Over the next ten days of hiking through the outer realms, Leon’s cultivation fell by the wayside. That didn’t mean he stopped entirely. While it was no longer his main focus, he still meditated both morning and night. The problem was that he had no time to sit and cultivate until he used up every last drop of power resting in his spirit. Between his alchemy, travelling, sword training, and practice with the puzzle box, he spent less and less time cultivating until he simply couldn’t use up his Qi fast enough.

Leon thought one could never have too much of a good thing. As it turned out, he was wrong. His spirit was packed with dense, highly potent Qi that was roughly equivalent to having four of his previous dantians rolled together. So while he spent less time cultivating, his speed of advancement was still twice what it was before.

Not to mention that he couldn’t keep up with the changes. His body was improving so quickly that his mind and body were constantly out of sync, resulting in him almost killing Claire a few times because his arm moved further than he intended. That forced him to reduce how much time he spent cultivating even more and, without anything else to do, left him focusing on the sword.

He didn’t really mind it.

The training was addictive, after all.

Sword Mastery not only pointed out his flaws but also guided him on how to perfect his movements. While the phantom wasn’t real, the duplicate was an exact copy of Leon. It even allowed him to feel what the movements of the phantom were like, granting him a speed of improvement that bordered on the impossible.

He made more progress in the last week than he had in the previous month. His every movement was imperfect, and when he actually did figure out how to correctly adjust his stance, grip, move, or any of the other tiny flaws he made, the skill provided him with new errors to work on.

The best part was that none of the problems were obvious. He had no idea how to swing a sword and had never seen a true master at work, so how would Leon know what he was doing wrong without actually fighting someone and making the necessary mistakes? That left him to soak up more knowledge about his body, general anatomy, and the sword than he thought possible. He even learned how to move in ways that normal humans simply couldn’t, his cultivation allowing him greater flexibility, speed, and balance than even the greatest athletes could manage.

Thanks to Sword Mastery, he also began to dominate Claire so thoroughly that he had to hold back even more than he usually did. He almost cried tears of joy when she gained Spear Mastery just three days after he did. What made it even better for Leon was that she improved even faster than him. After all, Claire didn’t have a side hobby like alchemy or Sophia’s cooking. She had even limited her time with the puzzle box to just one hour in the morning and one hour before dinner, giving her all the time in the world to cultivate and train with her spear.

But as soon as they began to reach a level of parity in skill, allowing them to fight to their heart’s content without holding back, Leon was taught a painful lesson.

Sadly, all good things eventually came to an end.

It was a normal day. At least as far as walking through a red and gold forest that released a soft, malevolent and radiant glow, it was, making it a normal day for Leon and the girls. Only instead of their usual monotony of training and hiking, they stopped outside the barrier to the central plane.

Their journey was over. Leon glanced at the girls, both of them obviously nervous. Sophia had withdrawn into herself, even going so far as to cross her arms and lower her head. Claire, on the other hand, was cycling between chewing on her lip, biting her nails, and darting her head around every time she heard a noise.

Tyler and a group of fully armed soldiers were in there, and so were the entities that were responsible for the red and gold corruption.

The monsters in the Central Plane were also of a much greater variety than the squirrels and panthers, the latter not even supposed to appear in the outer realms at all. They had obviously been searching for Pete. Leon glanced down at the little guy, his entire focus on helping Sophia relax. He ran around her feet, pawing at her for attention before rolling around the grass or pouncing on a taller stalk of grass in an attempt to distract her.

After only a moment of hesitation, they stepped through into the central plane. Bloody power washed over Leon. He restrained his arm for a moment and then allowed it to endlessly Devour the blood aura lingering in the air. They were on the crimson side of the forest, the golden forest about thirty metres to their right.

The plan was to follow the seam all the way to the twin mountains in the distance, using the close proximity to give Leon a chance to get out of the crimson forest if something went wrong with his arm. He was more liberal with its use now, but for all he knew, the energy he Devoured would suddenly condense into demonic power and attempt to kill him again.

Transforming into a demon required him to die. That meant he was essentially having his corpse reanimated, the real Leon dying to transform in the first place. It was a severe risk to allow his arm free reign in the crimson forest, but he simply couldn’t pass up a chance to get stronger. The idea of letting power slip through his fingers didn’t even cross his mind.

He didn’t want to be a burden to the girls. Sophia was barely a teenager while Claire still had a solid chance of losing to anything that came in a group larger than two. She had made great improvements recently, and with Sophia’s archery they could win against a panther or two with ease, but that was only if more than that didn’t show up. Even if the odds were low, Leon needed the strength to handle more than one panther at a time. A group of two had already appeared once so why couldn’t there be three or four?

The idea of allowing his own weaknesses to end someone else’s life was something of a nightmare for him.

He couldn’t imagine anything worse than accidentally killing someone.

The sun was setting over the twin mountains. Despite the golden forest releasing a soft golden radiance, they decided to stop for the night and rest on the very perimeter. Setting up camp was a simple, practised affair now. After finishing up, Leon and Claire prepared to spar while Sophia prepared dinner. It was a nightly ritual for them, Sophia remarking that having them train nearby was kind of like having a television in the kitchen.

Leon felt bad for not training with her, but when he asked, she said that it was fine. Sophia had Pete to help her with her archery practice. Not to mention she also had her own mastery skill to keep her occupied. Her abilities were terrifying now, Pete no longer playing around when they trained. Still, he was only slightly less relaxed, choosing not to antagonise her by sitting down and grooming himself between shots.

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Now he playfully watched her every move, his tail flicking around behind him as he remained frozen, his muscles coiled in anticipation. He watched her every move with laser focus. It was cute and seemingly harmless, but Leon was becoming acutely aware that he was different to other panthers. The most obvious was the aggression. Other panthers chose to ignore them and attack Pete, going after him like he was an oasis in the desert.

The other was that Pete’s fur was almost black. Of course, he could simply grow into that wine coloured fur, but Leon suspected that he was different to the other panthers in a very substantial way. Maybe a rare breed or some kind of royal lineage? Only time would tell, leaving the cub to simply be a scarily large kitty for now.

Seeing him sniff around the cauldron while Sophia cooked, Leon told him to behave while they rested and tossed him a stick of biltong. Pete lunged at the dried meat and held it in his paws as he tore into it. His little baby teeth were razor sharp, but Leon had purposely given him a dry and tough piece… Which he now realised was kind of messed up since that biltong was made from his relative, a panther. Since Pete didn’t care, Leon decided it was nature at work and got back to training with Claire.

She practically sprinted at him, a spear manifesting in the palm of her hand.

They lunged at each other without much fanfare. Leon pulled his sword out from the Interspatial Ring hanging from his neck, the blade cloaked in a flash of darkness. Qi flowed down his arm and into the handle, Fortifying his sword mere moments before it blocked Claire’s thrust at his stomach.

Their weapons sang with every impact. He listened to the music, Leon’s mind getting out of its own way as his body flowed to the invisible tune. He attacked and defended, stepping around Claire as she thrust her spear at him. Sword Mastery required too much focus to be used in an actual fight, but that didn’t mean sparring was useless. Fighting against a real person allowed him to try out what he learned so that nothing went wrong in a real battle.

He was thankful that Sword Mastery also taught him how to walk. He hadn’t really thought about how to manoeuvre his body until he gained the skill, but after spending a day working on his stance, he saw the benefits of good positioning.

What was once a mess of legs became a refined pattern of footsteps.

He practically glided around the clearing rather than walked, his steps powerful and quick. If Claire charged at him, Leon would be ready to make the most appropriate move. He was stable enough to take a glancing blow without being knocked off balance and could move smoothly enough to drift between her attacks like a ghost.

But even with his advantages, Claire was like a raging storm. She poked at every weakness he presented and pushed to make him reveal more flaws so that she could gain an even greater advantage. She would usually get one or two cuts in, but once the raging storm slowed to a drizzle, it was Leon’s turn to push back.

He weaved around her thrusts as she tried to keep him away. Without skills, she was able to leverage her greater reach to bully him. If he wasn’t so much better than her, she just might’ve been able to. But she wasn’t, and so Leon danced around her as she slowly retreated, sneaking into her guard and giving her a poke or two before she managed to bring her weapon back and force him away.

He was fully embroiled in the music after so much fighting, almost hypnotised by the battle. There was no point in mulling over every move. His mind went blank as his body did the thinking for him, but even though he didn’t consciously ponder like he normally did, his brain was still hard at work subconsciously analysing the flow of battle.

That was why he raised his sword in an overhead blow while Claire lowered her centre of gravity for a powerful thrust. He exhaled when she moved, the edge of his blade slamming into the tip of her spear. Their weapons cried out from the impact. The noise echoed throughout the clearing, the metal of his sword almost humming from the power involved.

Even his arms were going numb from the raw violence, but then he heard something crack, his body trembling as Fortify broke. Claire seemed to have heard it too, stepping back as his sword released a haze of Qi from the damage. What didn’t flood from the crack in his sword was drawn back into his dantian. A slight headache grew behind his eyes from the skill breaking, but Leon pushed through it as he stared in shock at the crack in his weapon.

Claire’s spear had dug into the edge and put a chip in it, and then the force of his Qi rushing past the damage had formed thousands of hairline fractures all throughout the blade. Or maybe it was from her Qi piercing into the blade and not his own leaking out? Either way, the weapon was ruined. Another solid hit and the whole blade would probably snap in half if not outright shatter into bits like a broken window.

Claire gaped along with him, looking just as shocked as he was. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to, I- I just wanted to see who was stronger!”

“It’s fine,” Leon said, chuckling at how panicked she was. “I know you didn’t mean to do that. Shit just happens, but I can say that I definitely didn’t expect my weapon to break before yours did. Turns out Fortifying a crappy weapon doesn’t make it immune from breaking.”

“I know, I’m just as shocked as you are. Do you think your sword is inferior in quality to mine despite both of them being the same rarity? Your Qi should have enhanced it quite a bit more than what I could do.”

“Maybe… it’s because of my potent Qi that the sword couldn’t handle the strain. The little chip you put in was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak? Anyway, it doesn’t matter much anymore. Let’s go and have dinner while we think of a solution.”

The duo went back to Sophia who saw the whole thing. She was quite upset, and when Leon showed Pete, he even tried to lick the sword better like how a wounded animal would lick their wound. It didn’t help, of course, but he still thanked the little guy and gave him a small piece of biltong. It was better to encourage good behaviour than punish him for being naughty.

After dinner, Leon had a risky idea of what to do. He pulled out the hologram disk from their shared storage space. The girls were curious why he brought it out so Leon explained his plan. They found his solution interesting, and thankfully they didn’t care if he used the disk. There was nothing important on it anyway.

Leon used True Sight on the black metal.

[Shadow Steel Formation Disk (Uncommon)]

A forged disk made out of pure shadow steel, a metal known for its innate ability to store reflections of anything it interacts with. Typically engraved with formations to store information, this disk has been used to record light and sound data from a short time before the fall of the Evergard empire.

Leon stared at the disk as the light of the campfire rippled across its pitch-black surface. If he transmuted his sword with the formation disk, turning it into shadow steel rather than regular iron, it would be much stronger than before. Not to mention that it was of uncommon rarity. If he was successful, it could even raise the broken sword into an uncommon item. It was a great option considering his current lack of materials, but the fact that it stored information made him frown.

That wasn’t a very useful trait for a sword, forcing Leon to hold off until he thought of a way to take advantage of that trait.