Complete focus technique

Mortal tier technique. No cultivation requirements

As a direct comparison to mental rejuvenation, this technique holds a direct use in a martial setting. As such, it is generally recommended to train in something similar to this quite early on in your life. It will not only help you as an alchemist but almost any facet of life, providing you go well over your limits.

Created explicitly by alchemists to give them an edge in processing with extreme precision, the simplest form existed for hundreds of thousands of years. We have refined and moulded this technique to our whims over all this time, and I present a universally usable version of this technique once more. Similarly, it is significantly weaker than the more specialised variants available.

Activation and requirements Have a soul and consciousness (The technical requirement is free-thought) Be capable of breathing Be awake

The requirements are exactly the same as mental rejuvenation, and as such you can only have one of the two active at any time. Of course, if you’re a rare person capable of splitting their mind and soul, then go ahead and use them both at once. It’s just questionable if you actually gain anything from doing this.

The first thing to note is your limits. Whilst mental rejuvenation forces your body to ignore the effect of your waning mental energy, complete focus does no such thing. This technique entirely focuses on consuming more energy to improve your focus, or your precision to be exact.

Set up is important for this technique, and may be the longest part about training in it. However, since most children can easily learn this in a few days I fail to see why any alchemist would fail with my universal technique. Focus on preparing everything the technique asks for and only then start practising it.

Begin by visualising a sharp blade. The most critical component is the blades sharpness, and as such you should place more attention there. It does not matter if the metal is fragile, some actually use glass as it’s sharper, but you should give a general form of a blade. This is part of a mental reinforcement. Since we inherently see these items as ‘sharp’ from an immature age we can ease a lot of the learning process by hanging off this natural occurrence. For races where this concept does not come from, it only makes the overall visualisation a bit harder

With the blade formed, to the sharpest your mind can imagine, go ahead and finish it off with a handle. This is not at all necessary. Most people simply don’t feel comfortable with grasping anything with a sharp edge, so this portion will simply remove a level of distraught in the common man. Fancy guards, pommels, or engravings are completely unnecessary. Although, some readers still feel the need to point out how this technique would be improved by adding some.

They completely missed the universal point of this technique in the end.

With the blade formed you must now transfer to imagining your hand grasping the weapon, although it’s obviously not there. Instead think of what it would feel like, focusing on the texture, grain, temperature, and so on…

This part can take the longest for two reasons.

You did not visualise the blade properly. If anything about the object is hazy then you’ll already fail with you yourself not truly knowing what the material is like. A beginner’s mistake is just imagining some extremely powerful metal that can cut through everything, but that utterly fails when you need to imagine how it feels. In the name of common sense, just use a simple metal you interact with all the time. Steel and aluminium are common in most worlds already, and those work as good bases.

The second point of failure is improper imagination of the feeling. This can take a lot of forms because there are lots of things to consider initially. Some people say the easiest way around this is to simply model the blade off something you own in reality and visualise that. However, I find that using a completely unseen blade is better for training your skills in visualisation and imagining objects, which you will surely need down the line. Just keep on thinking about every part of your object until it is no different from how the actual thing would rest in your hand.

Now for the breathing part, except it’s a bit more complex. Unlike before where the only part was remembering the cycle, you now require a build-up of muscle memory. You can do this entirely off memory, but that becomes extremely difficult if you’re trying to practise another technique.

Using your imagined blade, cut in the directions as shown by the diagram below.

It does not matter what order you complete the cuts in, simply that you complete all five cuts towards their meeting place. Red dots all represent the starting placement of your blade, while the blue dot represents the central meeting point. The arrows are to show direction.

For the specifics, you are drawing five lines which connect the points of a star to its centre. Anyone could draw links as to why any of this is important, like saying this is equivalent to dragging the five senses to one, but all that’s just rubbish. This movement is an activator for the technique, nothing more, nothing less.

The individual cuts must be completed in a certain fashion though. Use a slow, gliding cut each and every time.

Then comes the breathing alongside every cut which, unlike the movements, require a specific order. For example, you may choose to start from 3rd point on the diagram, but you must begin with the 1st breathing action. Your next cut may be the 5th point on the diagram but your breath will be the 2nd one given. This is why muscle memory plays such a big part here, as you will need to choose whichever order is most comfortable for you.

The five breaths are as follows:

Short breath in, and quickly breathe out. Do not stop breathing out if you finish the 1st cut before this, continue until you empty your lungs. Do not begin the next cut until you empty your lungs. Breathe in through the mouth, do not stop until your lungs are filled. Similarly, if you finish the 2nd cut too before finishing your breath, just fill your lungs quickly. Slowly breathe out while making the 3rd cut, but do not empty your lungs. When you finish the cut immediately stop breathing out. Completely empty your lungs once more. Finish this action even if you complete the 4th cut already. For the final 5th cut, keep your lungs entirely empty. No air should flow in or out of your body in this final stage.

Repeating these actions immediately is not required. Once you finish the final cut the technique will activate which is easy to notice as your general senses are improved massively. If this part has failed then you may have met a shortcoming at one of the many points.

In regard to the breathing and cutting part there are a couple more errors you can make. Most notably is not following the breathing set as laid out. There is no need to start off fast, so even if you need a minute to complete the set, go for it!

Then there are some who do not line up their cuts properly. These parts can be hardest for people with poor hand-eye coordination, but simple drills every day can resolve this. Making accurate attacks is a requirement for any fighter, even more so for a cultivator where the width of a hair could define your life and death. Not to mention in alchemy, where precision is one of the most important skills to train.

A common solution for the latter problem is to train your cuts on pieces of paper with the points marked. This lets you know how far off all your movements are, allowing for easier refinement. The only solution I know of for the former is to simply slow down. Rushing your learning will only hinder you on this long path.

Well, there’s nothing left to say from here. If you activated the technique then you’ve done it, if not then go back to the training ground. It’s just a matter of time until you perform it.

Usage

Massively improving the senses is rather vague, so we’ll use some proper justification for it. Using this technique will double your mind’s mental energy consumption in exchange for tripling your overall senses. Do note that this applies to all senses, so hurting yourself will feel a lot worse in this state. As an alchemist the most useful parts will be the improvements to your sight and touch since they’ll allow for more precision in general. Learning to keep your hand stable is another matter entirely though.

Unlike mental rejuvenation, this technique only needs to be cast once every 10 minutes. As there is no cooldown between uses it means that most will utilise it once every 9 minutes or so to guarantee they never leave this heightened state, especially since leaving this state could mean losing an important moment of clarity over a more difficult technique.

Last are the downsides. Doubling your mental energy consumption is barely a mentionable thing, but this value is pretty poor compared to other techniques. The current most popular technique on the market utilises 3 times as much mental energy for a 5 times increase for your senses. Then you have the far more special techniques that can manage a 10 fold increase in your sense for the same cost of this technique. But those ones aren’t universal, so what can I say?

Dump this one as soon as you can get your hands on a good, applicable one!