Dual Realm Exchange System

Damian remained silent for several seconds after hearing the price.

Five Spirit Stones for ten pills on the open market and three Contribution Points for fifteen high-quality pills from the Evergreen Sect treasury.

The numbers were so absurdly small compared to what the pills meant in Valoria that his brain immediately began firing cylinders in calculation.

"Right, so how many Experience Points are needed to reach Level 6 from the beginning?" Damian muttered, pulling his Spellbook closer and turning to an empty page.

After checking and verifying, the progression itself seemed painfully simple.

Level 1 to Level 2 required ten Experience Points while level 2 to level 3 required twenty.

This increased to thirty for level 4, forty for level 5 and then fifty to enter level 6, making for one hundred and fifty Experience Points in total.

Damian immediately began working through the diminishing returns of the Qi Nourishing Pill.

The first ten pills produced ten Experience Points, the next ten produced nine, and so on.

One hundred pills therefore produced fifty-five Experience Points before the conversion rate reached its permanent minimum.

That left another ninety-five Experience Points.

At 0.1 Experience each, that required nine hundred and fifty additional pills.

Damian stared at the number he had written.

"One thousand and fifty pills..." he whispered.

Jian Rui glanced toward the parchment. "Senior?"

Damian ignored him momentarily and continued calculating.

At market price, ten pills cost five Spirit Stones, so one thousand and fifty pills meant one hundred and five bottles.

That was a total of five hundred and twenty-five Spirit Stones.

That certainly sounded expensive to someone living on the street, but it was nowhere near an impossible fortune for an established cultivator, successful merchant, noble family, Adventurer Guild branch, or anyone operating on the scale Damian increasingly intended to reach.

Then he calculated Evergreen Sect pricing.

Fifteen pills cost three Contribution Points, and one thousand and fifty pills divided perfectly into seventy bottles, which meant two hundred and ten Contribution Points.

Damian’s hand stopped.

"...Two hundred and ten."

Jian Rui looked even more puzzled now as Damian slowly leaned back in his chair.

Two hundred and ten Contribution Points could purchase enough Qi Nourishing Pills to theoretically force a fresh Level 1 Valorian with a Standard Class all the way to Level 6.

Five entire levels, five free Attribute Points, a General Feat at Level 4, and after reaching Level 6, that person would stand only one level away from their first Class Feat at Level 7.

Damian became very still.

A Qi Nourishing Pill was not some secret inheritance personally refined by a thousand-year-old ancestor beneath a blood moon.

It was merely a Mid Grade One pill, something that, as far as he knew, entry-level Grade One Alchemists refined for a living.

From Jian Rui’s introduction, even Grade Two Alchemists who had reached Qi Condensation could apparently mass-produce them like rubbish whenever they needed easy money.

Aside from genuinely impoverished rogue cultivators, nearly every disciple from an organized sect had access to Qi Nourishing Pills. They simply used them sparingly because of drug resistance, medicinal buildup and pill poison.

Meanwhile...

A single Vial of Healing cost Damian eleven Copper in Valoria, yet that same measly bottle was worth six hundred Contribution Points inside Evergreen!

On the wider Shengyuan market, Mu Qingyao had conservatively estimated one Mid-Grade Spirit Stone as a stable price.

It might be worth somewhat less in peaceful territories where corpse cultivators were not turning people inside out every other week, but a healing medicine capable of restoring organs and meridians remained valuable anywhere.

Damian stared at the Healing Vials sitting among his belongings.

Six hundred Contribution Points for one Vial, just one!

That was almost enough to purchase three complete sets of Qi Nourishing Pills capable of pushing three separate Valorians from Level 1 to Level 6!

Damian slowly covered his mouth with a solemn expression.

"This... this is exactly what the Dual-Realm Exchange System is about."

For the first time, the system’s name truly settled into his mind.

Something ordinary in one civilization became priceless in another because the two worlds had developed completely different solutions to completely different problems.

Valoria could heal shattered bodies through disposable eleven-Copper potions, yet leveling was brutally slow.

Shengyuan possessed cheap beginner pills capable of translating into direct Experience Points, yet a cultivator with destroyed organs could spend fortunes and still die before finding medicine comparable to a basic Healing Vial.

The imbalance was ridiculous.

Damian should have been ecstatic, but instead, strangely enough, his excitement began cooling.

The previous joy slowly disappeared from his face as another realization surfaced beneath it.

Because now that he finally understood just how absurd the system could become, Damian was forced to confront something he had been avoiding since arriving in Valoria.

...How exactly was he going to use the thing?

Asking this sounded simple until one genuinely thought deeply about the question.

Obviously, Damian intended to empower himself, he wanted to build wealth, create safety and strengthen his loved ones, and of course, he wanted to save his mother.

If Valoria truly possessed some method of resurrection, then Damian would move mountains trying to bring his father back as well.

He wanted enough influence that no corporation, government, sect, kingdom or powerful lunatic could casually decide the fate of his family again.

Those goals were clear, but the path toward them was not.

The cold truth is... the system had never ordered Damian to become a merchant.

In fact, despite being called the Dual-Realm Exchange System, there was nothing called ’merchant’ anywhere in its name.

The tutorial had introduced both worlds, unlocked functions and encouraged him to establish himself, but the system had made something extremely clear from the beginning.

Outside mandatory tutorial objectives, Damian was free to do what he wanted.

Future quests could be accepted or ignored.

Their rewards could tempt him, but the system would not force him.

Which meant the entire idea of setting up shops and trading goods had been his own assumption based on what the system happened to do well.

Damian could choose something entirely different.

He could become {The Wicked} and take everything for himself, exploiting every imbalance between the realms, monopolize whatever he could, murder anyone blocking him and strip both civilizations for resources without caring what remained behind.

Why sell Qi Nourishing Pills fairly when he could hoard them?

Why help the Evergreen Sect when he could wait until they collapsed and loot whatever remained?

Why strengthen anyone except himself and those he personally controlled?

That road would probably generate frightening personal benefits, but Damian was not really interested in such a lifestyle.

Then there was the opposite extreme, {The Saint}.

He would share everything selflessly, bringing Healing Vials into Shengyuan until crippled cultivators walked again and flood Valoria with Grain Avoidance Pills during famines.

He would spread Purification Talismans during disease outbreaks, and use Spirit Gathering Arrays to revolutionize magical education and cultivation resources to help talented people rise regardless of background.

He could entirely and singlehandedly make both worlds better simply because he could.

It sounded beautiful, but it also sounded like an excellent way to get exploited by every kingdom, church, sect and greedy bastard who interpreted kindness as weakness.

Damian had already lived that life once, and his review? One star!!

Then came {The Neutral} path, one of mostly fair trade.

There would be no exploitation and no charity beyond what circumstances justified.

He sold something for reasonable value, purchased something for reasonable value, and allowed the resulting consequences to belong to the people who made those choices.

It was clean, simple, and professional, with no attachments involved.

Unfortunately, the world was rarely clean, simple or professional.

If he sold Purification Talismans to a kingdom during a plague, was that neutral?

What if another kingdom suffering the same problem could not afford them?

What if he sold Qi Nourishing Pills to a noble family that used the resulting power to conquer weaker neighbors?

Trading did not remove responsibility merely because money changed hands.

If one of his items he traded for fairly happened to come back and bite him in the ass, would he still cross his legs and say ’not my concern’?

Heh, it was easy to act nonchalant and absolve oneself of responsibility and consequences when those consequences did not directly affect oneself.

Damian rubbed his forehead, sighing at the complexity of that one.

Finally, there was also the path that probably matched him best naturally and was what most modern transmigrators with basic human decency defaulted to, {The Hero}.

This path was not about becoming some shining champion who sacrificed everything for strangers, but being someone selfish enough to pursue his own life while still occasionally interfering when his conscience refused to shut up.

Help people when he wanted, punish someone when they pissed him off badly enough, save a village if he was already there and possessed the means, and walk away from another problem if helping would destroy everything he was building.

It was inconsistent.

Very human, perhaps, but inconsistent.

And even after choosing one of those broad philosophies, another thousand decisions waited beneath it.

Damian had told Roland that he eventually wanted his own force, and at the time, the concept had been simple.

He could build something like an MMORPG guild crossed with a real-world company, where powerful people remained together because cooperation benefited everyone.

But what kind of force specifically?

Would it be a mercantile organization that managed trade routes, warehouses, shops and wealth across both realms?

Would it be a military organization that could seize territory, protect his interests and make hostile factions think twice before touching anything carrying Damian Baines’ name?

Would it be an Adventuring organization that explored ruins, hunted monsters, cleared quests and gathered rare resources for him?

Or would it be a hidden organization that collected intelligence, planted spies and removed threats before those threats ever appeared at his front door?

In fact, Damian could even abandon organizations entirely.

He possessed a system capable of multiplying his personal growth beyond reason, so maybe the correct solution was becoming so powerful that organizations became unnecessary.

He could take the best cultivation resources from Shengyuan as well as the best Feats, Skills, equipment and magic from Valoria, then fortify himself until his fists became his army and his personal strength became his political argument.

But even then, he still had to choose whether to become famous and high profile while doing it, moderately visible or completely hidden and cautious to the point of cowardice.

Damian suddenly felt tired mentally.

He had gone from excitement over cheap Experience Pills, to calculations that completely changed his understanding of progression, to contemplating the philosophical direction of his entire second life within several minutes.

The emotional whiplash was brutal.

His eyes drifted toward the bottle in his hand.

To be honest, it would be easy to delay this decision.

After all, he could tell himself that he needed more information, to wait until Level 5, to wait until he understood cultivation, to wait until Evergreen’s war ended, to wait until he possessed substantial funds, and to wait until some undefined perfect moment arrived where every option became obvious.

But Damian knew better than that.

If he refused to choose his direction, the circumstances surrounding his life would eventually choose one for him.

It could be a war, an enemy, a friend, a lover, or even... a situation involving his mother.

By then, Damian would merely be reacting to the world rather than deciding what kind of man he intended to become within it.

His fingers tightened around the jade bottle until the tendons along his wrist became visible.

Jian Rui finally could not remain silent.

"Senior Damian, forgive me for interrupting, but you still have not examined the cultivation techniques," Jian Rui reminded him cautiously.

Damian blinked, then released a breath and looked toward the six manuals resting untouched on the table.

Right, one problem at a time.

There was no point deciding the ultimate philosophy of the Dual-Realm Exchange System before he had even unlocked its basic Shengyuan reward.

"Fair point. I’m thinking too far ahead," Damian admitted, rolling his shoulders before reaching for the first manual.

’Let’s finish Tutorial Quest Three first. Once I know what the system actually gives me here, I can decide what kind of lunatic I intend to become.’ He thought to himself.

Damian opened the first manual, and <Appraise I> activated.

[Item: Evergreen Life Sutra

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to temper and condition the body to reinforce vitality, recovery and physical resilience. Every level increases DEX and CON by 0.5

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): A Wood-attributed cultivation method designed for stable Body Tempering progression. Emphasizes vitality, health, recovery and long-term foundation stability.

Note: Requires a compatible Spirit Root.]

Damian raised an eyebrow.

Jian Rui nodded toward the manual. "The Evergreen Life Sutra is our sect’s most common introductory method. It is somewhat slower compared to other techniques, but is extremely safe, and injuries during cultivation are uncommon."

"Reliable, healthy and boring," Damian summarized.

Jian Rui hesitated before nodding. "That is... not inaccurate."

The Crimson Furnace Art came next.

[Item: Crimson Furnace Art

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to perform controlled physical stress to accelerate bodily adaptation. Every level increases STR and AGI by 0.5.

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): A Fire-attributed Body Tempering method that uses aggressive Spiritual Energy circulation to refine flesh and blood rapidly. Produces faster early advancement at the cost of greater pain, medicinal consumption and cultivation risk.

Note: Requires a compatible Spirit Root.]

"Fast, painful and dangerous," Damian remarked.

"Many young males choose it for precisely the first word and regret the remaining two later," Jian Rui replied dryly.

Damian laughed and opened the Blackwater Circulation Art.

[Item: Blackwater Circulation Art

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to establish a gentle circulation throughout the body, improving coordination, acuity and balance. Every level increases DEX and AGI by 0.5.

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): A Water-attributed cultivation method emphasizing continuous circulation, endurance and gradual purification. Advancement is steady but slower than most offensive methods.

Note: Requires a compatible Spirit Root.]

Jian Rui described it as one of the safest choices after Evergreen Life Sutra, especially for cultivators without large quantities of pills.

The Golden Edge Tempering Art was far less gentle.

[Item: Golden Edge Tempering Art

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to condition bones, tendons and connective tissues toward greater structural resilience. Every level increases STR and DEX by 0.5.

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): A Metal-attributed Body Tempering method emphasizing bone density, tendon strength and explosive physical force. Particularly suitable for weapon cultivators but harsh upon the body.

Note: Requires a compatible Spirit Root.]

Jian Rui visibly approved of that one.

Damian noticed and sized the young fellow up. "Let me guess, you’re a prospective sword cultivator?"

Jian Rui straightened proudly. "Indeed, Senior."

"Pffft, thought so." Damian mocked with a roll of his eyes, leaving Jian Rui speechless.

Next came Mountain Root Foundation Art.

[Item: Mountain Root Foundation Art

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to reinforce overall durability, defensive power and resistance against external force. Every level increases STR and CON by 0.5.

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): An Earth-attributed cultivation method emphasizing defensive foundation, bone stability and sustained endurance. Progression is slower, but cultivation deviation is uncommon.

Note: Requires a compatible Spirit Root.]

"Tank build, huh?" Damian concluded immediately.

Jian Rui stared at him, not sure what the phrase meant.

Finally, Damian picked up the thickest manual, the Five Elements Harmonization Art, and the appraisal results appeared right away.

[Item: Five Elements Harmonization Art

Rank: Novice (Valoria), Human (Shengyuan)

Effect 1 (Valoria): Uses mana to establish a balanced framework capable of interacting with multiple elemental expressions of ambient mana. Improves physical compatibility between mixed elemental energies and reduces internal conflict during multi-element magical conditioning. Increases STR, DEX, AGI, and CON by 0.5 per level.

Effect 2 (Shengyuan): A Five Elements cultivation method designed to circulate Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water Spiritual Energy through a balanced tempering cycle. Offers exceptional versatility and foundation breadth but possesses slower early cultivation speed and significantly greater comprehension requirements.

Note: Requires a Five-Elements Spirit Root.]

Damian’s eyes stopped on the last line.

There it was again, ’Spirit Root’.

Every technique contained the same requirement of needing this special organ to function.

"Jian Rui, what exactly is a Spirit Root?" Damian questioned, setting the manual down.

Jian Rui blinked as though Damian had asked why people needed lungs.

"A Spirit Root is the foundation that allows a living being to sense, absorb and refine Spiritual Energy into themselves. Without one, cultivation is impossible," Jian Rui explained carefully.

Damian rubbed his chin slowly.

Impossible?

Hm, that word was rather absolute.

"I can already sense Spiritual Energy," Damian pointed out.

Jian Rui looked uncertain. "Senior Damian’s perception is strange, but sensing Spiritual Energy around you and possessing a Spirit Root capable of drawing it through your meridians are not necessarily the same thing."

Fair enough.

Damian leaned forward. "So, how do I find out whether I have one?"

Jian Rui immediately turned toward a small wooden case placed near the manuals.

"Elder Mu anticipated that question. She left a Spirit Root Testing Orb for Senior Damian to use before selecting a cultivation technique," Jian Rui revealed.

Damian stared at the box speechlessly.

Well, that would have been useful information five minutes ago.

Jian Rui opened it and removed a pale crystal sphere slightly larger than a fist. The orb appeared almost completely colorless, though faint mist drifted inside its depths.

Damian accepted it carefully. "How do I use it?"

"Place both hands around the orb and remain still. Do not intentionally cast magic or circulate any foreign power. The Testing Orb will react naturally to your spiritual foundation," Jian Rui instructed.

Damian swallowed, and for some reason, he suddenly felt more nervous than when choosing to be a Mage.

If Spirit Roots were genuinely mandatory, this one little test could decide whether half of the Dual-Realm Exchange System was personally usable to him.

Perhaps he possessed one, perhaps Otherworlders adapted automatically, perhaps his absurd Spirit Attribute mattered, perhaps the system had some workaround, or perhaps Damian Baines had crossed into a cultivation world only to discover that he possessed absolutely no talent for cultivation whatsoever.

He placed both hands against the crystal and focused.

Jian Rui leaned closer with interest whereas Damian completely stopped breathing.

For several seconds, nothing happened.

Then, deep inside the pale Spirit Root Testing Orb...

A faint light began to stir.

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