Astral Pet Store (WN)

Su Ping raised his eyebrows.

“Are you saying that I am the liability?”

The fact that upgrading the store had certain requirements about his rank came as a surprise to him. Although, there was another interpretation of this situation… He had to be too outstanding, since he had gained enough energy points to upgrade the store and had finished the task of aiding a pet’s progress when he was merely at the seventh rank!

Su Ping heaved a sigh and shook his head. “You must have underestimated me,” he expressed his disappointment at the system.

The system: “…”

“You must be over the moon to have me as your host,” Su Ping added.

Su Ping smiled a smug smile.

He had one-upped the system that day.

My dear, dear, stupid system, you lack the experience of dealing with a poser! “First warning,” the system cautioned Su Ping at once.

Su Ping chuckled and stopped that train of thought. He wouldn’t grant the system the satisfaction of getting back at him.

Su Ping started to browse through the list of pets and sorted them into different categories. Making sure that each pet’s aptitude could become first-rate was complicated, and making a lot of money turned out to be a difficult task.

“Those pets’ aptitude is quite low and some are downright poor. I’ll have to make sure their combat strength can increase drastically to make sure that the pets can progress, or at the very least, I have to enlighten the pets first so that they can master the elementary agility skill. I wonder how much their aptitudes can improve with that talent skill.”

Su Ping categorized the pets and summoned them from the pet room group by group. The first two pets were dragons, but only average ones.

Those dragons were more than common in the Realm of Purple-blood Dragons and would be viewed as “unsavory food” by the purple dragons.

Su Ping placed his hands on the dragons’ foreheads and started the enlightening process.

There was no surprise. Both dragons were successfully enlightened and currently had the elementary agility talent skill.

Su Ping checked their aptitudes. To his delight, both dragons’ aptitudes had increased drastically!

Indeed, talent skills are rare and powerful. The pets that can be enlightened are not unlucky ones. After all, the unlucky ones cannot even be enlightened.

He had not done any other sorts of training with the two dragons and yet the two dragons’ aptitudes were approaching the average grading. Talent skills were clearly important.

Also, with the addition of the elementary agility skill, those dragons’ combat strength was raised to 9.9 points!

The dragons’ combat strengths were previously 9.4 and 9.5 respectively. Considering that they had been at the lower position of the ninth rank, such combat strengths were a little bit better than their rank’s average and should be considered common among dragons.

Of course, even to raise battle pets to the expected average was already hard work for many battle pet warriors. After all, sometimes, if the training wasn’t up to standard, the battle pets could have combat strength that wouldn’t even match their ranks.

That wasn’t rare.

For example, it was common for your kid to have trouble passing an exam when everyone else’s kid did fine!

Training pets was a delicate job. Some might suffer from malnutrition and have a weak constitution if the master wasn’t able to take good care of them. There were also occasions when the pets would eat randomly because their masters were away and they could become weak after getting sick often because of eating strange herbs. Even pets of higher ranks could lose their combat strength.

Not all the Tibetan Mastiffs were able to defeat stray dogs.

Su Ping didn’t know if the two dragons were at the beginning or approaching the end of the 9.9 grading, because there were many more digits behind that decimal point.

Either way, Su Ping was glad about the aptitude improvement. He was able to tell that the Enlightening Guide was important. Things would be even better if he had the middle-level, instead of elementary agility skill. He could imagine what the middle-level agility skill could do when the elementary effect was already stunning.

That progress speed was much faster than using other known secret skills. When two pets had similar combat strength but one of them had elementary agility skills, the latter would be able to move two times faster as the former and would be able to eliminate the former before it even had time to react!

Su Ping had the two dragons go back and called out the other pets to enlighten them.

Those customers’ pets had benefited immensely with that way of training. Of course, he wasn’t losing anything; he just had to move his hands. Also, once he finished the professional training, the pets would be at their peak state; their masters would have to go to his store if they wanted to better their pets after that. No other store could help their pets progress beyond that point.

That was how he developed “loyalty” in his customers and gained a monopoly.

Soon after, Su Ping had enlightened all 24 battle pets.

Most of those pets had inferior aptitude and several already had an average aptitude; the latter would be the ones that were already trained well.

Su Ping categorized the battle pets once more; he would take the battle pets into cultivation sites group by group.

There were demons, dragons, and pets of various element families.

Few battle pets had nothing but brawns. Those such battle pets usually had strong defense but compared to pets of the element families, the former’s skills were neither practical nor aesthetic. That was why battle pets that only had brute force were usually the choices of poorer people.

The first group of pets Su Ping was going to train was the one of the demon family.

There were seven of them in total, and none of them were among the most powerful. The strongest of the seven ranked No.7 of all the demon pets.

Su Ping was at the seventh rank but his spirit had been refined enough times for him to host nine pets at one time.

He already had five pets of his own; he could sign temporary contracts with four extra pets for the next trip to the cultivation site.

That was to say, he would have to take two trips to train the seven pets.

Su Ping didn’t go to the Demigod Burial this time. He chose a cultivation site suitable for pets of the demon family.

There were multiple cultivation sites suitable for those pets, like various realms of the undead or that of demons, similar to the realms of dragons.

“Why are there so many different realms? I thought we lived in one world,” Su Ping asked the system.

It took a while before the system broke the silence and answered. “There was once one world but that was at the beginning of time. However, the world broke into different pieces.”

“What was the cause of that?” Su Ping inquired.

The system didn’t answer. Su Ping waited for a while but he didn’t hear anything back from the system. Su Ping called the system again but to no avail. He stopped wondering. He knew that finding out the answer wouldn’t do him any good; that was a world too far away from him.

Su Ping took a pick. “Then, I will choose the Ashura City of Sinful Swords.”

That was a middle-rank cultivation site and the introduction told him that an Ashura King of Swords was the ruler of that realm.

Su Ping didn’t forget to aim at bettering himself in that cultivation site, aside from training those pets. “It would be nice if I could find the Ashura King of Swords there and learn some sword skill from him,” Su Ping said to himself.

The introduction said that the Ashura King of Swords had mastered peerless sword skills which interested Su Ping greatly. Even though he preferred to use his fists, which were simple and brutal enough, he believed that it was good to learn something about other skills and weapons. Skills would never be a burden.

He paid the admission fee after he decided.

He bought four temporary contracts from the system’s shop at a cost of 40 energy points, then signed the contracts with the first batch of pets and hurried toward his destination.

The Ashura City of Sinful Swords.

The name was not wrong. It was indeed a city, the heart of the world. The city was ancient and desolate; outside the settlement was a wasteland where few lives could be found.

Inside the ancient city roamed a small number of skeletons, and that was all.

The highest point of the city was a platform, where a dark, giant sword stood. Sitting in front of the sword was a huge figure, exuding a horrible aura that actually swallowed light, and there was a horn on the head of the figure, but the rest of his extremities were broken.

Su Ping summoned all nine pets as soon as he was teleported there, which were his own battle pets and the four pets from his customers.

He fought on the empty streets of the city, and struggled all the way. Su Ping came to the heights point in the city after he was accidentally attacked and killed seven or eight times—the platform.

There were no other undead creatures there, not even evil ghosts. Su Ping saw the burly figure sitting in front of the giant sword; he recognized the figure’s species at a glance. The figure’s momentum was extremely strong, definitely not of the legendary rank, but the Star Rank. It was more terrifying than the old dragon he had seen in the Realm of the Purple-blood Dragons!

The figure was ready to strike at any time. The next second, Su Ping saw that figure open his eyes. Su Ping felt a tingling pain in his eyes the moment they made eye contact.

Su Ping went straight to the point, “I came here bearing no ill will. I’m here to learn sword skills.”