O43novel Chapter 67 : Chapter 67
Chapter 67 : Chapter 67
Chapter 67: Pressure on the Cultivation Art Research Department
The moment he heard that announcement, even Li Mu was stunned!
He had only wanted to take the test again, get a talent certificate, and see whether there was anything he could make use of.
So why had his talent actually upgraded instead??
Could it be that Wang Longcheng had tampered with it?
Had he deliberately forged a D-Grade Talent for him?
Impossible!
Talent awakenings were recorded in the national database. There was absolutely no way to fake them.
Forget Wang Longcheng—even if the Commander-in-Chief came in person, it would still be useless.
Li Mu hurriedly withdrew his hand.
Then he entered his Sea of Consciousness to check his talent!
Sure enough, his talent had really changed!
Before, it had been F-Grade, Heavy Strike.
Its trait had been: [When attacking, deals damage equal to 2% of True Qi strength.]
All this time, the effect of that talent had practically been negligible.
Some people might think percentage-based bonus damage was already very impressive.
That once you reached the later stages, its value would finally show.
But Li Mu’s former S-Grade Talent, Nine Heavens Thunderclap,
had possessed six traits!
And one of them was: [When attacking, deals lightning-sting damage equal to 30% of True Qi strength!]
Two percent compared to thirty percent.
Compared to a sixth of the full effect!
That was also why Li Mu hated the Li family with all his life.
Now Li Mu’s talent had also changed into Overheavy Strike.
A D-Grade Talent, with two traits.
[When attacking, deals damage equal to 5% of True Qi strength.]
[When attacking with a weapon, damage against armor is increased by 5%.]
It was a very simple combination of bonus damage and armor breaking.
If it were given to an ordinary student, the increase would honestly only be so-so.
But for Li Mu, who possessed Divine Weapon Art, Mountain-Bearing Art, Iron-Cleaving Form, Flowing Cloud Fleeting Shadow, and other attack-enhancing methods,
these two boosts were nothing but pure, direct, brutal power!
But Li Mu still could not understand it!
Why?
Why had his talent changed from F-Grade into D-Grade?
A Growth-Type Talent?
Just as Li Mu was racking his brains, the system suddenly produced a prompt.
[Each time the Heavenly Immortal Art rises by one tier, the talent grows upward by two grades.]
[The Heavenly Immortal Art is divided into Unranked, Inferior, Low-Grade, Middle-Grade, and Great-Grade.]
Li Mu was instantly shocked.
Was the Heavenly Immortal Art really so absurdly powerful??
It could actually mutate his own talent...
But then Li Mu thought better of it and called himself an idiot.
The Inferior Heavenly Immortal Art could already treat any three Internal Cultivation Methods in the world as nutrients!
If it really advanced all the way to Great-Grade, would modifying a talent even count as anything?
This was probably some sort of built-in self-correction by the system.
A way to make the Great Sage’s Divine Abilities fit this High-Martial World more naturally.
Li Mu calculated silently.
Unranked was F, Inferior was D, then Low-Grade would be B, Middle-Grade would be S, and Great-Grade would not that mean SSS??
Holy shit!
Just as Li Mu was still reeling in shock, the two operators were equally dumbfounded.
Because the information on Li Mu displayed on the computer had already automatically changed to: D-Grade Talent, Growth-Type.
Since Growth-Type Talent had appeared in the system, that meant it had definitely existed at some point in history.
But as for how many times it had appeared, or who had possessed it, that was not something they were qualified to know.
The two of them immediately reported it according to procedure.
Li Mu also immediately called Wang Longcheng.
In just a few brief sentences, he explained what had happened.
On the other end, Wang Longcheng’s voice shot up by a full octave.
“What!?”
Li Mu had no choice but to repeat it.
“D-Grade. It should already have been automatically updated in the talent registration system.”
“Hahaha, good!!”
Wang Longcheng burst into loud laughter.
Outsiders probably would not have understood what Wang Longcheng was laughing about.
But he and Li Mu both knew very well how important this was for Li Mu.
“I’ll take care of the rest from here!”
“You don’t need to make a big fuss about it. Just go do whatever you were going to do!”
Wang Longcheng instructed him.
“All right, Uncle Wang. There’s one more thing.”
“Hm?”
“I want to take up a military post. Do you have any arrangement in mind?”
After thinking it over, Li Mu felt he should speak directly to Wang Longcheng about this.
“Oh?”
Wang Longcheng paused for a moment, then quickly understood.
“You brat, you want to move your mother into the Military Residential District, don’t you?”
“Actually, I mainly just want to do my part for the military district...”
“Bullshit! If I assign you a military post that requires you to be on duty long-term, will you do it?”
Wang Longcheng laughed as he cursed.
“Heh heh, no.” Li Mu answered very decisively.
He wanted to hold a military post, but he did not want to be tied down to working under someone all day.
“In that case, go see Minister Song and take a consultant post in the Cultivation Art Research Department.”
“It’s leisurely enough, but still carries weight. And if you come up with any worthwhile insights into cultivation arts,”
“it’ll be very easy for you to earn merit there.”
After thinking for a moment, Wang Longcheng placed Li Mu in the Cultivation Art Research Department.
Other people had to rack their brains trying to earn merit, always thinking about what they were capable of doing.
Li Mu only needed to consider what he wanted to do!
Because Wang Longcheng felt that even if he assigned Li Mu some post like Instructor or Guard Captain, Li Mu would still be able to earn merit casually.
It was just that those kinds of posts tied a person down too much, and there was no way Li Mu would accept them.
“Got it!”
Li Mu hung up and headed straight for the Major Categories Cultivation Art Research Department to report in.
At the Cultivation Art Research Department, Minister Song, Professor Xu, and the others were in another meeting.
But meetings like theirs were very different from those meaningless workplace meetings.
If they held a meeting, it was always to discuss substantial problems.
At that moment, the atmosphere in the meeting room was extremely heavy.
Minister Song took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled slowly.
Letting the smoke obscure his face, he spoke.
“The paper-manual conversion of blade cultivation arts needs no further explanation in terms of importance.”
“This time, the Military Cultivation Research Bureau has assigned a task to all ten military districts across the three cities.”
“At minimum, it must be improved by 5%!”
The moment he finished speaking, gasps immediately rose throughout the meeting room.
“Five percent? That’s making things too difficult for people!”
“The paper-manual conversion of blade cultivation arts hasn’t advanced at all for five years.”
“Why are they suddenly asking for so much this time?”
“That’s right. If it were staff techniques, then with Flowing Cloud Triple Shock, we should be able to hand in a perfect result this year for its paper-manual conversion.”
Everyone was full of grievance and frustration.
Minister Song sighed.
“The National Cultivation Research Institute’s death statistics show that the fatality rate among blade-type Martial Artists has been rising continuously for the past half year.”
“The leaders at the National Cultivation Research Institute slammed the table. The pressure on all the Military Cultivation Research Bureaus is enormous.”
The National Cultivation Research Institute, full name the National Cultivation Art Research Institute, combined military and government authority into one body.
It was the highest institution in the entire field of cultivation arts in all of Huaxia.
When it came to the fatality rate of Martial Artists, cultivation arts bore an extremely important share of the responsibility.
The Military Cultivation Research Bureau was the Abyss-Suppressing Army’s Cultivation Art Research Bureau under the National Cultivation Research Institute.
Cultivation arts existed not only as one-time-use Cultivation Art Stones produced by people, but also as paper-format cultivation arts, which meant drawing the cultivation art into a book.
The problem was that things like cultivation arts were grasped best through intuitive understanding and were extremely difficult to explain in words.
If a person condensed their understanding of a cultivation art into a Cultivation Art Stone, then someone else could almost completely comprehend the profound essence of that art.
Books, however, found it extremely difficult to express that same profundity.
But the output of Cultivation Art Stones was simply too low.
And the higher the grade of the cultivation art, the lower the output.
That caused the price of cultivation arts to become extremely expensive. Even a Mortal Grade cultivation art started at tens of thousands.
There was no way to popularize them to everyone.
Take the same cultivation art, Flowing Cloud Triple Shock. Among spear-and-staff Martial Artists, its coverage rate did not even reach 40%. It was not that they could not afford it.
It was that they could not produce enough!
Demand far exceeded supply.
That was why the popularization of paper-format cultivation arts had always been a problem the Huaxia National Cultivation Research Institute was doing everything in its power to solve.
Because once the paper version of any category of cultivation art could be made to allow full comprehension, that would be equivalent to giving every Martial Artist of that same system an extra cultivation art for free!
After all, how much did printing cost?
It could be made so that every single person had a copy!
But despite constant refinement and repeated improvement of some cultivation arts, even the best paper-format cultivation arts right now could only achieve about 30% of the effect of a Cultivation Art Stone.
And that was only for Martial Artists with fairly good comprehension.
For dull-witted people with poor understanding, comprehending even 10% was completely normal.
For a while, the meeting room fell silent once more.
Just then, there was a knock at the door.
Minister Song and the others all frowned.
“Come in!”
The one who pushed open the door was Assistant Liu. He immediately lowered his voice and said,
“Minister, Li Mu is here.”
Originally, everyone in the room had been somewhat displeased. Meetings in the Cultivation Art Research Department generally were not supposed to be interrupted.
But the moment they heard it was Li Mu, every face present relaxed at once!
Minister Song even smiled.
“Quick, let him in.”