Unexpected

Li Wen calmly withdrew his gaze.

Without a moment's hesitation, he swiped his card and headed straight for the "Top Technique Exclusive Training Area" on the first floor.

Compared with the lively lobby and upper floors, the Peak Technique training area retained its usual air of solitude.

Even New Year's Eve couldn't lower the high bar for training in peak techniques.

A few scattered figures occupied separate training rooms, each immersed in a world of flashing blades and clashing steel.

Li Wen pushed open the door to the training room he always used.

Cold metal walls. The mixed smell of disinfectant and sweat. Thick, resilient energy-absorbing material beneath his feet.

He took off his coat, revealing a slightly worn black training suit, then walked over to the weapon rack and gripped the standard quick blade he'd used countless times.

The hilt felt cold in his hand. Its heavy metallic weight passed swiftly into his palm, then sank into his bones. The familiar sensation was like a command, instantly igniting the dormant factors within him.

Whoosh—

He drew a deep breath, then slowly exhaled.

The warmth of the holiday reunion, the expectant gazes of his parents, the complicated glances from Xue Jun and the others... All those emotions were forcibly suppressed and expelled with that long breath.

His eyes quickly grew focused and keen, like a blade tempered in fire. Not a trace of slackness remained.

The training rhythm he'd honed over the past half month began running on its own, without any need to think.

Buzz! Swish! His first strike cut through the air with a low hiss.

He didn't immediately activate his trump card. Instead, relying on his body's instinctive memory, he swung his arm again and again like a craftsman at work, repeating the Minor Accomplishment moves of Rainbow Light Blade Art, long since etched into his muscle fibers.

With every slash, every step, every shift in his footwork, he focused on feeling the blade's vibrations, the minute deviations in its trajectory, searching for the "roughness" he hadn't yet fully mastered.

The fluidity that came with Minor Accomplishment in Rainbow Light Blade Art was striking. But every step forward beyond that point grew more difficult, demanding finer and more painstaking refinement.

Time slipped away unnoticed amid the falling sweat.

About an hour later, Li Wen felt his body warming and his muscles beginning to ache slightly. He'd pinpointed several points in his Minor Accomplishment finishing moves that demanded explosive strength and control, but they still weren't flowing smoothly enough. The time had come!

With a turn of thought, there was no need for any elaborate ritual—

"Activate, Absolute Focus LV5!"

Buzz!

It was as if an invisible nuclear reactor had ignited deep in his mind! The qualitative transformation brought on by his LV5 soul strength appeared in an instant.

His primary consciousness wasn't completely submerged as it had been before. Instead, a clear film of awareness remained, like a composed commander perched high in a control tower, watching the instincts below enter overdrive.

His entire spiritual power became a precision scalpel, held in the hands of his will.

A fifty-percent boost to comprehension erupted.

His five senses instantly sharpened to an extraordinary degree.

The paths of dust motes through the air, the vortices formed as the blade cleaved the airflow, the exertion of every muscle fiber in his body, the flow of his blood and rhythm of his heartbeat... Countless streams of information surged in like a waterfall, only to be instantly sorted and integrated by the "calm commander."

The subtle sticking points he'd encountered while practicing moments ago appeared as clearly as grime beneath a microscope, magnified and fixed in his sights.

In his mind, footage of his past practice, the core principles described in blade art manuals, even insights he'd gained fighting Virtual Humans, were feverishly dismantled, compared, and reassembled by his terrifying processing power...

His body's instincts faithfully received the commander's instructions.

His wrist, forearm, shoulder blades, waist and hips, ankles... Every joint and every bundle of muscle seemed to receive a new, more efficient sequence of commands.

Swish! Slash! The blade light abruptly changed!

The same Startling Rainbow Strike, its trajectory adjusted at high speed with minute precision down to the micrometer.

The sharp whistle of the blade became shorter and more focused. Less of its image lingered behind; its energy converged at a single point on the tip! Its power doubled!

Turning Back Blade! The counter-slash, which had previously lagged ever so slightly during a rapid spin, became an almost perfect arc of light under overclocked calculations and absolute control.

The angle of his waist's twist was precisely optimized, as if an extra point of support had appeared out of nowhere. The shift from shedding force through rotation to borrowing it became seamless: the blade turned with him, and he moved with the blade.

Sweat ran down his forehead and into his eyes, stinging with a faint burn. But Li Wen didn't even need to blink.

Under overclocked calculations, his instincts took perfect control of his body's reactions. They instantly calculated the path of the sweat and the speed at which it would reach his eye. His eyelid blinked with millisecond precision, cutting off the sweat before it could interfere. His vision remained perfectly clear.

Focus on the present! Focus on this strike! Focus on etching this insight into his bones!

On his panel, the experience for [Blade Art: Peak (Minor Accomplishment)] silently ticked upward, several times faster than before... The flashing blade light lent meaning to time, making every second precious.

[You practiced blade art for 3 hours. Rainbow Light Blade Art +1]

[You focused on practicing blade art for 1 hour and 20 minutes. Rainbow Light Blade Art +4]

[Technique: Blade Art: Peak (Minor Accomplishment 30→35/100)]

The whole afternoon passed in the blink of an eye.

As his blade art kept improving, his rate of progress gradually slowed.

When he was at the Initiation stage, he could gain around 8 experience points a day.

Now he could gain only a little over 5.

Of course, that was still far faster than most other people could manage.

It made Li Wen appreciate the importance of comprehension all the more.

At the same time, he finally understood why those geniuses trained so quickly.

He could only enjoy his boosted comprehension for less than two hours a day.

Those geniuses had it twenty-four hours a day, nonstop!

Over the years, the gap between them would become a chasm.

"At least my comprehension can keep improving. Theirs is fixed." Li Wen wiped the sweat from his forehead, gathered his things, and left Xinhuo Hall.

Outside Xinhuo Hall, the city lights had just come on.

The lively New Year's Eve atmosphere hadn't completely faded. There were more people on the streets than in the past few days, mostly returning home after visiting relatives or sharing a meal.

Li Wen boarded his usual bus route.

The bus rolled along smoothly as the streetscape slipped past the windows.

Leaning back in his seat, Li Wen closed his eyes to rest and replayed every detail of that afternoon's blade practice in his mind.

Until...

A violent jolt abruptly roused Li Wen from his half-meditative state!

The driver slammed on the brakes. The shrill screech of tires stabbed at their eardrums, and cries and sounds of people colliding erupted throughout the bus!

"What the hell!"

"Was there an accident?"

"Up ahead... What happened up ahead?!"

The passengers, still shaken, got to their feet and craned their necks to look forward.

Li Wen immediately squeezed over to the window. Not far ahead lay the collapsed pit from the Greenwood Project—the site that had once become the focus of news across the county and buried so many of his father's coworkers!