After gaining his pure body, Naath’s circulation of the true void arts was just slightly faster and more intense than it was in the fear formation. The energy in the surroundings swarmed to him like hungry locusts would swarm to a field of fresh crops. In a matter of seconds, Naath had his first bone compression complete. After a few minutes, he was already up to 34 compressions. He was astonished to note that his true void energy at the core of his bones seemed to naturally and passively compress everything. Naath was overjoyed at this new discovery.
This excitement was short-lived however as he realised he was going to leave the bone hardening part of his cultivation behind entirely. This meant that this ability for his bones was completely useless.
Naath let out a disappointed sigh, the rune thought to itself, ‘Greedy little brat, if anyone else in this universe got a pure physique like him they would almost die of joy. But this kid actually found a flaw with it and is disappointed?’
Naath continued with his compressions after an hour or so reaching 50 in total. At this point, Naath began to feel a slight ache in his bones as he approached his normal compression limit.
However, that limit was before his pure physique was obtained, his bones had completely transformed now. Once Naath felt this dull ache in his bones the true void energy in his bones stirred. It drew all of the energy towards it acting like a gravitational center for it, causing the dull ache to disappear immediately. In fact, Naath now felt as if his progress had been reset, though there were very much so 50 compressions in his bones. He was delighted and confused by this, but he decided to think about it later and continued. Another hour passed as Naath had compressed his bones 30 more times and the dull ache returned. His true void energy stirred once more and a second layer of ultra-compressed energy formed over the first one.
With his true void energy as the center, a layer of 50 compressions seemingly became one layer. After that came another layer of 30 compressions that seemed to merge with the last. Another hour later, Naath had achieved 20 more compressions, once more these compressions seemed to turn into one and mold on top of the previous layer. Naath continued for another hour this time only managing to hit 8 more, at this point his bones compressed this layer on top and seemed to refuse to compress anything any further. This however stirred Naath’s stubborn nature and he pushed his true void energy harder to try and compress further.
The rune spoke up saying, “Naath 108 is a divine number, it is the limit of the human body before advancing beyond the physical. You can push as hard as you want, you will simply never be able to...to...t-”.
The rune droned off of its own speech, Naath was not the first genius he had ever seen who reached 108 compressions. One of them appeared once every 10 thousand years or so. However, he had never seen anyone accomplish this feat as quickly as Naath. He paused and stuttered his speech as he saw something that should have been absolutely impossible!
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All of the four layers in Naath’s bones seemed to be compressing together once more. The four major layers seemed to fuse into one large one with 108 smaller sections, this also didn't surprise the rune however as he had seen this as well. What shocked the rune to the point that it didn’t even have words was the fact that after this, a new layer of compressions began to form! In a span of another 24 hours, Naath had compressed another 50 layers. At this point, his true void energy took these again and compressed them into another singular layer with 50 sections. Another 24 hours later Naath produced 30 more compressions that did the same thing.
The rune was thinking ‘N-no he isn't! How?! Is he the reincarnation of a divine god?! No, he’s from earth! What the hell is with that little marble? Why did it produce such a monster?!!!’ In the time of four more days, he had another layer of 108 compressions!
However, Naath pushed his true void arts even harder and another compression began to slowly form. The rune felt like fainting at this point, it had not seen anything like this for beyond just a few tens of billions of years.
He thought, ‘might this brat actually do three compressions of 108? Might he be able to form a true human’s body?!’ Naath was completely unaware of any of this and was focused and straining to compress another layer of 108.
At this point, it took three days to compress a new complete layer of 50, and again for the next three layers as well. Naath noticed all of this and silently whispered a quote from a person he had rather idolized in his old world saying, “If you knew the magnificence of the three, six and nine, you would have a key to the universe.” It took three days to compress layers for the third major layer that was a multiple of three. The rune itself had said that 108 was a divine number so what happened when it was multiplied by three? Naath smiled slightly despite all of his pain and continued the compressions.
After 12 days of relentless cultivation, Naath had finally finished his third and final layer of 108 compressions having three layers in total and a total of 324 compressions! At this time a hairline crack began to spread across all of Naath’s bones, he could no longer hold it back. Naath released the pressure that held the bones back from advancing and snapping.
*POP!!!*
*CRACKLE!!!!!!*
*SNAP!!!!!!*
*BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!*
This time a shockwave spread out from Naath that actually broke the sound barrier, all the trees in the surroundings were swept to the forest floor silently. The surrounding beasts were all sent flying for hundreds and hundreds of feet swept away with no warning whatsoever. After this, the sound wave came and rumbled like thunder as it moved outwards, when the beasts at the edge of the forest heard this sound they did not react like last time. This time all of their instincts screamed at them to become defensive or to hide. Naath was sitting in the center of all of this but this time had made sure that all of this avoided Brutus.
Naath was slowly reforming his bones, or rather to be more accurate Naath’s bones were slowly reforming on their own with the true void and compressed energy as a core. Once this was done and before Naath was able to celebrate, a new wave of pain hit him. With a *RIIIIP!* sound, every muscle in his body tore simultaneously and the compressed energy from his bones poured into them to mend all of them. As this energy mended them it enhanced each muscle cell making it more elastic and stronger at the same time. Each cell seemed to double in the amount of muscle strands it could hold yet its size remained the same.
His tendons, muscles, and cartilage all began to be restored and filled with compressed energy that was dense like a compressed star. Naath went to begin adding his true void energy into this however, he was shocked to find that true void energy was already coming from his bones refining and mending his muscles, tendons, and cartilage. The rune had to suppress his laughter as he knew this would happen, it was common knowledge that after repairing the 10th bone-shattering, the muscles would tear soon after and one would be at early muscle strengthening level one. However, the rune was surprised that Naath had done so in only the roughly 10 months he was trapped in this forest.