Chương 32: Group Battles (Part 2) and the First Body Evolution (Qi Aspect)

Accepting her fate, Lin Xue closed her eyes and waited for disqualification." AAAH!" Instead of the pain she expected, she heard Yan Eli's piercing scream. She opened her eyes, and saw a disciple standing in front of her, blocking her with his broad back, wearing the same sect robes as her.

"Are you alright?" the disciple standing before her asked quietly, not taking his eyes off Yan Eli. In response, she simply nodded and hummed something with her mouth closed.

"How! Dare! You?!" Holding her bloodied hand and looking at the deep gash on it, Yan Eli, with a twisted face, raised her head and stared directly into the eyes of the disciple who had wounded her.

"Mo Fan! Everything is alright? We thought we wouldn't catch up to you!" From behind the fallen trees, a third group appeared, with Miu Muye running at the front.

"I'm fine! Forgive me for not waiting for you all. There was no other way." Mo Fan, standing in front of Lin Xue, shifted his gaze to Brother Devi. Mo Fan's group, seeing what was happening, quickly helped the wounded from Lin Xue's group and stood together next to Mo Fan, ready for battle.

"Devi Ali, I think we should leave." From behind Brother Devi stepped out a young man with wavy black hair with white tips that swayed in the wind. Throwing his piercing gaze at the significant numerical disadvantage, he adjusted his Practitioner emblem of three Non-Combat Paths on his chest.

"Shen Romun... You... You're right." Devi Ali was about to bark at him but, remembering that they were both at the seventh layer of Qi Condensation, he stopped himself in time.

"Brother Devi! What do you mean we are leaving?! You and Brother Shen are both at the seventh layer! Together, we could easily crush these soon to be corpses!" Having bandaged her cut with a rag, just to stop the bleeding, she gripped the handles of her daggers tighter. Her whole body showed that she was ready to pounce on both Mo Fan and Lin Xue at any moment.

"No! We've already lost too many from our group due to the bad luck of our initial teleportation location... We're leaving, Yan Eli." Devi Ali, without any fear, turned around, exposing his back to the enemy, and began to walk away. The others behind him followed." Oh … By the way, pray that you don't run into me in the paired battles. For that arrogant look you gave me today, I think I'll gouge these eyes of yours as my trophies! Hahahaha!"

Suddenly turning his head and staring at Mo Fan, Devi Ali, not hiding his killing intent, looked at him as if he were nothing. Mo Fan frowned. After all, he was only at the fifth layer. He was a few days short of breaking through to the sixth layer.

"Same to you, Blue Eyes!" Yan Eli, with one dagger, drew it across her own neck, while looking into Lin Xue's eyes. She licked her lips, smiled, and ran after her brother.

"Brother Devi! Wait for me!"

"Mo Fan! Are you hurt? Let me examine you." Miu Muye ran up to Mo Fan and began looking him over. Glancing at Lin Xue, who was already surrounded by her own group members providing first aid, she decided to simply ignore it. Seeing this, Mo Fan smiled slightly and shook his head. …. On the stands, the last row.

"Yan Eli is at the fifth layer, while Lin Xue is at the sixth, judging by the Qi flows emanating from her." An hadn't expected that if he concentrated hard enough, he could not only see the Qi flows through the projection but also read information from them.

"Is it due to lack of combat experience?" Watching the battle between the groups, An discovered a huge number of flaws in Qi manipulation during combat in both Lin Xue and Yan Eli.' The only problem if I were to face them would be the number of their techniques...' Analyzing everything he'd seen, the entire battle from the group fight down to the one-on-one, he realized that they all had more than one attack technique.

He saw how many disciples across all projections used several techniques, close combat and ranged, both through Qi itself and through weapons like swords. Analyzing everything he saw, trying to understand how he would respond if he were the target of these attacks and techniques, the only solution that seemed correct to him was a lightning-fast frontal attack, putting everything one has into the very first strike.

He noticed that all the disciples on the arena, every one he'd seen using techniques, had a large time window while they were chanting and gathering Qi to use their techniques. Noticing these nuances was easy for An once he realized he could read Qi flows through the projections.

The moment an opponent began redirecting Qi from their dantian, meaning moving that energy through their body to execute a technique, An would need to close the distance between them at maximum speed and deliver a strike, holding nothing back, a precise strike directly to where their defense was weak or neglected. He knew that with such a crude but effective tactic, his chances of victory were much higher. However, there was a catch.

If his first attack failed, the only thing left for him would be to study and find flaws in his opponent's Qi when they used techniques, specifically, to put all his effort into understanding how his opponent moved their energy inside their body, find patterns in their Qi movement, and use those patterns to catch openings. But An wasn't sure he could last long in such a scenario if his first attack failed. His opponent could simply overwhelm him with techniques and, for example, talismans.

Sitting, watching, and analyzing hundreds of battles on the different projections, An suddenly began concentrating on blades. It didn't matter what weapon: spear, sword, or daggers. All his attention was directed at the blades, how they made contact with their targets, their sparks, their clang, their weight. In his head, a moment suddenly surfaced, when he was under the Kavana tree, he had tried to make his Qi sharp, to make it like a blade, but all he had managed was compressing energy to the size of a thread.

Completely focused on replaying the sparks and sounds of blade impacts in his head, An remembered how, after long training in understanding Qi, reading books and some vague answers from Elder Shoa, imparting sharpness to one's energy was a process of giving an aspect to one's Qi. And an aspect was part of something else, something usually inaccessible to a cultivator at Qi Condensation.

Playing everything over in his head, everything he had seen and heard, he suddenly came to a conclusion, based only on his own guesses, that, perhaps, the aspects of Qi were part of something greater. Part of the Dao. Something he had only read about in novels, but never found so much as a hint of here, inside this great Sect. Elder Shoa's evasiveness regarding these aspects of Qi and what they truly were.

Books and scrolls in the Scripture Pavilion, containing so little information, so much cut out and inaccessible, that even now, An didn't truly understand where he was or what surrounded him, beyond the walls of the Sect. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience. In this strange state, on the threshold of complete detachment from the outside world, An suddenly raised his hand in front of himself, creating a thread of Qi on his palm.

Instinctively, without even realizing it, he took a flask of Qi Enlightenment pills from his pouch. Opening the stopper, several cultivators near him suddenly turned toward An, and seeing the flask of pills, their eyes darted around.

Especially one cultivator at the fifth layer of Qi Condensation, who suddenly stood up and slowly began walking toward An, completely ignoring the sideways glances of others who had wanted to take advantage of the situation but, sensing his cultivation, immediately abandoned the thought. Even in this semi-comatose state, his body sensed the threat, and for just a moment, it activated his Qi and pushed it outward, washing over the cultivator with his pressure.

Even though both were at the same layer, the very quality of the energy and the pressure that cultivator felt stopped him dead in his tracks. When the pressure suddenly disappeared, he turned around and sat back down in his seat, pretending nothing had happened. The others, seeing him sitting in his own failure, gloated, but only to themselves, afraid of being caught. Slowly but surely, a true void formed around An. Everyone moved as far away as possible, leaving an entire corner for him alone.

Tilting the flask, two pills fell into his mouth and immediately dissolved. All this time, not stopping for a moment, he replayed and analyzed the same memories in his head, simultaneously, the thread of Qi on his palm began to spin. From time to time, this thread changed shape, becoming very thin, then thick. Sometimes, it scattered into tiny particles. These particles would freeze, change places, and then glue themselves back into a thread.

Time after time, as if An was searching for something inside these particles. When the pills' effect was almost gone, An suddenly froze. The next moment, a horrifying, tearing pain from the inside spread throughout his body." AAAH!" Through gritted teeth, he cried out, drawing unwanted attention from everyone around him. His body suddenly stiffened. His teeth clenched so tightly that they began to crack.

Even with his consciousness in a borderline state, he felt this terrible pain, but could do nothing about it, only involuntarily fighting to avoid blacking out. And all this time, enduring all the pain. The memories, the sounds, Elder Shoa's words continued to spin in his head, over and over again. He kept trying to find something, to understand something that didn't exist. Suddenly, as if at the snap of a finger, he opened his eyes inside his inner world.

The pain and all his thoughts suddenly faded into the background. He felt that something was happening to his body, but all his attention was focused elsewhere. He sensed something near him, right in front of him, within arm's reach and at the same time millions of kilometers away. Without even understanding it himself, he felt a strong desire well up inside him, to grab onto this thing and never let go. The boundaries of his inner world began to vibrate, and the pain in his head intensified.

As he continued to reach into the void, he felt strong resistance, both from himself and from his inner world, the Qi around suddenly became chaotic. Even his spiritual body began to shake and distort. And finally, he grasped something. Something transparent, invisible to the eye.

"W-what... what the hell is this... Kh!" Bringing his hand to his face and opening it, he saw a particle of Qi appear from nothing, but this particle was different from all the others, he couldn't read the flow from it. Before he could even look at it properly, it began to grow.

"I-it's absorbing... my Qi!" He felt how, from his entire body and dantian, all his Qi, as if answering a command that wasn't his, rush into his inner world, specifically toward the growing particle. Frightened, he threw this thing into the air. This particle suddenly flew upward, toward the very boundary of his inner world. Watching this thing grow larger and larger, not knowing what to do, An slowly flew up to it and touched it with the tip of his finger.

"This... this is the aspect of Sharpness!" The moment he touched the particle, he immediately received the information contained within this strange thing. He realized, this particle didn't want to harm him, but the self-defense of his inner world had activated and begun resisting something unknown, unfamiliar. His world was resisting, not providing the amount of energy the particle demanded.

"I hope this isn't a mistake!" Not coming up with anything better, An allowed this aspect of Sharpness to take as much of his Qi as it needed, and the next moment, he regretted it. The moment this particle gained full access, not only his physical body but his spiritual body as well, were clamped down as if in chains. A terrible pressure descended upon him. The aspect of Sharpness suddenly began descending to the bottom of his world, where the particle stopped and began absorbing his Qi with terrifying force.

A second wave of pain struck him. He felt how greedily this thing was consuming his Qi, how his muscles began to dry up, losing all their energy. His veins and blood began to darken. He felt life itself being sucked out of him. All because this aspect of Sharpness didn't have enough energy to fuel itself from his dantian and his inner world, so it began taking it from his body, his whole body. Just when he thought nothing worse could happen, he was proven wrong again.

His stomach, intestines, pancreas and gallbladder suddenly began shrinking, dissolving, and breaking into small pieces to transfer all their energy directly into his inner world. Panic took hold of him. Feeling bound, lost, submerged in dulled pain, An continued to fight, trying not to lose consciousness, afraid that if he let loose for even a moment, it would be his fatal mistake. Only a few moments later, his entire digestive system had dissolved, leaving behind emptiness inside his body.

Having lost most of his organs, An nearly lost his mind. At the peak of his despair, this particle of the Sharpness aspect suddenly stopped, and as if at the snap of a finger, spat all the absorbed energy back out. Like a broken dam, all this Qi began to pour out of his inner world into his physical body, filling the emptiness, restoring the veins and blood, which instantly transformed and shed all their darkness. His muscles began to fill, each fiber felt the strength returning.

All the unleashed Qi restored his body from within, circulating through his body several times, finding even the smallest void and filling them. The remaining energy headed straight into his dantian. Finally, the tightness and pain disappeared, and An was finally able to open his eyes." Haa! Haa!" His entire body was trembling. His cracked teeth chattered against each other. His arms and legs, not obeying him, continued to shake.

Even though Qi had restored his internal state, externally he looked like a dried prune. He had aged about seventy years in appearance. Still in shock, An didn't notice his subconscious automatically activating his regeneration. Within minutes, all the wrinkles and folds on his body disappeared, making him look like a thirteen-year-old child again, only leaving behind his newly acquired thinness.

In this strange state, amidst the panic and phantom pain, he suddenly felt that his muscles had become harder and heavier, the strength within each fiber had increased. The Qi inside his body had become denser, and seemed purer. Closing his still-trembling eyelids, he examined his dantian, and understood that the Qi inside had also become denser and purer, not greater in quantity, but higher in quality than before.

Looking further, he swallowed when he understood what had happened inside him, specifically to his organs. From his dantian, barely noticeable channels formed from his own tissues and Qi spread throughout his empty abdomen, connecting his Qi source to all his remaining organs and turning the dantian into the center of a new organ system. Even his larynx had connected directly to his dantian.

Realizing that he had lost his intestines, he ' looked' inside himself, all the way down, where the exit of his digestive system used to be, and now there was nothing. Everything had fused together, without a single scar.' What's happening... What is all of this?!' Still with a heavy head, which would not calm down, he suddenly heard something. Thump-thump And then, silence. His heart had stopped beating. He placed his hand on his chest.

Thump-thump He exhaled, feeling his heartbeat again, but he realised that something had fundamentally changed. The frequency of his heartbeat had dropped significantly, to only a few beats per minute. The speed of blood flow through his veins had increased several times. His internal temperature had risen sharply, creating a furnace inside him. And his breathing had almost stopped, now, nearly half a minute passed between each breath.

"Wh-what happened to me... c-could this be possible just from some aspect of Qi?" An lowered his head and wrapped his arms around himself, trying to stop the tremor, still not fully believing what had happened.