Fused with Zhanxian's body, Han Xuhan decided to reassess his strength. The strength testing device was still sitting in the backyard, so in no time, he was raising down all types of explosive moves on the wooden plate, trying to make the rods behind it shrink as much as possible.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Sounds of punches and kicks began to swarm the yard. Mixed with this sound, a victorious roar followed soon.
To his delight, his suspicion turned out to be correct. Being fused with Zhanxian had not boosted his cultivation, but it had certainly enhanced his physical attributes. After several attempts, he managed to shrink the rods by nearly 40%!
This was an excellent news for him. Each 10% represented one layer of enhancement in the Physique Transformation realm. This meant that while his regular body had the enhancements of an early fourth-layer cultivation, his fused body had the attributes of a peak fourth-layer cultivator!
And this wasn't even his final form!
"Tun Shi Tian! Come fuse with me!" he yelled excitedly. A couple of minutes later, he was back to his dual-fused form.
Bang!
32%!
Bang!
36%!
Boom!
39%!
The strength behind his punches grew prominent, emitting sounds so loud that he roused both Mu Ran and Xiao Wu from their rest. The two dumbstruck young men watched as the measuring rods of the strength-testing device shrank by more than 40% under Xuhan's passionate attack!
Thump!
42%!
Boom!
43%!
"Just. A. Bit. More...Uuuaaghh!"
He threw the last knee strike with every bit of willpower, frustration, and desperation boiling inside his heart. The outcome was a distinct vision. The plate held up by the rods slid back by a few more inches, finally stopping right in the middle of the 40% and 50% mark!
"Middle of the fifth layer! I can fight with fifth-layer cultivators just with my body now! Hahaha!"
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His uproarious laughter broke his martial brothers out of their stunned reverie. Xiao Wu looked more affected between the two, probably because this meant that he was no longer the penultimate trash of the sect. He could very well claim the title of the ultimate trash if he didn't speed up his cultivation!
It didn't surprise Xuhan when he congratulated him in a strangled voice and rushed back to his room to cultivate. Mu Ran hung around a while longer, interrogating him about the whole concept.
In the end, he could only sigh and depart with one last piece of advice.
"Xuhan, you should be more careful in the future. Don't let this improvement in strength get to your head. The road to cultivation must be as steady as sex. A sudden change in tempo can be very dangerous! You understand what I'm talking about, right?"
"...Yeah, I sure do, martial brother Ran," he replied, flabbergasted, watching him return to his bedroom.
Shaking off the adrenaline pumping through his body, Xuhan got to work once more.
"Zhanxian, separate from me. Let's test how strong I am when fused with just Tun Shi Tian."
The mental erasure of the glyph followed his declaration. Soon, he was punching the wooden plate again, this time looking much different than before. Tun Shi Tian's skeleton body wasn't large. Han Xuhan appeared no different from a Birdman cosplayer as he moved around the yard.
The experiment result differed from before. Fused with Tun Shi Tian only, he couldn't move the plank past the 35% mark, whereas with Zhanxian, he had reached 39%.
"Aha! Take that, birdie! When he was fused with me, master was so much stronger!" Zhanxian shouted gleefully. "Maybe from now on, pipe down about being the better minion!"
"Actually, I'm pretty sure it's because of the difference in your cultivation, Zhanxian," Han Xuhan said.
"You've cultivated the Spiritual Bone Manual to the peak of the second layer, whereas Tun Shi Tian practiced it to the peak of the first layer. If both of your cultivation were at the same level, the difference in our fused strength wouldn't be so great."
"Then let me make the breakthrough! It'll be beneficial for all of us!" Tun Shi Tian screeched resentfully.
"Yeah, let us continue our original cultivation, then. Wouldn't the combined enhancements put our fused form on par with sixth-layer cultivators?!" Zhanxian yelled, growing excited by the prospect of becoming more powerful.
"I will, I will. I didn't bring all of you to existence to suppress your strength, minions. But first, let's attend to the more immediate concern. If we can't tell the rest of the sect that we have mastered the Treasure Tracing technique, sixth-layer cultivators would be the weakest enemies chasing us."
The night grew darker as endless masses of ashen clouds began to flow beneath a forlorn moon. Dim white flashes could be seen within the darkness from time to time, but they made little sounds, as if afraid of awakening the sleeping cultivators inside the mutilated spatial domain.
For Han Xuhan, this was the most remarkable night since he first took his step into the world of cultivation. This was the night that reminded him again how it felt to actually cultivate. Not even his very first experience of cultivation could compare to the sensations he was left with after each session.
First, he attempted to cultivate while being fused with Tun Shi Tian. The beginning was excruciatingly slow, rife with mistakes and restarts.
Tun Shi Tian's body being much smaller than his own didn't help much, as the qi cycles needed for the treasure tracing technique were highly complex and had stringent requirements.
The artificial channels he had carved on Tun Shi Tian's body could never hope to contain something so intricate and powerful by themselves. Han Xuhan had to use his meridians as the main channels and the minion's meridians as the secondary channels to complete the cycles.
What made this easier was the retention of their independence despite the fusion. Han Xuhan could freely control the qi flowing within his meridians, while Tun Shi Tian could control the qi flowing through his bones.
When one of them lost track of his share of qi, the other could stop the qi from being scattered. The remnants left behind by one were easily picked up by the other in the following wave. Each cycle was thus completed with high output!
But he wasn't satisfied with the result. While the output was a huge improvement compared to his non-fused state, he knew he could do better.
So he fused with Zhanxian again and returned to his ultimate form. With half of his body covered in bones on the outside and the other half having fused with the minions internally, their meridians grew far more complex than before. Almost every main channel now had a side channel escorting the qi flow. Where Xuhan's meridians weren't up to the task, Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian's meridians took the brunt of the workload.
In this fused form, Han Xuhan could no longer be called a cripple. In fact, he now had a meridian system so sophisticated that he could cultivate faster, easier, and better than almost every disciple of his generation. He could even tackle those unpopular, taxing cultivation techniques in the sect archives that seemed to be tailor-made for disciples with special innate abilities.
He began to feel grateful to the old senior who had been hiding inside his tower. Was he the one to tailor the fusion glyphs in such a convenient way for him? He had to be, right? His fusion technique had taken Han Xuhan from a cripple to a blessed child in one sweeping move!
This sense of superiority only grew with each hour as he burned through resources he had been stockpiling for weeks. With each session, he became increasingly familiar with the treasure tracing technique, grasping at its finer details, hidden principles, and even some minor shortcomings when cultivated by someone like him.
Being a stub-type technique with only two layers, the technique would have zero effect on his dao tower. It made Han Xuhan quicken his pace of cultivation, because he wanted to see the effect a real, registered cultivation technique would have on his dao tower.
What would happen to the remains of the previous tower littering the island? Would a new building rise up between Zhanxian and Tun Shi Tian's homes? Or would his original tower be restored?
Only time would tell, just a day's time.