BXBX NOVEL Chapter 109: Sphere of influence
It was because overheating the metal for so long while tempering it with spiritual ergy, made it not only gain the ability to retain quite a lot of its heat… but with the help of the spiritual force, contain it quite well.
That's why, while the slurry would settle into a half-solid state wh left on its own, with its heat hiding deep down in the core of the mixture while its outside cooled down, as soon as I agitated it by pushing spiritual ergy through the scythe's circuitry…
With the power of the spiritual flame agitating the heat hidd at the core of the slurry, it would mix its temperature out… turning it into a strange, half-liquid form again.
On one d, this changed how the scythe balanced wh swung, giv how this slurry would now squeeze down, dragging the attacks back…
But ev more importantly, as this slurry squeezed into the corner of the chamber it was locked in, all of the conductive materials inside of it, already filled with both thermal and spiritual ergy, would crash into each other, rapidly releasing just ough spiritual force to leave a mark on the surface of space itself.
A mark that, by a total accidt, appeared to have pretty much the same qualities as the nodes I installed all over my body to facilitate the discharges of my core!
'If the fifth stage of cultivation was about expanding the influce of one's core within their flesh, th by its very definition of the sixth stage, the only way to expand it would be to do it… outside of one's flesh.
And so, I swung my scythe again, and again. And after just a few slashes, I've figured out a simple, straightforward, and perfectly repetitive way to not only keep my scythe swinging but do so without breaking its momtum ev in the slightest.
'This has to look really cringe to anyone watching,' I thought, as I just walked all over the op part of Chica camp, swinging my scythe in circles on my left, th on my right, th above my head, th back on the left, on the right and so on.
And for every swing, I would leave a lasting mark in the space where I swung the scythe's blade as if I was painting with a three-dimsional crayon on the canvas of the air itself.
Bit by bit, more and more of those nodes appeared. And what was ev better, once I created a big ough number of them… the nearest nodes started to splatter out, as if reaching for each other and creating this intricate web, a scaffolding of sorts from which it continued to expand into a space that was fully within the range and ability of my core to discharge its ergy to it.
I couldn't tell for how long I continued this dance, immersed by the weird feeling of omnipresce I've gained as I spread my pottial influce out over greater and greater area.
At some point, wh I could add no more marks over how thick and complete this net of connections became, my swings started to just… add up, causing the sphere of my influce to keep growing in every possible direction. This process, however, grew the slower the bigger the dome of my domain grew, aligning with how quickly the surface of a three-dimsional object grew wh compared to its radius.
I was immersed in the process with all of my being… but that didn't mean I could miss the short, snappy explosions of Qi happing all over the place, all quite some distance away from the camp Chicka itself.
'I guess this has be going on for a while already,' I thought, quickly realizing that by the looks of things, my guess was correct.
The matter of my attempted kidnapping wasn't over yet, neither in the minds of those who organized it nor in Chihiro's own view.
And what was happing all a the camp, right now, was their response to the threat imposed by those who tried to get their hands on me!
'I wonder if any of them will slip past,' I thought, observing the reality not through my eyes alone, but through ssing the changes to the spiritual ergy within the dome of my influce.
This dance wasn't the only thing I was doing, however.
Planting more and more of those points was surely the plan, as I aimed to experice what it felt like to be a sixth-stage cultivator before ev attempting to gather ough ergy to become one.
But it wasn't the ultimate goal. Not at all. In fact, one could say that the more of the points outside of my flesh I could connect to, the harder I made my main task!
It wasn't ough being able to connect to any of those outside points at random at all times as I was doing now simply by expanding my perception of my very self from just my body to the full extt of my sphere of influce.
No.
The goal was to figure out how to conctrate on just one of those points… and th steer my ergy toward it, rather than just hoping my core's discharges would happ to accumulate in that geral direction.
It was a wish…
A wish that came true right wh the first emy petrated the defsive line set up by Claire, only to come out from betwe the trees and look a before zeroing in on my figure.
Just a few steps behind him, a bundle of familiar QI was rushing to cut the emy down… But Claire, for I had no doubt it was her, was just a single bit too slow, reaching the man's back with her sword right as he rushed ahead, ready to do to me whatever he was here to do.
And so, the man rushed at me with his knives barred and ready to strike down.
Yet, the very momt he unknowingly stepped into the area of my influce…
It happed.
The one thing that I wanted to somehow figure out, revealed itself to me.
Because the momt a bundle of foreign spiritual ergy I didn't recognize intruded upon my otherwise uniform sphere of influce, the ergy of my core just… radiated towards it, as if creating a path of the smallest resistance that outdid the attraction of each of my points.
Yet, as I was already channeling my spiritual ergy through my scythe to facilitate the process of my dome of influce growing…
It wasn't my flesh but my scythe that moved along with the flow of my mana.
And what started as me just… lowering my scythe to prepare for the attack, turned out with its blade digging into the back of the man's spine wh I suddly appeared behind him, in just the right position for my blade to reap his heart.