Jason continues to think over a number of facts and figures as he walks. In fact, he does this for the next three days in a row, never giving his mind a chance to wander in dangerous directions. It is finally on the fourth day that he wakes up and doesn't instantly feel the need to look back. So he went one more day of distracted walking and on the fifth day Jason got his bearings.

Because sure, Jason had just been walking slowly, but that was only slow for him as his movement ability was going full force to help distract him. Plus, on the second day he met back up with a road which, with the inherent power NeoRealm imparts to proper roads sped him up as well. This was slightly problematic because the shortcut was a little too good.

In theory, he was only at most a month out from the tardigrade themed dungeon and he wasn't even halfway to the bottleneck. This meant that now only was he ahead of schedule on starring his stats, he was behind schedule on leveling. Oh, and he was well and truly off course at this point.

Jason's original route would have taken him nowhere near. Nowhere near the last place. Forget.

So Jason wasn't too certain about the various nearby hunting grounds. A problem as the solution to being under leveled is to simply grind out a ton of low-level mobs. Not the most interesting or enthralling method, but maybe he could pick up some kind of benefit. Besides one of the slayer bonuses of course. That would be inevitable, though a good bit slower, without Peter around to guide him.

The fact that he had managed to get the bonus against cats and swarms is honestly a bit surprising as unlike some games from the past, the bonus didn't come from simply killing enough enemies. Instead, you have to learn through slaughter. Not even butchering a specific monster worked, though after enough of that you could get an assassin style bonus. No, the only way to get that juicy 5% or so bonus to damage was killing a ton of that kind of monster while working to figure out the best way to continue to do so.

Having someone more experienced could speed up the process, like with Peter, but it wasn't a guaranteed thing. Some people just don't have the right mindset to collect slayer bonuses. And in this case, mindset is very much the right word for it such that even official NeoRealm sources use the term. A rarity with how they avoid using any terminology that might even make you think about the pod reading your mind.

In the past, people have complained about this and petitioned for it to be changed. Those groups used all kinds of examples and took the whole "mindset" thing and ran with it. That got quashed quite quickly by NeoRealm as they brought out the actual mechanics behind the slayer bonus.

In simple terms, the bonus is given when someone has enough understanding of an enemy as well as the right mindset. Mindset, in this case, means the mental state in which a person can attack the enemy without any hesitation. A killer's mindset as it were.

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This didn't mean someone that hated the monster or had no emotions for the monster. Even those types of people can have hesitation or micro movements that exposes them to the System as not being fully focused on the matter. Not even most natives who grew up in the kill or be killed environment are capable of reaching this sort of mindset.

More importantly, this doesn't mean being trained to the point of reacting without thought. If the System detects that your movements are completely muscle memory without any true flexibility, you don't get the bonus either. As stated in the report, the bonus is for trained individuals, not robots. This one fact is part of why it can take so long to earn. The System needs enough examples of you fighting the monster to know you aren't just a dancing puppet.

Jason was a bit of a cheat in this situation. If there is one science that his past life had advanced in compared to his current life, it was a very narrow range of psychology. For cultivators, you can't depend on simple muscle memory because all it will take is someone more powerful than you to take a look and you're doomed. The person doesn't even have to fight you themselves, instead they can just teach someone else, even someone weaker, how to react in turn.

So after many millennia of highly unethical experiments and maybe even the manipulation of an entire world's population or two, cultivators figured out how to truly remove the hesitation along with a ton of other very nasty mental tricks. After all, both "good" and "evil" traditions will have methods that involve cutting off the seven emotions or forsaking one's "humanity". All for the chance at immorality and absolute power.

Not that Jason ever really trucked with that sort of nonsense even in his first life. After all, what is the point of being immortal if you're a cold, unthinking stone? Even stones that manage to cultivate try to gain emotions and stuff, so why should humans try to reverse the situation? Nevermind the rumors about how while those methods make the early stages faster, they can cut off your path.

Many people were willing to try it of course, especially those with heart demons. Though speaking of heart demons, Jason can't help but cringe. That is one downside to introducing cultivation to his current civilization. Many of the cultivation fantasy stories like to make them out to either be literal demons that form or simply mental hang-ups.

They're neither. Heart demons are closer to pseudo-personalities. That obsession with getting revenge? If you can't accept it, your cultivation will end up perverted as the thought continues to circle in your mind until the point that it becomes self-sustaining. At that point, you can't just "realize" your way out of.

The upside is that if you can untangle a heart demon, the power that came from your cultivation base will return and even be of a higher quality. After all, the heart demon is basically a form of dantian where the power is constantly cycled. However, without correcting the problem it can eventually take over if the amount of power within it ever exceeds your own.

Though, as always, some people try to use them for their own benefit. It can even work with one caveat. While the power in a heart demon will generally be denser and purer, it will also have bits that are heavily corrupted by the emotion behind the heart demon. So taking all that power in without thought could end up with rapid shifts in your personality. To the point that in some cases this ends up being a final gambit by the heart demon and results in it taking over, anyway.

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