Picking Up Attributes In Martial World

Chapter 184: Newfound Strength

Ye Jun took a few steps into the giant field and let the metal gate close behind him with a heavy thud.

The space stretched out further than his eyes could properly track, large enough that the far end faded into a kind of distance the size of a real outdoor plain. Yet the air inside was still and contained, the way only sealed spaces felt.

’Pocket dimension,’ he thought, glancing at the floor where faint formation lines ran in elegant spirals. ’Or close to it. Someone with the Dao of Space had to be involved in making this. Liangxue probably called in someone.’

He shook that thought away and walked toward the closer training area. The floor here was reinforced stone laid over absorption arrays, glowing with a low blue hue that drank in shock waves before they could damage the structure.

Rows of spirit-iron training dummies stood in formation, dummies meant to take Soul Tempering Realm Strikes without breaking. A stack of practice weapons leaned against the wall.

He cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. He had been wanting to do this since the moment he woke up.

He started with pure Physique. No Qi. No techniques. Just the raw body.

He walked up to the first dummy, settled into the foundational stance of Crushing Mountain Fist, and threw a single straight punch with maybe a third of what he had.

The dummy did not dent like he expected, instead it collapsed inward, the spirit-iron caving around his fist as if it were soft clay, and the back half of it tore free from its mounting and skidded several meters across the floor.

Ye Jun stared at his fist for a long moment.

’I didn’t even put effort into that.’

He moved to the next dummy and tried Coiled Tendon Strike. The technique focused power through his tendons and joints, gathering it into a single explosive release at the point of contact.

His fist landed in the dummy’s chest and the spirit-iron didn’t just cave, it shattered. The crack propagated through the body in a fast web of fractures and pieces of the dummy went flying across the hall before the absorption runes in the floor caught the energy and pulled it down.

He flexed his hand. There was no strain in his knuckles, no vibration in his bones. His arm felt as fresh as it had before the punch.

’Five times wider meridians and a body the Tribulation rebuilt at the molecular level. Yeah. This is going to take some getting used to.’

He decided to test footwork next. He went to the open part of the field and dropped into Stone Step Footwork, the same low grounded stance he had drilled a thousand times in the Gale Pressure Chamber.

Then he pushed off the way he used to.

He crossed the gap to the far wall in a single step and slammed into it before he could stop himself. The reinforced stone cracked under his shoulder and the absorption runes flared brilliantly and ate most of the impact, but he could feel the wall give beneath him.

He pulled back and looked at the spiderweb of fractures he had just left, ’Right. Recalibrate everything.’

He took a slower breath this time and tried Ashen Phantom Steps, the technique that produced afterimages by exploiting the gap between the eye and the speed of his motion and usually left blazing trails behind but not this time.

Previously he could produce three clean afterimages that held their shape for about a second each. Now, as he crossed the field in a curving arc, he counted seven distinct afterimages trailing behind him, each one solid enough to fool a careful watcher, and they held for longer than they used to.

The technique used roughly the same amount of physical effort as before. The difference was entirely in what his body could now do with that effort.

He ran through a quick sequence. Crushing Mountain Fist, Coiled Tendon Strike, Viper’s Bite Strike. He pulled his power back to maybe thirty percent of what he could feel available. Even at thirty percent, the training dummies designed to take Soul Tempering strikes lasted at most two hits before they broke apart.

He stopped after wrecking the tenth dummy and walked to the center of the field, breathing easily.

He was barely warmed up.

’Let me try the real thing.’

He set his stance again, this time channeling his full Physique into a single straight punch. He pulled nothing back. No Qi yet, just the body. His foot drove down into the stone, his core twisted, and his fist drove forward into open air.

The shock wave that followed his fist tore across the field. The wind ahead of him compressed and exploded outward, and the floor beneath his lead foot cracked in a wide circle, the runes fighting to contain the impact.

The next dummy in the line, almost two hundred metres away, vibrated visibly even though he had hit nothing.

Ye Jun lowered his fist and looked at the crater under his foot.

’A small hill. If I’d hit something solid, this punch would have taken a small hill apart.’

He had to actually pause for a second. The Qi-Tempered Physique was at a percentage he understood, and he knew where it sat in the realm hierarchy, but the gap between what he could do before the Tribulation and what he could do now was wider than the percentage suggested.

The Purple Lightning had done more than rebuild his body. It had pushed him through some quiet line that the system’s numbers hadn’t fully caught up to.

Ye Jun moved on to Qi.

He stopped at the center of the field, settled into a meditative posture, and reached into his Dantian.

The sensation was completely different from what he was used to. Where his gaseous Qi had moved through his meridians like wind, his liquid Qi flowed like cold mercury, heavy and Dense.

It was slow when at rest, and ferociously fast the moment he gave it direction. The expanded meridians let it move without strain. He could feel every drop of it, where before he had felt only currents.

He cycled a small amount of it through his right arm and tried Burning Sun’s Blast, his basic fire-projection technique. He used what he judged to be a tenth of what he would normally have spent on a clean execution.

The burst of flame that left his palm was the size of a house. It traveled the length of the field in a heartbeat and slammed into the far wall, where it detonated with enough force to shake the entire hall.

The absorption runes flared white-hot trying to contain the explosion, and they barely managed it. A wave of heat rolled back across the field and hit him in the face, and the air carried the heavy scorched smell of fire-attuned Qi for several seconds afterward.

Ye Jun stood there with his palm still extended, blinking.

"Okay. That used to take ten times the Qi to do half that damage."

He shook his head and tried Crimson Flame Lotus Art next. The flames that bloomed in his hand were not just hot anymore, they were heavy, similar to how his liquid Qi was heavy.

They burned quietly, with a focused intensity that he could feel cutting through the air around them rather than simply consuming it. He let the lotus form fully before he dispersed it, and the heat that rolled off it had a different quality than ordinary fire.

He walked to the wall stack and picked up a practice blade. Then he turned to face one of the more distant dummies and settled into the opening posture of Falling Star Sword Art.

He had only mastered the first form. Starfall Slash. A vertical descending strike that gathered Qi above the blade and released it downward in a condensed wave.

The technique was meant to be overwhelming on contact, designed to break through defenses through sheer compressed weight.

He raised the practice blade. Qi gathered above it in a dense ribbon of light, denser than it had any right to be at his cultivation, and he brought the sword down.

The strike traveled the distance to the dummy without the blade ever touching it. The air parted as a thin line of compressed Qi descended from where his sword had been, struck the dummy at the exact angle of the form, and split it cleanly from shoulder to hip.

The two halves fell away from each other and the floor underneath the dummy cracked in a clean diagonal line that ran for several meters.

He lowered the blade and stared at the cut.

’Still not on her level.’

He stood there for a long moment, the practice blade hanging loose at his side, and just breathed.

The Tribulation hadn’t just promoted him. It had rebuilt him, his meridians, his Dantian, his Physique, his Soul, his weapons, his techniques.

Every part of the cultivator he had been before the Ancestral Site was now operating on a higher floor. He had only scratched the surface of what his new body could do, and he could already feel that the floor was much higher than he had estimated.

He thought briefly about the Tier Four beasts that had reportedly attacked the Pavilion during his Ascension. Two months ago, a single Tier Four would have killed him without a fight. He still wasn’t certain he could beat an Origin Realm cultivator. But he also wasn’t certain he would die instantly.

He flexed his hand once and closed it into a fist. A grin pulled slowly across his face.

’A lot of work ahead. But I have the foundation now.’

The faint scent of cooking spirit beast meat drifted in through the gate behind him. The absorption arrays didn’t seal the hall completely, and his two lovers were somewhere down that corridor working on a meal that probably smelled better than anything else in the sect right now.

He set the practice blade against the wall and rolled his shoulders. There was one more thing he wanted to do before the food was ready.

He sat down on the cracked stone in the middle of the field, crossed his legs, and turned his attention inward to the place where the system always waited for him.

He smiled and muttered, "Status."

[Attributes System]

The hologram appeared in front of him, and Ye Jun’s breath caught the moment he saw it.