Mystical Journey

"From the first one in the beginning, and then two later, and then three... It should increase gradually." The thought flashed past Garen's mind.

If he kept dodging like this, he would end up backed into a corner eventually, so he had to come up with a way to figure out this type of attack.

Garen somersaulted forward, and four sharp currents of air brushed past his head, a few severed hairs falling slowly.

Five!

He counted them silently, and Garen carefully sensed the directions the five currents were coming from. Concentrating hard and holding his breath, he finally demonstrated just how powerful his level of martial arts understanding could be.

His five senses reflected any movements from the outside world into his heart like a clear mirror, flawlessly.

In an instant, five sharp currents appeared out of nowhere. They came at a high speed from behind Garen, leaving long trails of air currents behind them in the darkness.

"Now!"

Garen's eyes focused, and his body tilted abruptly, his right hand chopping down hard.

Chak!

The sharp air current missed, but just as it brushed past Garen's side, it was instantly hit hard by Garen's hand chop.

With a screech, that sharp air current actually screamed out like a living thing.

"It's alive?" Garen was slightly shocked, but he did not have time to think. It was as though he had poked the hornet's' nest, an instant later, more than ten sharp currents attacked him simultaneously from both the front and back. It was somehow one level faster than before.

"Hmph!"

Garen harrumphed coldly, and then his body began to spin like a top, deftly avoiding the dozen or so air currents coming from the front and back.

But almost immediately, another dozen or so currents joined the fray, adding up to almost thirty currents altogether.

They split into four groups, and actually began to attack Garen from four directions.

This time, even Garen was finding it hard to cope.

The time passed by, second by second, and Garen avoided the attacks of the four groups of air currents again and again. These currents were shockingly fast, and you got hurt from just a touch, that was how sharp they were.

There were more than thirty currents, and even Garen could not avoid them with just his body alone.

"Cold Radiation! On!"

In that instant, with Garen in the center, a cold blue mist spread along a twenty-meter diameter.

That was the cold air of the Hellfrost Peacock Technique, other than influencing all living creatures and slowing down their metabolism, it also could confuse them and mess with their minds.

As expected, as soon as the cold air spread, the air currents naturally slowed down a notch, and he could vaguely see their movement trails slightly better.

Garen observed them carefully and finally realized that these air currents were actually some black mudskipper-like creatures, their heads were extremely sharp, and their bodies could twist at will. When they moved, they used their potential energy to jump, as though pressing down on a spring. They would instantly shoot themselves out, using their heads as spear tips, piercing through everything before them.

Thanks to the speed reduction effect of the cold air, he could also begin to handle the mudskippers' attacks with relative ease.

Whoosh!

A black mudskipper brushed past Garen's ear, and just then, one of Garen's hands struck out like lightning.

"Ten Thousand True Destruction!"

Instantaneously, his explosive power increased by half, and Garen's sharp fingernail pierced into the middle of the mudskipper's body.

Bam!

The mudskipper's body fell apart and scattered, and it actually turned into wisps of black air that quickly spread apart and began to twine onto the remaining mudskippers.

After a moment, the other mudskippers actually began to move even faster.

Garen's heart gave a jolt, but his movements did not slow down at all.

He kept using the Ten Thousand True Technique's only move, Destruction, and kept killing these black mudskippers with high precision.

Bang bang bang bang!!

The sound of mudskippers being blown apart kept ringing, but with every such explosion, the remaining black mudskippers grew faster and faster, their movements becoming even stranger.

They no longer wove around in straight lines, but instead began to move in strange curves.

As a result, even Garen began to struggle with avoiding them.

"Destruction!"

Suddenly, Garen's finger jab missed, causing him to pause slightly. He saw the mudskipper in front of him turn, and actually shoot towards his right eye.

"Destruction!"

The terrifying effect of the Ten Thousand True Technique finally manifested itself.

In that instant, after he had used too much power in his haste, Garen could actually still change the direction of his attack, his second Destruction attack catching up to the black mudskipper again.

But to his surprise, the black mudskipper tossed its tail and actually created a faint ripple, its speed increasing with another whoosh. It avoided Garen's finger, and went straight for his right eye.

"Impressive!" Garen was slightly shocked. "Well, I don't believe it! It's just a black mudskipper!"

He changed his move the third time, using the Ten Thousand True Destruction again, his finger almost touching the tail of this black mudskipper.

But suddenly, the mudskipper tossed its tail and sped up abruptly, leaving the fingertip in the dust. It had practically become a shadow of a black image, its speed rising dramatically to three times the original speed of the black mudskipper.

"It can still change attacks and speed up!?"

Garen could not react in time, and all he could see was the black mudskipper breaking past the cold blue mist, aiming straight for his right eye. In that one-thousandth of a second, he began to use the Cold Scarlet Snow Technique throughout his body.

The Eighth Grade of the technique instantly melded with the Cold Radiation.

A circle of pale blue ripples began to spread with Garen in the center. The ripples swept past the black mudskipper's entire body, reducing its speed considerably.

But Garen still could not kill it.

In such a short period of time, he had changed his pure Ten Thousand True Technique killing move three times, but the black mudskipper managed to throw him off each time. If he were just a normal Energy Machinist, he would have fallen apart and gotten hit a long time ago. Even a Level Five Energy Machinist would only be able to fight it head-on with their force fields, instead of using a test of techniques like this.

In his haste, Garen could not dodge in time, so all he could do was turn his head hard.

Hah!

The black mudskipper brushed past the side of his face, drawing a tiny bit of blood. Thanks to the speed reduction of the two types of cold energy, Garen managed to get some time to recover, and the black mudskipper only managed to cut a line through his skin.

"There's something weird about this black mudskipper!" Garen nearly got hit, so he started to observe the other black mudskippers, and he noticed that they were nowhere near as strong as that one. Clearly, that one was most likely the leader of these black mudskippers.

"If I can finish off that one, I might be able to pass this round." Garen's thoughts turned quickly. In his current state and physical fitness, he was perfectly capable of using the Ten Thousand True Destruction continuously without having to worry about side effects.

It was just that the Ten Thousand True Technique's true strength was not in its killing power or destructive power, but rather in its usability. It was not the strongest combat skill, but it was the conglomeration of many of Garen's most basic and universal moves. According to his conjectures, unless he was in a completely different universe with wildly different rules and laws, this Ten Thousand True Technique should be able to hold together in most similar universes, and it would be fully applicable in all those different worlds.

As a killing move, however, it was slightly too weak.

Inside the dark space, Garen's body turned and turned rapidly, more than ten black mudskippers cutting and slicing quickly through the vast blue mists around him like a dozen or so black threads.

These mudskippers seemed to create faint ripples with their tails, those ripples seemed to be made out of air, but at the same time, they also seemed to be threading through the water.

"This is a way of exerting power..." Garen's senses were very sharp, so as he looked for an opportunity, he also noticed that the way these black mudskippers exerted power was slightly strange.

"Interesting!"

For now, he could still withstand the attacks from these black mudskippers, so Garen decided to just observe how these black mudskippers could use such terrifying power.

These many ripples began to slow down in his eyes. His immense memory and powerful IQ allowed Garen's Energy Machine Imprint to spin at high speeds, as it began to analyze the rhythms of these black mudskippers' movements.

Soon enough, a bunch of statistics flashed past Garen's mind like lightning, these statistics may not carry much meaning for regular Energy Machinists, but to a martial arts master like Garen, the statistics and numbers here could already be turned into a practical way to exert force.

"These ripples..." Garen slowly began to understand.

　　**********************

Outside the black space, the invigilator rubbed the bristles on his chin as he watched the huge spherical screen in front of him.

There were many images there showing the situations of the participants and Energy Machinists inside the dark space.

His gaze had always been trained on the three captains from the Big Three Sects.

March was currently standing quietly in his space, a pale blue membrane rising around his body. More than thirty black mudskippers kept crashing into the blue membrane from all directions, and would occasionally burst into bits of blue light, looking exceptionally beautiful.

March's expression was natural and relaxed, as though he felt no pressure at all.

In Wade's dark space, he just happened to be waving his hand like a fan, and with a crash, he shot out a large amount of yellow lightning. There was a high-pitched bird-like cry, and then the last few black mudskippers were instantly vanquished.

A black figure walked out of the shadows slowly, and stood in front of him.

"It's the second stage now? This one's not bad." The invigilator nodded slightly.

"To think that someone could enter the second stage so quickly in a small place like this. I would not be surprised if it was the Central Sects, but this is pretty decent for the Northern Yu Province," said another male voice slowly, from beside the invigilator.

"Exactly." The invigilator nodded. "To be able to defeat the Black Thread Bugs and enter the second phase means that he would be equal to a middle-grade disciple even in a Central Sect like Star Cloud. This Wade is rather talented."

"He is the top-level disciple of a third-level sect after all, such a result is not too out of the ordinary," the voice said again. "But the second phase is the end of it. No one can pass the second test in a small area like this. It's not bad for them to get the Black Thread Bug Smoke, that's a good item for increasing their calculation speed, and it works well for stabilizing the mindspace as well. For the Energy Machinists here, that's a priceless treasure, a resource you could not buy with money."

The invigilator nodded in agreement, moving his gaze away. He saw that some of the dark spaces were already empty, the Energy Machinists participating in there having been completely defeated and shot out of the Spirit Mothership directly. The ones who remained on the large screen were just a dozen or so, the few who were still active.

Of these, there were six from the Nine Owl Sect, three from the Dragon Eye Sect, and five from the Scarlet Snow Sect.

One of the spaces caught the invigilator's eye for a bit.

"This Energy Machinist..." His gaze fell on the space where Garen was, and he frowned slightly.

"That's a pretty high level of martial arts... He's already at the Water Mirror stage, and it seems that he got there without any pointers from others. He has potential," said that voice again.

"What's that? What are you thinking?" The invigilator's lips curved into a smile.

"What am I thinking? If he can get past the second phase, maybe I can consider giving him a few tips, but it's still too early to say," said the voice calmly. "After all, we Energy Machinists have our roots in the Energy Machine Imprints, Willpower is the foundation to our strength, and battle skills were just invented so that we could properly use all the power we had."