"Damn, am I in a desert or what?" Ning wondered as he kept flying in the blistering heat of the sun. For some reason, he felt like everything was way too bright and hot.
It had been nearly 15 minutes since he flew away from the beach and still, there was no sign of life anywhere. Now that he thought about it, there were no fishes in the brief glance he took underwater.
"What's going on?" he wondered as he kept on flying. Finally, after a few more minutes, he saw the first sign of life. There were small shrubs in the desert, and he could see some sort of forest far away.
He kept flying and finally reached the forest. The weird plants and trees of this planet really messed with his knowledge of plants from back in Kumia. Still, he recognized a few of them from the time he was back.
"Wait, where actually am I?" he wondered and asked the system. He had been preoccupied with just finding life that he had never bothered to know where he was.
The system gave him an accurate location on the map he had from before. Although the map was only an intermediate one, it was still quite helpful to him right now.
"I will have to upgrade it soon," he thought.
He then carefully checked the map and realized that he was close to the massive forest that spanned half of the entire continent.
Ning took the time to check more of the map and realized that nothing of what he remembered from last time was on the map anymore.
The places had all changed their names, old empires had broken down, new kingdoms had formed. Forest appeared in places that weren't a forest, and the forests that were there were destroyed to make room for humans.
All in all, in just 2000 years, things had changed at an incredible rate, and Ning was going to let that happen one more time.
"I need to find the Origin of this planet so that I can quickly get stronger," he thought. Unfortunately, the system wasn't going to help him in this case, and he was unsure what he could actually do.
"Alright, let's just spend some time collecting energy before I go do anything," Ning thought and flew inside the forest and found himself a place to stay.
He carved a giant tree and stepped inside. "So, how long will it take me to collect enough energy to fill my cap daily with my current speed of Aether absorption?" Ning wondered.
He didn't know how long he had, so he used the technique he already bought and used it to speed up his Aether absorption process. In just 5 minutes, he was notified that he could no longer absorb any more energy.
Ning then left his body and moved to the tree wherein he took back his body and decided to go unconscious.
"Alright system, wake me up when the cap resets," he said.
<Confirmed>
Ning slowly lost consciousness and immediately felt it coming back on. However, some time had clearly passed as the time was night now.
He went back into his body and tried to do the same thing once again. When he used the better, manual Aether Absorption skill, he could be done in about 20 minutes.
Other times, Ning would consider that to be quite fast, but now that he was used to the energy absorption time of the Origin, this felt incredibly slow to him.
"I need something better," he thought. "Status!"
[Status
Name: Ning Ruogong
Energy: 18 Billion
Separated Energy-
Heat Energy: 9 Billion
Sound Energy: 4 Billion
Qi Energy: 0
Kinetic Energy: 3 Billion
Aether Energy: 2 Billion
Skill: …]
"Hmm…" Ning realized that he didn't really have a lot of energy now. "Did I spend a lot with those questions I asked the system regarding Kumia?" he wondered.
"How much Energy would I require to upgrade my current automatic absorption art so that I can become an Aether Master in a single day?" Ning asked.
<You want to collect 100 Million Aether in a single day. This will cost you 12 Trillion energy>
"Yikes, that's a lot. Uh… that will take a few years certainly," Ning thought. "Although…"
He quickly opened up the list of things to buy and saw that there was still one more thing he hadn't acquired yet and definitely needed to before he did anything else.
"235 Trillion for perfect talent huh. Now the 12 Trillion for the Aether looks like nothing much really," he thought.
"247 Trillion in total… that will take me... how many years will it take me, system?" he asked.
<528 Years and 248 days>
"Sigh, so long once more, huh? Now I'm starting to doubt if I should even buy the talent. That's one-fourth of the way to getting my new energy. Urggh, why is it always such a hard decision?" Ning wondered.
"Screw it, I will just go with the absorption art for now and spend all of my time unlocking the next type of energy. After that, my energy absorption speed should be 8 times faster. Then I can absorb all the energy in the world," Ning thought.
"Yes, that's the right thing to do. Okay, let's collect energy once more."
And so, Ning went on another years-long energy gathering work where he did nothing but go in and out of gathering Aether for days on end.
All he would do was wake up, go into his body, reach his limit as fast as he could, go back to inhabiting the tree, sleep, and do it all over once again.
From time to time, he had to change hosts as the trees couldn't handle his energy enough. He was gathering more energy than a normal tree could ever hold.
So, he had to create an incredibly tough material so that it could collect as much energy as he could.
Finally, after doing that for years on end, Ning felt that life had gotten too monotonous and needed some spark in it again.
So, he decided to stop for now and left to find a human civilization.
