1589 Practice
Alex wasn't sure what to name the technique he had created. He went through many different names and in the end decided not to name it. He would name it when it was a bit more established.
As he had wished, the technique was only in its base form. Even then it wasn't completely perfected. And he had so much to add to it to create different techniques. He would have to name them individually.
It was better to do that later.
He trained for the next month using nothing but either Sword Intent or this technique. As a result, his fighting prowess grew a lot more as well.
Godslayer hadn't been lying when he mentioned that creating a technique of one's own helped improve one's Sword. In just one month, Alex had managed to improve his Sword Intent to Saint Soul 3rd realm.
It was supposed to have taken much longer the stronger he got, but the sword technique helped him improve at a relatively faster rate.
A month more of practice and Alex had more or less perfected the base version of his sword technique.
A woman stood before him, head full of graying hair and a sword in her hand. She was an elder from some big family that didn't matter to Alex. Her cultivation base was in the Saint Soul 9th realm and even then, she was afraid of what was coming next.
She swung her sword before Alex could, sending out a wave of fiery attack that seemed to target unconditionally. Alex swung his sword, sending a simple, but strong Sword slash made up of nothing but Sword Qi.
The slash didn't completely stop the incoming attack. It couldn't with its Saint Soul 5th realm power. It did, however, lower its intensity so that Alex wasn't harmed even when he took the attack head-on.
He could have run away to dodge it, but instead, he focused on his technique. Intent and Qi poured into Midnight, amalgamating into something incredible.
The woman prepared her defensive techniques. As she knew the strength of what came, she knew how hurt she could be if she didn't.
And then Alex swung his sword diagonally.
The woman had her eyes on his sword, she had been paying attention to it the entire time, but even then she saw nothing. She didn't even see a glint of light.
She did sense the incoming attack. The attack was so fast and so incredibly condensed that it was impossible to sense it with anything but just her senses. Even with the senses, without looking for the attack, she wouldn't have been able to know where it was.
All she could have otherwise sensed was its aura. She would have never known what hit her.
Her defensive technique created a lotus flower below her feet, the golden petals opening around her. There were 12 petals in the lotus flower, spread out in 3 rings with 3 petals in the inner ring, 4 in the middle right, and 5 in the outer ring.
3 petals on the outer ring of the lotus were destroyed at once, and the remaining 3 moved to replace them. When they were shattered without any effort, the attack landed on the middle 4 leaves.
Even this close, the woman couldn't see the attack, only sense it. The shape of the attack was undoubtedly still a slash, but it was so compressed that it felt wrong to call it one.
The thinness of the attack was even lower than the breadth of a hair and the width of the attack was somewhere in between a blade of grass and a snowflake.
Alex had packed so much into so little, that the level of the attack itself had gone up as a result.
The middle petals of the defensive lotus burst into bright golden light and then the inner petals cracked as well. The woman couldn't put up another defense in time and put up her sword to block the last bit of attack.
Her sword bent slightly before she was pushed back by the attack. The power of the attack dwindled past that point, but it still left a mark on her body as the outer robe she wore had a paper-thin cut to it.
She looked up in fear, realizing that there was no way to defeat him anymore.
"I give up!" she shouted quickly.
Alex stopped before he was about to send out another attack and looked at the woman. "Oh… okay," he said, realizing his talisman had just buzzed a little.
The woman nodded toward him and quickly walked away. He watched her as she walked not just back to the group, but away. She was done with this.
He looked at the few remaining people that weren't as strong. He could only sigh. "Do you guys want to continue this? All the strong ones got the pills they could want and left," he said.
The remaining group looked at each other. Few of the ones that were there were there to fight Pearl, and the rest were there to fight Alex realizing they couldn't defeat him.
They were still struggling to figure out how he was ever consistently defeating people so high above his own rank, but they couldn't figure it out. In the end, they realized that they too couldn't defeat him.
It was time to leave.
A few of them bowed toward him and walked away. The remaining were the ones that were here for Pearl, and they were hesitating.
"I won't be staying here since the strong fighters are gone. I'll have to go look out for them as well," he told them. "You guys should leave as well."
They looked at each other a few times and then bowed toward Alex again before walking away. They had gotten all they could hope for in the past 6 months, so it was time for them to move on too.
Alex took back the puppet and the rules and was about to prepare to leave as well when he saw one final person still standing in line. Whisker had already left, so the person alone was there.
The young man looked no older than him and simply stood there with his hands behind his back.
Alex wondered what was going on. "Umm, do you want to challenge me?" he asked. "You can if you want to." The young man wasn't very strong compared to him, so it would be a rather quick fight anyway.
The young man shook his head instead, confusing Alex.
"Then… what do you want?" Alex asked him.
"Nothing," the young man said. "Don't mind my presence, Your Majesty. Or if you do, just tell me. I will move away to give you some privacy."
Alex frowned.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"My name is Shan Wangjiu," the young man said.
"And do you want something from me?" Alex asked him.
"Only if you can give it to me," the young man said, taking a step forward, his eyes bright with hope.
That concerned Alex a bit.
"What do you want exactly?" Alex asked him.
As if being allowed to finally speak, the young man fell to his knees and banged his head on the ground in kowtow.
"I want you to teach me the ways of the sword," he shouted out loud. "Please become my master."
