Mystical Journey

Several days later

Black Fire Palace back garden

Bam!

Garen thrust out his first and pulled it back slowly, as though pulling something from mid-air, countless white mists appeared in the air, like white ropes, and madly gathered in his hand.

Like a huge white web.

Garen wore loose white clothes, closing his eyes to concentrate, and then he swung out his left hand as a fist again.

Bam!!

There was another dull sound in the air.

"Do you need me for something?" Ivycius was slowly walking out from the corridor on the right of the garden. Looking at Garen, doing his morning exercises in the garden.

"How’s the situation on Beckstone’s side?" Garen asked with his eyes closed, never stopping his movements for a moment.

Turning around, thrusting his fist, reaching out his palm, as the white mist around him roiled around, giving off a foggy, blurry feeling.

The flowers and plants in the garden, and the surrounding varde flowers kept waving in the mist, whooshing as they went. The pebbles and dried leaves on the ground also formed whirlwinds of different sizes, constantly spinning.

Ivycius watched Garen train casually. He replied,

"My men have searched the whole area around their landing spot, we could only find the marks of their landing, they probably ran away. After all, Form Four fighters would have a few survival methods no matter what."

"Then forget it, there’s no rush for now, when the time comes they will naturally appear, how about the Wells Castle?" Garen spread open his fingers and grabbed lightly, five little snakes made of white clouds appearing instantly and then disappearing as rapidly.

"The people from the Secret Service have all left. We didn’t find that Black Nesat you were talking about." Ivycius replied calmly. "What do you plan to do now? Just staying here and training?"

Garen gradually pulled back his stance and stood on the spot. Ever since his fight with Ivycius, he had obtained a brand new and deeper understanding of the secret techniques he had learned before.

"The situation has just only stabilized here, if we want to take root here, we have no choice but to stay temporarily and steady our forces here."

"It’s not that easy to steady our forces, since we’re the ones controlling the palaces. As Palace masters, we had always been sponsored by the royal family, paid from the country’s coffers, but now that Avic is dead, our main source of income has been cut off as well."

"Other than the royal family’s sponsorship, what other sources of income did we have back then?" Garen accepted some faintly salty water from a Black Fire Guard at the side, and gargled lightly, then he used a warm and damp towel to wipe the sweat from his body.

"There are also the offerings and teaching fees from our disciples." Ivycius said mildly.

"Then we’ll start from there." Garen smiled slightly. He was preparing to introduce the things he learned from the Secret Technique World to this world. Naturally, he couldn’t simply reveal his secret techniques, these were a form of martial arts that required a background in the culture, and wasn’t something one genius could invent by himself. Anybody with a good eye could be able to discover the completely different culture embedded in them.

But while the secret techniques couldn’t be taught, basic martial arts and fighting techniques would be fine.

Some totem users liked close combat as well, and although there were Master-level fighters among the normal people, their martial arts had never been appreciated by others. And they were an utter mess, with not a single unified system.

"Thankfully I have the Green Vine Sphere here, so other than the Black Fire Guards ability, I can also bestow Totem Light on regular armor. This will infinitely reduce the distance between normal people and regular totem users. Wouldn’t this prove to be the best basics?"

"Aren’t you afraid of raising a future threat? Since your father could create the Green Vine Sphere, surely someone would be able to neutralize it."

"That was why Avic was too scared to use this on a larger scale, right?" Garen said calmly, "If I don’t even have that much generosity, what right do I have to pursue the legendary Strongest Way?"

"The Strongest Way?" That was the first time Ivycius heard Garen mention his dreams.

"That’s right. I used to contemplate often, how the universe has limitless colors, limitless miracles, limitless mysteries, limitless horizons. Since I was already born into this world, if I don’t see and experience everything I find interesting, then wouldn’t I have come to this world only to waste my life?"

Garen had recently started fusing his fist fighting secret techniques, and in his silence, he had an enormous aura like the peaceful sea.

Every day, he would use his own body to channel the Myriad Water Jasper Technique, his unimaginably powerful Nine-Headed Dragon’s body had its blood qi rise and fall like the tide in the process of training with his secret techniques. It was enormous. It reflected back to nourish Garen’s spirit, until his spirit reached an indescribable level. He was also growing closer to the legendary Form Five.

Every time he channeled his blood qi and made it boil, Garen could feel the Nine-Headed Demon Dragon’s body slowly merging with his own. The huge totem power kept slowly nourishing and modifying his body.

If the other Form Five totem users could only start training their secret techniques after they achieved the highest form of merging, then Garen was approaching the peak of this step by using his level as the strongest secret technique practitioner, the King of the Century.

He just had to achieve Form Five, and then he could instantly reach the very peak of the Form Fives.

This was the base he had forged himself from the previous world. It was a spiritual level and height.

This was the powerful will that came from countless battles of life and death.

In the Secret Technique World, although Garen had his special power to help him, he still experienced many life-and-death battles. And as he continuously crossed swords with many peak-level masters of the ancient martial arts, he had successfully walked out of his failures and fears, the martial arts of his spirit having achieved an extremely high level.

The more he feared something, the more this will of his made him excited.

Because he could feel terror, that meant he had seen a taller mountain for him to scale.

Ivycius was the person closest to him, and the one who had the best view of the changes Garen had been undergoing recently. He also knew the method to train for Form Five, but usually Form Five required a period of adaptation after the user merged with the totem.

This was because a person’s will couldn’t control the totem’s massive power. This adaptation period was a time to get used to it. Usually, this would require years. The stronger the totem, the more years needed to get used to it and adapt.

Only after experiencing this adaptation period, could someone truly be considered a Form Five elite fighter. Even the Form Five fighter that spent the shortest amount of time in this adaptation period used a full twenty years. The longer ones could take up to a century.

This was also the main reason most Form Five users didn’t usually walk the grid, they were too busy adapting, so they sent their clones out, and let their wills continuously adapt to the totem.

Even for those powerful fighters who had experienced the adaptation period, if they wanted to use their totem bodies to learn the secret techniques that had been discovered in the ruins, that would also be an extremely long process. A decade or two would pass like nothing. Each time they tried to train, during the time it took for them to close and open their eyes again, even their grandchildren’s grandchildren might have been born.

And they could only start from the beginning after achieving Form Five, by channeling their immense blood qi through their bodies, which made it far harder than using just a normal person’s body.

This was Garen’s biggest advantage, in that he could easily learn this sort of secret technique.

"Is your dream to pursue the position of the strongest?" Ivycius looked at Garen, as though affected by this atmosphere, his experience growing slightly solemn as well.

"Rather than pursuing the position of the strongest, it’s more like I want to overcome life and death." Garen replied calmly, "I’m just a normal person myself, it’s just that my desire to avoid death is too strong." It was as though he had instantly returned to that pure state of mind he had in the Secret Technique World.

"Once you reach the strongest, nothing will be a threat to you?" Ivycius was slightly surprised.

"Perhaps." Garen didn’t reply, it was a question even he didn’t really know the answer to.

"We better return to the previous problem, since we have no source of income, and we also need to build a strong influence. Then let’s open the palace doors."

"Open the palace doors? You intend to?" Ivycius had thought that Garen had only wanted to expand a little, but to think he actually...

"That’s right, I plan to truly open the palace doors, and recruit disciples on a large scale!" Garen said deeply.

He didn’t want to teach the Secret Technique World’s secret techniques, that was his biggest secret, no matter how much of a genius he was, it wasn’t something he could create by himself in such a short frame of time. What he truly wanted to teach was a series of understanding he had come to after coming to this world and using the Totem Light to fight.

With Garen’s level now, without using any of the Secret Technique World’s secret technique basics, it was still possible for him to invent some rough and simple blood qi channeling methods without revealing anything.

Although it wouldn’t reach the level of secret techniques, but mixed with the martial arts and fighting techniques of this world’s masters, he could naturally still form a school of his own.

During these days, the stuff he had been training every day were the simple exercises he was planning to teach. At the most, these exercises could only train the human body to infinitely approach the level of a Grandmaster of Combat, but it could never break the limits of this world. So it couldn’t be called a secret technique.

The so-called secret technique was something that could theoretically approach the level of a Grandmaster of Combat, a secretive form of martial arts that could approach the limits of the human body.

Garen’s aim now was only to build his own power and influence, so naturally he didn’t have to go so far.

This rough and shoddy exercise, added with some various other useless steps and methods that he himself couldn’t remember, plus some messy, meaningless spirit training methods. He hid the truest, simplest technique into the countless intercepting signals.

This guaranteed that Black Sky from Obscuro, and the ancient antiques of Terraflor, would definitely be unable to decipher its secrets.

Seeing Ivycius’ somewhat surprised expression, Garen continued.

"I invented a form of fighting exercise, upon surveying all of the normal people’s fighting techniques from this world, I noticed that most of them began from the outside moving in, and there are even some Master-level fighters who achieved the peak of their techniques. Unfortunately they worked for most of their lives, and still can’t defeat even a normal Form One totem user. In the world of normal people, this sort of elite martial arts fighter would naturally grow weaker in influence. But everything will change with this Green Vine Sphere technique of mine."

He smiled slightly.

"I plan to use the Green Vine Sphere as the basic, and use the normal people as the base, to create a force that belongs to us completely."

"As long as you don’t find it troublesome." Ivycius gave Garen a long look. Then he turned around and left.

Garen stood alone in the garden.

"Won’t it be fine as long as I give all the troublesome bits to the people most suited to handling it?"

He reached out with one hand and grabbed with his five fingers, so the countless white wisps appeared instantly, surrounding and dancing around his arm like many little snakes.

These simple exercises used his Ten Thousand Mammoths technique as a base, and was an adaptation of his Northern Capturing Hand. He used his own body to vibrate rapidly, the blood qi inside turning and rippling, absorbing the countless water vapor around him to form rapidly vibrating micro water droplets that could permeate into the enemy’s body and wreak havoc.

After Garen simplified it, this simple set of exercises created from this move could also control water vapor to permeate and destroy the enemy’s insides, while at the same time he could also use Totem Light to sense the movements of any possible threats around. Once it was given the quality of Totem Light, this move’s ability to kill and destroy tracelessly would be unstoppable! If enough water vapor was gathered, the ripple of water vapor summoned would be bigger and bigger, stacking up to an extremely powerful vibrating force with countless water vapor. Even if its ability to break defenses was slightly weaker, it was still a peak-level ability to cause large-scale destruction.

In terms of power, once it was trained to the peak, it could at least reach the Form Four level.