"Is he strong?" Gin asked, his face alight with excitement.
Kuro rolled his eyes and pushed up his glasses. "Strong enough to make you despair."
"Man, our captain really shouldn't have become a Shichibukai. If he hadn't... he could've had a proper fight with West Owl."
Gin paid Kuro's warning no mind. The stronger the enemy, the more interested he became. He and Lucci were alike: the tougher the opponent, the more their bloodthirsty fighting spirit burned.
Kuro gave a cold laugh. "If that happened, he might've killed us all by now."
Ye Chen shook his head, ignored the discussion, and settled into meditation on the deck. He sat cross-legged like a bodhisattva upon a lotus throne, and before long, he had lost all awareness of his surroundings.
Lucci and the others thought Ye Chen was asleep and paid him no attention. Inside him, however, power surged like rolling waves. Two currents of Internal Power circulated slowly through his body. His cultivation had never been particularly advanced, and he had rarely trained it before. Now he understood that if he wanted to grow stronger quickly, he had to practice the finest cultivation techniques.
He had already accumulated a considerable amount of Internal Power. This was the perfect time to begin practicing an Internal Cultivation Method.
Internal Power and True Qi were two distinct things, though martial arts stories often treated them as one and the same. True Qi was more accurately a form taken by Internal Power when projected outward. In other words, Internal Power could be transformed into True Qi.
For example, when Ren Woxing fought Zuo Lengchan, he used his power-absorbing technique but failed to draw out any of Zuo Lengchan's Internal Power. Zuo Lengchan had converted all of it into True Qi and hidden it throughout his