After his advancement, Raphael was considering ways to improve himself further.
First, he needed to refine a few "bronze corpses" using the Three Corpse Refining Arts. Bodies would be easy to find. Winter was approaching in Backlund; all he had to do was take a walk through the streets before dawn, and he could bring back an entire football team.
The only drawback might be that the vagrants' bodies were too scrawny, so the Living Corpses he refined from them might not be very strong.
As for Self Refining, Raphael was confident he could achieve what was called "major mastery" in about a month.
That was because the Raphael in the Beyonder world and the Raphael in the cultivation world were practicing this art together. Their combined efforts produced a result far greater than the sum of its parts.
Raphael was absolutely certain of this. Whether he was practicing the Demon Source Scripture or the Wolf Fang Art, his previous progress had been unimaginably fast.
Only after giving it serious thought had Raphael roughly understood why. It was probably because his two selves were cultivating together. For example, the barriers encountered while practicing the Demon Source Scripture were like thresholds. Cultivators had to keep tempering their bodies and Spirit Bodies before they could cross them.
For someone cultivating alone, crossing these "thresholds" required continuous accumulation, but with two people working together, it was much faster.
For instance, if crossing a particular "threshold" required a strength of "2," while one person only had a strength of "1.2," he would have to cultivate bit by bit from "1.2" to "2" before he could cross it.
But with both Raphaels cultivating together, they had a strength of "1.2 + 1.2." They could easily cross that "threshold" with strength to spare.
Thus, Raphael had