"Ugh", a sound came from a formless mass of blankets. After a few moments a hand protrudes itself from beneath, in an attempt to pull its self-free. Eventually a male with matte black hair and hazel/black eyes crawls out while continuing to groan. He stands before shuffling his way to the small bathroom in the 10m² apartment, turning on the faucet and splashing water in his face.
The man continues leans on sink as he tries to focus his mind from the worst hangover in his life. "Damn, feels like someone scooped out my brain and threw it into a blender before putting it back in my head," the man complains before sticking his head back under the faucet to run cold water over it. After a few minutes he pulls his head back up and wipes his face before opening his eyes. He stares stupidly into the mirror at the person looking back at him. He slaps himself before pinching his cheek and stretching it. He was an American Cuban when he went to sleep, while the person looking back at himself also had Cuban traits, there were clear Asian features to it.
"Hah, seriously. I was looking forward to the endless nothingness of death after being single for 35 years," the man said to himself. After growing up in a family where he was gas lighted and made the scapegoat, it was no surprise that he had a depression problem, and it didn't help that he had asperge's making his ability to communicate that much harder. Last thing he remembered was that it was his birthday, and he was spending it the way he normally did, alone, and with a few bottles of liquor. The difference this time was that he was on short-term disability after being hurt at work and in his drunk state kept forgetting whether he took his medication or not. "I'm not sad I died, I'm sad I didn't stay dead", he said to himself while considering whether or not to throw himself off the roof of a building.
(Ding)
(Now loading the Rebate system)
(10%…20%…60%…90%.100%… Completed)
(System allows for 10 times return on purchases)
He stands frozen in the spot for a few minutes after hearing a voice in his head. "Well, that changes things. There is no way I'm not going to live this life to the fullest now", he said while grinning at his new self in the mirror, "First things first, I need to get my bearings of this life I slipped into." He closes his eyes and tries to recall any memories that the body might still retain while wishing he could forget the memories of his old life. 'Name, Anthony DeLaRosa. Age, 18. Father's name, Rodolfo DeLaRosa. Mother's name, Ye FanFan. Father was a Cuban passing thru using the transfer gate when he met the mother, and they had a fling before father moved on. The mother raised me alone in this apartment until she died a few years ago when he was 12 years old during a hunt outside the city. This is a cultivation world with a futuristic theme.
The realms are:
Qi Condensation: This is the first step in cultivation. Practitioners absorb spiritual energy to build a foundation for grasping natural laws in the next stage. It's divided into 20 layers, and progress is made by absorbing spiritual energy. This is when cultivators clear their 12 main meridians and 8 extraordinary meridians to increase their ability in absorbing spiritual energy. The wider and stronger they are the faster they can cultivate and the higher their cultivation can reach. Wide but weak, they can only reach the core formation stage. Narrow but strong, they may die of old age before reaching the nascent soul stage.
Foundation Establishment: In this stage, spiritual energy refines the body, making it more suitable for cultivation. It's divided into Early, Middle, and Late levels. The quality and quantity that is purified, the easier it will be to break through in future stages.
Core Formation: Here, practitioners form a core inside their dantian using spiritual energy. The core is essential for further advancement. The larger the core the more powerful they are when they break into the nascent soul stage. It is made up of layers, the average cultivator has 3 to 4 layers, while the highest reached is 9 layers. Each layer requires exponentially more resources to form.
Nascent Soul: The nascent soul forms at the center of the core, dissolving and absorbing each layer from the inside out. The breaking of the core produces a Nascent Soul. This stage is divided into Early, Middle, Late, and Peak levels.
Soul Formation / Deity Transformation: Cultivators comprehend the heavens, obtain a Domain, and fuse it with their Nascent Soul to form an Origin Soul. This stage involves great cycles of transformation. The stronger the nascent soul is the higher a Domain the cultivator is able to comprehend. The strongest cultivator in history was able to comprehend the Domain of space and granted humanity the transfer gates.
'Hm, considering this is a cultivation world, you would think they would know about the 350 sub meridians and 600 acupoints. Unless the rich and powerful are keeping that bit of information from the masses,' I thought to myself. This world is larger than my old one, but there are city states that make up countries due to animals evolving and becoming strong, limiting commute between cities. Small towns and villages have long since been destroyed by the evolved beasts. It is also due to this reason that traveling is not common except thru transfer gates which are man-made wormholes or between close cities thru flight. A transfer gates usable distance is determined by the quality of materials used making them expensive to not only build but to maintain. In order to prevent in breeding, some men can choose a government job of traveling between cities to spread his seed, which explains how a Cuban reached an Asian city.
Apparently in this world women outnumber men 10 to 1 causing a societal shift allowing for polygamy and giving financial aid to families with sons. It's not bad enough where men are getting raped in the street, but men are required to donate sperm after turning 18. 'Due to his mother's death, he was unable to afford cultivation materials and started to fall behind his classmates, upon which he started to be singled out and bullied by the students. Eventually it got bad enough that he dropped out of school and became a Neet. But thanks to the governments financial aid he was able to live till now. He was able to live well on his own until a few months ago when he turned 18 and the government assistance ended. Due to his timid personality and Neet tendencies, he never looked for work or donated sperm which also paid incentives causing his money to quickly run out.
The only reason he did not die sooner or was out on the street was thanks to the kindness of the landlady and her daughter. Having lived in that apartment his whole life he got to know them well, so they would check on him and sometimes bring him food. The landlady also kept putting off the rent, knowing what he went thru even though her daughter was starting high school and needed cultivation materials. The apartment was old and a little run down at the edge of the city, so she did not earn much from the rent to begin with making him even more depressed from being a burden. So, he started to dig thru trash to look for food, after a while he got food poisoning and dead.
"Well shit, my life was as bad if not worse, but at least I still had the drive to at least find a job", I said after remembering this guy's life. I leave the bathroom and look around the tiny trash heap of an apartment. I look down at the mound of fat hanging off of me. "Let's start with trying out the rebate system first, I still feel like shit and need a checkup before I start sorting shit out", I say. I shower and get dressed in the only halfway decent clothes I can dig out of a pile before grabbing his phone and leaving the apartment. Checking my balance on the phone I found there was 50 credits in the account, equivalent to 50 cents in my old world. 'The system has a 10 times rebate, if this works there is no knowing how long it will take before I become rich,' I think to myself as I walk down the road. I then see a small store and buy a pack of gum before leaving. Checking my account again I find a balance of 500 credits. A smile starts to grow on my face as I think about living this life at the pinnacle of luxury and indulgence.
As I make my way down the street to the local medical center I stop randomly at stores to buy things to increase my credit balance. I even stopped at a clothing store and bought a new set of clothes. When I reached the medical center, I had eaten a decent amount of food, a new set of clothes, watch, and phone. 'My new balance is 890,200 credits. That should be enough for the checkup or else I will have to break up the payments which may cause them to be suspicious', I think to myself as I walk inside. I look around and notice only older women were there, most of them being rough looking hunters with various types of injuries. You would think this being a female dominated world they would jump on any poor stick they can find, but not a single woman bothered me the whole way here.
'It seems that even in this world most women do not like fat people, good, I didn't want to be hounded by women anyways. I may have died single, but I was not a virgin,' I thought to myself as I walked up to the counter. The nurse at the counter was only average looking with small breast and a bucket of make-up on. Once she sees me, she gives me a scowl before asking, "What do you need?" "I think I got food poisoning the other day, so I am looking to get a full work up since I am here anyways," I reply. She hands me a tablet and tells me to fill it out while I wait. Afterwards I glance at the women around me and notice that after the initial glance they gave me when I first came in, they never looked at me again. I may not be a looker, but there were no women here whose looks were above a 70. I don't think it helped that I was as tall as the average woman here.
Eventually I got called to the back where they lay me down on a table sticking out a wall, before the bed slides back inside and the machine began to check my body. While I lay there, I keep looking thru the old me memories to see if I missed anything important. From the memories the mom looked like a goddess, if she wasn't a hunter and didn't live in the slums, I would think that she might have been picked up to be someone's wife long ago. She was a good mother to him, if not a little overindulgent to his whims making him chubby. So, the other children started to mock him making him emotionally dependent on his mother, so when she died, he started stress eating making him really fat, giving the other kids a bigger target for their bullying. He was in high school for only a year and a half before he turned into a Neet and stopped leaving his apartment.
After a while they finish, and I went back to the waiting room to wait for the doctor with the results. As I sat there, I recalled that with money you could be a lot of cultivation resources, including a treatment using herbs and spirit stones that are supposed to enhance the bodies quality to cultivate. If I remember correctly, they start with poor quality spirit stone treatment going for 1 million credits, low quality spirit stones for 10 million, and treatment using average quality spirit stones for 1 billion. There are also elemental based spirit stones, but those can only be purchased using spirit stones along with other high-end things. Also, apparently humans in this world did not develop space travel due to it being so dangerous, instead they built teleportation gates to go to other planets. Some of the planets are not very friendly, so for safety reasons inter-planetary gates are only found in capital cities.
I was lost in my thoughts for a while before a doctor called me into the office with my results. Besides telling me about the usual problems fat people had she prescribed me some antibiotics and digestive medicine because of the food poisoning. I went to the counter afterwards to collect the medicine and pay the bill which came to 720,000 credits earning me 7.2 million credits. When I got back to the apartment complex I ran into the landlady, Fan Bingbing. Standing at 1.5 meters tall with waist long black hair, black eyes, and a plump figure. She had no make-up on, so it was easy to tell that her looks were a solid 78, but she has never been thru a nutritional bath, so her looks were a little lagging.
"Little Anthony, you came out. That is good, it's bad for your health to always stay in your room. By the way I have some leftovers from last night you can have," Fan Bingbing says before she runs inside and coming back out with a container that has Rice and fish.
"Thank you for your help aunt Bing, I wouldn't know what I would do without you. Also, I won some money from a lottery ticket so I can afford to pay the back rent," I say before sending 200,000 credits to her account. "This is more than the rent, why did you send so much? You need to keep some money for yourself, don't worry about the bills and just concentrate on getting better," she replies with a look of concern and affection in her eyes. "This is what I owe you with interest for the food, and if I am going to get better, I should start taking responsibility for myself, besides Fan Yi Ran is in high school now so I know she needs it," I said. "It's no trouble; I watched you grow up so I couldn't just abandon you. I am just glad to see you are doing better now," she says while smiling before going back inside.
Once I get to my apartment, I heat up the food before I start eating while searching the internet on a tablet I found. From what I found, you could buy just about anything online if you know where to look and have enough money. Products are separated into mortal grade, earth grade, and sky grade. Higher grades can only be purchased in special auctions that use spirit stones instead of credits to keep everything anonymous. 'Unfortunately, I could not find any information on the high-end markets, so I believe they can only be accessed vie invitation only,' I thought. They are than further divided into poor, low, medium and high quality. They had things of poor, low, medium, and high quality. With mortal grade starting at 10 million credits and earth grade at 1 billion credits. But things of sky grade could only be purchased with spirit stones and higher grades could only be owned or purchased by large families, sects, or the government. I purchased 9 poor quality spirit stones for 9 million credits.
(Ding)
(Host has spent 9 million credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 90 million credits to the hosts account)
'Hm, if I buy too many things from a single place, people will start to get suspicious, best if I spread out my purchases until I can get into the high-end market,' I reasoned before buying 2 more poor quality spirit stones.
(Ding)
(Host has spent 2 million credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 20 million credits to the hosts account)
I then went to another site and purchased 1 average quality spirit stone for one billion credits.
(Ding)
(Host has spent 100 million credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 1 billion credits to the hosts account)
I didn't want to attract too much attention so after purchasing 10 more I switched to looking at techniques. They had books for cultivation, fighting, and auxiliary skills like forging, alchemy, or formations. They also had books on the arts, but those were not expensive since you can learn them in school or technical colleges. I was just looking to increase my account balance, so I only looked at the prices without caring about what it was. Eventually I purchased a low-quality earth grade technique on swordsmanship for 7.3 billion credits called the "Wind Blade Technique".
(Ding)
(Host has spent 7.3 billion credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 73 billion credits to the hosts account)
I then started looking for movement techniques and cultivation techniques. I settled on an earth grade middle quality movement technique called the "Cloud step technique", for sixty billion credits and a high-quality earth grade cultivation technique called "The heavenly purification technique", for four hundred and fifty billion.
(Ding)
(Host has spent 60 billion credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 600 billion credits to the hosts account)
(Ding)
(Host has spent 450 billion credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 4.5 trillion credits to the hosts account)
I then started looking for high end nutritional treatments for beginner cultivators. What I found was one that needed an initial deposit of 50 billion credits for a total cost of 250 billion credits, but they use average quality spirit stones with earth grade herbs in the treatment, and it also doubles as a learning pod which instills knowledge of whatever you want into your mind at the same time. You still have to practice what you learned afterwards to get it to stick and learn how to use it though, since knowledge without wisdom is useless. I set my appointment for three days later so I can have some time to get my place together first since the process will take a week and I did not want to come back to a mess.
(Ding)
(Host has spent 250 billion credits)
(Congratulations to host for receiving 10 times rebate)
(Transferring 2.5 trillion credits to the hosts account)
I messaged aunt Bing and told her that I would be gone for a few days. I then decided to call it a night and just flopped down on the bed. When I woke up the next morning, I took a shower before looking around my tiny apartment. I started with throwing all my clothes into the washing machine before opening the window to air out the place as I began to throw everything into trash bags and placing them outside the door, I even emptied out the fridge for good measure. I then wiped down and cleaned up the kitchen and the bathroom, making sure to scrub in the cracks. I finished by sweeping and mopping before going outside to take everything to the trash. While I was taking out the trash I ran into Fan Bingbing. "Dear, how are you doing today?" she asked. "I am doing better, I just saw online that it is good to clean up to help people in changing the state of their minds and help them in refocusing," I reply. "That's good to hear dear, why don't I help you. Afterwards you can take a bath and come down for lunch," she stated before she began to carry the trash bags out with me.
With Fan Bingbing's help I was able to finish taking out the trash and washing my clothes by lunch time before jumping into the bath. Even though my apartment was only a 1 bedroom/1 bath, it was hard as I was already tired both physically and mentally by the end. I swear, by the time I got out of the bath I felt like a new man. I dressed and went down to Fan Bingbing's apartment that had 2 bedrooms and was 3 times larger than my place. She was still cooking when I arrived, so I looked around while waiting. Looking at the pictures on the wall I noticed that I was in a few of them. My mother moved here while she was pregnant with me, and being a hunter, she was rarely home so Fan Bingbing volunteered to baby sit while she was away. During that time Fan Bingbing decided she wanted a child, so she went to the local fertility clinic and when I was three years old, she gave birth to Fan Yi Ran. We grew up like siblings until I dropped out of school 2 years ago and I became a Neet. That was when she started to give me the cold shoulder or stink eye. She didn't even like being seen outside with me, not that I went out that much in the past 2 years.
After looking at the pictures and comparing them to my memories I sat at the dining room table and noticed a few letters on top, one even had a past due notice on it. Seeing Fan Bingbing still cooking I decided to read it. The letter was a bill from Fan Yi Ran's high school, apparently, they still had not paid for this year, also, that she was behind other students and needed cultivation resources to bring her up to speed. 'I don't want her to go thru the same thing the old me went thru, I'll sort something out when I get back to my place,' I thought to myself before slipping the bill into my pocket. "There we go, a nice home cooked meal. It has been a while since you came over so I may have cooked a bit much, so eat as much as you want," Fan Bingbing said when she came out of the kitchen a few minutes later. As we ate, she reminisced about the past and I added comments on anything I could remember. I also reminded her that I would be away for a few days at a retreat that I won with the lottery.
When we finished eating, I said goodbye before going back to my apartment upon which I took out the tablet and paid for Fan Yi Ran's schooling in full until graduation along with S rank cultivation materials and tutoring. I was surprised to find out that just a single year came to two hundred million, five million for the basic course without cultivation materials. 'That is the difference between public and private schools, I guess. I had to pay 5 thousand in the public school for the basic course. But Fan Yi Ran was able to get into a private school with a partial scholarship because of her talent and how much effort she puts in. I would like to do more for them, but they would become suspicious if I just happen to start throwing money around causing them to not except it,' he thought to himself. He decided to put off helping them too much until he had a reasonable excuse for his newfound fortune and went to bed.