After returning from Monk Tianming, Li Su felt a little groggy.
From the Arhat Fist to Arhat Gong, and now the Formless Calamity Finger, he suddenly wondered whether the top-tier techniques in the world of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils really were limited to things like the Northern Dark Divine Skill.
Li Su could only express his doubts—deep doubts.
Leaving aside everything else, this Formless Calamity Finger alone had five layers of force in a single jab.
The Six Meridians Divine Sword was powerful, but Li Su didn't think the Formless Calamity Finger was any worse.
He could only say that its fundamentals were too formidable. During the main story, no one at Shaolin Temple had cultivated this finger technique to the level of mastery.
Leaving everything else aside, just take the Six Meridians Divine Sword.
By the time of Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils, it only had a grand-sounding name. If not for Duan Yu, what difference was there between this martial art and the Formless Calamity Finger?
Each person learned one finger, and the sword technique became a sword formation.
In the end, Jumozhi caused so much trouble that they had no choice but to burn the manuals.
Thinking about it, wasn't that much like the Formless Calamity Finger?
At this thought, Li Su couldn't help feeling excited.
If the Formless Calamity Finger really was as that old monk had said, then he wouldn't need to go to all the trouble of traveling to Dali in search of the Six Meridians Sword Qi. Wasn't the Formless Calamity Finger much better? Most importantly, it was free, and he even had the rights to use it directly.
In the real world, and here as well.
Still, despite his hopes, Li Su's expression turned troubled.
A profound martial art like the Formless Calamity Finger obviously couldn't be learned simply by hearing it described and watching it demonstrated.
The monks had taught them every part of it by hand.
And that was precisely what made Li Su realize how difficult it was.
Just nurturing five completely different kinds of true qi in his five fingers was already incredibly difficult. Then he had to fuse them, until all five fingers became one. It was obvious how daunting that would be.
Li Su took a deep breath and decided to give it a try.
This technique should be very difficult.
But the five layers of force were something Monk Tianming had demonstrated through his true qi, letting each of them experience them one by one. It was a lot to take in.
Mastering just one kind wasn't impossible. With some time, he should manage it.
But there were five kinds of force, and even after cultivating them, he still had to combine them into one, making them burn like fire.
In other words, the Formless Calamity Finger didn't require you to have Yang-type internal energy. Instead, the finger technique itself produced Yang-type force, evidently through the five layers of power.
True qi was formless and intangible, somewhere between a gas and not a gas. Producing that kind of heat was no easy feat.
So Li Su took a breath and decided to start with the simplest part.
Of the five layers of force, the easiest was the Forward Spiral.
By the way, the spiral qi of the Formless Calamity Finger and the spiral true qi of Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling were two entirely different things.
The former was simply true qi gathered at the fingertip, spiraling under the user's control. The latter was passive; the true qi itself was naturally in that state and flowed directly through the meridians. The difference between them was enormous. The former was spiral qi, while the latter was a kind of variant true qi.
At a thought, wisps of true qi spun around his little finger. The movement was slight.
Li Su stared blankly at the qi spiraling around his little finger, unable to stop himself from recalling what Master Tianming had told them just moments ago while demonstrating the five kinds of force.
"Of the five layers of force, the Forward Spiral is the simplest. The quick learners can master it in three to five months; the slower ones will need a year."
Three to five months? A year???
A question mark seemed to appear over Li Su's head. Had he already done it?
Hmm, the movement wasn't strong enough.
For one thing, his master, Monk Tianming, had spun it much faster.
He reckoned the spiral itself was simple enough; the difficult part was making it spin quickly.
Li Su thought it over. He really didn't believe that his talent could be so good that he'd mastered one layer of force in an instant, when even his master had spent decades practicing the Formless Calamity Finger just to reach the entry level.
So he began to speed it up.
Hmm, this was a little more difficult.
Increasing the speed took more concentration and consumed more true qi, but the improvement wasn't much.
By comparison, the true qi at his fingertip completed about two rotations every second, while his master managed almost three.
And at the time, his master had deliberately slowed down so they could see it with the naked eye.
In other words, to meet the standard for the Forward Spiral, he needed at least five rotations per second, or even ten.
Li Su didn't think too much about it and began working hard to increase the speed. By nightfall, he had just barely reached the speed his master had demonstrated to them.
Letting out a breath, Li Su decided to head back and rest.
On the first day, after finishing his lessons and chores, he began trying the second layer of force: the Reverse Spiral.
Hmm, it was just a little harder than the Forward Spiral. The main problem was that his thoughts kept wandering, and one slip was enough to send it spinning forward again.
It took about the time to drink a cup of tea before he succeeded.
Li Su paused, and his eyelids twitched a few times. At that moment, he confirmed one fact.
His talent was probably very high.
Not 75%, but 175%. Otherwise, there was no explaining his cultivation speed.
What should he do??
Seeing the conflicted expressions on Xuannan and the others as they failed to make any progress, Li Su wore a conflicted expression too. His own progress made his scalp tingle. He wasn't being coy; he really didn't want to attract too much attention.
The Formless Calamity Finger had to be difficult, because it really was difficult.
Of course, difficult as it was, that didn't mean Li Su would stop practicing it.
He was naturally going to practice it. But this time, Li Su planned to shore up his foundations a little more and at least take longer. Xuancheng could remain the star pupil. After Xuancheng suffered a deviation of qi, Xuanci could take his place.
Soon, Li Su began practicing again.
He kept the movements subdued and proceeded cautiously.
He had clearly mastered the Reverse Spiral in the time it took to drink a cup of tea, but, just like with the Forward Spiral the day before, Li Su still spent the whole day consolidating it.
Some might complain, asking whether it was really appropriate to describe a single day's practice as "consolidating" his foundation. Li Su could only say there was no helping it. By the end of the day, the Reverse Spiral had reached an astonishing five rotations per second, and the Forward Spiral had also improved from three rotations per second the day before to five. The only reason the Forward Spiral had reached such a high speed was that he couldn't make the Reverse Spiral go any faster. It wasn't that he couldn't do it; his fingers simply couldn't take it.
Li Su let out a breath. Though he felt helpless, there was nothing he could do once he'd reached the limit.
Then came the third day, the fourth day, and the fifth day.
He mastered all five layers of force in the Formless Calamity Finger.
And when he demonstrated them individually, they were far more powerful than Monk Tianming's display.
Next, all he had to do was fuse the five layers into one, and he would have reached the entry level of the Formless Calamity Finger.
Li Su didn't do that.
He decided to strengthen his fundamentals further, so he focused his internal energy on his index finger and continuously switched between the five layers of force.
There was no doubt that this was difficult.
Even Li Su spent a whole day before he could just barely switch between them once every three seconds.
Three seconds wasn't much.
But it made Li Su feel as though he'd discovered a whole new world, and he began experimenting nonstop. It required a great deal of control over his true qi. If he could manage it in one second—or even reduce it to one switch per second—it would mean he could change his true qi at will.
Li Su hadn't forgotten what Monk Tianming had said: one had to cultivate both internal energy and martial skills.
And so Li Su began pushing himself.
A day, then half a month.
Although the goal didn't seem too ambitious—reducing the time from three seconds to under one—the actual practice was difficult.
Especially once he got the switching time down to one second. As he continued practicing, Li Su hit a bottleneck. For a full twenty days, his switching speed didn't improve at all. As he kept at it, he realized that further improvement wasn't a matter of accumulating years of practice. His true qi simply couldn't undergo that kind of violent change.
Of course, he had made some gains as well.
Li Su discovered that although he couldn't directly speed up the change, switching between two kinds of force was much faster if he started with both already present. For example, the Forward and Reverse Spirals, or Vibration Contraction. In essence, they were all variations of the same kind of change; only their direction and form differed slightly.
This greatly interested Li Su, and he kept experimenting.
It wasn't until a full month and a half later that he finally emerged from his absorption. He took a breath, his face filled with deep helplessness.
Looking at Monk Xuanbei, who wore a smile nearby, Li Su felt a pang of anguish.
Monk Xuanbei had reached the entry level.
He had successfully mastered the first layer of force in the Formless Calamity Finger: the Forward Spiral.
That was impressive. It showed just how difficult and profound the Formless Calamity Finger was. A month and a half! Hadn't Li Su needed only half a month to reach the entry level of the Dragon Subduing Elephant Taming Art?
But by Li Su's standards, he had basically mastered the Formless Calamity Finger.
Not merely reached the entry level, nor just made some small progress.
Looking at the invisible force formed at the tips of his index and middle fingers, Li Su let out a deep sigh.
The Two-Finger Realm!!!
He had compressed the five layers of force onto two fingers.
Though this wasn't the highest level of the Formless Calamity Finger, for Li Su, it was basically the limit. Reaching the One-Finger Realm would take many things, such as years of practice and experience honed through endless trials.
This wasn't a guess. It was a feeling—a feeling that the final level of the Formless Calamity Finger required mastery to come naturally, with a quantitative change bringing about a qualitative one.
Li Su sighed deeply. He was overjoyed, yet felt strangely powerless.
Master, this finger technique really is too difficult. I don't even know what to do next!
The only one who'd mastered it, Xuanbei, had needed a month and a half just to master one layer of force. If he had to wait for the others to reach the entry level, how long would that take?
It was agonizing.