Chapter 4502 — Sounding Out the Martial Arts
The Blossom Guardian · Page 2 of 2
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