Outworld Liberators-Chapter 199: Getting a Head Start with Cultivation

Fay had given Tabulae her first real insights into the human body back on the road from Ironbuck Mine to the Goldkeep Crownmarkets.

Tabulae had crammed every scrap she could, not from panic but from hunger.

She loved studying. The books big sister Fay carried were too detailed to belong to ordinary cultivators, pages dense with the kind of knowledge that made physicians uneasy.

Tabulae had told her grandfather Biscuit again and again that Radeon and Fay were not regular sect folk.

She said they were from a top force on the continent.

No one listened.

Not because her logic was bad, but because she was thirteen, and because she was a girl in an age that treated a girl’s certainty like wind.

Her words went in one ear and out the other.

Now people carved Radeon’s name into stone and raised temples like he had always been inevitable.

The same mouths that dismissed her called it coincidence. Tabulae’s jaw tightened.

"Ridiculous. Absolute buffoons," she murmured.

"What was that? I didn’t hear," Lonequiver asked.

"It’s nothing," Tabulae said. "How about this. If I can start something, I’ll demand the pay."

"Fair enough," Lonequiver said. "We’ll wish for your success."

Tabulae sank into the Workman’s Body Strength Codex like a diver slipping under water.

Page after page, her focus narrowed until the arena noise blurred into background grit.

She finished the first part and moved to the second.

By the third, her hands turned pages without her noticing.

By the fourth, she did not even register that she had swapped volumes.

By the fifth, the codex stopped looking like words and started looking like a path.

It demanded work, not prayer.

The method began with exercises. Chest first, a movement called a pushup. Legs next. Then back and neck. Then core, pelvis, and lower back.

Once the whole body was stimulated, the breathing came. Pull qi from the air. Hold. Guide. Let a thread slip inside.

Tabulae dropped to the floor and did it. Pushups until her arms trembled. Leg work until her thighs burned.

Her breath came fast and hot. She drank another Stamina Tonic mid pant, the roasted sweetness washing down her throat, and the fatigue peeled away like it had never belonged to her.

Then she tried the breathing.

On the first attempt, a thread entered her lungs and she choked on it. She coughed until her face reddened.

She steadied herself, swallowed the panic, and tried again. Again. Again.

The air felt thick, then thin, then thick again, like it was testing whether she deserved it.

On her thirtieth failure she caught the thread, felt it hook in her, and then it slipped out again as if the world had yanked it away.

Her lungs burned. Her shoulders ached. She checked her own state by feeling, and her body answered with exhaustion.

She did not hesitate. She drank another Stamina Tonic.

Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher watched her gulp down Stamina Tonic, one after another, like it was roadside refreshment.

Still, they did not interrupt. They did not ask questions.

They simply placed their own five Stamina Tonics beside her, quiet offerings, because they understood one thing even mortals understood.

Cultivation demanded concentration sharp enough to cut.

Fiftieth try. Seventieth. On the ninety ninth attempt, Tabulae’s eyes were red, her hair damp with sweat, and she was unnervingly calm.

She grabbed the strand of spiritual qi and pulled it deeper, guiding it down into her abdomen. A dim light started to glow beneath her skin.

She did not stop. Two strands. Three.

She kept going until seven thin threads rotated slowly in her belly, a small orbit of borrowed power.

Then she looked up at the three men like a tired teacher.

"Senior. Who has a spirit stone?"

"Here. Here. Take it," Sackmace said at once, shoving one into her hands.

Tabulae began to absorb it. The energy inside the stone felt thick, like a heavy robe soaked in warmth.

She drew it in toward her dantian, and when she tried to pull a second wave, a sharp pain stabbed through her middle.

She froze and focused.

The pain was the clue. The stone’s energy was too dense.

She circulated it, broke it down, and the thick mass separated into individual strands, the same kind she had pulled from the air.

"Ah. So that’s how it is," she whispered.

She gathered the hundred strands she needed, patient and relentless.

When she finally looked down, the spirit stone in her palm had dimmed and became ash.

Reelfisher leaned in, voice cautious.

"How is it?"

Tabulae lifted her gaze.

"We can proceed on cultivating you three."

"Let’s fucking go," Lonequiver said, and even suppressing his voice, he could not hide the heat in it.

"How do we do it?" Sackmace asked.

Tabulae did not answer right away. She raised her hand.

Her index finger and thumb formed a circle, and she gave them a look that made the air feel transactional.

All three understood. A deal was made.

They paid her in pieces that mattered.

First came the redeemable armor. High tempered silk thread clothing, a robe like the ghost attendants wore, said to resist blades and arrows.

Her reason was simpler than protection. She had arrived at the Crownmarkets without anything decent.

Her father, Shortbread, had sold her clothes for gambling money after being fooled by a guide who pretended to know the way.

Tabulae wanted fresh clothes. She wanted to stop feeling like someone else’s discarded problem.

After she took a bath in the free baths, she demanded the three men’s Competition Hint Scroll.

The words inside were vague, but Tabulae could read between them, and she deduced what weapon would suit her best.

That became her next demand.

A crossbow. Ropes to go with it. And Lonequiver teaching her how to use it.

Tabulae’s hunger to learn made the crossbow lesson simple. She did not fawn over the weapon.

Then she set the last condition with the same calm face. Twelve more healing pills and fifteen Stamina Tonics.

Only then did Tabulae lower her hand and turn back to the codex, ready to turn her new knowledge into leverage.

Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher should have been angry at her demands.

Instead, their faces eased the more she asked for. They had seen the glow. They had seen the proof.

Compared to that, armor, pills, rope, and a crossbow skills were nothing.

"Since all my demands are satisfied, let us start."

Lonequiver stepped in first, the closest and the most restless.

Tabulae put him through the exercises again, watching his posture with a sharp eye, tapping where muscles should wake.

She asked after every set if he felt the right part simulate, and she did not let him lie to sound brave.

Then she guided his breathing. She corrected his pull. She made him slow down.

On the fourth attempt, Lonequiver caught it. A thread of qi slid into him and stayed.

His grin started to rise.

"Focus," Tabulae said at once. "Don’t be excited. Grab at least ten more."

He swallowed the grin like medicine and obeyed.

Soon all four of them carried a faint glow. Sackmace and Reelfisher followed the same steps, clumsy at first, then steadier as Tabulae’s corrections landed.

They began to draw from spirit stones too, something Irongrit did not have, and the stones dimmed in their hands one by one.

People who wanted them to fail found themselves stalled. The white robed attendants lingered nearby, curious, watching four mortals tugging at cultivation.

Almsgiver drifted closer. He sat, straightened his back, and copied their breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

He wanted that stillness. Then he started to glow.

Not white. Lavender, soft and strange.

The air around him felt smoother, like a hand pressing down on panic.

Tabulae felt it first, a quiet easing in her chest, and then the men felt it too.

Their absorption quickened. Their hands steadied on the stones.

When they reached for another spirit stone, Almsgiver spoke without looking up.

"May I also have some spirit stones."

They knew him. Goldman’s son. A kind kid. Sackmace remembered a small hand helping him up after a loss years ago, the boy barely six then, face earnest and unafraid.

Sackmace did not hesitate. He tossed a few stones over. Kindness was cheap compared to what they could build from it today.

So they kept going. Stone after stone.

On their eight spirit stone, the environment dimmed.

The light in the arena shifted, a warning that the break was ending.

Second round of the tournament was about to start again.

Tabulae sat at the peak of herself, and it felt unreal. Clean skin. Clear breath. The heavy bags under her eyes were gone.

An attendant had handed her a small trick earlier, five Injury Healing Pills to revive the body from extreme fatigue.

Tabulae had taken them without pride, and the effect was better than any rest she had known back in the Ironbuck Mine.

Now Eldric loomed over the contestants again, vast as a carved idol that had decided to speak.

"Welcome to the final segment of the Mortal Martial Tournament."

The crowd roared. Cheers rolled through the stands.

They were excited for the perils, yes, but even more excited for the benefits, for the prizes that could be bought with small capital and big nerve.

Eldric lifted his hand and his voice carried.

"Participants. In my age of eight thousand years old, I was once like you."

"Not even as talented as young Almsgiver, not as fast as young Raj, and I had no friend brotherhood like Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher."

The participants shifted, moved despite themselves. Even a god remembering your name could make the heart soften.

Tabulae felt it too, that tug toward belonging, then she tightened her grip on herself.

"In the vicious recruitment, I lost an arm and both my feet," Eldric went on.

"I regained them later. I am only here to say that I was once poor and destitute."

"Still, I outlived all the young masters of my era, didn’t I."

Eldric’s smile stayed.

"We will now decide the people who deserved the chance to complete the two thousand forty eight participants."

His gaze swept the floor, and the air went tighter.

"Lastly, if you are eaten by the earth, then unfortunately Heaven has not smiled upon you today."