Reaper of the Martial World

Book 5: Chapter 172: Second Trial (115)

It seemed like problem after problem was arising. Dyon didn’t have the time, if he failed once, it would all be over. Something was telling him that this final battle would be the final of the trial. After this, he would be teleported out. Even worse, if he failed, he would be entering the battle injured.

However, Dyon did have one thing no other person had. Well, two things. The first was overwhelming body cultivation talent. While it was currently buried and unrecognized by the tome, when he began to burn his blood essence, it would be his true essence that he was burning. Either way, his control over his body, if someone said he was second best, only an ignorant fool would dare claim first. Unless their name was Clara Sacharro, of course.

The second reason was the reason he was truly confident. He had his master’s memories!

Normally, a person could only accept the guidance of their master and try to meander their way through vague explanations. However, to Dyon, it was as though he experienced all of his master’s failures personally. And, even more importantly, it was as though he experienced his master’s success personally as well!

In Dyon’s mind right now, he had attempted to form his runic flame 28 times and succeeded once!

Normally, Dyon never truly integrated his master’s memories. Except for the ‘sexy time’ ones he used for, ahem, reference, he essentially delved into his master’s memories whenever he deemed it fit. However, this time, he went out of his way to integrate all of his master’s experiences. Although she was a beast, and he was human, the process was essentially the same. Only two steps: burn, then condense. The idea was to condense the fumes of your burning blood essence into a flame before it dissipated into your body and improved your strength.

The potential of the flame would then, obviously, depend on the talent of the blood essence used to form it. Now that Dyon’s blood essence was essentially the amalgamated talent of billions of individuals, his talent as a runic master would be no less than that of his talent as an array alchemist.

About a half an hour later, Dyon concluded his memory integration and took a deep breath. He cleared his mind completely of all worries and focused on the task at hand entirely. If he let the pain of burning his blood essence take over, he would suffer greatly. Luckily, Dyon had dealt with far worse pains.

Dyon’s inner eye immediately circulated through his body, checking every nook and cranny. It wasn’t an actual physical eye, but because of Dyon’s bodily improvement, if he focused, he could even feel his organs subtly vibrating with vitality. The more he focused, the stronger the picture became. It was almost like how you might not notice an ant was crawling across your skin until you focused on the spot, except it was like this for Dyon with the inside of his body.

He could suddenly feel the contraction of his lungs and heart, he could feel the blood flowing through his veins, he could almost feel the subtle movement of each individual cell.

When Dyon reached this state, he knew he was ready. He immediately focused his attention of the strongest presence of vitality in his body: his heart. Without a shred of hesitation, he grasped onto the golden blood that rested within his and forcefully increased his heart’s pumping rate.

The heat in his chest skyrocketed to levels the human body shouldn’t be able to withstand, agitating the blood and causing it to grow closer and closer to its gaseous form.

Dyon kept the rate of acceleration of his heart beat steady. This was because he knew that an erratic beat would cause him to miss the proper window.

If he burned too little, he wouldn’t be able to form the flame because it wouldn’t be potent enough. If he burned too much, it would be too much to handle. There was an optimal range for flame creation, if it was too much, not only would he lose control, he was harm his foundation, and it would instead re-condense into blood instead of a flame. 

The key to surpassing this issue was to steadily increase the speed to the boiling point of the blood essence, that way, it would be possible to slowly siphon the gas that floated up. The moment it was enough, the flame would form, and you could then slow your heart beat.

This may sound simple, but it was incredibly difficult and required a lot of mental fortitude. If Dyon didn’t have such control of his body, it would be impossible to pull off. It wasn’t that Dyon’s master was stupid and couldn’t figure this out after her first few tries, it was just that, even as a beast, her body cultivation talent couldn’t match up to Dyon. In the end, although she had memorized the theories to perfection, she succeeded mostly due to luck.

The other problem with this method was that it pro-longed the feeling of having your heart burning, which increased the pain manifold… However, Dyon persevered.

Not long after, Dyon could finally see signs of faint wisps of golden fumes wafting off of his blood essence. His muscles tensed as the most difficult part came into play. He needed to contract his heart, bringing the fumes into a separate and cooler chamber where the heat could die down and allow a flame to condense.