* * *
When John arrived back at the house, Kelly and Isabel were saying their goodbyes. Kelly was hugging Isabel’s legs and Isabel was stroking Kelly’s hair while smiling.
He wasn’t certain if Kelly was truly feeling sad or if she was putting on an act, but he genuinely felt sorry for having to separate them.
Logan, Evan, Nathan, Kyle, and Cody were standing further away in a group.
Sarah saw John emerge from the jungle and walked up to him. “The others have already said their goodbyes to Kelly,” she whispered. “I knew Isabel would take the longest, so I made her go last.”
“When they’re finished, I’ll order them all to start walking into the jungle,” John whispered back. “After Kelly loses sight of them, and when I’m in the clear, I’ll go and put them all in the Storage Space.”
Sarah nodded and the two of them waited forty-five minutes for the pair to finish saying goodbye.
When it was over, Kelly stood on the deck as she watched Isabel walk to John and Sarah. John smiled at Isabel and spoke loud enough for Kelly to overhear him. “Thank you for all you’ve done these past few years. I’m grateful from the bottom of my heart that all of you helped protect my family while I was away.
“That allowed me to concentrate on the fights instead of worrying about them back home. It could be said that your actions allowed me to survive the war, so consider your debt more than paid.
“I’ll walk with you part of the way to the next village to make sure you don’t get lost. It has been almost half a decade since you walked through the jungle to get here, after all.”
Isabel and the rest of the puppets smiled and nodded at John’s gesture—as John had ordered them to—when he finished speaking. He walked them towards the jungle as the puppets followed him, turning around and waving at Kelly every so often.
Once he was out of Kelly’s line of sight, John sped up a little and the puppets followed. He couldn’t go much faster, though, because the worker puppets couldn’t keep up.
After he got a mile inside the jungle, he stored them inside his Storage Space and headed back.
Chapter 5: Leaving
That night, John watched over Sarah instead of sleeping. She had started the process to fix her cultivation shortcut, and she wanted him around to make sure nothing went wrong since she had used Toxin Power to create clots to kill off her Life System’s Branches.
Prior to doing so, Sarah realised that she needed to make all the poison and antidotes they would need to immunise Kelly before creating the clots. The couple also decided that they would stay at the house until Sarah’s cultivation shortcut was fixed and she mastered the disguise technique that Luke had created. She knew that it could take anywhere from a week to a year for the method to finish, but she had no other choice.
As for the disguise technique, its completion depended on a person’s sensitivity to changes since it used the water inside a person instead of Life Power. The more sensitive the person was, the faster they would be able to get used to the changes and train faster as well.
Due to that fact, Sarah would be able to train the disguise technique until it reached level eight. Unfortunately, she would have to wait until her shortcut was fixed to obtain level nine, solely because she needed to use Life Power to help with the strong vibrations and mirages.
They spent the rest of the night dividing their chores. In addition to martial arts, John would teach Kelly how to hunt, and Sarah would obviously teach her about medicine and poisons.
By the time the beginning process had finished, dawn had broken and the two decided to get an early start on their day. John ventured out to hunt in the jungle for the first time, but this time, he ran far past the training area.
As he came to a halt, he was shocked by what he saw in his Scan. A deer-like creature stood grazing on some leaves, completely ignoring John’s presence.
Deer are supposed to live in the woods, not the jungle! Then again, that’s back on Earth, not here.
He wasted no time killing the deer. John then drained the blood, skinned it, and cut the meat off the bones. After placing the meat inside his Storage Space, he started his journey back home.
He placed the meat on top of the kitchen counter when he got back, then waited for Kelly to wake up so they could start their daily training.
The three of them fell into a routine and before they knew it, a year and three months had passed by.
On this day, John was training Kelly like usual, but he heard his system go off.
Ding!
He realised how much he missed that noise ringing multiple times a day.
“Practice the last two moves ten more times each.”
After making sure Kelly was occupied for a little while, John opened the system for the first time in over a year to check the changes.
Welcome to the Idle System 9.9.
Name: John
Title: Demon
Age: 58
Idlers: 2160/2160
Skill Points: 4
Toxin Pool (Brain): 9.05T
Toxin Pool (Body): 6.45T
Soul Pool: 100B
Sin: 159,101,645
Immortality List:
Vitality - Idlers 0/2160, Neurons - 3/3, Organs - 0/3, Body - 0/3
So the third level of Immortality’s Vitality is finished. I’ll get the epic Vitality’s Neurons up next since that skill will now work at full capacity. But… I don’t know if it will take five, ten, or twenty years.
John took a deep breath and placed all the Idlers into the skill but closed his eyes before he saw the time pop up. He then wished for good luck before looking at the time needed
