Chapter 355 - 10: Body Refining Rebirth 2

Chapter 355: Chapter 10: Body Refining Rebirth 2

Ash was already dressed and about to head out for breakfast with Rylan when he stopped. The Martial Saint’s insights were still fresh in his mind, and the urge to test their true effect on his own martial cultivation proved stronger than hunger.

He made up his mind and immediately sat cross-legged on the dormitory floor, closed his eyes, and turned his sharpened awareness inward.

Before the first cycle of energy could fully form, his thoughts drifted. (AN: Some more worldbuilding time.)

Outside, across the training fields of Azure Cloud Martial Academy, every newly awakened student—whether celebrated S-Rank genius or ordinary E-Rank like himself—remained firmly inside the Body Refining Realm. Not a single one of them had dared to take the final step into Martial Apprentice. The rules were absolute, the risks permanent, and the price of impatience far too high.

A second safeguard followed from the same principle.

1. No one is allowed to awaken below the age of 18.

2. No one is allowed to breakthrough to the martial Apprentice Realm before reaching the very peak of Body Refining.

And this led to a situation that even after a student successfully awakened their martial soul, no newly awakened eighteen-year-old was permitted to break through to the Martial Apprentice Realm until that soul had fully settled and integrated with their body and mind and they have reached the peak of body refining.

The academy and the governing authorities treated this rule with absolute seriousness. Attempting the breakthrough too early meant permanently losing many of the passive amplification effects, recovery bonuses, and compatibility benefits the martial soul would otherwise provide over a lifetime.

The loss was irreversible. Because of this, every student in Ash’s cohort—from the most celebrated S-Rank geniuses standing in the eastern courtyards to the lowest E-Rank sitting alone in a western dormitory—remained somewhere between Rank 1 and Rank 9 of the Body Refining Realm.

Before the age of eighteen, students had been restricted to specially modified "Advanced" versions of traditional martial arts.

Advanced Boxing. Advanced Breathing Exercises. Advanced Tai Chi. Advanced Taekwondo. Advanced Karate. Advanced Judo. Advanced Muay Thai.

And many similar systems. Experts had spent years redesigning these methods so they could safely suit still-developing bodies. The techniques allowed gradual progress through the nine ranks of Body Refining without any cosmic energy involved. Progress came only from disciplined training, proper food, rest, and the occasional energy drink issued by the schools.

Ash had practiced Advanced Muay Thai for years. He had never been the best in his gym. He had never been the second best. He had never even been close to the front of the class. His coach had once looked at him after a long sparring session and called him the most stubborn average student he had ever trained.

Ash had decided to take that as a compliment. Consistent effort, repeated drills, and quiet refusal to quit had slowly carried him to the middle stage of Rank 7 in the Body Refining Realm. The more gifted students in his age group had already reached the peak of Rank 9 long before the awakening ceremony.

But still none of them had dared take the final step into Martial Apprentice. The physiological risk, the institutional prohibition, and the permanent loss of future martial soul benefits made the decision obvious to everyone.

Ash was still cross-legged on the floor of his dorm room thinking about all this.

The Body Refining Realm was the absolute foundation of every cultivator’s path. Its nine ranks looked simple on paper and proved demanding in practice.

Ranks 1 through 3 tempered the skin, flesh, and blood. The goal was to toughen the outer layers of the body, improve the quality and circulation of the blood, and build basic resilience against impacts and fatigue. A cultivator who finished these three ranks could already take punches that would leave ordinary people bruised and breathless.

Ranks 4 through 6 turned the work inward to muscles, tendons, and bones. Strength, explosive power, flexibility, and structural integrity were forged here. A cultivator who completed Rank 6 already possessed a body far beyond ordinary human limits. Their punches carried real weight. Their bones resisted fractures that would cripple a normal person. Their tendons stored and released force like coiled springs.

Ranks 7 through 9 refined the internal organs and fused every earlier improvement into a coherent whole. Only when the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and other organs could withstand the denser, more violent energies of the higher realms was the mortal foundation considered complete. Most people who reached the peak of Rank 9 felt stronger than they had ever imagined possible in their ordinary lives.

Most students treated the Body Refining Realm as a necessary but unremarkable staircase. They climbed it as fast as they could, eager to reach the more prestigious Martial Apprentice Realm where true cosmic energy cultivation began and real status started to appear.

Ash no longer shared that view.

He closed his eyes and turned his newly sharpened perception inward.

Under the lens of the comprehension talent and structural insights he had copied from the Martial Saint, every flaw in his foundation stood out with almost painful clarity. It was like someone had suddenly handed him a high-resolution microscope and pointed it at the body he had lived in for eighteen years.

The density of his muscle fibers was uneven. Some areas were tightly packed and efficient. Others were looser, wasting force with every movement. When he shifted his weight even slightly, he could feel the tiny inefficiencies. The alignment of certain tendons carried small leaks of power that he had never once noticed in all his years of training. His bones, though stronger than an ordinary person’s, lacked the optimal micro-structure the copied blueprint demanded. There were microscopic gaps and imperfect crystal patterns that would become liabilities under higher pressure. Even his organs, which had reached the middle stage of Rank 7 through years of steady training, showed faint weaknesses. His heart worked a little harder than necessary. His lungs did not expand to their full efficient capacity. His digestive system processed energy drinks and food with small, unnecessary losses.

It felt like being handed a master’s finished sketch of a perfect body and then looking back at his own drawing, line by line, and seeing every place it wobbled.

A long, decisive thought process unfolded inside him.

Continuing upward from middle Rank 7 would be the expected path. It would also be a waste. With the talent, instincts, and physical blueprint he now possessed, he had a rare chance to rebuild the entire foundation correctly. He could go back to the beginning in terms of methodical refinement and push every rank to an extreme that ordinary cultivators never attempted. The process would take time—possibly weeks of careful work—but the resulting body would be incomparably stronger, more efficient, and better prepared for the enormous energy demands his Boundless Origin would one day impose.

There was also the matter of the Genesis Apex Assessment, one month away. He turned the problem over carefully in his mind. Starting again from Rank 1 did not mean losing what he had already built. It meant re-tempering each stage from the inside, like reforging a sword without ever unmaking it. His measured rank would not drop. If anything, it would climb in a way the examiners could not easily explain. A student with an official E-Rank soul and a body that tested far beyond his years was exactly the kind of unpolished diamond the academy loved to find. It was also exactly the story he needed people to believe. The truth about the Boundless Origin would stay buried, and the cover story would be one that people were eager to tell themselves.

He reached into the spatial pouch at his waist, took out one of the cloudy low-grade energy crystals issued to E-Rank students, and held it in his palm to test the idea.

The crystal lasted perhaps five breaths.

Its trapped light slid out of the lattice and into him as if it had been waiting for the invitation. Warmth spread through his palm and up his arm, then faded almost immediately. The stone crumbled into dull gray dust that sifted between his fingers and onto the floorboards. Ash blinked at the dust. The energy had barely registered—a single warm swallow in a throat the size of a canyon. His entire monthly stipend of crystals would be gone in a single afternoon if he tried to cultivate this way.

Right, he thought. So that’s why I need Quintessence Fluid.

He brushed the remaining dust off his hand. The ambient cosmic energy that filled the academy would have to do the heavy lifting for now. That meant efficiency was everything, and efficiency began with the foundation.

The old dream of simply reaching Martial Apprentice and living two hundred comfortable years watching adaptations felt distant now, almost na?ve. That goal had belonged to an average young man with average prospects. The young man sitting on the dormitory floor possessed a martial soul that could reach across the multiverse and a fragment of a Martial Saint’s foundation. His trajectory had changed permanently.

He was no longer aiming for a long, pleasant life. He was aiming to become an existence that could stand above the limitations of the era itself. Then and only then would he have the freedom and the time to watch every show and read every story he had ever wanted.

He still intended to see how every story ended. A long life was just the floor now, not the ceiling.

Ash exhaled slowly. He straightened his spine until it felt perfectly aligned. He settled into the optimal posture for cultivation—the one the Martial Saint’s knowledge had quietly corrected in his mind. Shoulders relaxed but not slumped. Hips settled firmly. Hands resting lightly on his knees. Breathing steady and deep.

He began the first circulation of the Seven Star Martial Cultivation Technique.

The technique was the standard method issued to every E-Rank student. On its own it was simple and efficient enough for ordinary progress. Ash did not use it on its own. He carefully wove into it the far more refined insights and cellular-level tempering methods he had brought back from the golden-string universe. The result was no longer the basic Seven Star method. It was something hybrid, denser, and far more precise.

The first loop through his meridians felt like pulling a thick rope through a knot he had not known was there.

Resistance met him at every turn. The pathways that had felt acceptable for years now revealed themselves as slightly narrow, slightly rough, slightly inefficient. He did not force the energy through. He guided it with patient pressure, using the Martial Saint’s understanding of cellular absorption and micro-circulation. Slowly, the knot began to give.

Heat gathered under his skin.

It was not the sharp burn of a fever. It was the steady, controlled warmth of metal being brought up to forging temperature. The heat started at the surface—skin first—and then sank deeper into the flesh and blood. Sweat beaded along his hairline and ran down his temples. More sweat traced paths down his spine and soaked into the back of his thin dormitory shirt. When a drop fell from his chin onto the floorboards, it left a faint gray stain.

Impurities were being driven out.

Ash kept the circulation steady. He focused first on the outermost layers—the skin, the flesh, and the blood—that formed Ranks 1 through 3 of the Body Refining Realm. According to the Martial Saint’s blueprint, these layers should not merely be tough. They should be dense, elastic, and capable of rapidly circulating refined energy without waste. He guided the ambient cosmic energy through the surface meridians again and again, each cycle slightly more refined than the last.

The Boundless Origin Martial Soul hummed quietly in the back of his mind. The vast nebula of primordial light seemed almost approving. It continued its passive work of drawing in surrounding energy and feeding it into the process, making the ambient field of the academy noticeably more useful than it would have been for any ordinary student.

Time passed without clear markers.

Ash’s awareness narrowed until the only things that existed were the slow movement of energy, the rising heat, the gradual expulsion of gray impurities, and the quiet correction of imperfect structures inside his body. He felt individual muscle fibers adjusting their density. He felt blood vessels becoming smoother and more efficient. He felt the outermost layer of his skin tightening and strengthening at a microscopic level.

Sweat continued to fall. The gray stains on the floorboards multiplied. The air in the small dorm room grew warmer and carried a faint metallic scent.

Outside, the academy continued its ordinary morning routine. Instructors shouted corrections across the training fields. Students practiced basic stances under the growing sunlight. High-rank geniuses received preferential guidance in the eastern courtyards. Laughter and the occasional sharp impact of practice strikes drifted on the breeze. None of them had any reason to glance toward the western dormitories.

Inside one of those quiet rooms, an E-Rank student sat in silence. A half-eaten breakfast seat still waited for him in the cafeteria. His personal terminal still held an unanswered message from a friend. And on the floor of that small room, a young man with a vast, hidden martial soul continued the slow, meticulous work of rebuilding his body from the foundation upward.

The rebuild of his physical foundation had truly begun.

Ash did not know how long he had been circulating energy when the first clear change settled into place. The resistance in the outermost meridians had lessened. The heat under his skin had become steady rather than fluctuating. The gray impurities no longer rose as quickly. When he finally guided the energy through one complete, clean cycle without meeting a single major obstruction, a quiet sense of rightness spread through him.

He opened his eyes.

The dorm room looked the same. The morning light had shifted across the floor. The gray stains around him had dried into pale marks. His shirt was soaked. His hair stuck to his forehead. Yet when he moved one hand and examined the skin on the back of it, the difference was already visible to his sharpened senses. The surface felt denser. Tighter. More alive.

He was still only at the beginning of the process. Ranks 1 through 3 would take careful, repeated work. The deeper ranks would demand even more. But the direction was clear, and the method was working.

Ash closed his eyes again and returned to the circulation.

There was still a long way to go.

Outside, the sun continued to rise over Azure Cloud Martial Academy. Instructors continued their lessons. Students continued their drills. And in a quiet western dormitory, an ordinary-looking young man with an E-Rank classification continued to quietly rewrite the limits of what an ordinary foundation was supposed to be.