120 Enemy of the Kingdom (1/2)

Hartley's first encounter battling a saint left him rattled. Before entering his cultivation room he stopped and stretched, his earlier exertion still weighing on him as he exhaled.

There was no doubt in his mind that gravity manipulation alone wouldn't be able to injure a saint as it did with those below the saint realm.

A saint's physique seemed almost impenetrable by those in the lower realms of cultivation. No wonder the saint had called him an ant.

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To his dismay he also concluded that his time domain would be just as useless.

If he couldn't hurt the opponent, even if the opponent was a sitting duck frozen in time, the outcome of the battle was already set in stone.

He took some consolation in knowing that gravity could still restrict and affect a saint's movements as was evident with the saint in the back mountains.

How could he find a way to injure a saint? Hartley stood for hours contemplating that thought.

Hartley spent a day meditating to consolidate his breakthrough, then entered his inner world. He remembered advice once given to him by Kang: the closer you are to the saint realm the more important it is to find ways of using minimal effort for maximum output.

Hartley stood in his inner world, his skin faintly glowing blue and his golden-blonde hair of his mother's heritage hovering around his head like clouds around the sun.

After taking a deep breath he brought down 250 gs of gravitational force onto the earth. With a sudden boom, a hundred meters around him was flattened instantly, the earth quaked, rattled and cracked. Every tree in this diameter turned to splinters and were forced down into the bare earth, not even a blade of grass could escaped the wrath of gravity.

Black energy started blaring out viciously like a raging storm of black fire around him.

It was was if the very seams of the mortal plane were coming apart like a cheap robe, causing the black energy to lash out more ferociously at the gravity field that was violating the laws of the mortal plane.

Hartley was encased in his sphere which turn to a solid blue like an egg shell protecting him from any harm.

Why was it so important to find to find ways using minimal effort for maximum output? Hartley stood still in his sphere observing the chaotic maelstrom of black energy raging more violently than he had ever seen. Then the answer struck him like a bolt of lightning.

Black Energy!

It was the most potent and uncontrollable energy in existence. Chaotic and volatile with impartiality, it was the blood of the mortal plane. It ensured the balance of the plane acting as a protector to extinguish forces that were breaking the threshold of power for the realm.

”What if I could control black energy indirectly?” Hartley struck up on an idea.

It has to be known that there was nothing new under the sun, Hartley was far from the first person to have this thought. The problem was that the people before him who had a similar thought process had perished miserably fooling around with this unpredictable power.

Not even a saint would foolishly come into direct contact with black energy, but Hartley had one advantage they didn't have and that was his inner world. His inner world that perfectly simulated the real world was the perfect lab to conduct such life threatening experiments.

He was the ruler here and a with a thought everything would reset back to normal.

Others who had gone down this road before him had been erased from the world with the slightest miscalculation or error in judgement, no one ever got a second chance to observe, learn and make adjustments when it came to black energy. It was literally suicide to even be curious about this energy.

After two days of just standing and watching the behavior of dark energy Hartley had some insights as to how it behaved. At first it seemed like just a random explosion of energy that just appeared at the place you least expected it.

Soon Hartley figured out that by just barely breaching the laws of the realms he could see the ripples in space where the black energy was most likely to appear. In another two days he became adept at knowing where to punch out to make these ripples appear where he wanted them to.

Hartley would then send out a mini sphere the size of a basketball to surround the ripples where the black energy would appear and then as quickly as possible pump in tremendous elemental power with his spiral circulation technique, blue spiral lines would circulate and weave around the sphere suddenly causing and eruption of black energy turning the sphere black.

At first the black energy would just writhe and roil violently siphoning off the blue energy until there was nothing left then disappear to nothingness leaving the sphere translucent and empty once again.

Hartley even had the sphere explode a few times like a nuclear bomb around him literally rocking his world....

In a majestic castle in the east of the capital, under the dark night skies a dim candle light gleamed through a narrow window in a high tower on the north side. An old man sat at his desk scribbling down some notes on a piece of parchment. In a castle full of luxuries the man spent most of his time reading in this small dank room, the floor would creak when stepped on, and the door would squeak when opened but the room was kept looking like a commoners abode by choice.

The man was tall and sturdy, sporting a full head of white hair he resembled the young prince in facial features. The man sat in the silence of the gloomy room reading reports and writing the odd reply.