Pan Long had said Zeng Xiaoqiang's martial arts were all flash and no substance, but that was a little too harsh.
Zeng Xiaoqiang's approach—projecting the Projected Mindscape of the Desert, then hiding his killing moves in the wind and sand—was genuinely formidable within the Innate Realm.
Even Pan Long himself could not have been sure of victory against such an opponent back when he was in the Innate Realm.
But now they had reached the True Person Realm and returned to the natural state.
The power of the True Person Realm far exceeded the limits of the Innate Realm. Techniques considered peerless in the Innate Realm became commonplace at the True Person Realm. To True Persons, who could generally control their True Qi with meticulous subtlety, even the strongest Innate martial arts amounted to little.
That was why, after entering the True Person Realm, a martial artist usually had to revise everything he knew to suit his current cultivation and bring the full power of that realm to bear.
Zeng Xiaoqiang had entered the True Person Realm only four or five years ago and had just stabilized his cultivation. Raising his martial arts from the Innate level to the True Person level would take at least another five to ten years.
And that assumed the Zeng Family had a legacy of True Person techniques he could study directly.
Those self-taught True Persons who had broken through their bottlenecks by luck normally needed fifty or sixty years, if not longer, to work out martial arts that could fully harness their cultivation.
Some who were less fortunate, or simply less clever, reached the end of their lives before they could draw on a lifetime of experience to produce an incomplete True Person martial arts legacy.
The same problem was even more pronounced