The First Store System

panda (nov)el​ The man had to leave the queue disappointed after paying for the reward. It took him three million supreme Primal stones to materialize the prize he had won after completing his first quest.

After the man left, another customer took his place and repeated a familiar scene.

The man who had joined the queue not long ago began waiting for his turn to arrive. At the same time, he was thinking of ways to increase his gains from the store.

Time flew by, and a few minutes had passed.

Philips, who had been waiting for a while, finally got his turn. He now stood in front of the mysterious blue-skinned store owner.

“Hello, store owner! I am Philips,” The man respectfully introduced himself. His bow was formal. It signified that Philips had accepted the store owner to be stronger than him.

“I am Aakesh,” Aakesh expressionlessly replied by his name.

“Store owner, I have heard that the store sells cultivation arts?” Philips respectfully asked Aakesh and came to his purpose straight away.

Even though he was an Intermediate Immortal, and it wasn’t going to be easy for him to switch his cultivation art if he wanted. Despite the problem, Philips needed to swap it from the one he could buy in the store.

The reason behind his need wasn’t the quality of the cultivation art he currently used, but it was the hidden danger inside it.

The current cultivation art used by Philips belonged to one Immortal from several Epochs ago. During one of his travel, he had gotten it when he was only an intermediate Soul Formation level cultivator.

At that time, he didn’t know about the hidden danger in the respective cultivation art, nor did he have his father check it for him. In the hope of avenging his father and greed for a top-quality cultivation art, Philips gave up on his previous one and started cultivating using the new art.

Only when Philips reached Immortality did he come to know of the hidden danger in the cultivation art. The cultivation art contained a wisp of the soul of its owner.

As Philips reached Immortality, the wisp of soul finally became active. Philips tried everything to destroy it since he could sense from the soul that if he didn’t do anything about it, and then the wisp would take over his body. At that time, only the body would be his, but someone else would be the one controlling it.

Since things were like this, Philips attempted everything to destroy the wisp of the soul. Unfortunately for him, whatever he threw at it didn’t destroy the wisp, but instead, it made the wisp stronger.

All his energy had a pattern of cultivation art in it. So instead of harming the soul, it strengthened it. The only saving grace for Philips was that the wisp still hadn’t regained consciousness, so there was no fight back from it. Or he would have already lost his body to the wisp and would have become someone else’s playtoy.

After knowing about it, Philips started searching for other cultivation arts, but whenever he attempted it, the energy inside him would go berserk. At that moment, Philips would only have two choices. First, he could stop and continue while ignoring the wisp and get his body controlled by others in the end. Second, he could continue and lose his life to stop the wisp from taking over his body.

Philips wanted neither of the two choices to become a reality. He wanted to avenge his father. He had been hiding since the death of his father from those groups of people once his father called friends.

If not for one of the friends of his father helping him at that time, he wouldn’t have been able to survive till today.

He needed to repay the favor as well as debt to different friends of his father.

As Philips fell into the dilemma of whether to get his body taken over by some other person or get killed trying to stop that other person, he got a third option in front of him.

Since the current cultivation art’s quality was topnotch, he needed to find a cultivation art even better than this one. It would result in the new energy being superior to his current energy. It would suppress the energy if it attempted to go berserk.

When Philips had thought of that option, his face had bloomed with a smile, but not long after, when he thought of it more, an aura of gloom had covered his body.

No one would be willing to share a cultivation art that was even better in quality than the current one he had.

From the moment Philips had gotten the cultivation art, he had rarely lost in a battle, showing the cultivation art’s strength over other cultivation arts of similar level.

But since it was the only way, Philips began a search for the needed cultivation art.

His search finally came to an end yesterday, but alas, it took several centuries for him to find it.

Several centuries for an Immortal was nothing but the blink of an eye, but for Philips, the case wasn’t the same.

The wisp of the soul had begun to gain consciousness. From the way it was going, in only a few weeks, if not a few months, the wisp of soul would be entirely awake. At that time, Philips would have lost the battle of the soul, and someone else would control his body.

***

“Yes, the store sells cultivation arts,” Aakesh expressionlessly responded. Since the customer already had a specific product in his mind, he wouldn’t have to introduce the store products to the man.

“Does the store sell Immortal grade cultivation art as well?” Philips nervously asked Aakesh as he saw not a single Immortal in the queue for the cultivation arts.

“Yes,” Aakesh replied right away.

Phillip’s face had turned pale as he waited for the answer. Aakesh answered straight away, but even that little amount of time felt like an eternity full of torture to him.

The store was the last option he had since there was no other way for him to come across a cultivation art with even better quality than the one he currently used in only a few weeks.