The Path to Creating Your Own Breathing Technique

As for how to develop his own breathing style...

Xia Xi had recently begun to see a way forward.

The core of a "breathing" style lay not in its sword techniques, but in the word "breathing."

Although every breathing style bore the name of some element...

They were all, in essence, techniques for controlling the rhythm and manner of breathing.

They increased the strain on the lungs, heart, muscles, and every part of the body, briefly pushing physical performance to the limits of human potential.

The difference was...

Different breathing styles emphasized different aspects and parts of the body.

Take Wind Breathing, the style he knew best.

Its core lay in improving limb extension and explosive power, particularly strengthening the ligaments and muscle groups of the waist, abdomen, and lower body.

Although his grasp of the other breathing styles was shallow, he had also gained a vague understanding of them.

It was like distributing a hundred stat points across dozens, or even hundreds, of different branches.

The breathing styles were roughly equal in overall strength.

But their different stat allocations ultimately produced completely different "sword intent" and combat styles.

To get into finer detail...

Even when targeting the same body part, different breathing styles might take entirely different approaches to enhancing it.

Based on Xia Xi's own experience...

When Stone Breathing strengthened the heart, it seemed to increase the ventricles' maximum expanded volume by 30% and the heart valves' closing efficiency by 20%.

Water Breathing, on the other hand, improved heart rate regulation by 10%, ventricular nerve conduction speed by 10%, and maximum ventricular volume by 20%.

As for how many parts of the body could be enhanced, there were too many to count.

When he first learned Water Breathing...

Xia Xi had tried [Fusion] as a way to create a breathing style.

The idea was simple and crude.

Break the rhythm of [Wind] Breathing into several sections, then substitute and slot in portions of [Water] Breathing's rhythm.

Then he got a stitch.

Not only did it fail to dramatically improve his physical abilities the way a normal breathing style would...

It instead produced a burning, suffocating sensation that nearly sent his lungs into spasms.

Afterward, he kept adjusting the proportions and transitions between the two breathing patterns, ultimately discovering that he had to reduce either style's share to below 10%.

Only then did the suffocation and burning noticeably ease.

But... this cobbled-together [Hybrid Breathing] was weaker than simply using a single breathing style.

At its core, it was nothing more than an inferior experimental product.

After learning Stone Breathing from Matsuyama, Xia Xi tried another approach.

[Tuning]

Adjusting the rhythm of a particular breathing style.

If a breathing style essentially distributed a large number of points across different branching options, then that allocation might not suit everyone's individual circumstances.

His earlier [Degraded Fusion] had crudely mashed plan A and plan B together.

As a result, the code threw an error as soon as the human body started running it.

For his second approach, Xia Xi tried to figure out the force, movement, and frequency of every breathing action, along with the specific principles governing how they worked in combination.

Then he adjusted them little by little, in tiny increments.

Then he observed the changes and effects they produced.

It was probably like someone who knew nothing about programming trying to modify another person's code.

Like reverse-engineering the underlying code from nothing but its effects on the client, searching for patterns through constant trial and error, testing, and reconstruction.

Xia Xi believed this approach was logically sound.

It was just that the scale of the undertaking and its difficulty far exceeded what most people could imagine.

Even with Wind Breathing, the style he had mastered best, he still had not fully grasped its underlying logic.

Perhaps... he would need to raise the breathing style to LV.4.

Or even beyond LV.5 before it became feasible.

Honestly, if this had been the real world rather than a game, Xia Xi would have admired the founders of the Five Great Breathing Styles.

Each of them had managed to derive a stat allocation suited to themselves from an ancient breathing style.

And now...

At Nikaido Mei's dojo, Xia Xi had found a third path.

It was also one of the rare occasions when this Cultivator, who spent all day immersed in booze and sparring, showed the dependability of a senior mentor.

She offered another suggestion.

There was no need to insist on understanding every part of a breathing style. If he did not understand the logic behind the code, so be it.

He only needed to focus on the parts he understood and adjust or modify those.

As for the rest, it only needed to run.

Mei indeed had no experience creating her own breathing style, but one of her students did.

A swordsman named Tengen Uzui.

He had spent less than three months with her before losing patience and insisting on leaving early to take the Final Selection.

His knowledge of Thunder Breathing barely scratched the surface.

Yet after roughly grasping some of the principles behind breathing styles, he had actually cobbled together a derivative [Sound Breathing], relying on his considerable talent and past experience as a ninja.

Yes, a ninja.

Back then, Nikaido had wanted to keep the boy at the dojo a little longer to temper his disposition.

After all, pragmatic as she was, she would not send an apprentice to a Final Selection with a substantial death rate after just three months of training.

In the end, she had failed to "persuade" him.

Or rather, persuasion by force had failed.

Nikaido simply could not subdue that white-haired young man who constantly went on about being [flashy] and [lively].

Sound Breathing did have some power to it.

But that was not why he had managed to overpower Nikaido instead.

After all, whether it was his rudimentary Thunder Breathing or the prototype of Sound Breathing he had only recently created...

Neither could pose a real threat to Nikaido.

Tengen Uzui had earned the right to graduate entirely through his formidable physique and the foundation he had built as a ninja.

In the Far East, Nikaido was already taller than the vast majority of men.

Yet he stood a full head taller than she did.

He was nearly two meters tall, with an outstanding physique and musculature to match.

Not to mention, the kid had extensive combat experience and considerable skill with a blade.

Nikaido could tell he had cut people down.

And more than once.

If that had been all, perhaps she could have simply called the kid exceptionally gifted.

But the brat had actually used bombs inside the dojo!

Small bombs packed with gunpowder that exploded on contact.

!

He claimed it was some kind of flashy Ninjutsu.

He had blown apart nearly half a room in her Dian Ci Dojo on the spot.

Even now, the roof was still covered with a waterproof tarp, with repairs dragging on and on.

Nikaido had been so furious that she threw him and his bedding straight out the front door.

He might as well go wreak havoc on those demons sooner rather than later.

Whenever she reached this part of the story, Xia Xi would see her practically grinding her teeth in anger.

Still, it was indeed a possible approach.

Xia Xi had tried it with his LV.3 Wind Breathing, and it really worked.

The system had obligingly popped up a notification to confirm it.

[Detected a breathing style prototype undergoing revision.]

[Potential assessment: degraded breathing style.]

[Current compatibility: 83% (can continue to improve).]

[Notice: a self-created breathing style will occupy the character-exclusive skill slot (unique). Please choose carefully.]

Naturally, Xia Xi declined.

The game only allowed one self-created breathing style. That "inferior" rating alone was enough to keep him from committing now.

Combat skills that the system did not recognize could not receive points or be leveled up.

At that moment, Xia Xi had two paths before him.

Either rely on time and high levels to figure out how the breathing style with the highest compatibility worked, then create his own.

Or strip down the most compatible breathing style and quickly refine it into a simplified version better suited to himself.

In gamer terms...

The former was an [XX Breathing: Modified], requiring high levels and extensive development, with no loss in power.

The latter was an [XX Breathing: Modified, Lite Edition], with a low entry threshold, minimal development requirements, high compatibility, and low power.

And Xia Xi...

Of course he chose neither!

He wanted to learn all Five Great Breathing Styles, then use whichever suited him best as the framework.

Once he understood its mechanics, or achieved an extremely high degree of mastery, he would incorporate the essence of the other four breathing styles.

After all, he had already gained a basic grasp of four of the Five Great Breathing Styles: [Wind, Water, Stone, and Thunder].

He could already faintly sense certain shared threads running between them.

He even suspected that these four styles, or indeed all five, had once, in a much more ancient age...

Been degraded, downgraded versions of a single, stronger breathing style with a higher entry threshold.

He still wanted to give it a try.

After mastering the Five Great Breathing Styles to a certain degree, he would use them as puzzle pieces to reverse-engineer what that lost "Prototype Breathing Style" should have looked like.

Besides, Xia Xi kept feeling that if he truly learned all Five Great Breathing Styles...

It would definitely trigger some special event.

If he were the game's designer or story writer, he would certainly have designed it that way.

Collect nine Dragon Balls to summon the Super Holy Sword, gather four Soul Jade fragments to combine into an orb, and so on...

So, if he collected a full set of five-element breathing styles and combined them into a Primordial Thunderbolt Unity Breathing Style...

That would be paw-fectly reasonable too.

At least Xia Xi thought it was extremely paw-fectly reasonable.