"...Now that you know the basics, try hitting me." Yrre had just finished explaining the basic foundational moves that every blade user needed to know. She took a proper defensive stance, yet looked utterly ridiculous threatening Elizabeth with a kitchen knife.Confronted so straightforwardly, Elizabeth felt conflicted. Subconsciously, she understood that with Yrre"s experience and her probable centuries spent in cultivation, there was hardly a chance she could injure her. However, it was an unchangeable fact that Yrre"s current fighting strength was limited to a whole stage below Elizabeth"s cultivation.
Elizabeth took her own offensive stance and decided to use her various auxiliary abilities in the form of Timeworn Eyes and Kinesthetic Acuity. Not wanting to risk injuring Yrre should she be unable to keep up with her superior stats, using those Innate Skills would reduce the risk in fighting by augmenting Elizabeth"s reaction time and comprehension speed.
In the middle of her room, Elizabeth thrust her blade with the entirety of her speed and strength. She aimed to stop right before Yrre"s chest but quickly found out how naive her line of thinking was. Yrre didn"t even have to take this level of pressure seriously, as she barely rotated her wrist to let her knife hit the back of the Inferioria blade and moved ever so slightly to the right, causing Elizabeth"s blade to miss her entirely.
Naturally, as a veteran blade user, Yrre could tell Elizabeth"s wavering intent as she distinctly noticed the pull of strength in the Inferioria blade as the blade came closer to her body. She didn"t want Elizabeth to practice with a focus on holding back. So, the moment that she finished diverting her attack, Yrre used a thrust of her own to nick Elizabeth right before slicing into her larynx.
Instinctually, Elizabeth couldn"t help but sweat bullets as her vocal muscles tensed. She jumped back a couple meters and wiped her brow clean of sweat as that horrifying conflict in sensation replayed in her mind. Experiencing both danger, in the form of having a deadly blade pressed so closely to a vital, and safety, in the form of knowing her opponent could never take that terminal move, at the same instant conflicting within her subconscious was the worst feeling she had thus far experienced.
Taking a couple seconds to recover, Elizabeth jumped back into the fight after calming down. Yrre made for a very patient teacher. Paradoxically, though she usually went for the most sinister life-ending attacks, there was never the intent to kill. For several bouts, Elizabeth was treated to the feeling of being right at death"s door, and each subsequent visit only furthered her desire to quickly learn. As a Master Acupoint Pract.i.tioner, Elizabeth knew fully well the hidden mark Yrre"s knife aimed for, and seeing that she only used the moves taught, Elizabeth started treating the foundation of her swordplay with the seriousness Yrre sought.
With sparring as intense as the one Elizabeth engaged in, it was no surprise that she managed to develop a skill for general blade mastery within five minutes of learning the basics.
[Blade Art: Basics
Level 1
Experience: 0/10
Grade: F
Description: The foundation from which all Blade Arts are bred from. Once mastered to a high enough level, the basics alone can serve as a Blade Art comparable to the best of the best.
Current Effect: Armed combat with a blade at the Mortal level yields a 6.25% buff to Strength and Speed.]
Given that it only took a couple minutes for Elizabeth to manifest a legitimate skill within her status functions, the rate with which her Blade Art improved was jaw-dropping to say the least. She acquired experience at a rate that could almost be described as logarithmic, as her experience fed her strength, which in turn served to let her persist for longer and in more intense rounds with Yrre.
…
As Elizabeth and Yrre were fighting through the evening with a blade and knife respectively, in a different part of the yacht, Sun was training as he always did. In this particular moment, he was in the resting phase of his training cycle, or to put it in other terms, he was meditating. With his body consumed in dazzlingly bright orange flames, he looked more like someone suffering an infernal torture than a pract.i.tioner recovering.
As the meditation progressed, an anomaly began manifesting with the stability of his flames fluctuating between weak and strong and the color fading from orange to yellow. Sun himself acknowledged the oddity in his Qi as tension appeared in the form if his eyebrows scrunching. With eyes closed to improve his concentration on controlling the rapidly destabilizing flames, Sun concentrated on the pa.s.sages and mantras from the [Basic Flames Control Manual].
Gradually, the uncontrollable nature of his flames shifted back to normal as a dim yellowish-orange now became the primary hue of his flames. All was well thereafter, as Sun continued on with his never-ending training. However, the next time Sun entered the resting phase of his training cycle, when he switched meditation methods, all h.e.l.l broke loose.
Sun was caught completely unaware as the Spatial Qi he was galvanizing also became unstable and conflicted with his recently evolved flames. After receiving a method to improve his ability with s.p.a.ce from Atid, Sun knew better than most how bad of a situation he was in, as s.p.a.ce and Fire was a combination that could turn out to be exceedingly deadly.
Unfortunately, with his foundation yet to be reset and his Qi Connection still being only a bit above average, Sun couldn"t mitigate the instability of his evolving s.p.a.ce conflicting with his advanced flames. Sun couldn"t even take a second to sigh at his own idiocy as he knew from the spatial method the importance of taking time to let his body acclimate; especially if he was training in other energies. He could only hope for the best, as the battle within his Dantian began.
…
Hours pa.s.sed with Elizabeth and Yrre crossing blades thousands if not tens of thousands of times and in the span of that time, the difference in Elizabeth"s swordplay was like night and day. She leveled up her Blade Art so quickly for various reasons. But if a list of the greatest contributors had to be made, they would without question be: The base strength she possessed as a Soldier Stage Mage, that fearless prowess she possessed to jump back into the fires of fighting even though it terrified her at her core, and last but not least, arguably the greatest reason she improved so quickly, was because of her teacher.
Though not a teacher in principle, Yrre"s experience as a Level 79 Void Stage Djinn made it impossible for her to not teach Elizabeth how to use a blade more effectively than anyone else on Earth. Even the greatest pract.i.tioner on Earth couldn"t be stronger than Level 50 as it had only been a couple weeks since the dimensional upgrade. Her "teaching" style also served to boost Elizabeth rate of learning as she didn"t dare attempt holding back. Every bout ended with Elizabeth fleeing scared out of her mind, or with another nick near her vitals. Either case left her even more desirous for the power to fend Yrre off…
While she still wasn"t anywhere near being able to stop Yrre from utterly outcla.s.sing her, about an hour into their blade sparring, Elizabeth"s Blade Art broke through D Grade. Two hours later, C Grade was accomplished, and now, after a couple minutes pa.s.sed after midnight, Elizabeth leveled up her Blade Art for the last time during that session.
[Blade Art: Basics
Level 43
Experience: 27,648/30,398
Grade: C
Description: The foundation from which all Blade Arts are bred from. Once mastered to a high enough level, the basics alone can serve as a Blade Art comparable to the best of the best.
Current Effect: Armed combat with a blade at the Soldier level yields a 62.5% buff to Strength and Speed. Total Achieved: 262.5%]
Similar to how Sun cultivated to Level 9 in the span of a day after Elizabeth reset his Dantian, Elizabeth herself experienced immense growth as her skill approached the level appropriate for her strength. She was starting to see longer and longer times in between her Blade Art"s level ups and after that last one to Level 43, Elizabeth had to call off any further blade sparring.
Whilst sparring, her senses picked up a startling genesis of s.p.a.ce Qi, the strength of which could potentially do major damage if left to grow at the rate she felt. Yrre didn"t need to be told why the fighting stopped, as even in her current weakened state, she too could feel the fluctuations of abnormally growing s.p.a.ce Qi.
Elizabeth might not be as sensitive to raw energy as Yrre, but with her Kinesthetic Acuity, even if she only had an absolute domain of one-centimeters range, she could clearly feel the anomaly just as well. Using her attunement to s.p.a.ce, Elizabeth dashed out of her room and rushed over to the ship"s deck where Sun was currently straining himself past his limits to tame the conflicting s.p.a.ce and Fire Qi within his body.