After the long, emotional conversation in the warm light of the living room, a profound stillness settled over the small apartment.
Judith had finally retreated to her bedroom, her steps lighter and her spirit noticeably lifted by the firm, unwavering promises her son had made.
Left entirely alone in the quiet hall, Ceres stood motionless in the faint illumination of the ceiling fixtures.
The soft, gentle expression he had worn while reassuring his mother gradually melted away, replaced by a razor-sharp, chilling focus.
The devoted son vanished into the deeper recesses of his mind, making way for the terrifyingly sharp intellect of an ancient, reborn Sword God.
He turned on his heel and walked into his own bedroom, shutting the door behind him with a quiet, decisive click.
Sitting on the edge of his modest bed, Ceres rested his elbows on his knees, leaning forward as he began contemplating his future and immediate course of action.
Returning to the chaotic, blood-soaked wilderness of the Mystical Planes next week was non-negotiable, but doing so unprepared was a fool’s errand.
He desperately needed a cohesive set of battle techniques and proper physical gear.
However, a major dilemma stood in his path: he couldn’t possibly use the divine magic spells, high-tier martial techniques, or signature soul armaments associated with his *Asterius* persona.
He wanted to keep his Asterius identity a total secret.
Anonymity was his greatest strategic advantage; it allowed him to operate in the shadows without drawing unwanted eyes.
Furthermore, he knew that no one in their right mind would ever connect the black armored, mysterious, and peerlessly skilled Asterius to the weak, unassuming, and routinely mocked Ceres Turner.
He intended to keep it that way for as long as humanly possible.
*’I need techniques that suit Ceres Turner’s current standing,’* he pondered, steepling his fingers beneath his chin.
Within his vast mindscape lay an infinite repository of grand combat arts from his past life—skills that had once shattered mountain ranges and split starry skies.
But almost all of them were either absurdly too powerful for his fragile, baseline Foundation Building body or far too advanced for this world’s current martial norms.
If Ceres Turner, a notorious weakling who had barely survived his encounters with low-tier beasts, suddenly reappeared at the Star Origin Asylum executing high-level, mysterious martial arts, it would instantly trigger mass suspicion.
It might even catch the attention of those tyrannical, tiered families—the entrenched aristocratic elites who hoarded martial power and brutally eliminated any uncontrollable variables.
If Ceres were completely alone in this world, he wouldn’t give a damn about corporate factions or aristocratic warlords.
But he wasn’t alone anymore.
He had Judith to protect and Ellen to guide.
Implicating his new family in a bloody war of intrigue before he had fully recovered his original strength was an outcome he refused to entertain.
He would feel sick to his stomach if his carelessness brought even a sliver of harm to the home he had just sworn to defend.
“Subtlety it is,” Ceres muttered softly under his breath.
Rising from his bed, he walked over to his desk and booted up his personal computer.
The sleek, monitor display flared to life, casting a cool, rhythmic blue glow across the darkened room.
Bypassing the public news portals, Ceres navigated straight to the official Federation Martial Arts Techniques Repository—the massive digital marketplace where warriors purchased registered training manuals.
In truth, Ceres didn’t hold a high opinion of this world’s modern martial arts.
From what he had observed on the VR platform and in public archives, most contemporary styles were crude, inefficient, and bloated with unnecessary movements.
Moreover, he knew that the genuinely terrifying, world-shaking manuals wouldn’t be freely listed on a public Federation portal; those were locked away in the high-security vaults of military academies, powerful sects, and top-tier asylum factions.
The Federation repository categorized martial arts into four distinct ranks: **Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Sky**.
Bronze was considered mediocre—the bare minimum for ordinary citizens and low-level adventurers.
Sky-grade techniques were legendary, capable of turning an individual into an army-destroying force.
However, the system was strictly gated.
Browsing or purchasing Gold and Sky-grade manuals required special military privileges, aristocratic clearance, or exorbitant sums of wealth.
The database further divided techniques into specific functional categories: **Movement Techniques** (pure speed enhancers), **Footwork Techniques** (movement patterns, kiting mechanics, and evasive maneuvers designed to simultaneously elevate speed and positional advantage), **Fist and Palm Techniques**, and **Weapon Techniques**.
Ceres began by casually browsing through the Movement and Footwork tabs.
He scrolled past dozens of flashy manuals boasting grandiose names, but nothing held his interest.
To his elite, master-level eye, the footwork techniques were needlessly overly complex—wasting kinetic energy on useless flourishes—while the movement techniques placed far too much unnatural strain on a cultivator’s meridians for tiny, negligible bursts of speed.
Dismissing those categories with a subtle sigh, he clicked over to the **Sword Techniques** section.
As he scrolled through the entries, his eyebrows twitched in quiet disdain.
Most of the styles were outright disgraceful.
He either scoffed at their flawed mechanical logic or sneered at their inflated prices.
Basic piercing and chopping techniques were listed for absurd amounts simply because they bore the stamp of a famous modern academy.
He didn’t bother clicking into the Silver section.
Silver-grade manuals cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Federation credits—a sum he simply couldn’t afford right now.
His current financial reserves consisted entirely of the credits he had accumulated from humbling arrogant hotshots on the Battle Online VR platform, and while it was a decent purse for a teenager, it wasn’t enough for upper-tier commercial manuals.
He scrolled through the pitiful list with a look of profound boredom.
*Basic Heavy Slash.
Triple-Point Thrust.
Iron-Cleaving Edge.* They were shallow, mechanical, and completely devoid of any deeper martial intent.
Just as he was about to log off and resort to heavily diluting one of his ancient past-life techniques, a specific entry at the very bottom of the discounted archive caught his eye:
> **Technique Name:** Nine Lightning Heavenly Sword Technique
> **Grade:** Bronze (Discredited / Flawed / Incomplete)
> **Price:** 5,000 Federation Credits
> **Classification:** Weapon Technique (Sword)
>
Ceres paused, his eyes narrowing slightly.
*’Nine Lightning Heavenly Sword?
A name like that tucked away in the Bronze section?’*
He clicked on the details and read the official assessment provided by the Federation evaluation board.
According to the record, the manual was originally classified as a high-tier Silver—or possibly Gold-grade—technique, but it had been permanently demoted.
The reason was simple: it was a severely incomplete manual containing only four surviving stages, and even those available parts were rumored to be filled with fatal structural errors.
In the modern martial arts community, practicing an error-filled, incomplete technique was considered outright suicide.
Misdirecting Qi through flawed meridian pathways inevitably caused violent energy backlashes—disasters that routinely resulted in shattered channels, internal organ failure, permanent crippling, or sudden death.
The description promised that if one could successfully master the four available parts, they could infuse volatile lightning elemental effects directly into their sword slashes.
At the absolute pinnacle of the fourth part, a master could allegedly summon real, devastating lightning sword slashes capable of striking targets from a distance.
Curious, Ceres scrolled down to the user review and comment section.
The feedback was an absolute wasteland of outrage and warnings:
*
* User9021: DO NOT BUY!
THIS IS A DEATH TRAP!
I tried practicing the second stage for two weeks and ended up in the emergency room with severe nerve damage.
My right arm is still twitching!*
*
* ThunderMaster_88: Absolute garbage.
The energy routing in the third stance literally electrocutes your own heart.
I suffered static backlash and ruined my Foundation Building base.
The Federation needs to remove this scam!*
*
* BladeSeeker: It’s completely broken.
You take more internal electrocution damage than the guy you’re swinging your sword at.*
Ceres stared at the angry, traumatized reviews, but instead of being deterred, a quiet, knowing smirk curled at the corner of his lips.
“Amateurs,” he whispered softly.
To the average, uneducated martial artist of this era, the technique was a death sentence.
But Ceres, an existence who had been ordained as a **Sword God** in his past life, saw right through the problem.
The issue wasn’t that the technique was fundamentally broken; it was that the people trying to practice it were entirely ignorant of elemental attunement.
The *Nine Lightning Heavenly Sword Technique* was deeply attuned to the natural laws of Lightning.
If a practitioner lacked a natural affinity or failed to understand how to channel atmospheric resonance, forcing raw lightning energy through standard, unadapted mortal meridians was equivalent to pouring boiling magma through thin glass tubes.
Of course they were getting electrocuted!
Furthermore, modern martial artists treated elemental sword styles as purely physical exercises.
They didn’t understand that practicing high-level elemental techniques was actually an act of imitating mystical formations and inscriptions—drawing the true elemental *meaning* and intent into the steel of the blade while using the human body merely as a grounded, fluid conduit rather than a closed storage tank. This chapter was copied from novelping.com without permission.
“They’re trying to force the thunder to stay trapped inside their flesh instead of letting it flow through the edge of the sword,” Ceres analyzed, his eyes glowing with sharp brilliance.
“And as for the structural errors in the text…
fixing a broken Bronze-grade flow is child’s play for me.”
To him, this wasn’t a broken piece of trash.
It was a miscategorized, brilliant gem hidden beneath a mountain of dirt.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Ceres clicked the purchase button.
> **Transaction Confirmed.**
> **5,000 Federation Credits deducted.**
> *Nine Lightning Heavenly Sword Technique (Stages 1-4) downloaded to local storage.*
>
He winced slightly as he watched his bank account balance drop to near zero.
The purchase drained him of almost all his savings, leaving him with just enough to secure basic physical gear.
Navigating away from the manual archive, he opened the Federation equipment marketplace.
He needed practical, mundane equipment for his return to the Mystical Planes—gear that wouldn’t draw a second glance from suspicious eyes.
He would hunt for high-grade sword soul armaments later once he was actually inside the planes.
He spent his few remaining credits methodically:
* A standard, well-balanced **steel arming sword**—durable, unadorned, and discreet.
* A pair of reinforced **combat boots**, built for long-distance travel and quiet tracking across rough wilderness.
* A basic **adventurer’s tunic**, made of flexible synthetic leather in subdued, neutral tones to easily blend into natural terrain.
* A leather thigh holster containing six balanced **steel throwing knives**.
Ceres selected the throwing knives specifically because the original Ceres Turner had used them constantly.
Ceres had been terrible with them, relying on them purely out of fear to keep monsters at a distance.
By continuing to carry throwing knives alongside a standard sword, Ceres would maintain the perfect illusion of being the exact same weak, desperate youth.
With his bank account completely wiped out, Ceres finalized the shipping order.
Because it was already late into the night, the automated logistics system scheduled the physical package to be delivered directly to his apartment chute early the following morning.
Satisfied with his night’s work, Ceres shut down his PC.
The holographic glow faded, plunging the bedroom back into soft shadow, illuminated only by the faint moonlight filtering through the blinds.
Instead of lying down to sleep like a normal teenager, Ceres crossed his legs, sitting upright on his bed in the lotus position.
He rested his hands lightly on his knees, palms facing upward, and closed his eyes.
He slowed his breathing, synchronizing his heartbeat with the natural flow of the ambient energy in the air, and began mentally deconstructing the manual he had just bought.
Throughout the long, silent hours of the night, while the rest of the city slept beneath the hum of high-tech defense grids, Ceres’s mind worked at a supernatural pace.
Within his mindscape—that vast, silent ocean of consciousness—he tore the *Nine Lightning Heavenly Sword Technique* down to its absolute core concepts.
He identified every single structural error written by the original author.
Where the text prescribed crude, forced energy loops that built up lethal static friction in the torso, Ceres mentally redrew the energy pathways like a master architect repairing a dangerously flawed bridge.
He smoothed out the violent friction points, rerouting the volatile lightning flow away from his fragile internal organs and guiding it through secondary meridians meant to act as natural lightning rods.
In a single night of intense mental deduction, what the Federation cataloged as a crippled, dangerous Bronze-grade manual was completely deciphered, corrected, and elevated in his mind into an elegant, lethal instrument of death.
He fully mapped out the refined execution of its four stages:
1.
**Flash Step Slash:** An explosive forward thrust using a brief pulse of lightning-attunement in the footwork to burst forward in a micro-second, taking the opponent completely off-guard with blinding acceleration.
2.
**Arcing Edge:** Coating the steel blade in rapid static friction to bypass physical parries, allowing the electrical charge to jump from the sword directly into the opponent’s body to disrupt their nervous system and cause instant, temporary paralysis.
3.
**Thunderclap Cleave:** Stacking heavy concentrations of energy along the flat of the blade, releasing a crushing wave of concussive force upon impact that could shatter heavy armor and destroy internal organs.
4.
**Heavenly Bolt:** The pinnacle—summoning a concentrated beam of true lightning sword intent, throwing a devastating arc of thunder that could strike targets from a distance, vaporizing flesh and leaving behind nothing but scorched earth.
By the time the first golden rays of dawn began to creep through the window blinds, Ceres opened his eyes.
The deep, ancient clarity in his gaze slowly softened, returning to the quiet, unpretentious calm of Ceres Turner.
It was morning.