that fought for space against his.

"Kill him quickly," one of them said. "I smell Alliance treachery all over—"

Before he could even finish the sentence, Shen's vision was filled with notifications.

| Notice: rift portal reopened

| 6,732% devastation quota reached.

| Rifts are meant as training opportunities, not as an easy way of gaining AP. This rift's population will be given 201 Earth days to regroup and prepare for Earth's next assault. Every human inside will be forcibly teleported out.

| Error: This rift has a duration of only 90 days. A cooldown period of 201 days greatly surpasses it.

| Override engaged. New cooldown period: 9 days.

Light enveloped Shen and teleported him away.