Four days later, early morning.
On the Dead Shell Wasteland outside the second Resurrection Point, an afterimage glimmering with cold, midnight-black light swept past broken stones. A toe pushed off the cliff face, and the figure twisted his body in midair like a mighty bow drawn to its fullest!
Bam!!
[Tom Pie] slammed into the bottom of the slope like a meteor. His right claw swept across the rock wall, gouging five terrifying furrows half a foot deep into the hard, weathered stone and sending sparks flying.
He did not pause for an instant. He bent his arm against the ground to absorb the impact, then launched himself upward.
Shoulders down, chest out, stomach tight, change footing!
His legs flexed and extended naturally like springs, absorbing the force. The entire sequence of extreme, high-mobility evasive maneuvers flowed seamlessly, without even a trace of the stiffness and stuttering that Nirvana Energy had once imposed on him!
Only after his third aerial flip back to the top of the slope did he hook one hand around a rocky ledge and look down at his slowly rising and falling chest.
The gray-black Corrosion Marks that had once sat rigidly on his skin now flowed beneath his scales like dark currents possessed of their own intelligence, quiet and deep.
Power slid smoothly from his forearms to his shoulder blades and poured into his core muscles, then flowed obediently back into the depths of his meridians with every deep breath. The excess Nirvana Energy left over from his bursts of power no longer turned into bloodthirsty frenzy. Instead, it quietly returned to its original circuits within his body.
He no longer needed to divide his attention to monitor every muscle.
Wherever he strained, the meridians there naturally slowed their flow;
wherever he needed to redirect