*Thump*

Thanos walked over, pulling the knives from the target before returning them to the leather roll. It was a chilly, overcast day, but he was thankful it wasn't raining, allowing him to get a better practice session.

He had done his usual routine of helping around the farm whilst doing some training with Marcus. They had not moved into sparring yet, and he was made to stick to a strict regime of stances and movements that built his flexibility.

After that, he ran around the valley, doing some laps and taking a quick break to eat before moving on to his throwing practice. With all his hard work, he had improved significantly in this time but still felt like a novice. He firmly believed any weapon was easy to learn but would take a lifetime to master.

Going to his room, he grabbed the cultivation book and brought it outside as he relaxed on a chair at the rear of the house. Flipping through it, he arrived at the back section detailing the skill Many Form Mirage, Reading over the auction house summary that sat like a bookmark.

Many Form Mirage

Allows the user to create a copy of an object from memory and bring it to life for a time. The replication isn't an actual copy but is constructed from illusion essence to imitate the real thing. The skill uses willpower, spirit power and illusion essence to form the mirage, and the strength and duration of it scale with how much is used. The mirage will be destroyed with enough force and should be considered a supplementary skill and not something used to attack outright.

Sounds interesting.

Flipping past the attached summary, he started to read the skill. When looking at the book before, he had glanced over it but hadn't given it any more time than that due to focusing on the cultivation part.

As he read, he became intrigued by the application of the types of energies used: willpower, spirit power and illusion essence.

He had formed his will a while ago, allowing him to use willpower, which seemed to be the crux of cultivation; he felt so anyway. There was no way of measuring his willpower currently, and he only knew that when he used too much of it, he would begin to feel the strain mentally.

Illusion essence was far easier to gauge as he could sense his core and work out how much he had stored through that. Unlike many other essences, it was much harder to pin down. This meant he was still trying to understand how it functioned and fit into the natural world.

The final type of energy used would be spirit power, and he knew this was a type of energy formed by utilising his soul. The soul referred more to the ethereal presence inside his body that made him who he was, whilst spirit was more about the type of energy you could draw from the soul. That's how he had come to view the two terms.

The interesting thing was how each of the three got used to form the skill. It was an incredibly complex process, and he had dumbed it down by thinking of it like making a sculpture.

Illusion essence acted as the material that would get shaped. Willpower was the tool that would allow for the shaping. Spirit power would be the creative mind deciding what the shape should be.

Illusion essence was the main ingredient to form the mirage, making up the central part of what he thought of as an energy braid. Spirit and willpower then wound around this central point, all three interconnecting in various ways, allowing the skill to come to life.

The biggest issue was that he had no experience using his soul for anything other than basic cultivating. Fortunately, the skill detailed a simple method to bring forth his soul aperture and withdraw energy.

Once he had all three energies intermixing within him, he sent it through his channels and began weaving the complex patterns required to bring the skill into being.

A big issue was that whilst doing all this, he had to hold an image in mind of what he wanted to form while getting enough energy out to create it. It was a mentally taxing process, but he managed it more straightforwardly than expected.

Staring at his hand, he watched a shimmering form flicker in and out of existence in his palm before the twisting shape shattered with a poof sound.

Not to be deterred, he repeatedly performed the process, noticing the shape growing more solid each time. After a dozen more times, a replica of a throwing knife appeared in his hands and didn't evaporate into nothingness.

He felt the weight of the ethereal knife, turning it over and checking the balance. It wasn't nearly as heavy as a normal one, but it seemed equally balanced like the ones he had modelled it after.

It also had a faint dull glow around the surface, making it obvious something wasn't right with it, but he knew this was a sign it was about to vanish, and he watched as it did so.

Another couple of dozen attempts later, he had managed to form a knife that looked the same as the others and even felt as heavy. There was no odd glow to it this time, and that was because he had put in enough energy to sustain it for some time. The glow would only appear just as the illusion was about to fail.

As far as he could tell, it was no different than a real knife, and even using his essence vision on it brought no results. That didn't mean much, as his essence vision was just a self-created way to see the flow of essence in the surroundings; it wasn't anything great.

He wasn't sure how it would stand up to the scrutiny of someone with an actual vision skill.

Standing up, he turned and threw the mirage knife at the battered wooden target not too far away and watched as it disappeared on impact without any sound other than the usual soft noise the mirage made when it vanished.

He noted a tiny chip in the wood where it had struck but nothing else.

It's Just like the skill said. It's excellent as a fake, but it does next to no damage.

Remaining standing, he conjured up another knife and threw it at the target.

I need to get the time down.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Forming the knife took him over thirty seconds to achieve, and he knew that that would be a lifetime in battle. He decided then and there to add this skill to his already-packed training regimen as ideas began to form of ways to use it.

He got the time down to around twenty-five seconds when he started to feel unwell and mentally drained, and he knew this was due to the high use of spirit and willpower. Checking on his core, he found it depleted by one-fifth, and he noted this as a mark for future comparison.

It was getting dark, and he headed around the house to relax for the night when a sudden thought stopped him dead in his tracks.

Could that work?

Without thought, he ran to his front door and quickly walked towards his bedroom.

"I'm tired and going straight to bed, night." He called out to his mother, who was over by the cold storage unit rooting around in it.

He didn't look over to see her perplexed expression as he shut the bedroom door behind him and jumped into his bed.

Closing his eyes, he spent a few moments calming himself down and waited for the excitement to pass before using his mind's eye.

The braiding process used by the skill had given him an idea for his cultivation method, and he wanted to try and do something similar for his three essences.

When cultivating using his core, it was a two-step process. He would have to pull essence from his surroundings and then convert it using the core to match the three types that made up his core—filling up the battery.

The second step would be to use that built-up illusion, space and time essence held in equal parts by his core to cultivate by using it to empower his body and soul.

The part he was struggling with was the second step, as he could not pull all three essences simultaneously. What he wanted to do was braid them similarly to how the skill Many Form Mirage did.

When he had tried to use his will to pull more than one type of essence from his core for use in cultivation, it had never worked. It was as if something about it was against the natural order, and no matter how hard he tried, he met failure.

Pushing essence out of his core and into his surroundings was doable as it was more akin to dumping it all out than taking it out controlled like he needed to do.

He pulled some illusion essence and cursed that he had used so much earlier, so he checked the core, relieved to see it would turn over soon.

With the flow of illusion essence still firmly locked in place by his willpower inside the core, he gathered space and time essence and wound it around the strand of illusion, attaching them at intersections and using his will like glue in places.

When essence collided outside his core, destruction essence was formed. He had tried to mix essence inside his core previously, but it didn't seem to have the same explosive result. He felt it was because they were all intermixed inside the core anyway, so that process never occurred.

He had hoped at one time that forcing essence together in his core would be the key to forming his cultivation technique, but it had never worked. What he was doing now wasn't quite that.

The process he was using now was more like attaching space and time essence to illusion and then using his willpower to tug at it.

As he tugged, he noticed the stream of illusion essence rise and leave his core, bringing the other two streams of essence with it. He breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed that even though they were outside his core and mixing at places, they never exploded. Whatever prevented it in his core was still happening now.

Pulling at the essence thread, making sure that the balance between all three was equal, he began a cultivation cycle. He remained calm as he pushed the essence out to reinforce his body, waiting for the resonance from his soul aperture before sending the essence there instead.

The cycle went by smoothly, and the euphoria signalling a complete cycle felt extra sweet this time. He had actually done it.

I've officially created my own unique cultivation method.

Should I give it a name?

He happily thought for a while but felt he sucked at naming things. In the end, he decided the original name of the manual that made all this possible was fitting and decided to use that with a slight change.

His cultivation technique would be called The Essence Weaver's Technique, which felt fitting for what he had just done. Not that anyone would ever hear the name anyway, so it didn't matter too much.

Noting that the hourglass still had a while longer, he decided to try something potentially dangerous. This had been on his mind for a while now, and he felt the possible benefits outweighed the risks. He had also found a way to summon his soul aperture prematurely earlier, filling in the final piece of the puzzle.

Settling down, he used his new technique to gather essence ready to perform another cycle, but instead of starting with his body, he summoned his soul aperture and forced the essence into it.

The response was immediate, and pain, unlike anything he had ever experienced, washed over his body. His control of will slipped, and the only thing that prevented the cycle from failing was the aperture greedily sucking in essence like a black hole stripping gas from a star.

The pain spread, and he started to panic as the process continued without stopping. Just as he was trying to gather himself and find a way to end the torture, the soul aperture vanished on its own, cutting off the process.

A strange feeling of dissonance spread across his body as if it was rebelling against what he had just done. He knew he needed to complete the cycle, so he began feeding essence to his body and stopped when that feeling of wrongness disappeared. He felt like himself again as a similar but more dull euphoric feeling overcame him momentarily.

Wiping sweat from his brow, he noted there was still time before rejuvenation kicked in, and after finding no other issues, he started another inverted cycle. The damage wouldn't appear immediately, as it would accumulate the more he reversed cycled.

He completed five full cycles before feeling extremely unwell, so he stopped for now. The illusion essence inside his core was also very low, so he waited and watched as the hourglass flipped over, crossing his fingers.

The strange feeling of wrongness in time washed over him, and he was happy to note that his injuries and the horrible feeling of impending doom had gone.

Now that he had infused his body and soul, the essence he sucked into his core converted, but instead of filling it up as it was already full, it caused the core to expand and grow slightly before stopping.

He knew the core would grow in line with him getting stronger from performing cycles, as that was how a cultivator grew more powerful.

Using the mental mark he made earlier, he copied the exact number of created knives, even throwing some of them so he roughly matched his earlier training.

This method let him check on his core, and he was happy to note that it wasn't as empty as earlier in the day, letting him know that it had expanded slightly, increasing its capacity.

At that point, he began to work on his skill at forming knives and some other simple objects nearby as he waited for his core to get close to turning over.

After burning through energy using the skill, he checked the core and frowned.

That isn't right.

As expected, his core was greyed out in sections because he had been using a lot of illusion essence when practising. Oddly, it was only halfway to flipping over and rejuvenating him. He could hear the animals outside making noise as they greeted the rising sun and knew his core should have flipped over by now.

There was something that had been bugging him ever since his core had been turning over, and that was sometimes there would be a variance in how long it took, but it was only slightly.

It had taken far longer tonight, and he guessed it would be around seven hours by the time it rotated.

The more he thought about it, the more a suspicion started to form until he concluded that it was the only logical explanation.

My core takes longer to flip over and rejuvenate me after it helps me recover from an injury.

It was the only thing that made sense, but if true, it would throw a spanner into his future cultivation plans.

He hoped to work around his core and reverse cycles to increase his soul strength, which he felt would benefit his path most. Now, he had to integrate the factor of taking longer than expected, but he didn't change his plans.

A stronger soul gave too many benefits not to do it, especially since it seemed illusion skills favoured a strong soul.

I'll just need to try and supplement my training with medicine to heal me and reduce downtime.

Perhaps Mother can talk to that creepy herbalist for me.

With a sigh, he got out of bed and started to get ready for the new day.