Chapter 4503 — Super Butterfly Microsteps

Generally speaking, when matched against opponents of equal cultivation, experts who specialize in body arts are often stronger overall than those who specialize in martial techniques. After all, anyone accomplished in body arts must cultivate both the inner and outer paths. Once one advances beyond the Heavenly Rank, there can be no further progress through cultivating only the outer path. Those who can persist in cultivating both inner and outer disciplines are therefore no ordinary ruthless characters.

Until now, Wei Zhao had always been an inner-path expert. Every trump card and killing move in his arsenal belonged to the realm of internal martial techniques. That was only natural; compared with other experts of the same level, he had spent far, far too little time cultivating.

From the day he began cultivating until now, less than three years had passed. To a cultivator, that span of time was practically negligible. Body arts, however high one's natural talent might be, demanded vast amounts of time above all else. That was an objective fact no one could evade.

The common consensus throughout the world was that body arts had no path to rapid mastery. Wei Zhao had always believed the same. Yet after his duel with Cheng Haonan today, he suddenly realized that although this view remained correct, it was not necessarily so absolute.

There was a technique to everything one did. Even the simplest movement possessed its own essential trick, and body arts were no exception. If one could grasp their underlying essence, achieving twice the result with half the effort was not beyond possibility.

Wei Zhao believed that the terrifying power and dominance of Cheng Haonan's body arts came not merely from the vast amount of time he had invested in them. More importantly, Cheng Haonan had mastered a secret beyond the reach of ordinary people: he had incorporated True Qi into his body arts.

It was not difficult to mingle True Qi into ordinary punches and kicks; any cultivator could do so with ease. But that was all they could accomplish. Though mixed together, the punches and kicks remained punches and kicks, while True Qi remained True Qi. Not only could the power of the two fail to stack, they would instead wear each other down, making the effort a losing proposition.

Yet on Cheng Haonan, there was not the slightest sign of such mutual depletion. Quite the contrary: every punch and kick carried only the tiniest thread of True Qi, yet that thread multiplied its force several times over, until his physical attacks could confront ordinary martial techniques head-on. Such a method of cultivating both inner and outer disciplines truly bordered on the miraculous.

Wei Zhao had not studied body arts for long, nor had he previously attained any profound mastery of them. But first, as a killer by origin, his physical talent was unquestionably exceptional; and second, he possessed an extraordinarily refined control over True Qi. With those two conditions combined, learning Cheng Haonan's astonishing body arts was not impossible.

Even if he could not reach Cheng Haonan's level in a short time, Wei Zhao was certain that multiplying his own body-art strength several times over was no idle fantasy. Just as things stood now, after countless rounds of deduction, he had already begun to enter an entirely new realm of body arts.

"So that is how it works. The root of that thing's formidable body arts lies in using True Qi to stimulate cellular vitality in an instant, causing the physical body to surge in strength all at once." Wei Zhao suddenly exhaled a long breath of stale air. After grasping the point, his spirits rose sharply, and he could not help sighing, "He may be a scum through and through, but in the field of body arts, that thing truly is a genius."

As a native of Yunjie Island, Cheng Haonan could of course never have known a term like "cells." His understanding of the human body was also nowhere near as scientific and thorough as that of the secular world. Even so, he had managed to accomplish this while knowing nothing about the underlying principles. It had to be called a miracle.

Instant stimulation of cellular vitality had appeared countless times in the scientific research of the secular world. But on Yunjie Island, it was a genuinely rare feat. The crucial point was that Cheng Haonan had not only conceived of the method, he had actually made it work. The technical sophistication involved was anything but trivial.

The more powerful a cultivator, the tougher the physical body and the stronger the vitality of its cells. But that did not mean True Qi could be used to stimulate them recklessly. A stimulus too weak would have no effect; once its intensity crossed the threshold, however, it would no longer be stimulating cellular vitality but killing cells by the thousands. Success or failure depended entirely on whether one could grasp that precise limit.

Wei Zhao had no idea how Cheng Haonan, who knew nothing about cells, had managed to accomplish such a feat. But one thing was certain: the process must have been extraordinarily difficult.

Even with Wei Zhao's astonishing talent and comprehension, and with Cheng Haonan's ready-made example before him to observe and analyze, he had spent more than half the night experimenting. Several times he had ended up in a sorry state, vomiting blood, before finally managing to grasp the proper measure by a narrow margin. Only then had he taken his first faltering steps into a wholly new level of top-tier body arts.

"If top-tier body arts work according to this principle, then Cheng Haonan's state of total blackening must be an extreme stimulation!" Wei Zhao's heart leaped with excitement.

If normal top-tier body arts provided the physical body's cells with the most suitable level of stimulation, then the level of stimulation in Cheng Haonan's fully blackened state should be the maximum his cells could withstand. The instant that limit was exceeded, True Qi would kill the cells of the physical body outright.

In fact, even without exceeding that limit, a great many cells would die after such extreme stimulation because their vitality had been exhausted. In other words, the body would have to suffer a certain degree of internal injury. It was the price one had to pay for temporary overwhelming strength.

One was top-tier body arts; the other was ultra-limit body arts. After a full night of deductions and experiments, Wei Zhao had finally glimpsed the threshold. Once he truly applied them in actual combat, his strength would inevitably surge another notch beyond what it had been.

In his current state, if Wei Zhao were to fight Cheng Haonan again, the situation would likely be completely different from before. Unless Cheng Haonan blackened his entire body without regard for the cost from the very beginning, Wei Zhao might not lose to him even without using his ultimate weapon, the top-tier bomb.

After grasping the principles of top-tier and ultra-limit body arts, Wei Zhao did not stop there. His demands of himself went far beyond simple imitation. He intended to fuse them with his own strengths and create new combinations, just as he had with the Wildfire Thousand-Blast Fist.

Compared with a specific martial technique like the Wild Sand Thousand-Blast Fist, fusing top-tier body arts with Wei Zhao's own strengths was actually easier. Just as with the Butterfly Microsteps he had conceived of now, he could add the stimulation of cellular vitality through True Qi and transform them into an advanced version: the Super Butterfly Microsteps.