On the morning of the fifth day of intensive training, the trainees gathered in front of the Experiment Building after breakfast.
It had been nighttime last night, so no one had paid much attention. Now, in the bright morning light, they noticed that the Experiment Building's entrance was a thick black steel door that looked even sturdier than the walls. All the windows were seamless blastproof glass, ventilation relied entirely on the ventilation system, and even without curtains, no one outside could see in.
"Could this be the legendary... One-Way Glass that often appears in those *****?" Yuan Dang spoke with complete seriousness, but his words did not match his upright appearance at all.
Overall, Ren Suo's roommates were fairly ordinary. They kept an appropriate distance from one another and were not idiotic enough to decide who was first, second, third, or fourth brother by age—why the hell would they do that after only five days as roommates? They only chatted a little and had barely revealed anything about their backgrounds.
But this intensive training was not military training. It was the stairway from being ordinary people to becoming transcendent. Even those who normally kept their emotions hidden could not help revealing their true feelings out of excitement. Though they still held some things back, they had become fairly good friends. The embarrassing nighttime topics among men were an important part of their bonding.
Jie Qiansi might have made friends with a purpose, but his appearance and manner of speaking were genuinely good, and he had become someone most people in the Eighth Team could talk to. Yuan Dang had been the first to master the Intermediate Cultivation Method, had graduated from one of Xuan Kingdom's TOP2 universities, and usually carried himself like a dog-headed strategist. After getting familiar with people, he loved making dirty jokes. Zhao Huo, meanwhile, merely kept his head down and cultivated, utterly unremarkable.
"We're leaving at noon today. Aren't we supposed to cultivate?" Ren Suo sighed. "I still haven't reached rotation."
Like forming a qi vortex, making it rotate did not actually take much time. However, it depended heavily on aptitude. Some took two or three days, while others could take a year. As for why the gap could be so large, the middle-aged scholar in Aura Cognition Class had explained it this way: forming the vortex was like sperm and egg combining, while rotation was like the fetus taking shape.
Some were premature Seven-Star Children, while others were Nezha and needed three years before they popped out.
So far, it had been discovered that reaching rotation was not closely related to aptitude. Some cultivators with low aptitude could activate their qi vortex in just a few days, while some with high aptitude could form their vortex in the morning and achieve rotation by evening.
No principle had been found yet. They could only rely on luck, but cultivation would definitely accelerate the process of reaching rotation. That was why Ren Suo was so eager to seize every chance to cultivate.
After witnessing the power of Clothing and Lock yesterday, Ren Suo longed to master this transcendent power too, even though he had the Little Tyrant game console. At present, the game console's rewards were all limited to the realm of "ordinary people." The only unexpected thing had been that Physical Fitness Optimization, which he did not know had helped activate his qi vortex.
Yet as soon as Ren Suo spoke, his roommates all turned to look at him with expressions that said, I understand. They patted Ren Suo's shoulder kindly, looking at him as though he were a loser in life.
Jie Qiansi said, "I know. You must want to keep your distance now... There are plenty more fish in the sea."
Yuan Dang said, "Besides, it's not like you have no chance. We're all from Lianjiang City."
Zhao Huo said, "Mm-hm."
After speaking, they looked at the girls at the front of the Eighth Team, then at Ren Suo, and sighed.
Ren Suo rarely used his brain to think about what they meant. Realizing last night that his miraculous maneuver had somehow charmed a girl was the first time in his twenty-some years that he had ever had such an epiphany. Normally, he was a goal-oriented human being who stared fixedly at his objective and thought about nothing else.
At exactly eight in the morning, the instructors arrived one after another. Yu Kuangtu, who had only appeared once before, showed up again. He walked up to the steel door, grabbed its pull ring with one hand, and forcibly hauled it open!
The trainees stared in astonishment. The instructors hurriedly took the opportunity to show off. "If Clothing is strengthened to its limit, it can even cancel out the reactive force from whatever it touches. This is basic stuff. You youngsters are far too inexperienced."
Yuan Dang muttered, "Now that is the most powerful Lock..."
No one disagreed with Yuan Dang. Before such a plain iron door, all high-tech cracking equipment was meaningless. Only the most brutal, fundamental violence could open it!
Or perhaps they could use power beyond mortal imagination—the power of immortals!
After opening the door, Yu Kuangtu led the others inside first. Under the instructors' directions, the rest lined up to enter the third floor of the Experiment Building. Teams that had not been called remained downstairs to wait.
This resembled the inspection on the final day of military training, so naturally it drew everyone's dissatisfaction. However, the instructors who remained downstairs were not standing around idly. They had the others sit on the ground while they demonstrated derivative techniques of Clothing and Lock.
The trainees had learned Clothing and Lock, but learning that one plus one equaled two did not mean they could solve Fourier equations. The instructors merely displayed a few advanced techniques, and the trainees immediately cried out in amazement—things like "Partial Clothing," "Clothing Tough Armor," and "Life-Stealing Scissor Lock"...
The most impressive was the powerful technique Zhao Jingzhong demonstrated: the Clothing Lock Secret Method! Anyone who came into contact with Zhao Jingzhong's outer layer of invisible Clothing lost control of their entire body and froze, as though they had been attacked by Lock!
Only then did everyone learn that Zhao Jingzhong was a formidable first-rotation cultivator. Even among the military cultivators who had begun cultivating before them, the Clothing Lock Secret Method was a top-tier technique. Even if one were taught its intricacies, it would still take countless hours to practice, let alone the fact that such techniques might not be available to learn at all.
When the others asked how they could learn these techniques, the instructors merely smiled faintly. "You'll know once you go back."
"Why does that sound like a flag? I feel like we'll run into trouble as soon as we leave the base."
That long-unheard voice, impossible to tell as male or female and coming from nowhere, spoke up again. The trainees downstairs immediately fell silent. They had previously thought it was some mischievous person making snarky comments, but now they realized that even the instructors could not find the speaker. Whoever it was had likely used some advanced Aura Technique that no one could detect.
After a while, the Seventh Team came downstairs one after another. Some looked delighted, while others looked calm; there was no way to tell what they had experienced. Zhao Jingzhong led the Eighth Team up to the third floor, where they waited outside a sealed room. Each person went in alone and only emerged several minutes later.
When it was Ren Suo's turn, he found the room extremely spacious. Only Yu Kuangtu and three men in Black Vests sat to one side. On the floor lay a strange black tile covering a full four square meters, with four objects resembling photography softboxes pointed at it.
Yu Kuangtu gestured for Ren Suo to enter the black-tile area. "Run the Breathing Method. One or two minutes will do."
Ren Suo followed his instructions. One or two minutes later, Yu Kuangtu and the other three all raised their eyebrows.
Under Ren Suo's uneasy gaze, Yu Kuangtu said calmly:
"Your aptitude for aura breathing is 1.25."
After a pause, he added:
"At present, the average aptitude of newly promoted cultivators is 1.77."
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