《Solitary Sovereign》10. Incorporeal Visualisation
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Admiring his craftsmanship, Yun Fei rubbed some animal grease onto the bow in order to prevent splitting, and then proceeded to make arrows.
He cut and ground branches from a particularly hard-wooded tree, making them rather thick in order to complement the sheer power of the bow, increasing their piercing power.
He decided to make saw-toothed arrowheads from the bones of the demon beasts. After being feathered, the arrows looked extremely gruesome and barbaric with their jagged, pure white head.
‘Wash your neck and wait for me, you damn reptile, this Yun Fei has decided to not take any losses ever since he entered this forest.... Wait, now that I think about it, isn’t it all neck? So should it take a bath to wait for me? Actually, where does the neck even end and the tail begin?‘
Yun Fei mused as he kept making arrows and arrowheads out of the bones of the gorilla.
Picking up a finished arrow that was close to a meter, he notched the arrow on the bowstring.
The draw weight of the bow was currently a little too strong for Yun Fei, but he had decided on maintaining it since he planned to get stronger anyway.
Drawing the bow as far as his strength allowed him to, Yun Fei aimed at a tree some distance away and released it.
The projectile flew true, piercing the air before slamming into the tree and decimating it, screwing a fist wide hole through it. Impressed by its power and piercing ability, he drew once more, aiming for a tree further away.
He let loose and once again, swooshing through the air, the arrow struck the tree, impaling itself deeply.
A frown creased his brow, dissatisfied, Yun Fei thought, ‘The arrow deviated considerably from my projected path. Shooting further away is a lot harder, too many factors are at play here…’’
‘I must practice to perfection, but still it’s not all bad, the power is phenomenal. This should cause the serpent to thrash like a worm in salt,’ said Yun Fei, smiling as he looked at the nearby tree, which had actually been slightly twisted at the point of impact.
Inspecting the used arrows, he found that the arrowheads were slightly worn out, but this could not be helped because of the power of the bow.
He decided to try a few different styles in order to find the best fit for him.
Yun Fei created a quiver from some leather to hold the arrows and chose a tree that was about 150 metres away from him to start practicing his aim. He loosened the string to decrease the strength of the bow because he was practicing from a close distance and didn’t want the arrows to pass completely through the trees.
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The higher the strength of the bow, the more the arrowheads would wear.
Yun Fei didn’t require any kind of target markings, to him; 150 metres was so close that he could even make out the patterns of someone’s fingers if they raised their hands. He chose a particular piece of bark right in the middle of the trunk, and drew the string.
The arrow went straight towards the tree, hitting just half a centimeter off from the place intended by him. Not getting discouraged, he drew another arrow and aimed it directly at the tail of the arrow impaled into the tree.
The arrow shot forwards and this time really hit the intended target, splitting the exposed part of the first arrow into 2 pieces.
He started doing it again and again, trying to shoot the back of the arrow that was shot before the one on the string, sometimes succeeding and sometimes missing with a small margin.
Trying to pick an arrow from the quiver, he realised that he was out of them.
He looked towards the tree he was shooting.
‘Aaaah shit, only a few have survived. Now I have to go back to making arrows again, why did I have to be so dumb...
This is very inefficient, I can’t do this next time.’
Yun Fei voiced to himself as he picked another log and started carving straight sticks out of it, thinking of going to retrieve the arrow heads and the fletchings from the pincushion of a tree later.
As the sun set, Yun Fei was having the first thing with wings that he had ever eaten. It tasted pretty novel.
‘A bow sure is convenient for hunting.’ he thought.
After cultivating straight for 5 hours, he once again picked up the bow and his newly carved arrows. Standing close to 220 metres this time, He once again chose a tree and started practicing his aim and improving his stance while trying to shoot the arrows fast.
This time he avoided shooting the back of the arrows, and shot at different places to reduce wastage of time and resources.
Yun Fei had created the bow more than a month ago and started practicing his archery; he could gradually shoot from greater distances, so he decided to start practicing on moving targets and other beasts with some cultivation.
He never stopped cultivating during this time, and now his body was stronger than before. The greatest benefits that he reaped wouldn’t be his skill in archery, but in his skill of utilisation of the visual prowess that he already had.
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Breathing out, stabilizing his body, Yun Fei squinted, aiming his bow and visualizing the line his arrow could pick, threading past the dense foliage and impaling the unwary squirrel nibbling on its stash.
As he was trying to imagine the path, he could very vividly see a ray of blue light appearing in his vision, which was exactly like how he intended it to be. He never knew that his imagination could be so vividly drawn over the landscape which he was seeing in real time.
This line existed only in Yun Fei’s mind and only he could see it, but for him; it was no different from a literal beam of light which illuminated the path for his arrow.
Just as he was able to visualise this, he felt some of the information included by Sun Ming entering his brain.
‘So this is just an auxiliary ability which can be done if the eye technique has a little progress in the first step.
Incorporeal Visualisation
This name indeed suits it very well‘
Thought Yun Fei.
He knew from this incident that Sun Ming had only included the minimum information, and he would have to try and find ingenious ways to use his ability on his own.
As it is said, though the pen is mightier than the sword, an illiterate person can only use it for stabbing someone in the eye. Without figuring out the way to benefit from his abilities, they are just a waste of time to cultivate.
Seeing his arrow nail a rabbit to a tree, Yun Fei, crouching on a tree branch half a kilometre away cursed
‘Just what the fuck is going wrong.. this arrow should’ve clearly hit it in the neck, it still hit the torso. I am already accustomed to accommodating the pull of the earth and the movement of the target into my shooting, but it still doesn’t follow the line which I visualize.’
After many days of archery, he was pretty much used to the pull of gravity on the arrow and could also aim properly, calculating the movement of his target.
The thing that bugged Yun Fei was that, even though he did everything perfectly, sometimes he was still a little off the mark from the exact place he wanted the arrow to be.
‘The inaccuracies are mostly random, and they only happen sometimes. From now on I will properly observe each shot and then try to note the differences in each situation to pinpoint the reason for it.’
Yun Fei calmed down, and decided to think of the situation rationally, set on finding out the reason for these inaccuracies.
Two days later.
Yun Fei laughed a little and said loudly,
“So this stupid wind was the reason, I can shoot accurately without the wind. The wind has more chance to interfere with the arrow if I shoot it from farther away. It doesn’t matter, I’ll get used to reading the wind eventually.”
The pride that he felt for his talent in archery reduced a little as Yun Fei thought that he had been too stupid to ignore such a basic thing as the wind.
However, this was inevitable. He was completely self taught. He figured out his stance, aim, factoring in the pull of gravity by himself with experimenting and rationale.
If other archers knew that Yun Fei had reached this level in just over a month, they would cough up blood in anger and curse their lack of talent.
Time passed but Yun Fei was stuck in a troublesome bottleneck in his archery technique. He could simply not predict the random gusts of wind or even the soft breeze that threw him off a little.
Deep in meditation, Yun Fei pondered over a solution. Drawing in a deep breath, he opened his eyes as he began to exhale. Suddenly his eyes lit up as he leapt to his feet, rushing to his bow in order to test his epiphany.
Picking a target 650 metres away he slowly notched the arrow and calmed himself before visualizing the line that he predicted the arrow would take, instead of shooting the arrow he closed shut his eyelids exuding a faint mist of Qi, which slowly gathered and condensed into a shell for his left eye.
Opening his left eye he smiled at the sight that greeted him, faint gradients of translucent flow were everywhere. Yun Fei smiled as he knew what they were, AIR FLOWS. His visualized path shimmered as it corrected itself slightly, flowing along the currents he perceived.
In a single fluid motion, Yun Fei drew and released the bow. He watched with confidence as the arrow followed the blue line to a T before slamming into the target.
‘Bullseye, just you wait, you slippery bitch. Daddy’s coming for your skin.’
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