Chapter 885: Three Techniques!

Fifteen minutes later, Feng Xuan brought him to the Chronospace Jade Walls, and Li Yun was a little surprised by what he saw. There was not just one jade wall but sixty of them.

Each massive wall was made of smooth jade and covered in intricate images, and every one of them represented a different low-level secret technique. Several cultivators sat beneath each wall.

Some walls had only a few people studying them, while others had more than a dozen. All of them sat with their eyes closed, completely absorbed in comprehension.

Li Yun began with the first jade wall. The secret technique recorded there was called the Crimson Slaughter Mark, and it was designed specifically for long group battles. For every ten enemies a cultivator killed, he could condense one blood mark inside his body.

Once enough blood marks had built up, they would merge into a Crimson War Imprint, which would raise his combat power substantially. More importantly, the imprint could sustain his essence qi for an entire day, letting his energy keep replenishing itself without running dry easily.

Against a single enemy, the technique was of limited use. On a battlefield with hundreds or thousands of opponents, however, its value would be terrifying, because the more enemies the user killed, the stronger it became.

Unfortunately, Li Yun had little interest in it. His immediate goal was to clear the Everlasting Pagoda, so what he needed most was better individual combat ability. A technique built mainly for large-scale slaughter would not help him enough.

He moved on to the second jade wall, which caught his attention far more. Its secret technique was called the Ripple Suppression Field.

By circulating essence qi in a special pattern, a cultivator could create countless invisible ripples around his body. Those ripples formed a force field, and any attack that entered it would keep weakening as it passed through layer after layer of vibration.

Better still, the Ripple Suppression Field could overlap with a Domain, and that caught Li Yun’s interest at once. If he combined it with his Sword Domain, enemies who entered his domain would not only face its natural suppression but would also have their attacks weakened before those attacks could reach him.

“This is useful,” Li Yun said with a nod.

Auxiliary defensive techniques that could merge with a Domain were rare, and their value was enormous. Out on the Central Continent, a technique like this could probably sell for at least ten million Source Stones.

Li Yun kept going. The third jade wall held another defensive technique, the Stoneheart Essence Armor.

Unlike the Ripple Suppression Field, which weakened incoming attacks, the Stoneheart Essence Armor focused on strengthening the user’s body and forming a dense defensive shell of essence qi. Li Yun quickly set it aside.

With his Sword Domain and the Ripple Suppression Field working together, his defense would already improve a great deal, and adding another defensive technique of a similar kind would only use up time that could be better spent elsewhere.

He continued looking over the jade walls. Several of the techniques were powerful, and others had very unusual effects. Most of them, however, either did not suit him or overlapped with abilities he already had.

Then he reached the nineteenth jade wall, and his footsteps stopped. The image showed a long-haired swordsman standing in the air with his robes fluttering loosely. His posture was relaxed, almost careless, and an enormous mountain stood far below him.

As Li Yun focused on the image, the swordsman seemed to come to life. He raised his sword and swung it, but there was no magnificent explosion. No visible Sword Qi crossed the sky, and no violent energy burst out. Instead, with a quiet crack, the enormous mountain split straight down the middle, and its two halves slowly drifted apart.

Li Yun’s eyes sharpened. The cut was unbelievably smooth, and more importantly, almost no energy had been wasted. No debris had flown outward, and not even a pebble had been thrown into the air. Every bit of the sword’s power had been focused exactly where it was needed.

“What incredible control,” Li Yun murmured as he stared at the image.

At his current level, splitting a mountain was nothing special, and he could do it easily. Doing it while wasting almost no energy, however, was something else entirely.

“This technique…”

His interest rose immediately. The jade wall recorded a sword technique called the Void Severing Sword Style, and he made up his mind almost at once.

“I’ll learn this one.”

The reason was simple. The Void Severing Sword Style held a faint trace of spatial principles, but its interpretation of space was different from the Old Fisherman’s technique.

The Old Fisherman used space to bypass distance, and his fishing line seemed to jump straight from one point to another. The Void Severing Sword Style followed a different branch, which was spatial severance. Instead of crossing space, it cut space itself.

The first approach was mysterious and hard to defend against, while the second had terrifying offensive power. Both came from spatial principles, yet they were used in completely different ways.

If Li Yun wanted to truly understand space someday, he could not focus on just one of its expressions. He needed to understand several branches and eventually link them together.

Li Yun committed the Void Severing Sword Style to memory and moved on. After the Ripple Suppression Field and the Void Severing Sword Style, most of the remaining techniques did not appeal to him nearly as much.

That changed when he reached the forty-ninth jade wall, which recorded a movement art called Horizon Fold Step. The idea behind it was simple but astonishing.

The user warped the space around him as he stepped forward. To an observer, it might look as though he had moved only a few meters, but the spatial distortion could actually carry him hundreds or even thousands of feet.

Li Yun immediately compared it with Aurora Step. Aurora Step relied mainly on overwhelming speed, while Horizon Fold Step was fundamentally different because it changed the distance itself.

That made its movement even harder to predict. An enemy might clearly see Li Yun take a single step and still have no idea where he would actually appear.

Li Yun quickly settled on his choices: the Ripple Suppression Field, the Void Severing Sword Style, and Horizon Fold Step. That gave him one defensive technique, one offensive sword technique, and one movement technique, and the three complemented each other perfectly.

He stopped looking at the remaining jade walls, since there was no need to greedily collect everything. Cultivation did not improve simply by knowing as many techniques as possible.

Learning too many at once would only split his focus and leave each technique shallow. These three alone would take a good deal of time to comprehend properly, and that was enough.

Li Yun briefly told Feng Xuan what he had decided. Then, following the example of the cultivators around him, he sat cross-legged beneath the jade wall that held the Ripple Suppression Field and fixed his attention on the image.

Gradually, the scene on the jade wall seemed to come alive. A cultivator appeared, and invisible ripples spread out around his body, forming layer after layer, with each ripple overlapping the next. Li Yun watched carefully, and before long everything around him faded from his awareness as he became completely absorbed.

Days went by, and then weeks. People around Li Yun came and went. Some finished their comprehension and left, while others arrived to take their places, but Li Yun noticed none of it.

The structure of the Ripple Suppression Field kept appearing in his mind. He studied how the ripples formed, examined how they overlapped, and analyzed how force was spread from one layer to the next, and little by little his understanding deepened.

A month passed. Then the air around Li Yun suddenly trembled. A faint ripple appeared, and another formed beside it. Dozens more followed, spreading around him like overlapping translucent bubbles.

A powerful gust of wind suddenly swept through the area and rushed into the field. Its strength began to fade immediately, because every layer of ripples weakened it a little more. By the time the wind reached Li Yun, the fierce gust had turned into a gentle breeze that only softly stirred his hair.

Li Yun opened his eyes, and a faint smile appeared on his face.

“The Ripple Suppression Field has finally reached advanced mastery.”