After the sighting of the other people, a group of what looked to be a small caravan of traders, the rest of Jason's escape went smoothly enough. With Lily grasped in his hands, he continued fleeing until the monsters had all returned to the strange Mana and Qi supported grass forest.

Not that he stopped right away, instead continuing his escape until the first signs of trees and bushes showed up, you know, stuff other than grass. Though he still didn't see the caravan from before. Well, he did see signs of them. Even with a magical road, you can't completely remove your traces when traveling in such a large group, especially when running away.

At this point though besides a little relief that he didn't pull them into his mess, Jason is just out of it. The alarm ritual he carves out is a lot rougher than usual and likely won't last as long, but he is barely able to keep his eyes open at this point. So once the defenses are up and Lily has had a chance to clean herself in a nearby creek, Jason conks out with Lily soon behind him.

With both of them now asleep a man seems to appear out of nowhere on the tree above. He looks down at Jason with a frown and waits until the shoddy ritual fails. Then the man silently hops from tree to tree, following the path the caravan had taken.

After that Jason and Lily continue to sleep for a good seven or so more hours before waking up. Lily is fine as she mostly just had to deal with an intense fight. Jason? Not so much. He had overdrawn himself and the System apparently didn't like how he handled it last time.

Sure, he still felt some natural soreness from overdrawing himself, but on top of that Jason can feel an unnatural restriction. The strings that make up his body are stiff in a way that feels like when you try to move, but your clothes are too tight. You can tell you could move better, just something is stopping you.

Of course this felt worse as not only was the surface being restrained, but a more core part of him in this world. This makes sense of course. His strings are still controlled by the System and so likely this was one of the methods it has to restrain people. In fact, it was quite likely that most other people would not be able to tell the restriction came from an outside force.

Jason shakes his head and turns his attention to something else. While interesting, there isn't anything he can do about it for the moment. Instead he brings Lily back over to the creek and does a better job of getting her clean. The fight had left her basically soaked in the blood of her enemies and a quick dip while completely worn out isn't exactly going to get you properly clean.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

While focusing on hygiene he also gets the System to display his and Lily's gains. While the System wasn't too keen on him breaking certain limits so often, the escape and Lily's fight would be rewarded.

{+7 Agility, +12 Stamina

Lily gained: +10 HP, +2 Toughness, +5 Agility}

Jason grimaces when he sees the amount of HP she gained. While one of the more common stats for people to see raised due to "training", it generally only goes up by one or two after a tough fight. To be raised by an entire ten, especially when she only had about 50 to begin with, really showed how dangerous the fight was.

Still, it was nice to see Agility go up some more. It was likely going to be the hardest to star, even if it was also the one that seemed to be raising the quickest. After all, if Jason's capped out at 83, how much more must a rabbit's natural cap be?

After that Jason headed back to where they had slept. Nothing had attacked them there yet so staying another day likely won't cause any problems. Besides that, while he sort of remembers setting up the ritual, he could tell it was a lot rougher than he would expect to work.

So after a quick breakfast, Jason settles in to examine the traces left by his ritual. Because sure, it likely only lasted a few hours, but when he would expect something that rough to last minutes, there must have been something going on. Sure, the rough outline of the ritual had already started to fall apart, but there was enough left to get an overview.

This took a while as figuring out what had been a line and what was just a scuff in the dirt was a little tough. In the end after much head scratching, Jason managed to find what was different. Though he wasn't certain if the discovery was a good or bad thing.

When drawing the ritual, Jason had done some things differently. Not the worst thing, well not the worst since it didn't literally blow up in his face. The problem was the origin of the change. He hadn't used some half remembered scene from a NeoRealm video and it wasn't some random accident.

The change came from his past life. Sure, he wasn't some formation expert, but anyone who had been at a sect will have likely picked up a few simple ones like the alarm ritual Jason now has. None of them too complex, but Jason had learned more about why they worked. Part of that was how each of them gathered energy from the environment so such simple toys didn't end up using any cultivation resources to power.

That was the key to the change. Jason had figured out which part of his alarm ritual involved drawing in his Energy and in his delirium, substituted that piece with the remembered essence gathering sub-formation. And it had worked. Not just worked, it had allowed the alarm formation to last a magnitude more time than it should have.

It shouldn't have worked.

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