Several days passed by as Illyan still maintained these fires.

Nobody was around despite the smoke billowing into the sky.

It was only Illyan alone.

Only animals made noise in the distance, but even they didn’t come close.

However, Illyan didn’t waste his time sitting around and doing nothing.

He hunted down several boars during these few days and employed the [Blood Feeding Technique] before quickly recovering.

The more often he employed this technique, the more he realized the intricacies of his gift.

His newfound knowledge about life force helped a bit too.

His ability wasn’t only about regeneration; it was more like the ability to consume energy, be it from food, spiritual energy, or something as vague as his emotions, to convert it into the life force that eventually regenerated him.

Not only that, he tried several experiments on himself to test one of his theories.

He dislocated his wrist with one simple twist of his second hand.

Then he waited.

Soon, his stamina was being depleted as his wrist trembled.

With a click, the joints returned to their original places. Before applying the medicines to others, he always needed to align the joints to their former place manually for the medicine to work properly.

But his body would do it automatically.

“Why didn’t I think about this sooner?”

Illyan mumbled to himself as he finally realized another hint about his ability.

His ability wasn’t just pure regeneration or generation of life force; it was helping him to develop his body to its utmost potential and helping him to revert it to its best form.

That’s why his eyes mutated instead of the energy just being ejected out of his eyes.

‘For now it works probably only on the body and my mind. Even then, the ability to recover the mind is much slower. Will the power spread as the ability gets stronger?’

Illyan’s eyes narrowed.

After Korin gave him the tea of clarity, his mind felt clearer than ever.

He was boiling the water on one of the fires and made himself tea every hour.

Illyan didn’t feel like he was being wasteful.

Once he ate half of the boar and recovered most of his muscles, he turned his attention back to the [Mind Strengthening Runes].

But then a question came to his mind.

What if he took the tea of clarity before the session?

So, he tried it.

And the result was excellent.

Not only was his mind clearer than ever, but even the session itself made some progress.

It didn’t feel easier; actually, it was the opposite. As his mind felt clearer, he could see the runes clearer too, which made an even bigger toll on his mind. But that sped up his progress as he could almost visualize a simplified version of one of the runes inside of his mind for a short time.

That, on the other hand, made his mind grow to the point where he almost produced the smallest amount of Mind Power after just a few days!

Thanks to that, his mind felt clearer even without the tea of clarity’s effect as his mind permanently strengthened.

‘Mind Power Training is definitely much easier than Spiritual Training…’

Illyan felt a sense of accomplishment that he felt only two times in his life.

Once, when he successfully survived the last training with Degres and the second time when Kaoran told him that he absorbed all the knowledge of medicine he knew.

Illyan always yearned for the mystical powers like Spiritual Energy but was also realistic.

His talent was so-so.

Without it, it would take him too much time before he made good progress if he went the normal way.

But, any normal person would already give up if they saw the arduous path before them.

People in Illyan’s situation would probably choose to become a knight and be satisfied with it.

But not Illyan.

He wanted more. Greediness was one of the few things that remained in his heart.

But doubt emerged inside of him.

If he was compatible with this mind practice, should he give up on the path of the knight and the path of mana?

Especially the knight path.

After all, he could already see that the end of this path wasn’t that glorious.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Ezekiel was at least an aura master, yet Illyan could face him off with all other advantages that Ezekiel had. So, a pure aura master wasn’t his match.

There were only four realms in the knight path, but just Illyan’s pure body strength could achieve the same results.

It seemed useless to learn it if this was the result.

But the idea of discarding the thing he risked his life for disgusted him.

After being in a dilemma for some time, his brows relaxed as he took a sip of the tea.

Learning it would not be a disadvantage.

He already saw that Ezekiel actually combined the usage of the aura and mana, giving it stronger power.

There was no way it was useless.

‘But there is not enough time…’ However, catching two rabbits at once would result in not catching either.

Illyan stared at the pit as he waited for the clay to harden. Then, he started to consider how to solve this problem…

Another day passed.

Illyan sat down as he was chiseling a tree trunk he found. It looked like the roots were broken after a storm and not because the tree was dead as the wood was sturdy.

He was carving a wide groove on the surface of one side of this trunk.

Firstly, he cut out most of the wood by using the axe he hid in his bag and then used the knives to chisel out the details.

The fireplaces were still burning, but Illyan looked inside of the pit to confirm whether it was ready.

Just one touch was enough to feel the sturdy structure he made.

“Good. Let’s begin.”

He jumped out and took the long tree trunk in his hands.

Then, he lodged one of its sides at the edge of the pit and the other right in the middle of the waterfall.

Once he felt it was stuck between the rocks, he let it go as he watched the streams of water fall into the pit.

Soon, the bottom was covered with water.

It was then when Illyan reached his hand inside of the fireplaces.

There, hot red rocks were being heated under the temperature of the hot embers.

Without caring for his hands, he took them and threw them into the pit.

He ignored the sizzling sound of his hands as he threw all rocks from all of the eight fireplaces inside.

Then, he put other cold rocks in the center of the fires.

Once a certain time passed, he jumped inside of the pit and retrieved the now cold stones before throwing the second batch inside.

He was repeating the process every time the stones in the fire got hot and the stones in the pit got cold.

After an hour, when the water was filled, Illyan put the trunk away but continued to heat up the water with the stones.

Thankfully, his unrelenting effort resulted in the water starting to bubble little by little as the water came to the point of boiling.

It was then when Illyan started to throw large quantities of herbs and other plants inside of the water.

He also threw some body parts of the creatures he hunted down during his time spent in the wilderness.

After doing this, he just waited for the water to cool down to the acceptable level while stripping himself and piercing the barbs in some of his acupoints before jumping in.

“Agh..” It was still extremely hot as Illyan’s skin turned bright red, but he didn’t care.

The scent wafting out of the water was tempting as he sat down in the pit.

His nose was barely above the water point. This was on purpose. He didn’t want his body to absorb the nutrients unevenly, so the moment he employed the technique, he could just crouch his back a little to cover his entire body inside.

However, he also wanted to be able to breathe air when he needed to, so this was the best he could think of for now.

‘I can begin now. Time to test the idea I had.’

He started the breathing technique with his head outside of the water.

He knew that the technique was made with the spiritual energy in the air in mind. That’s probably why the herb bath helped a lot.

With his eyes, he could see the dense particles of Spiritual Energy around him.

That made him wonder… If the herbs were full of Spiritual Energy, then why did Korin tell him that plants produced mana?

He shook his head as he put this question aside.

The pressure inside of him was getting worse and worse, but he didn’t care.

Instead, he started to meditate to clear his mind.

But this time, his meditation was different.

He employed the [Nature Breath Method] as that was his best meditation method, but he took a different approach.

To reach a meditative state, you had two options.

One was for you to empty the mind and not think about anything.

The other was the opposite. It was to focus on one and only thing.

It could be one of your senses, mostly hearing. Or it could be the Spiritual Energy flying around.

Or it could be something you imagined in your mind.

And Illyan imagined. Or rather visualized.

These days of mind practice weren’t useless at all as the rune he could visualize gave him an idea of how to solve his problem.

If he didn’t have time to practice these three techniques separately, then he needed to just find a way to combine them into one!

Of course, the strain on his body was unimaginable as a normal person’s body would already collapse. But Illyan withstood it.

His ability was a curse but at the same time a blessing.

He always suffered because of it, but now it was time to exploit it.

When he reached the equilibrium of three techniques, the only thing on his mind was the rune. But his body automatically performed the rhythm of the breathing technique. It became almost muscle memory after performing it most of the time in recent days.

However, as he didn’t think, his body started to incline towards the water subconsciously as there was more Spiritual Energy to breathe in.

Then he submerged his head inside of the hot water as he breathed in the water.

The sensation was familiar to him, so he didn’t fall off his meditative state.

His lungs were filled with water as the Spiritual Quality of it was filtered down and passed inside of the body while the water flowed back from where it came when he exhaled.

The same could be said about Spiritual Energy, but since it should also be ejected through his acupoints, it couldn’t leave at once, accumulating inside of his body.

That was a dream for past Illyan who wanted nothing more than to accumulate Spiritual Energy inside of his body.

But now it was just a fleeting thought, not even that, as he focused on the rune.

Time passed by before he finally noticed that a lot of the Spiritual Energy was actually flying towards the sky as the water would soon lose the efficiency that he wanted.

That made him come out of his meditative state as he contemplated the solution.

Soon, another crazy idea came to him.

Just this day, he came up with an idea of how his body worked.

He made an experiment which confirmed half of his suspicion.

Now, he thought about how to confirm the other one.

Did he need to consume the energy internally for it to be absorbed?

He didn’t waste time as he employed the technique he didn’t think he would use so soon after using it just a few days ago.

He didn’t have a Firestorm Herb with himself now as he used the only one piece he had in his bag when he employed the technique before. However, as he practiced this technique tens of times already, he felt he could create enough heat within himself to make it work.

The water’s temperature also helped a lot as he felt his muscles heat up.

Once the technique started to work, it couldn’t be stopped, so he didn’t dwell on it as he turned his focus back to the rune in his mind.

Time passed by.

The extreme pressure was getting even steeper.

His muscles slowly deflated as each fiber turned into mush of vitality essence that was absorbed by the blood.

What he didn’t expect was that as his muscles were refined away and were condensed inside of his blood, it caused tenfold of pressure on his body.

Squelching sounds resounded in his body as his blood vessels burst open while his bones literally cracked.

But he persisted.

Suddenly, the water surrounding him came to disturbance as the energy within was flowing towards him as if he was a siphon.

The energy was used by his ability to regenerate his body at a heightened rate as his bones reconnected and his vessels sealed themselves. Even his stressed-out mind that was visualizing the rune felt refreshed by the supply of energy.

Not only that, but the amount of nutrients inside of the water was so high that his half-refined muscles started to heal!

The moment this happened, a tug-of-war between the [Blood Feeding Technique] and his ability began.

But Illyan perceived this only vaguely as he was in a deep state of meditation…