Chapter 17: Increased cultivation
Ignoring the people who were making a fuss outside, Aurus welcomed his sister back from school.
"How was your day at school today?" At the same time as he was asking, he was eyeing the four other girls which came back with Laia. Obviously, he wasn't interested in them but was merely wondering how they looked. After all, he had heard about them but never actually met them.
With a cheerful smile, she answered: "The day at school was fine.". Seeing Aurus eyeing her friends. She continued, pointing at her friends: "They are my friends at school. Alice, Camila, Lola and Lyla."
Starting from the right was Alice. She had curly blond hair, pale blue eyes and she had slightly tanned skin. She had pretty good facial features. She was a little smaller than Aurus and her body was moderately developed.
Next was Camila. She wore long straight black hair and had black eyes. She was as tall as Alice at around 180 centimetres tall. Small freckles around her nose and on her cheeks made her look lovely. As for her body, she was a little less developed than Alice but it matched her well.
Afterwards, there was Lola and Lyla. They seemed to be twins since they were completely identical. There was only a single difference in the way they dressed their brown hair. Lola put her hair on her left side while Lyla put them on her right side. They were a lot smaller than the two other girls as they stood around 160 centimetres. As for their bodies, well, there was no way to hide it, they were flat.
Well, it didn't matter to him whether they were flat as he was certain that there were some people who prefer girls with small breasts.
After a quick look over them as Laia made the presentation, Aurus shook hands with them and Laia immediately went to Zaya to present them to her friends.
Aurus was not very concerned about them being in the shop and playing with Zaya. Instead, he asked out loud at the four girls: "Will you join us for supper? I was about to start making the food and it's no problem to prepare more for everyone."
Laia immediately turned around and gave a happy smile at Aurus before turning towards her friends: "You will stay right?" She gave them a hopeful look and her friends who were wondering if it was fine to stay immediately said yes.
Aurus shaking his head with a smile made his way back to the second floor to prepare the food. He would from time to time look over with his shop icon to be sure everything was fine in the shop as they were playing in it. While it could be considered spying on them, he was merely making sure they were fine and once he confirmed he would just close the shop icon. After all, he didn't want to develop tendencies of voyeurism.
Half an hour later, the food was ready so he came down to the shop and called the five of them to come and eat. He had made some pasta with a salad. While it was pretty basic, it was good and he liked that taste, so did Laia. As such, he decided to make this for supper this evening.
After supper, the five girls did their homework together while Aurus cleaned up everything and after supper, they went back home.
After all this time the people who had been crowding the door were long gone and the girls could leave without any problems.
After everyone was gone and Laia went to her room, Aurus went to the bathroom, directly in the bathtub and sat crossed legged. He was preparing to increase his cultivation once again. Back in the shop with the customers, he had received, he had collected a total of 2'645 crystals which meant 2'645 points.
Aurus had made some research about cultivation and had discovered that in the first rank of cultivation if you didn't want to waste your time meditating and collecting the energy in the atmosphere, each stage would cost 360 crystals of energy. While he had been feeling pretty rich, after seeing the price of a single stage for the lowest rank in cultivation, he understood that he was pretty poor. While he didn't need to use them, they could be used to buy weapons, different items for Hunters or he could just give them to Laia to increase her cultivation. After all, the stronger she was, the better it was. Moreover, he could create an organization in the future and if he did, he would need to give them some cultivation resources. Well, the organization was still just an idea but it would be pretty useful from a lot of perspectives.
Stopping thinking about random things, he opened the shop icon and looked at the cultivation category. He immediately paid 250 points, and the cultivation started. Closing his eyes, he felt the changes in his body. His muscles seemed to be strengthening and his bones were cracking. Compared to the first stage, this stage was extremely difficult as having his bones and muscles being refined was extremely painful.
After five minutes, the feeling of pain vanished and instead a new feeling appeared making him feel extremely good. Looking at the black goo around him, he didn't bother to wash as he paid 500 points to the point system to increase his cultivation to the third stage. He knew it would hurt even more so he didn't want to wait and did it immediately. Not having time to regret, pain washed over him immediately and he subconsciously knew that being pierced by a sword would be less painful.
The third stage was about refining the organs. It would help his blood circulate more easily and his senses would be enhanced.
Finally, after five difficult minutes, he finally breathed and he had a slight smile on his face. It was easy to tell that he was extremely happy that it was done. However, his smile froze immediately after looking at the cultivation category in the point icon.
There was still a stage to complete before breaking through. He knew that to break through, he had to kill a beast of the same level along with his contracted beast. However, he never knew that people could still strengthen their cultivation before breaking through their rank.
Seeing the price at 750 points, he gritted his teeth and touched the cultivation. Closing his eyes tightly, he waited for the pain to come but this time, he only felt a refreshing feeling in his body and he immediately noticed that the energy in his body was flowing easily and that his senses had been enhanced even more than before.
Slowly opening his eyes, he slowly got up and started the shower. This time, it wasn't at the same level as the previous time. The black goo was everywhere in the bath and on his body. At this time, he thought out loud: "Luckily, I read somewhere that breaking through my stages in the bathtub would save me a lot of trouble afterwards. Well, thanks for the tip." Smiling at his increased cultivation, he washed up and after everything was cleaned, he put on his clothes, going back to his room.
---
In the next two days, nothing very important happened. In Ernia, the adventurers which had brought back the phoenix had done a great search around town and the surroundings, trying to find traces of the phoenix. At the same time, they killed every beast around while searching which actually helped the town a lot.
In the end, the adventurers could only accept that they were unlucky and that their cage was malfunctioning. Aurus learned that the adventurers who lost the phoenix would still receive a part of the reward since the cage that sealed space that had been provided by the noble was malfunctioning. Because of the fact that they had indeed captured the phoenix and had proof but the cage was the problem, the only one who made a very big loss was the noble in question.
Aurus was weirdly not very fond of the nobles, probably because of all the novels he had read previously and the way they were acting in the world of Arashina. They thought they were better than everyone else and would act as they pleased without any consequences whatsoever.
Apart from this, in those two days, Aurus managed to complete over forty tasks in total when counting those he had previously completed. As such, he wasn't very far from ranking up once again. Moreover, thanks to him using most of his money on buying the resources of the guild's warehouses which were overloaded, the guild had a very positive impression of Aurus and would always help him politely.
With less than ten tasks to complete before ranking up to D rank, Aurus was quite happy as he would be able to bring more resources in the future. In the beginning, he had believed that the increase in the system space would be useless since he already had a lot of resources and bringing back a little bit more wouldn't be very useful.
However, he afterwards learned that some resources were extremely big such as the bark of a bloodyew tree. This was a cultivation resource of the nature element and it was extremely dangerous to collect it. Not to mention the price of the resource just by how big it was, he couldn't bring it back to the world of Arashina with the space being only so big.
At the same time, Aurus had also bought a sword mastery skill orb for five gold coins and a movement body skill for two gold coins. Just by seeing the price of these two skills, it was easy to see how low the people of this world thought of the mana manipulation skill.
He had trained on all of his four skills and now he had levelled them up a little bit. His identification skill had been upgraded to B rank. Honestly, it wasn't very useful except for getting the information on the different beasts and resources he could collect. In the world of Arashina, he only used the skill to confirm the status of a monster and which herb would be the most useful for that said beast.
His mana manipulation skill had been upgraded to C rank, he was stuck and couldn't make it breakthrough once again. After he asked the people from the adventurers guild, they said that no one had ever managed to break through to the B rank of the skill. When he asked, the attendants of the guild said that people using this skill would use it to attract mana to them to reduce their own mana consumption and to recover faster.
Aurus thought that he should start learning about turning the mana into different elements and increase his precision with the skill. This might be the reason why he couldn't breakthrough.
His sword mastery skill had increased to D rank. To increase its rank, he merely had to practise with his sword and become used to having and using it. Of course, Aurus was aware that he could increase his skill rank faster than everyone else and it was very easy as it only took two days to increase from F to D rank.
Finally, his movement body skill, shadow step, was a skill which helped him dodge every attack against him and let him move like a shadow. This skill had also been ranked up to D rank. According to the attendant, the power of the shadow step skill would truly begin to shine when it broke through B rank as it would allow the user to make short teleportations. Although short teleportation would take a lot of stamina, it could be easily used as a trump card when fighting other monsters.
Back in the world of Arashina, nothing much happened. The people working for those nobles seem to have had their egos put into the dirt as they never appeared since then. It didn't matter much to Aurus anyway since they would eventually come if they wanted to win against their opponent. There were no other customers since then and Aurus merely used this time to train his different skills, play with Zaya or brush Zaya's feathers. Her feathers were very fluffy and her body released a little bit of hot air which made people become addicted to petting her.
As for Laia, she did her homework and there were no problems at all. Her friends came back to visit on the second day. It seems that they either like the shop very much or they like Zaya very much. Aurus tended to support the second hypothesis.
Finally, on Friday morning he sent Laia to school and opened the shop around half an hour later. When he opened the shop, there were a few people at the door of the shop.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
xxAsura
xxAsura There are a few days left to the contest, I'll be asking for help once again for the last few days if you don't mind! I hope you liked this chapter, have a great day!
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