Chapter 89: Cheating to Grind Proficiency

“Eat grapes without spitting out the skins; if you do not eat grapes, you will end up spitting out the skins anyway...”

Yanluo Guan Yu rode out on his horse from the community service station, muttering the words under his breath. Before long, his tongue had grown nimble at last. After all, the consciousness at his core belonged to a modern mind, and even if this sub-personality had been touched by some obscure influence, it could still be corrected quickly.

“At last, that’s settled.”

With the problem of speech resolved, Yanluo wandered the wild zone, passing through three high-rises and a fountain. Before the entrance of a residential building, he saw a wild wolf crouched there like a guardian beast. It was a strange creature, with six legs and a mane beside its neck that spread like petals.

The system identified the monster as:

Mercury Wild Wolf.

“Seriously, why are there wolves on Mercury? That other world is so bizarre. What kind of creatures has it gone and bred...”

Riding together, horse and man formed a kind of partnership, and both Yanluo Guan Yu and Creamy Chocolate received a boost in strength. This was no ordinary mount either; it was a European heavy warhorse, born for charges! With the power of its sprint behind him, the two-meter-long Green Dragon Crescent Blade lunged out in a single thrust.

“Awooo...”

The Mercury Wild Wolf was instantly sliced open by the ancient battlefield blade, leaving a savage wound as translucent blood spilled out. It let out a resentful howl, its blood-red eyes brimming with ferocity, the hairs around its neck standing on end as it sprang more than two meters high, lunging at Yanluo in the saddle.

“Ha!”

Seeing just how vicious the beast was, Yanluo swung the thirty-eight-catty blade again, slamming the flat of the weapon directly into the wolf’s head. At the moment of impact, there was a clear recoil in the motion—that was the force of shock, the hidden burst behind the strike.

The blow landed squarely on its forehead. If its brain had not already shattered from the impact, it surely would have then, yet the wolf still refused to die.

“Sever!”

Yanluo lifted the Green Dragon Crescent Blade high. At that moment, Creamy Chocolate also reared in perfect coordination. When the blade came down, it dragged a roaring wind that howled like a gale, as though even the void ahead would be cleaved apart by that single strike.

Crack!

The Mercury Wild Wolf’s skull was split cleanly in two.

“Tough little bastard.”

After all, this muscular sub-personality of Guan Yu was probably on par with a level-three enhancer who had unlocked advanced strength. Yet even mounted and wielding a heavy weapon, he could not finish off the weakest neutral wild wolf in one blow?

Was a level-three enhancer really that weak?

Did monsters in a level-three otherworld take several hits to kill?

But after a moment’s thought, Yanluo came to a different conclusion. That was not it at all. A level-three enhancer had already awakened spiritual power. One obvious difference between high martial and low martial worlds was energy. Even the lowest form of it, qi, if cultivated within the body and suffused through the cells to strengthen the flesh, would greatly amplify both offense and defense.

Guan Yu possessed tremendous strength and an equally formidable physique, but without energy reinforcement, even with the mounted bonus from his partnership with the horse, his true offense and defense still fell short of a level-three enhancer.

And then Yanluo noticed something else.

Just now, he had in fact executed three moves from the Ten Directions Staff Technique: A Pillar Holds Up the Sky, Earth Shatters the Two Poles, and Might Splits the Eight Wilds. Thrust, shock, and smash. Guan Yu wielded a blade, but who said the Green Dragon Crescent Blade could not perform staff techniques? Only the original thrust had become a stab, the shock had become a flat-blade strike, and the smash had become a severing slash.

Yanluo closed his eyes, savoring in his mind the power he had just used, the flow through his body, and the coordination of his muscles.

To use staff forms as blade techniques, while the force principles remained the same—this sub-personality of Guan Yu might well possess an even more monstrous aptitude than mere blade mastery. Yanluo suddenly realized something: wasn’t this basically cheating to grind proficiency?

“Three Powers, Fiery Tremor!”

Yanluo Guan Yu unleashed the move, suddenly shaking every muscle and every thread of force through his body. The tendons across him snapped and quivered violently, setting off surging shock-bursts of power.

Crack, crack, crack!

With that tremor, the full-steel blade of the thirty-eight-catty Green Dragon Crescent Blade and its steel-bar shaft alike gave off sounds like metal exploding, as if the entire weapon had been filled with gunpowder and was about to burst apart.

The weapon was vibrating violently!

Yanluo closed his eyes once more and felt it out carefully.

As expected.

This was without doubt cheating. Grinding the proficiency of the Ten Directions Staff Technique like this—receiving the mind-imprint from an inherited secret manual was already a kind of cheat, and with this added layer, even without gaining the titles of Silver Vanguard or Golden Vanguard, this staff art could be mastered in no time.

“Fortunately, the blade’s length and weight are similar to an iron staff—both more than two meters long and weighing several dozen catties. And the techniques and force patterns can be used interchangeably.”

“Come to think of it, if I used the Heroic Soul Mask of Li Bai, could I also cheat and grind sword mastery?”

Of course, that was only a thought. Yanluo did not actually know any sword technique.

This body belonging to Guan Yu’s sub-personality was simply too well-built. Yanluo made full use of it next to practice the forms of Stirring the Four Seas, Turning the Five Elements, Sweeping the Six Realms, Seven-Star Chain Strikes, and Nine Nether Shattering—every move, whether involving overt force or hidden force, was tested in turn. The coordination of the muscles and the flow of power were deeply imprinted into his consciousness.

Only the final move, the killing art known as Ten Directions Invincible, still could not be used. The martial general’s body had reached the peak of both overt and hidden force, but it still could not yet unleash transformative force.

After circling the residential district and practicing the forms of the Ten Directions Staff Technique, while also killing two wild monsters—Mercury Wild Wolf and Mercury Hawk—Yanluo Guan Yu was preparing to farm the Mercury Lizard, a creature glowing with red light and standing more than two meters tall, clearly not to be trifled with, when he suddenly discovered that a battle had broken out in the lower lane.

Lower lane—

Butcher who had broken beyond human limits: Du Rong.

Cook who had broken beyond human limits: Liu Xin.

These two enhancers were facing off against a Martian creature that was round, earthy yellow, cylindrical in shape, and had two large eyes growing on its head. It was not terrifying at all—in fact, it was a little cute. The minion lines on both sides were clashing at this border.

On Yanluo’s side, the cloned soldier was Hobbit Huang Jiang. As for the alien cloned soldiers, they were dog-like creatures, with the system identifying them as “Martian Hounds.”

Clone Huang Jiang and the pack of dogs were locked in fierce combat, evenly matched.

The weapon in Butcher Du’s hands consisted of two thick-backed cleavers, each more than a meter long. Their silvery blades looked like two slabs of door wood, and each blade’s spine had three metal rings threaded through it.

These were unmistakably pig-slaughtering knives. A blacksmith in the otherworld had spent thirty-six days forging them with painstaking devotion, repeatedly hammering, tempering, and polishing them through fourteen separate processes. Though made of ordinary steel, each knife weighed seventy-six catties, and could quite literally kill a man just by being smashed into him.

Indeed, Butcher Du specialized in strength. He had not only unlocked advanced strength, but also possessed the rare hidden gene known as the Power to Suppress Floodwaters.

Legend said that when the floods rose, the force used to hold them back came from nine iron oxen, two iron tigers, and one iron rooster. This Suppress-Floodwaters gene had three stages. The first stage granted only the strength of one rooster. The second stage added the strength of two tigers. The third stage added another nine oxen.

Together, it became the Power to Suppress Floodwaters.

In truth, this was not even the rarest strength-type gene among combat genes. Stronger than it was the Dragon-Elephant Prajna Power, and it was said there was even a gene called the Overhead-Lift Power, which, once unlocked, allowed one to seize oneself by the hair and lift one’s own body into the air purely by strength alone.

Butcher Du’s Suppress-Floodwaters gene had only reached the second stage, yet combined with advanced strength and the power of one rooster and two tigers, handling two seventy-six-catty slaughtering knives was perfectly natural.

As for Liu Xin, this enhancer nicknamed Liu Three Blades did not mean he carried three knives. He had only one weapon, and that was a long blade made of ice. Thousand-Year Ice Essence, Ten-Thousand-Year Profound Ice—this was an “Ice Soul Blade” forged from millennium ice, its surface embossed with the head of a wolf and covered in tiny raised points of starlight. He had named it the North Star Heavenly Wolf Edge.