Lucas First Learned of Battle Qi

A few days later, old Zhang finally woke after his soul mutation succeeded. Unfortunately, he discovered that his body no longer felt familiar. Now he was even being held in a woman's arms and breastfed!

He wanted to speak, but as a baby, all he could manage was "Ah, ah, ah!" Though his soul had once belonged to an old man, his body was a child's. So he failed to say what he wanted, and Zhang Chaoyang could not understand what they were saying either.

A year passed like this, and Zhang Chaoyang could roughly understand what they said. Only then did he learn that his name was now Lucas and that he had been reborn in a primitive age. Unfortunately, he was still only a one-year-old child and had no way to learn more.

Time passed swiftly before Lucas's eyes. From the time he was three, his father began teaching him a little about this world, and he also learned its writing.

By then, he had learned to walk, and only then did he discover that their tribe lived in a valley. He also learned that his father was one of the tribe's stronger warriors, and his father told him about the warrior ranks.

Their Stans Tribe worshipped the Tree of Life. When he first heard this, he thought he might be an elf. Unfortunately, from what he observed, his current body was not much different from an ordinary human's in his previous life. He did not have the long ears distinctive to the elves he had seen in the books he confiscated from his son.

Later, after questioning his father carefully, he learned from him that the Tree of Life their tribe worshipped was a great tree growing on a mountain. It was alive, and eating its fruit helped warriors rise in rank.

Lucas still remembered asking for the details at the time. His father had said, "Most of us humans can only train up to the sixth rank. A small number can train up to the seventh."

"Our tribe's ancestor only raised his warrior rank to the eighth because he happened to eat a fruit from the Tree of Life."

Lucas also remembered asking why it was only the eighth rank. His father had sighed and said, "After our ancestor broke through to the eighth rank, he went adventuring across the continent. By chance, he learned how warrior ranks were divided. Some particularly powerful tribes possess battle qi. That was how our ancestor learned about the warrior ranks!"

Lucas wanted to ask for more details, but unfortunately, his father told him these things were all too far removed from him. He was still young and should first study the cultural knowledge passed down through the tribe.

In his previous life, after his son graduated and he had time to spare, Lucas had read some of the novels he had confiscated back then. Naturally, he knew about things like battle qi and magic, but he could get nothing about magic out of his father in this life.

After all, he could be considered a novel reader. One novel he had read recently, called Coiling Dragon, was about battle qi and magic. He had even thought that magic and battle qi were standard features of every world!

Now it seemed that either his tribe was relatively weak and had never had the opportunity to learn anything about magic, or this world had no magic at all.

After learning that this world held great power, he took up the techniques he had practiced before, which had been of little use. The only unfortunate thing was that his current body was still only about four years old. He could not practice the movement exercises of his previous life at all, nor could he sense his inner breath.

A four-year-old's body was still undeveloped. Even in his previous life, strict as his master had been with him, he had only begun practicing health-preserving movement exercises at around eight. He had not started the strenuous ones until after fifteen.

Although he was only four now, perhaps thanks to his rebirth, he could clearly feel that he had more energy. So he also believed he could practice some stillness exercises, some visualization techniques.

In his previous life, he had practiced his school's Judge Diagram. Now that he was in another world, he did not intend to continue visualizing the judge.

His practice had produced no noticeable results in his previous life, but this world possessed supernatural power. So he had to be cautious with anything involving the soul. After some thought, he finally decided to visualize something relatively powerful. He was familiar with the legend from his previous life of Pangu creating heaven and earth. According to the legend, Pangu had been nurtured within an azure lotus. Naturally, then, the object he would visualize was an azure lotus.

But he also knew that all visualization involved settling one's thoughts into the sea of consciousness and carving out something of one's own within its chaos. In other words, so-called visualization meant shaping one's mental intent into something one understood, until it ultimately became the image one visualized.

What Lucas did not know was that the Judge Visualization Diagram from his previous life had not been useless. After many years of visualization, his soul had already formed a phantom image of the judge. After all, his previous life had lacked supernatural energy such as spiritual energy, so achieving even a phantom image already qualified him as a genius.

Unfortunately, when his phantom judge merged into this world, it played a role in the struggle against this body's native consciousness. It defeated the consciousness of this body in this world and devoured it.

But because this caused soul mutation, the absorbed soul still contained this world's imprint, which he had not had time to refine. Heaven and earth therefore identified the judge's inherent death affinity as this world's similar Death Edict. This in turn triggered a three-element soul mutation with the soul's own earth and life affinities.

That illusory phantom judge of his was nowhere near enough to meet the soul mutation's expenditure and was directly absorbed and completely consumed. Originally, thanks to his phantom judge soul, his aptitude for the Death Edict should have been the strongest after the mutation succeeded. Unfortunately, death and life were natural opposites, and the two consumed each other. In the end, his earth aptitude was the strongest, followed by death, while his aptitude for the Life Law was the weakest.

Naturally, the present Lucas knew none of this. After all, even magic had yet to be spread by the Sovereigns. At this point in time, the Four Edicts Planes had not even been created.

Lucas began his first visualization. He visualized himself as Pangu, nurtured within chaos. An azure lotus containing all manner of wondrous edicts enveloped him, rising and sinking in the sea of his soul.

He slowly began to settle his mind and rein in his stray thoughts. Unfortunately, perhaps because it had been too long since he last practiced visualization, or perhaps because he had lived through most of a person's lifetime and had many stray thoughts, he could not enter a meditative state for a long time.

He slowly began recalling the little moments of his childhood, remembering how, when he was young, he had followed his master through streets and villages to make a living in those impoverished years. Little by little, he recalled how his master had guided him in visualization!