The items he received from the Path were mostly without a description past their names and functions. So when he saw the two “cultivation establishment pills”, respectively the Layline Formation Pill and the World Pool Construction Pill, he just assumed they were high tier and eccentrically named. Like the talents would make you capable of establishing a world in the future, or something to that effect.
He could not have been more wrong. Although he didn’t know the extent of how wrong he was, the fact his new cultivation manual was entirely worthless to him told him there was something afoot.
“Why the hell would she give me a non-matching cultivation manual?!” he roared in fury.
Years of his hard work and planning were slowly trickling down the drain. Never would he have expected this sort of development. What would even be the point of slighting him?
He, Fillan Strand, was nothing in their eyes. They were beings from the Immortal realm, while he was just a little mage, without the slightest talent for cultivation. Him not being the target for their tests just didn’t seem enough to warrant underhanded means.
Normally, this situation would have meant nothing to Fillan. He’d simply keep it in mind, and deal with it as he sees fit in the future. He was a time-looper after all.
But this is significantly different. For some reason or the other, a unique function of the time-loop is him gaining ever increasing talents and prowess. So this cultivation talent he was hunting for wasn’t simply a one and done deal, it was something he would be using for an uncertain amount of lives.
Him receiving a potentially defunct, or at least highly uncommon set of talents would leave much deeper wounds than the Path could have predicted.
“Cutting off someone's path to enlightenment is tantamount to killing someone’s parents; I will never let this go,” he vowed with conviction. “Whatever, I guess I’ll have to focus on the body tempering path in this life. There’s no way they fucked me with that manual as well, right?”
They indeed didn’t fuck him in that regard. The manual was fluent and coherent, while the powers and functions it provided were domineering and profound.
Unfortunately, most of its extraordinariness meant nothing to Fillan, as his body tempering talent and level were too low. But that didn’t affect him memorizing the technique well.
As he gradually improves his talent, his understanding and comprehension will naturally be elevated to a level where the technique becomes like a common book.
“Seems like Blood Engraving will be my limit unless something special happens,” he mumbled with a frown.
Despite being told his talent every time he restarts his time-loop, Fillan still hoped he could brute force his way to a higher level with sufficient time and dedication. But the fact that he could only read and memorize the words of the higher levels, yet have them be illegible and incoherent when he tried to focus on what they were actually saying, proved it was just not meant to be.
“The Blood Transmutation realm seems so easy with the ability to sense qi.”
No more were the times where he would forcefully replace his own blood for that of slightly stronger—to avoid exploding in the process—beasts.
It was a method that was tried and tested and gave results not at all comparable to the time, effort, and risk the undertaking requires. In all his attempts, he only barely managed to improve his body tempering talent to Blood Engraving, and even still, it was one of the worst possible talents in the bracket.
“Let’s begin,” Fillan thought, as he put his whole focus on the task at hand.
Blood Transmutation, as the first realm of body tempering, was the most simplistic foundation for all that is to come later.
It is a very relaxed—when qi sense is involved—process where you mainly need to do four things.
1. Sense qi.
2. Sense and get a good grasp of your blood and its flow.
3. Through breathing, infuse the blood with qi until it transmutates into blood-qi.
4. Repeat.
There are nine stages to the realm, where one to eight indicate how much of your blood is transmuted successfully, and the ninth requires the person to refine their marrow with qi until it begins producing blood-qi inherently.
Only when this is achieved can the person begin to practice true Body Tempering.
In his many lives, Fillan has become incredibly adept at sensing his blood and its flow, which combined with his new qi sense, allowed for an easy initialization process.
Within an hour, he already fused his first batch of blood with qi. Two hours later, he transmuted his first percentage, and five hours later, he reached the second stage of Blood Transmutation.
Each stage requires a further 11,11% of the person's blood to be transmuted, which doesn’t sound very impressive, but it allows for a comprehensive change in prowess.
A person with blood-qi is already far superior to what an Inept could ever aspire to be, and every stage in the Blood Transmutation realm allows for a near doubling of strength.
Fillan, who had been using a flawed and lackluster method to do this in the past, felt the surge of strength and energy in his body with awe and excitement.
Sure, he was a powerful mage, but that power always felt “borrowed”, almost like it didn’t belong to him. It didn’t give him this exhilarated sensation of ever advancing strength and internal evolution.
It felt like he was transforming into something beyond humanity.
“This. This has to be why people are obsessed with cultivation and body tempering,” Fillan exclaimed. “Just this tiny first step is already so rewarding; I can only imagine what the future realms will hold.
In a giddy stupor, Fillan continued his body tempering.
As mentioned, the Blood Transmutation realm is incredibly simple, meaning as the person becomes more adept at fusing blood and qi, their speed will increase. In just another twelve hours, Fillan finally broke through to the eighth stage peak, standing at the precipice of the ninth.
“It seems I just have to guide both qi and blood-qi into my bone marrow and it will refine itself…”
And for the next ten hours, managed only with a few spells dispelling his need for sleep, he strenuously indulged in this refinement. While he didn’t feel a surge of strength doing this as he did in previous stages, it brought a different sensation: vitality.
It felt like his blood and body became more energetic, while his blood flow and production skyrocketed to levels countless times superior to before.
Then, like turning from a child to man with a sudden boom, the final part of the marrow refinement was completed, hurdling Fillan into the Blood Engraving realm.
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For a normal person this would be the extent of the improvement and benefits of completing the first stage of body tempering, but Fillan was suddenly filled with a bizarre manner of understanding and comprehension. Things that seemed distant before, whether they be magical, law-related, or philosophical, all became so much more clear. Like a veil was lifted from before his eyes, the world turned crystal clear, and his mind reveled in enlightenment.
He sensed a sort of resonance coming from different parts of the universe, guiding him on his path, complementing his improved strength.
“Who knew law comprehension could bring such unexpected benefits,” Fillan reflected. “In all my research, I’ve never once heard about something like this.”
“Although it would be incredibly fucking difficult and tedious for someone to reach this level of law comprehension before cultivating, the boons you get from it are definitely worth it. Hell, this might even be the proper way of cultivation, while what most people use is a flawed path.”
Yet, despite being lent a helping hand by the fabric of reality, Fillan, like a punch in the face, was hit by a major bottleneck of insurmountable proportions. It felt almost like the flowing river of power that was continuously growing stronger within him rammed itself into a pure steel-mountain.
“Damn,” was all Fillan could say.
Something that felt like it was going to be the essence of his life in the foreseeable future was ripped apart with impunity. It left a gaping hole in his heart, despite only living in euphoria for less than a day.
“Am I supposed to just practice my magic again?” he wondered. “I’m getting really tired of engraving over and over again; there’s just no fun in it. It’s so goddamn easy and slow, and those that are hard require risk. But I can’t really afford to die right now either. This. Fucking. Sucks.”
A powerful mage is very respected no matter where they go, not just for their power, but also the way they gain and use their power.
The process of engraving a pattern on the soul, in most cases, carries no risk, and is incredibly straightforward. You just will mana through the aptitude seed your spell requires, like you do to cast a spell, and focus it into thin threads before weaving it in and out of the soul’s fabric.
There are rumors of particular mages being capable of engraving on the insides of the soul, rather than just the surface, but those are ancient myths always connected to unfathomably powerful figures, capable of creating and shattering worlds at a mere whim.
This is not what people respect though. All spell patterns, no matter how simple or complex, regardless of affinity or power, are derived from the physical aspect of the universe. Not its laws or spirituality, but what they control and rule.
While a cultivator tries to find answer to WHY stars function through the law’s of yang and fire, a magician would take a look at HOW it functions, and capture it in enigmatic runes and “drawings”.
This affects how the two groups utilize power. Cultivators will need to achieve a certain level of attunement with their wished law, before utilizing its authority to launch an attack. This requires a long time for comprehension, and in the heat of battle, there is a delay between when you really would like to make a move, and when it happens.
A mage simply manipulates the world on their own, bypassing everything a cultivator has to do.
The down side is the sense fulfillment mentioned earlier. Fillan feels no joy discovering or, depending on how you look at it, creating spell patterns. He also finds engraving most spells to be tedious, boring, sloppy, and annoying, while using a spell feels like the world is just doing things, without him taking part.
“Why couldn’t I have been a born cultivator? Sigh, I’ll start on the Soul-Vein project then. It will probably have a multiplicative effect now that I’ve got true body tempering prospects.”
…
7 Years Later—
“Hey, what the hell is that?” a devilish young man asked the people detailing behind him.
“Devil Seed, it appears to be a giant needle of sorts; there’s likely some powerhouses fighting in the distance. If you continue to progress at the speed you have, casting and destroying such moves will be as simple as a flick of the wrist. Keep up the hard work.”
“Yeah, the Devil Seed is the most talented person in all of Garth, not even the heavens can stop his rise.”
“That’s right—”
“Shut the fuck up!” the Devil Seed shouted without turning his head from the sky above. “That needle is clearly heading straight towards us…RUN”
With a massive cataclysmic tremor, the sky and earth of Graaryll cracked like a broken vase. Space and time turned turbulent, oceans and magma surged, the laws cried, and people died. Within seconds, this massive needle from beyond shattered every trace of Graaryll’s prior existence, leaving only a few ascendants to mourn their bygone home.
What used to be a prosperous world was now just a massive black hole, pierced by a needle, hungry for the blood of demons.
Without wasting much time, it shifted its direction, and took off in search of its next target.
Of course, it would never reach it, at least not this time around.
When the needle left, the suppressed and banished laws of the universe rushed to fill the void in space with all their might, causing a tremor that could be felt across all of reality. In the very center of the impact, highly unfortunately, was a very simple-looking opaque sphere with a frustrated youth within.
“Don’t you dare kill me before I finish this, or else…!”
Knowing that death was unavoidable, Fillan did everything in his power to finish the last traces needed to complete his intricate soul engraving, something he had been planning for a couple years, and practicing for seven more.
“Three, two, one, YES! Hahaha, you stupid fucking bast—”
Before he could finish casting obscenities at the misfortunes targeting him, he, like everyone else on Graaryll, was decimated into fine dust.
…
With a familiar cold sensation running up from his arm to his spice, and then through his entire body, Fillan opened his eyes to a massive floating sphere hanging in front of him. It looked unassuming, simply hosting a single color: bleak turquoise.
To the side stood an impatient old man with a frown of displeasure on his face, something Fillan was more than used to.
The geezer only ever showed that look towards those with talents worse than pigs, which naturally referred to the “original” Fillan. It’s only after touching the measuring orb that his talents change accordingly.
As quickly as it came, the cold sensation wormed its way out of Fillan’s body, back into the measuring orb, before sending two small beams of light towards Fillan and the overseer.
Not one to waste time with someone he deemed trash, the overseer began announcing the results aloud.
“Cultivation: Qi Gathering, talent: World. Body Tempering: Inept, talent: Blood Engraving. Magical talent: Solid fire aptitude, solid psychic aptitude, robust lightning aptitude, resilient…soul-blood aptitude—what?”
While the overseer didn’t particularly care for the results and only payed them little mind, Fillan’s cultivation talent caught his attention, but he quickly dismissed it as something nonsensical, especially since he had never heard of it before, and the measuring orb didn’t give him a description, like it would for the significant things.
But when he came to the final magical talent he could no longer hide his surprise. Along with the name “soul-blood”, which he was totally unfamiliar with, came a description.
It “read”: The body is shaped according to the soul and its core, yet why does it not have blood and veins, organs or bones? Some people are innately shaped to become revolutionary magicians, and soul-blood aptitudes only appear in the best of them. With inherent control of their blood and soul, and the god-given ability to fuse the two along with mana to form an unfathomably powerful substance, these people are destined for limitless greatness through transcending the flesh enforced by a universe's laws.
With this kind of description, there was no way he could keep his cool. The worst part was that there was more information to be digested, indicating, according to his experiences, that Fillan Strand, someone worthless by every measure only moments ago, possessed an innate physique, bloodline, or trait.
“Karmic Reincarnation Eye: one’s previous lives' karma is accumulated and shielded in a third eye, giving them the ability to release a certain pressure from it (virtuous/sinister.) It provides the innate ability of gazing upon other’s karmic aura, while showcasing causal lines. The Karmic Reincarnation Eye grows stronger along with the person's cultivation, gradually giving them deeper insight and eventually control of Karma.”
“World Origin Body: The energy veins as ley lines, the core as the world’s pool, individuals with this physique mimic the legendary Katesthio, an all devouring beast that uses the energy it gathers to establish and evolve its own innate world. It relies on destruction to create, because only through reformation will a shackled creation transcend imposed limits.”
“Universal Law Incarnation: Born with an innate comprehension of a universe's most fundamental laws, which in time, will grant an all encompassing comprehension of reality’s workings.”
“I won!” Fillan thought in ecstasy. “What the fuck kind of talents are these? Who, on this entire planet, would dare compare their talents to mine, huh?”
It truly is as they say: the beginning is the hardest part.