The Whisper of the Nightingale

Chapter 37: An Arbitrary Amount of Skills

Raven stared at the description of the Divine Skill in her hands with wide eyes; it was an impressive movement type skill.

'Well this is definitely not a skill that I can base on my old martial arts!' Raven exclaimed to herself. 'This is practically a teleportation skill!'

If mastered, the Divine Skill Spacial Dash could be used to separate some of the practitioner's spirit essence into a separate incorporeal body of sorts, that could be sustained within a radius dependent on the practitioner's level of cultivation. It was then possible to, at any given moment, shift one's real body to that location, instantaneously.

There were however a few drawbacks to the skill, which might explain why it was graded as only a level six skill, despite the essence fluctuations being a bit stronger than those of the other level six skills Raven had inspected.

Besides being unusually hard to learn, the two major drawbacks were noise and essence consumption.

Keeping a incorporeal body of spirit essence separate from oneself would, not surprisingly, be extremely taxing on the soul and once the actual dash was made huge amounts of spirit essence would be used up. Raven guessed that with her current cultivation, she would only be able to use the skill perhaps 2-3 times in actual combat, and this was only thanks to her soul being unusually fast at absorbing spirit essence.

Then there was the noise. The immediate shift of pressure in the atmosphere, caused by the sudden disappearance and subsequent reappearance of a human body, would generate a bang so loud that it would burst the eardrums of any low level Spiritualists nearby. Not to mention the potentially deadly effects it would have on normal humans.

'Hehe, if I get proficient enough in using the Void Tracker, I should be able to cancel out the noise,' Raven was incapable of hiding the glee from her face, 'although it will be hard to learn, I'm not in a hurry, and thanks to the extra skill given to Advanced Students I will still have plenty of slots open for other skills.'

Raven had made up her mind and held up her identification stone to the scroll to unlock the Divine Skill within. Instantly a low murmur filled the floor.

"Do you see that?" someone snickered quietly, "the slave kid picked the Spacial Dash."

"Wasting his extra skill on a Divine Skill he will never learn, what a rookie mistake."

"I thought a slave would have been taught his self-worth early on. . . ."

It came to no surprise to Raven that the students on the second floor were only ignoring her when they thought she was looking. Although their voices were low, they might as well have shouted - it would have made no difference to Raven.

Although she registered what they said, she chose to ignore it for now as she instead looked at the identification stone in her palm with some confusion; the text "Divine Skill Count 1/4" was once again displayed.

'Shouldn't it be 2/4?' Raven frowned.

She thought back to the words Elder Stork had left her with: "you are to choose four Divine Skills and practice them to perfection. You are not permitted a fifth skill until one of the first four is mastered."

'Could it be that my trial run downstairs was enough for the stone to deem the Paralizing Ligtning Strike as mastered?'

As far as Raven was concerned, her earlier performance had been merely adequate, with many adjustments still required before she would be satisfied.