Chapter 4503 — Super Butterfly Microsteps
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 2
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."