Defiance of the Fall

e every day right now.
With the cultists gone and the defensive towers destroyed, the only threat to the beasts was the flock of birds from the mountains.

It felt like Earth in general was fast reaching a tipping point, where millions of peak F-Grade beasts finally broke the shackles of their inferior bloodlines and took the next step on the path of cultivation.
The beasts had always been a step ahead of the cultivators since the integration, and the humans were fast approaching peak F-Grade as well.

That was great news for Zac, though killing level 76 beasts weren’t all that beneficial for his cultivation either.
However, it did provide him with a seemingly endless supply of targets to practice both his Dao and his control over [Love’s Bond].

Any Spirit Tool created by the [Divine Investiture Array] was supposed to be a perfect fit for his needs and something that would be able to follow him in his cultivation until the end.
He needed to become better at using it, and not only relying on his axe.

Doing so would not only improve his overall strength, as using both his spirit tools at the same time wasn’t a problem, but it might even give him a greater understanding of both his classes and his cultivation path.

It was probably the best he could do for Alea as well.
Just hanging around his neck day after day wouldn’t challenge her spirit.
Spirit Tools grew and were refined through battle, and only through being used could they bring out their full potential.

’

The boar fell to the ground with a thud, but Zac didn’t bother harvesting the meat since it was tainted by him.
He only extracted the two tusks as they might be of use for the craftsmen on Port Atwood, before he shot out a chain that latched onto a tree in the distance.
The beast was left where it was, its meat turning into a feast for the other beasts in the region.

The trees flashed past Zac with a dizzying blur as the chains pulled him forward with extreme momentum.
He almost felt like a certain superhero as he flew through the forest toward the domain of the next E-Grade beast he had marked for target practice.

Using the chains as a mode of transportation was something he had already dabbled with since fighting the dragon, and he was quickly becoming more accustomed to it.
With [Love’s Bond] he could also use real and extremely sturdy chains rather than the flimsy spectral ones that the Cultist Bishop effortlessly had cut apart with his flames.

He still wasn’t fast as when he walked with the help of [Loamwalker], but it was still a huge improvement for his Draugr side, which was previously a slow-moving tank.
It looked a bit embarrassing though, like he was being dragged around through the jungle like a ragdoll.
Then again, he had long discarded any semblance of cultivator’s dignity in favor of pragmatism, so this was nothing to him.

Zac kept working on his coordination and his strikes like this over the next two days, slowly making progress in how much damage he was causing with a ‘non-lethal’ strike.
Better yet, he would no doubt be able to apply these insights to his other Daos and his other class in the future.

Most of his time was still spent in the Cultivation Cave though, sitting inside his Soul Strengthening Arrays while going over his insights.
The array pretty much ran on its own by now with how used Zac was getting to the feeling, and he could both ponder on the Dao and work on repairing his pathways while cycling his Mental Energy.

It was a bit like working while being severely sleep-deprived though since the array was siphoning his mental energy.
He made quite a few mistakes and was forced to redraw the pathways many times, though it was still a lot more efficient to multitask than just sit around waiting for the array to finish.

Another interesting thing he had learned about the array was that he was actually making better progress when swapping his race in the middle.
However, the benefits only appeared when he sat as a Draugr in the life-attuned side and as a human in the death-attuned.

It was like the stark contrasts helped reinforce the effect of the array, which resulted in a larger number of clashes and his soul getting strengthened and purified to a higher degree.
One full cultivation procedure still took around 10 hours even when using E-Grade Crystals to power the array, but the improvement he saw while swapping his races was double a normal circulation.

’

That meant that he was almost three times as efficient compared to his first try, getting 28 hours’ worth of cultivation done in just ten hours.
There were probably even greater gains to be had in the future as well, though Zac guessed any future improvements wouldn’t come quite as easily.

He had ordered a couple of D-Grade attuned crystals from the Sky Gnome to see the effect, but the cost of that was a bit extravagant even for him.
It would have to provide a huge benefit to motivate spending over a hundred million Nexus Coins every day.
For now, he made do with just E-Grade crystals as he was still mostly focusing on short-term benefits and upgrading his skills.

Zac was currently fighting some sort of mutated cat that was as big as a rhino.
It looked extremely cute even with its size, with two enormous eyes that stared straight into his.
The beast suddenly turned into a blur, and Zac barely had time to block a furious swipe toward his throat by using the flat side of his axe.

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The beast unsurprisingly excelled at Dexterity, and Zac tried multiple times to inflict it with a wound without success.
It was like trying to hit a cloud, where the cat was just a blur.
It was almost as bad as when he fought Faceless 9 back in the tower, though the cat didn’t have that man’s lethality.

It wouldn’t have been hard to kill the thing with the help of [Deathwish], but that wasn’t his goal.
He instead activated [Vanguard of Undeath] and grew to a towering behemoth almost reaching four meters.
The transformation added around half a meter to his height after reaching middle proficiency, while also increasing the thickness of the plating of his miasmic armor.

More importantly, it increased the power of his taunting effect, and the cat suddenly rammed straight into him by mistake when it tried to pass him by.
Zac took the opportunity and delivered a shallow cut in its side, eliciting a pained yowl from the beast.
It scrambled out of the way as Zac stood rooted to the ground, keeping his focus on the skill.

Zac instantly pushed the mental energy further into its body, like an army performing a blitz to attack its enemy unaware.
The natural defenses of the beast were quickly roused, but Zac was like a steamroller as he pushed his energy toward its organs.

This was the one.