14 Skin sewing (1/2)

Bi Yun took out a bandage from his storage ring and tightened up the wound to stop it from bleeding. He could have dodged the attack if he had used his soul, be chose to only use his qi to battle in order to acclimate himself.

He walked up to the wolf and cut its head to recover its demon core. The beasts in the first four steps of cultivation had a demon core in their body, that could be used by alchemists or weaponsmiths. There were many pills that required the wild strength inside a demon core as an ingredient, or it could be affixed on to a weapon to increase its strength.

After taking the demon core, Bai yun put the body of the beast in his storage ring. The storage ring his father had given him was of a high quality and could store quite a bit of beasts. The beasts flesh could be used as food and its skin, bones, blood and other parts had many uses. The beasts that were killed during once stay in the beast garden had to be sold to the clan. The resources and demon cores could be sold or kept. The prices one would get if the beasts and other resources inside were handed to the clan was only half of what one would get if sold outside, but for most people who would come to the beast garden, going outside to sell the beasts carcasses wasn't an option. And for most people only the medicines could be used freely, all other resources had to be sold anyway.

By now Bai Yun had completely spend all his qi. After resting for a while to recover his strength, stood up. He then left in search of more beasts.

For the next five days Bai Yun spend his entire time battling all kinds of beasts. He battle beasts from leopards to snakes and even some chimeras. He was currently sitting on a tree eating a demonic deer he had killed. Sitting alone like this was dangerous, and sleeping alone was even more dangerous. His father had given him an artifact that would alert him of danger, but only if he was sleeping. But since his god sense had a sixth sense which was even more sensitive to danger, he never used it. His entire body was filled with cuts and bruises and he had lost so much blood that he was slightly pale. The only reason he could continue was due to all the demonic beast meat and blood that he had eaten.

But the last five days hadn't been without its benefits. His qi spiral had completely stabilized, and the traces of the second spiral was beginning to form. He was sure that he could form it in another week at most. And this was due to the Way of Harmony, an inferior technique would not be so effective.

Bu the most important fact was that he had finally managed to keep his old instincts in check. It was thanks to his god sense and y spilling more blood than his body could handle that he finally managed to do it so quickly. Even though he still hadn't reached a state where he was happy with his body's responses, at least he was no longer in danger of making a mistake.

Not only that, due to practicing the Undying Body everything he got hurt and had to heal up, his skin had started to absorb some qi, and had begun to strengthen. Today he had finally reached the threshold of skin sewing, and could officially begin his cultivation in the body tempering path.

Of course as a price for this he looked more like a mummy than a human.

In the skin sewing stage the cultivation was not broken up like the qi condensation stage. It was much simple. The point of skin sewing was to use the qi as a needle and carve mysterious patterns into the skin. The more patters and the more area the pattern covered, the stronger a person would be. The human body could support up to ten patterns only. But most people wouldn't look at the number of patterns in skin sewing, as due to the difference in nature it could be wildly misleading.

Any person who had even one pattern could technically break through to the muscle tempering stage, but no one would do so. The biggest obstacle in the body tempering path was that only the muscles beneath a pattern could be tempered, thus covering as much of the skin possible in mysterious patters was essential. Even further down the lane, only the locations beneath the mysterious patters could be tempered.

Most techniques would do their best to use up all ten patterns as well as cover as much of the area as possible. Even the technique Bai Yun used in his past life had ten patterns and covered over ninety nine percent of the area. Even all god level techniques but a top few could only do this much. The reason was that if two patterns touched then their power would be mixed, and thus a gap had to be left between all the patterns and all these gaps would be weaknesses. There was no way to eliminate this. Different cultivation techniques tried to hide these gaps in different parts of the body , so that it would be difficult to notices and find out someones weakness.

Even god level cultivation techniques had this weakness. The reason they were superior was that they would have more profound patterns which would end up making one stronger, and reduce the uncovered area as much as possible. It was also possible to create a resonance between patterns and allow a person possess some extra powers.

This was the accepted norm for trillions of years until the God of Battle showed up. He came up with a crazy idea: what of instead of ten patterns, only a single pattern was used. Many people had tried this before, but since a pattern had to be completed in one go, and the larger a pattern was, the effort needed and the pain in carving it would go up explosively. It was impossible for anyone to complete a full body pattern in one go.

What the God of Battle did different was to split up the single pattern into ten. He used the first nine mysterious patterns as a base, and used the tenth to tie them all together to make them into a single pattern. This meant that there would no longer be any weaknesses in the body. But by doing so the power during the first nine pattern would be much lower and one would also be not able to get any powers by resonance between the patterns. Also each of these patterns were much harder to make than a pattern from any other technique.