As the thin youth carried a large, heavy sack on his back and walked through the blue-tinted forest beyond the town, homesick thoughts gradually reached the forefront of his brain.
The ultimate goal is to return home.
Liue Sheng repeated this internally as to not get carried away. His desire, one that exists parallel to and intersects with the will to live, is to return back to where he once was in his first life.
The planet without the Profound Way.
He never thought about the complications of getting back his original life. He just wanted to go back to Earth.
This one thing was at the very front of his mind even as he smiled at the thought of Han returning to his home and losing his mind at Liu Sheng making off with everything he left behind.
"This is pretty heavy," he said, sighing at his own lack of strength. Speaking of strength...
"I really do need to figure out how to get more powerful. With a System, the path to strength should be obvious. But just how do I embark on that journey?"
With one foot before the other? He's already doing that, but feels no stronger. He's done exercises in the past and practiced throwing weapons. He's done an assortment of things that pushed his mortal, common body to a limit without it suffering permanent damage and even then, there were small wears and tears both within the skin and on top of it.
Liu Sheng looked at his unmarred arms.
"I really did get restored to a completely recovered state."
It's like if a middle-aged man realized that the creaking in his joints and the painful cracks in his back were no more, a complete restoration of a body that was worn by time. No longer would be be slow to stand; no longer would there be small delays in his motor movements.
Though what Liu Sheng is feeling is less comparable to a miraculous transformation like that, the side effect was personally fantastic to him.
People his age referred to him as bad looking because of his scars, both the ones born from contusions that stayed too long and the self-inflicted injuries of training too hard. Whether it was the fault of his caretaker, Han, or his own recklessness, the youth built up a repertoire of wounds, a stockpile of accumulated injuries, and a rap sheet for his bullheadedness.
His earned consequences have vanished, leaving the potent lesson of cautiousness moot.
"With this ability to resurrect after death, can't I just be as reckless as I want?"
The worst thing that can happen to Liu Sheng is dying. If he can always avoid it, then he can always avoid the worst outcome.
That just means he can be as crazy as he wants and he'll be fine afterwards...right?
The boy tightly clutched onto his arms.
"No, no way," he says, shaking his head.
He remembered the pain of dying. He doesn't want to go through that again if he can help it.
He'll acknowledge the ability, but he doesn't want to spam it like it's going out of style.
The feeling of eyes being ripped out. Orbs connected to strings of nerved being severed, and with it his vision. Blind to everything, but the all-consuming pain.
Choking on water and blood. The bloating sensation like a beached whale a simple poke from bursting. Holding it in and suffering a death from the profound energy of water rampaging in his body and destroying his organs painlessly.
The dread of pain and the dread of no pain are both things Liu Sheng is intimately familiar with.
He swayed, the burning memory of water strong. He placed a palm on a tree to prevent himself from stumbling and falling. He trembled.
Liu Sheng isn't someone who can just shrug off something like that.
"Am I just acting stupid? I'm following a fleeting emotion and now there's a new one seizing me. I...can still feel it."
That bloating feeling.
What if it hasn't gone away?
What if there's still profound energy coursing through him, slowly, waiting to sneak up on him like a predator? He'll die again.
Just as his mind was swirling in a chaotic haze of fearful thoughts, there was an abrupt sensation that made his head jerk forward, his eyes widening in surprise.
A feeling of something swelling, ballooning, expanding.
"What is this?" It's not painful. It's not painful at all.
In fact, it's comfortable. Something is being pulled inward, giving the feeling that Liu Sheng is becoming lighter.
All of a sudden...
Bang!
A limit was broken.
Liu Sheng's consciousness dove inward instinctively, guided by a formless strength. As if a foreigner was experiencing a new country for the first time, the youth's emotions were replete with starstruck awe and confusion mixing into the sentiment a tourist would feel.
Yet this was his own body!
To be a stranger within one's home means that an absurd transformation took place, rendering one's memories different from the current observation.
What entered Liu Sheng's inner eye was an abstract, thick tree layered on top of the insides of his body. Branches pierced through the walls and flesh of organs, yet there was no pain in the slightest. On top of those branches laid strange openings akin to doors with some of them remaining closed and others open.
A gaseous blue flow of energy was rapidly being pulled into the open entrances and filling the empty tunnels, running through the entirety of the tree.
"These are...!"
Liu Sheng would've been a fool if he couldn't figure out what this was.
Energy being drawn from his own vitality and the water elemental profound energy still contained in his body.
For one reason or another, his resurrection came with a free set of Profound Veins and now the profound energy has a place to rush in.
'But...this isn't good! It's still way too much!'
He regrets what he did before. If only he didn't go for a drink, then this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
But if he didn't go for that drink, then he probably would've never activated this System.
"Guess, I have to take the good with the bad," he said, a wry, forced smile on his face.
Liu Sheng took a moment to catch his breath. He found a sturdy tree to sit down with his back against it. Deep and rhythmic breaths flowed and resounded within the forest. With every inhale came a squeezing pressure; with every exhale came a relief. The excess energy slowly filtered out of his body through natural breathing while the rest of the energy flowed within his new veins.
Bang...!
Another booming echo from within, only audible to the youth.
The rushing tide of energy finally showed signs of lessening. From a raging current to a trickling stream, the profound energy from the endless mouthfuls of water he took into his body steadied.
"First level of the Elementary Profound Realm."
The first explosion was the sound of the profound veins becoming active from the rushing force of energy. The second explosion was entering the Profound Way as a cultivator.
There was an immediate change. Liu Sheng noticed the complete transformation of every part of his entire body; from the senses that grew sharper, to the parts of his body that seemed to respond with tighter reflexes than before, and the surging power running through his entire body giving the delusional idea of omnipotence, like he can take on the entire world.
"This is strange though."
He might not have experience, but he has knowledge. He struggled to learn how to read and understand a new language, especially in this backwater town with no real standardized education, so there were still some gaps in his literacy, but he knew how to communicate well enough.
His caretaker, Han, reluctantly taught him about cultivation and the Profound Way despite his prior lack of cultivation ability. The difficulty of entering the Elementary Profound Realm, exactly how to do it; both of these two things weren't really applicable to his situation, so he could only make a guess.
"The resurrection forced my vitality to overflow, and without my knowledge and control, it developed a set of profound veins to compensate? That doesn't sound accurate. Could it be that the resurrection brought me back as a complete person who lives in this world, thus it generated a new body under the law of the Profound Way? If that's the case, then the overflowing, newly generated vitality would've then flowed into these new veins causing me to basically skip months of hard word slowly pulling my own life energy into these veins."
He was previously half a person with one foot in his old world and one foot in this one. Dying again must've brought him completely over here.
Liu Sheng clenched his fists, his eyes shining.
"Nice!"
All it took was dying...again, but he can finally cultivate now!
The knowledge he acquired about cultivation can finally serve him.
He entered the Profound Way to ultimately escape it.
That journey begins here and now.