As the slanting light stabbed into the corner of his eye, Li Wen finally stopped his mechanical repetitions.
He wiped the sweat and dust from his face and checked the virtual clock on the wall. It was time to leave school.
He had spent the afternoon chipping away at those dozen or so formidable obstacles like the Foolish Old Man moving mountains, and had finally conquered most of them.
Through this almost clumsy, one-point-at-a-time approach, only a few of the most challenging hurdles remained—
The hardest of all: the sixtieth form, "Shadow"; the sixty-first, "Startled Swan"; the sixty-second, "Thousand Illusions"; the sixty-third, "Blazing Sun"; and, as the ultimate burst of power in the entire art, the final form—the sixty-fourth, "Piercing Sun."
Li Wen pulled a towel from his backpack and vigorously wiped the sticky sweat from his body. Weariness surged over him like a tide, and his limbs felt heavy.
But he didn't hesitate. He went straight to the control panel in the corner of the training room, entered the commands with practiced ease, and set a thirty-minute countdown timer.
Time. This was the final sprint!
Li Wen took a deep breath, turned, and firmly gripped the fast blade on the floor again. Its cold touch spread across his palm.
"Activate—[Absolute Focus]!"
The thought was like pressing a button. The skill activated instantly!
Vrrm—!
An invisible force swept through his mind, dispelling all fatigue, all stray thoughts, and every sensation unrelated to the blade!
His slightly weary eyes became, in an instant, like polished black obsidian: deep, cold, and shining with an inhumanly pure gleam.
In his world, only the fast blade in his hand remained. His exhausted body seemed to have been injected with a powerful stimulant; every cell sprang to life.
His mind raced like an overloaded quantum computer, frantically extracting, combining, deducing, and refining the details of the forms that had stumped him for so long.
Tiny deviations that were hard to notice during normal training—was the angle of his muscle exertion off by 0.1 degrees? Was his wrist turning 0.02 seconds too soon? Was there a slight lag in coordinating his ankle's push with the shift of his center of gravity?
Under the boost of lv3 [Absolute Focus], these minuscule errors that would usually go unnoticed were magnified and dissected, thread by thread.
Data surged through his mind as trajectories rapidly took shape.
He moved!
Li Wen's standing figure seemed to be yanked by an invisible thread. Without warning, it blurred.
Whoosh—
Almost in an instant! Like teleportation!
One moment he was still where he'd been; the next, he had appeared in the opposite corner of the training room, so fast that even the dust in the air hadn't reacted.
More unnervingly—
"Clang!" The faint but unmistakable sound of a blade sliding back into its sheath arrived belatedly.
At some unnoticed moment, the fast blade in his hand had already completed the entire sequence: drawing, striking, and sheathing.
The sixtieth form—Shadow!
The essence of this form was extreme speed and deception.
So fast that the enemy had no time to react, couldn't even tell whether you had drawn your blade to attack.
So fast that the instant your figure moved, the cold blade might already have swept across their throat! In the Rainbow Light Blade Art, this move pushed deceptive speed to its utmost limit.
He had mastered it!
The instant Li Wen's body instinctively and perfectly reproduced the results deduced under [Absolute Focus], successfully executing "Shadow"—
The passive skill [Once Proven, Forever Proven] within him blazed to life, like a divine rune branded deep in his soul.
Every "successful feeling" and physical detail—how to gather strength, how to unleash it, how to coordinate body and mind until the movement became flawless—was imprinted with crystal clarity into his neural memory and muscle instincts.
From then on, this experience became a permanent part of his innate talent, never to be forgotten or diminished.
"Whoosh~"
In the span of a thought, Li Wen, still intensely focused, didn't pause for a moment. He immediately used his [Absolute Focus] state to tackle the sixty-first form, "Startled Swan."
This time, reality showed him what a true gap looked like. Unlike "Shadow," the sixty-first form didn't come together in one smooth motion.
There were still minor discrepancies in the rhythm of his exertion and in the transitions between movements.
But at that moment, Li Wen had no concept of failure.
His absolutely focused mind had no emotions, only cold, efficient instructions for correction.
Didn't get it on the first try?
[Deduction: Adjust wrist exertion angle by +3 degrees, increase right-foot push by 5%... Try again!]
Still no luck on the second?
[Deduction: Rotate core 0.05 seconds earlier, optimize blade's horizontal pull arc by 0.8%... Again!]
Three tries, four, five...
Time slipped quietly by with the ticking of the clock. When the shrill alarm began its final countdown, with only a little over ten minutes left—
"Got it!" An indescribable rush of exhilaration swept through him, and the mark of [Once Proven, Forever Proven] imprinted itself clearly once more.
The sixty-first form, "Startled Swan"—initiated!
Repeat! Correct! Break through again!
Like a tireless, emotionless precision machine.
When five minutes remained on the countdown, the dazzling blade light of the sixty-third form, "Blazing Sun," tore through the air of the training room for the first time in earnest, accompanied by Li Wen's rapidly spinning figure and layers upon layers of blade shadows.
Two minutes remained.
Li Wen's body trembled slightly from the intense exertion, and his mind neared some kind of limit, but the light of absolute focus in his eyes didn't waver in the slightest.
Only the final form remained—the devastating last strike, said to pierce through anything with its ultimate speed and power, and even to outshine the blazing sun.
The sixty-fourth form—Piercing Sun!
He poured all his remaining strength, will, and the full force of his mind, driven to its limit by lv3 [Absolute Focus], into this one move.
"Hah!" A muffled growl burst from his throat.
His entire body became a resolute streak of light. The fast blade in his hand seemed to bear the weight of a thousand jun, yet moved so swiftly that it tore past the limits of sight, thrusting straight ahead.
"Vrrm—clang!!!!"
A blade cry far more powerful than any before, blending the resonance of strength and speed, rang through the well-insulated training room like the roar of a dragon and tiger.
The blade light was no longer a mere glint of cold steel. In an instant, it burst forth like a miniature sun, filling his vision! Countless brilliant blade-light afterimages interwove and flashed, as if they would slice space itself into fragments.
The sixty-fourth form—Piercing Sun! Successfully executed!
With this move, the Peak Blade Art known as the Rainbow Light Blade Art officially reached—
Initiation, in Li Wen's hands!
Vrrm!
The instant "Piercing Sun" succeeded, an ineffable insight surged through every cell in Li Wen's body like an electric current.
The framework of all sixty-four basic forms of the Rainbow Light Blade Art, its core methods of exerting force, and the essential principles of coordinating footwork with blade techniques all suddenly clicked into place.
They were no longer isolated moves, but parts of an organic whole that could flow together.
For the first time, the unique Artistic Conception of a Peak Technique began to take clear shape in Li Wen's consciousness.
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