13 First step into the garden (1/2)

Two weeks had passed since the day Bai Yun told his plans to his parents. He broke through to the first stage of qi condensation that night. He then spend the next three days mastering the Moonlight Sword, the Lions Roar and False Armor.

He finished with the first movement of the lions roar overnight while the first movement of the Moonlight sword only took him an hour. He had to spend a lot of time to master the false armor skill, as it took too much energy, and he had to stop and recover energy. Only after having a high enough cultivation could he use this freely.

But then he spend thenext ten days trying to master Specter Steps, but was completely unsuccessful. As expected of one of the most mysterious movement techniques in the world, he was barely able to trigger the first motion of its qi part. At first he was only interested in the Specter Steps ability to move unhindered out of restrictions and was planning to switch to his old movement technique after reaching the immortal step, but after studying it, he realized that the Specter Steps was even superior to his old technique!

The qi part of Specter Steps was split into four motions, wind motion, soundless motion, traceless motion and ghastly motion. Even after spending a while, even with his understanding of the dao and experience, he was only able to rarely simulate the wind motion. If one mastered the wind motion, one could move freely in the wind, unpredictably and through the smallest of openings. The range of movement one could make would be unrestrained, allowing for a more varied attack pattern. Thissuited Bai Yun fighting style.

But he did not study the wind dao in his previous life. He could barely comprehend part of the wind motion. In the end he just gave up and studied Shadow Walk ,which he easily comprehended.

After Bai Yun left seclusion, he found the old butler and asked him to take him to the beast garden. The journey, which would have taken Bai Yun days to complete, was finished in a matter of minutes.

In front of Bai Yun stood a wall hundreds of meters tall, and over a hundred meters in depth. In the wall, at regular intervals there were gates, so that people could go through.

Bai Yun used the Assassin God's disguising technique. Unfortunately he was not very good at it. Even though many details about the Assassin God was known, what no one seemed to have realized was that he was someone who had walked all three systems simultaneously and that he had reached the god level in all three. This was the critical secret behind his strength as well as the disguise technique.

Since Bai Yun had not started on his body tempering path, there was no way for him to properly implement the technique. He only used some of the surface parts in order to change his face and skin so that no one would easily recognize him.

Bai Yun passed through the wall and entered the beast garden. The places where the beasts were being held were still quite far away, the wall was build as a security measure. He picked a random direction, and started to walk. As he walked he saw that almost all of the people here were in groups and most of them were wearing much coarse clothing than the ones worn by Bai Shun and his group. Thankfully no one recognized him, and he was able to move freely.

In the beast garden all the animals who were trapped inside were extremely ferocious. The reason for creating the beast garden was to give the people of Bai clan a chance to fight. Thus all the breeds were of ferocious beasts. Any gentle beasts would be quickly wiped out in the environment inside. On top of this, a special pill powder was regularly added to the water inside so as to keep the animals on edge.

Usually it would be possible for people to tame demonic beasts and use them to fight. There was even an entire profession of beast tamers who were specialized in doing so. But it was impossible to tame any of the beasts in the beast garden. The best they could try to get was a cub or infant that had just been born and did not have the chance to be infected yet.

Bai Yun quickly ran toward the vegetation. Soon he entered the forest, where the demonic beasts were reared. The moment he did so, the surrounding clamor from the people quickly quietened. The silence that permeated brought with it an intense pressure. It seemed as if the whole forest was watching you. This would immediately overwhelm people who were here for the first time, and would make them scared and unable to perform properly.

Bai Yun felt comfortable. This reminded him of the time he was being chased by the devils during the Grand War. He had a feeling of being in his natural environment.

He pulled out his sword from the storage ring, and started to walk forward, using the sword to cleave a path forward.As he walked he knew that the most important thing that he had to do in the next few weeks was to build up the muscle memory of the Simple Sword.

The Simple Sword was an extremely powerful technique. Even though its usefulness fell as one progressed until the dao step, it would once again become very powerful at the god step. Butin order to use the Simple Sword properly, he had to integrate it into his muscle memory. Otherwise, there would be a slight delay while making a move which would often mean that the optimal time to attack would be lost. As a veteran of tens of thousands of battles Bai Yun would never make that mistake. The optimal thing would be if his body could react even before his senses had seen an opening.