Chapter 4502 — Sounding Out the Martial Arts

The only regret was that Cheng Haonan did not choose to keep challenging him afterward. It released all the pressure on Wei Zhao, but it also cost him that elusive state of mind on the verge of a breakthrough—a genuine pity. Had Cheng Haonan pressed on, Wei Zhao might still not have been his match, but there was a very good chance he would have broken through on the spot in the middle of the fight, and that would have made for an entirely different situation.

Of course, failing to break through and advance in one clean stroke was a little regrettable, but not entirely irreparable. Since he had brushed past that state of mind during the day, the fix for Wei Zhao was simple: all he had to do was find a way to summon it back. Strange as such things seemed, there was in fact a trail to follow.

Wei Zhao remembered clearly that the state had first appeared when Wu Baoliang knocked him off the platform for the first time, and he had been mentally simulating and working out the Wildfire Thousand Burst Fist. At the time his head had been full of how to defeat Wu Baoliang, so he had not paid it much mind—but looking back now, the feeling was still very vivid.

In other words, so long as he re-simulated that overwhelming, crushing technique, he could draw out the fighting spirit already stirring restlessly inside him, and a true breakthrough would not be far off.

Wei Zhao was at least sixty percent confident of this, and he set about trying without hesitation. Yet there was no longer any point in simulating the Wildfire Thousand Burst Fist: he had that move completely mastered by now, it posed no pressure to him at all, and so it would not summon that pressure-forged state of mind.

As the scenes from the day's battle churned through his mind, this time Wei Zhao fixed on something else—not Wu Baoliang's Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist, but Cheng Haonan's full-body blackening.

Cheng Haonan excelled at ordinary fists and kicks and had no killing technique like the Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist, but the sight of his strength exploding after his whole body blackened had left an incomparably deep impression on Wei Zhao.

Strictly speaking, full-body blackening could not be counted as a technique. It was a state—an absurdly overpowered state even harder to counter than the Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist.

Because he could not experience it firsthand the way he had the Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist, and had not faced it in as many exchanges as he had with Wu Baoliang, Wei Zhao's understanding of Cheng Haonan's full-body blackening was actually shallow, which made simulating it far harder—and the state itself was in any case much more complex than a single ultimate move like the Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist.

To successfully simulate a technique, the most basic prerequisite was to grasp its essence and key principles. Take the Thousandfold Burst of the Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist: had Wei Zhao not understood the principle behind the sand explosions, he would never have thought to substitute fire crystals, and the Wildfire Thousand Burst Fist would never have come into being.

But Cheng Haonan's true full-body blackening had lasted only a brief instant. How easy could it be to seize its essence and key principles?

He went over it again and again, reviewing the daytime battle in his mind like a film played back and forth—Cheng Haonan's movements, his reactions, the aura radiating from his body, not a single detail on the platform overlooked. Only in this way might he find some clue.

When he had simulated Wu Baoliang's Wild Sand Thousand Burst Fist on the spot, it had taken him less than the time to burn a stick of incense to roughly reconstruct his own Wildfire Thousand Burst Fist. But this time, simulating Cheng Haonan's full-body blackening, he spent half the night and still could not grasp the essentials.

Could that move really be so flawless? Wei Zhao could not help frowning. With his extraordinary comprehension, to be unable to see even a thread of a clue—that was truly a strange thing.

Suddenly a flash of insight struck him. No—no, that was not it. The key lay not in Cheng Haonan after his full-body blackening, but before it!

Though the gap in strength before and after was enormous, the essence of Cheng Haonan's fighting did not change either way: it was always ordinary fists and kicks. The only difference was that his power and speed had surged enormously.

In other words, if he could fathom Cheng Haonan's ordinary fists and kicks, he could follow the current and fathom his full-body blackening as well—the two were in fact one continuous line.

Once he understood this, the difficulty of simulation dropped considerably. Cheng Haonan's full-body blackening had lasted only an instant, but as for ordinary fists and kicks, Wei Zhao had plenty of firsthand experience—he had, after all, been locked in a long stalemate with the man and taken no small amount of punishment.

As every punch and kick of Cheng Haonan's churned through his mind, the true qi in Wei Zhao's body began to stir restlessly. This was not mere comprehension but a fusion of bodily experience—and in some ways bodily experience was more reliable than comprehension, felt more truly, and naturally yielded better results.

Though he still did not know exactly how Cheng Haonan did it, Wei Zhao had already vaguely entered a new realm—an entirely new realm of body arts.

Unlike martial arts, whose root lay in true qi, the root of body arts lay in the flesh itself—in fact, somewhat akin to those external-school experts of the mundane world!

Look at the cultivation world today, including the five great islands of the Heaven Grade: everywhere the eye turned, martial arts held sway. Whatever the level of the contest, it usually ended after a few exchanges of powerful martial techniques, and very few still insisted on using body arts—though to be fair, most of those few were former external-school cultivators.

After all, apart from freaks like Cheng Haonan, the vast majority would never train body arts specifically. It demanded years and decades of relentless, drip-by-drip effort, and the crucial point was that the results were far less impressive or quick to achieve than those of martial arts.

Spend the same amount of time, and mastering a martial art could raise one's combat power by ten; applied to body arts, combat power might rise by one—or not even that much. With a gap that vast, which a normal person would choose was obvious at a glance.

Slow progress was the greatest weakness of body arts—but at the same time it had an absolute advantage no martial art could rival: so long as one kept training, the power of body arts could rise without limit!

Any martial art, however formidable it looked at present, was ultimately capped by the limits of one's cultivation realm; past a certain level it could rise no further, and even if one could go on training subsequent moves, the gains were negligible, far outpaced by the new realm—so one had no choice but to take up an even stronger martial art and start over from the beginning.

Body arts were different. To this day no one had ever heard of anyone reaching the upper limit of body arts—the notion that further training would make the body explode and kill you simply had no chance of existing. R1152