There had been plenty of arguments over what exactly this thing called the "Heavens" really was. Some said it was the collective consciousness of all cultivators, others that it was a separate deity. There were even theories about the will of the world itself.
If you ask me, it's just a bot. It doesn't even measure up to a neural network.
What made me think that?
Once again, I was circulating my profound energy through my body while drawing in raw energy of heaven and earth from outside. Suddenly, that flow literally began tearing its way out of my body, while information about a technique very similar to mine was forcibly poured into my head. It had everything: breathing, a mantra that had to sound in your thoughts, even the mental attitude needed to get the desired result.
There were technical details, of course, but ninety percent of the success depended precisely on that attitude. You had to mentally tune yourself toward strength, toughness, and vitality.
Just like that. The damned bot decided that creating a cool new technique from the information field of Primal Chaos was too much hassle and simply fed me a ready-made template solution.
When I finished digesting the information and opened my eyes, a silver Buddhist pagoda was spinning right in front of my face.
If some local cultivator had been in my place, you could've dressed the whole thing up in grandiose bullshit. He was so worthy that enlightenment descended upon him, and the Heavens themselves decided to bestow this great teaching upon him.
But this was me. An old cynic who understood how bureaucracy and logistics worked in big corporations. Roughly. From TV shows, internet blogs, and dubious conspiracy theories, but I had a general idea.
And I'd wanted to create a cool replacement technique and give it an even more pompous name. Something like the "Great Way of the Fiery Buddha." Get the reference to my fire energy? Kidding. I actually didn't give a damn. The important thing was that the system worked properly. And I also needed to experiment with this so-called "attitude."
I'm not some local aborigine for whom only brute strength and survivability exist. Absolutely not.
Need an attitude? I remembered one of my favorite superheroes—the Flash. I'd tune myself not toward strength, but toward speed. I'm not some schoolkid who's played too many RPGs, and I understand perfectly well that speed depends on physical strength too, among other things, and is a complex parameter in general. It isn't just about powerful muscles, but also how fast the brain works and how quickly nerve impulses travel. There was no way to predict whether profound energy could affect all of that, but it was definitely worth trying.
What difference does it make how hard you hit if you can't land a blow on a fast opponent? And if the enemy hits first, there are far too many possibilities—from a poisoned blade to a plain old poke in the eye. It's logical that speed matters a lot more than raw strength, isn't it? That was how I saw it.
Next, there was vitality? In other words, regeneration. That stays, obviously. Healing after a hard fight is sacred; you don't touch that. Toughness, though, was worth thinking about.
In the visions used to set the proper attitude, they showed me a cliff by the seashore. How that cliff stood unshaken against the raging elements. The message was simple: "Look how tough I am. Be like me."
But I saw something completely different. There's a reason people say water wears away stone. That cliff was actually retreating, millimeter by millimeter. Any static toughness can be broken. I had another idea. How did Ip Man put it? "Be like water"? Instead of dumb toughness, I thought about adaptability. That was far more important—adapt to damage, develop immunity, and stop caring about it.
Yes, that path was longer and more painful. But couldn't you get the same toughness through controlled absorption of damage?
So instead of "strength, toughness, and survivability," I programmed "speed, adaptability, and survivability." Ideally. Could I control my thoughts and sensations with enough precision to properly reflash the qi in my pagoda before using it to improve the cells of my body? Answer: probably, at least partially.
Maybe it helped that I already knew how the technique worked in canon, and that knowledge seeped through subconsciously. Over the course of a year, I became much faster. No beast could catch me, even those in the True Profound Realm. For purely pragmatic reasons, I didn't go picking fights with Spirit Profound ones myself.
I moved slowly, and there was an objective reason for that—I was experimenting. Who knew how badly this kind of messing with the technique's code could hurt me? So I preferred to wait and make sure everything was working correctly.
Force the cultivation of the Great Way of the Buddha? Easy. You just had to get yourself hurt badly enough. Canon made that perfectly clear, and I remembered the life hack.
My body became not only faster, but stronger as well. It was too early to say much about adaptability, but my overall toughness increased. Not radically, but noticeably. And survivability definitely worked: even without consciously activating the technique, wounds closed much faster.
Only after a year did I finally decide to force things along. But how do you get a lot of wounds quickly? Purely psychologically, that's not an easy task. Deliberately cutting yourself is generally not the smartest thing a person can do. Even when it's necessary, even when you know everything will heal perfectly. Push it too far and you'll leave permanent marks on your psyche, and I was already walking along the very edge.
So instead of self-harm training, I deliberately started challenging stronger beasts—the kind that left me healing for a long time even when I won.
A pack of wolves that had been circling the village and terrorizing lone travelers made a convenient target. We didn't have many loners, mind you—the local hunters only left the Phoenix's protection in groups. Common sense. I was the only lunatic. But sometimes someone might make a quick run to the river or step outside the perimeter for some other reason. There had already been a couple of victims. Beasts were generally afraid to come close to our territory, but every now and then you got some especially batshit specimen.
Eventually, I met the pack. And they tore me up pretty damn well that time.
Though at first, everything went like clockwork. I stepped outside the perimeter with a spear in hand and simply walked around a convenient spot, completely confident in my strength. The strongest wolf, the leader, was at the peak of the Nascent Profound Realm. By then, I could kill those with my bare hands. One precise thrust of the spear, and he was dead.
And that was exactly what happened when the pack started surrounding me. The leader died instantly—the strike was monstrously powerful.
A normal pack would have retreated immediately after that, but these freaks rushed me all at once without losing the coordination natural to predators. Two wolves jumped and clamped onto the shaft of my spear, one managed to bite my leg, and two more went for my right side, but I managed to land two blows that sent them flying with broken bones. I intercepted another three as they lunged for my throat and flanks, sending them to meet their wolf gods with my bare hand. I really was fast, and I had strength to spare, but in this case the enemy's numbers and sheer recklessness proved decisive.
Fortunately, I had enough sense to immediately abandon the stuck spear, kick the wolf hanging onto my leg, and get the hell back under the protection of the Phoenix aura at maximum speed.
The beasts didn't dare enter the perimeter, but before giving up they decided to demonstrate exactly what separated the Nascent Profound Realm from the Elementary one. Dozens of wind blades flew into my back and tore the hell out of my back and legs. Good thing I managed to duck and protect my head.
I somehow made it home and dropped flat onto the floor. A second later, neighbors who'd seen my sprint burst into the hut. They were the ones who patched me up: treated the wounds and hauled me onto the bed.
That day, I made two important discoveries. First, a spear didn't suit me at all, and I desperately needed a dodging technique, because standing still like an idiot was obscenely stupid.
And the second discovery was probably worth all the pain I'd endured.
It was all about the nature of the wounds. Foreign profound energy from the beasts, carrying the wind element, remained inside them and kept the tissue from closing. But the moment I activated the Great Way of the Buddha, that energy began gradually being drawn into my own profound veins.
I screamed. Remember, the curse from the "fried chicken" hadn't gone anywhere. My profound veins swelled, and the Phoenix's fire energy started burning them from the inside. It hurt like hell, but... on the other hand, if my theory was right, didn't that mean I was developing resistance not only to wind, but to Phoenix fire itself right now?
Slowly, at the price of savage pain, I could at least get closer to Trash Che's cheats and become immune to elemental attacks. Wasn't that the whole point? And considering my plans for the near future, that resistance was more than worth it.
I had to clamp a folded leather strap between my teeth and keep going. I was willing to pay that price.
As soon as I got back on my feet—and that happened very quickly, since the locals already knew about the peculiarities of my technique and weren't surprised—I immediately headed to the blacksmith for a new weapon.
By the way, as for what the locals knew: yes, everyone knew about my Great Way of the Buddha. I wasn't especially close to the tribe in any familial sense, but I wasn't going to play some mysterious chosen one either. Only two hunters eventually risked trying to repeat my method; everyone else decided it was too dangerous. And they were right—you could easily blow yourself to hell by distributing the energy incorrectly. Neither of those two managed anything. They didn't even come close to understanding the essence of it, though I honestly tried to chew everything up and spoon-feed it to them. After seeing their failure, the remaining doubters finally changed their minds.
Only the tribe chief kept looking at me with growing hostility. Well, of course—by then, despite my young age, I was already stronger than he was. It was becoming obvious that his precious son wouldn't become the next chief unless I personally allowed it. I could've explained to the idiot that I had no intention of staying in this backwater, but... let him suffer. I didn't like the weakling anyway.
Anyway, back to the blacksmith. I needed a sword, or better yet, a saber. But the shop had neither. Only after an hour of persuasion did the blacksmith agree to bring me a blade from his house, one his father had forged long ago.
He wasn't being so kind to me out of simple politeness. When I trained on beasts, there was no way I could physically eat that much meat by myself, so I shared generously with my clansmen. And my recent fight with the wolves, along with the instant kill on their leader, had sent my rating through the roof again.
I needed to start thinking about where to print campaign posters and who to ask for campaign funding. Meet the next chief, Feng Lun! Kidding. But the chief once again looked at me like an enemy of the people and whispered to his twins that they should stay away from me.
There I go off into the weeds again. Back to the blacksmith's father's blade. It looked very much like a katana, and I liked it immediately. Why wasn't it a proper katana? The curve was too subtle; the blade was almost straight.
I wrapped the hilt myself with leather cord. I think that style is called tsuka-maki. It came out pretty aesthetic. I liked it.
That settled the weapon issue. All that remained was learning to dodge. Unfortunately, I hadn't been born with "Heavenly Fate," as I'd said more than once. All I had this time were a couple of tricks with profound energy available in the Elementary Profound Realm and knowledge of basic physics. The harder you push against the ground, the harder it pushes back, and that's what makes movement happen. Crude, but accurate.
Even at my level, manipulating qi let me play around with my center of gravity. My idea was this: shift my entire body weight directly into the foot at the exact instant of a step, so that the impulse-kick became several times stronger. Within a few days I managed to produce something very crude, but functional. It looked more like an explosive leap, but the speed was decent. I was moving in the right direction.
The second part of the idea was getting rid of unnecessary upward movement. When you run, your foot pushes down and backward, which sends the movement vector forward and upward. I wanted every last bit of useful energy to go strictly into movement along the horizontal plane—forward, sideways, or backward.
How to do that? With profound energy again—artificially increase the grip between my feet and the ground during the right phase of movement. The old men helped me here, and I had no shame about asking them for advice. That, by the way, is another funny trait of mine: I communicate with people easily, but making close friends is an almost impossible task for me. In the end, I talked to everyone; people genuinely smiled when they saw me, but I never had guests, and I didn't go visiting other people's huts either.
With great difficulty, I finally managed to turn that ridiculous half-technique into something usable. Do I need to tell you how many times I mangled my own legs in the process? We'll probably leave the juicy descriptions of my feet turning into bloody pulp while broken bones stuck through the skin offscreen. The important thing was the result—I really had become damn quick at dodging.
Now I could finally go have a heart-to-heart with one fire chicken that thought far too highly of itself. Yes, yes. I was going to take the Phoenix Trial.