A sword swung down towards Fortkran with the weight of a thousand boulders. Or at least… one boulder and one very large man. Blocking the attack was a terrible idea, and even parrying it was extremely difficult. He managed a half-dodge half-parry. The sword crashed into the ground, cleaving it apart. That left him a chance to counter with his own sword, striking for the throat of the man in front of him. Then his armpit was tapped by the enemy’s sword.

“Very good, young master Fortkran.” The large man in front of Fortkran was Brage. He was the swordmaster of the Tenebach clan, and even though he was only a couple steps into the Foundation Stage at thirty years old, his swordsmanship left no question to his ability. Quite a few cultivators had met their ends- or at least their significant embarrassment- at his hands when they underestimated him for his relatively lower cultivation. “You’ve improved greatly.”

Fortkran nodded. “Thank you. I feel much more confident. So, what did I do wrong?”

“As I said, you’ve improved greatly…”

“You could have cut off my arm before my blade reached you. You didn’t even go past my cultivation level.”

Brage scratched the back of his head, “Well, I do have a second spiritual totem. That empowers me quite a bit.”

“Look, you’re not paid to compliment me,” the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps he was, to some degree, “I need you to make me as strong as possible. I thought that was a perfect time for a counter, with your sword digging into the ground. But obviously it wasn’t.”

“Alright. It was a feint. You have to know I’m an earth element cultivator. Bouncing my sword off the ground isn’t so difficult. It might seem like an overswing that will lose all momentum, but instead it comes back in a snap. You can tell by reading the way my energy was arranged. Too much on the backside of the sword that was never going to connect with you, so I can have enough power on the reverse. Then there was the way it was always planned to reflect off the ground, though that’s a more subtle thing than the quantities of energy.”

Fortkran nodded. “I’ll have to watch for that. Should I step in more?”

“That can do it. I more or less make it go straight back along the trajectory it was on, with only small deviations. Someone else might do better though. You might instead strike my arm, with it extended so far.”

“I understand. What else? Even tiny things. I need to know what you see so I can fix it.”

“Well, as long as you’re asking… your stance was a smidge narrow. The angle of your blade was off for that particular guard, and you telegraph your attacks too much. Even if all I know is that you’re attacking and not how with your darkness element aiding you, it helps me.”

He would need to keep training with Brage every day. He would also train with his grandfather on the darkness side of things, then there was cultivating on his own, increasing his base level of power. He had an actual goal in the tournament. He needed to be as good as possible. Winning would be desirable, but probably not realistic. At best he might return to the fifth or sixth level by that time, a significant margin weaker than peak ninth level cultivators. That wasn’t counting they might have higher tier totems. Though… he could feel the Seed of Darkness advancing. It might be equivalent to a full second tier before he reached Foundation Phase. Or maybe it would be slightly after. Judging how long either would take was sort of nebulous. It had taken five years to first reach the ninth level of cultivation, but he was fairly certain he could do it in one or two now. Experience paid off, even if it wasn’t his experience.

-----

In private, John wondered if he had been too ambitious. The thought that he could be twice as powerful as he was now if he’d just made a different choice grated on him. But… he couldn’t help it. For his first life he’d first been drifting along a gentle current until a storm hit. Then he’d merely been trying to hold on. He hadn’t become a manager at Brad’s Burgers because that was his life goal. He’d done it because that was where he’d ended up. He put in the effort… but it wasn’t the best place he could have ended up. Humberto was a good boss, and it wasn’t a bad job, but he’d been getting a college education before that. He was going to be… something. A so called ‘real job’. Though managing a restaurant- even a fast food place- was also a real job. But if he was going to do it, he wanted even more. Humberto hadn’t stopped at one location, and perhaps he shouldn’t either.

That was why he planned to complete a full elemental cycle. Even just getting halfway meant he’d have to pass where his parents currently were, and then he’d have to surpass his grandfather. Could he really make up for eighty years and more?

John decided not to worry about it. There was a saying, shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll land among the stars. Of course, realistically someone would end up in wide open space… technically just as among the stars as anywhere else. But motivational phases weren’t supposed to be literal. If he planned to complete a full elemental cycle and only managed to reach late Foundation Phase in twenty or thirty years, he would still not be an embarrassment to his family. If he reached Soul Expansion Phase at all he could be content. The step beyond that was the Consolidated Soul Phase. If he made it there, then the clan he now found himself a part of could be very proud. Beyond that… there weren’t enough cultivators in the Stone Conglomerate that had reached that level for it to have a set name. Even the names for the other stages were generic but not entirely accepted. Earth cultivators might go by Pebble, Boulder, Hill, and so on. However, the fifth phase could be called anything from Brilliant Radiance, Mountain, Demigod, or something like the Pure Spirit Phase. Or just the fifth phase, which was easiest to understand. Some people like that existed, but that was too far off to consider, even though his lifespan would increase as his cultivation did.

In short, he’d planned out a full elemental cycle and would carry it as far as he could. Maybe he’d change his mind at Foundation Phase if he found a totem that perfectly suited him in a higher layer, but somehow he wasn’t sure if he could afford to do that. He might feel like he failed. Then again, he could consider that before doing anything. In the short term, he had a tournament to win… or at least avoid making a terrible display of the clan.

He’d siphoned some earth elemental spiritual energy in his matches with Brage. As he circulated the small remnants he hadn’t used in battle through himself, he felt it absorb into his meridians, tempering them. It was a slightly different feeling than the darkness he had, but he didn’t have enough to learn more. The same was true with Matayal’s water elemental energy. At most a few percent of his total had been a different element, and it was all gone after the first cycle.

Once he was at his peak, he pulled out the technique scroll for Gravity Blade. With a name like that, one would expect that he would be manipulating one of the fundamental forces of nature. While his family had access to fairly good techniques, anything made for those at the Spiritual Collection Phase was a bit more… modest. The exact effect wouldn’t be apparent until he actually was able to perform the technique, but the basic description was that it would add force to his blows among other things.

He circulated his spiritual energy through the prescribed path to eventually reach his hands, where it then extended to his sword. It was much too slow to be used in combat like this, but he did feel something more than just the normal darkness element on his sword. He gave it a swing. It felt sluggish. Like someone was trying to hold it in place. As it was he doubted he would hit harder- he could barely even make it move, and striking someone who was at all aware of him would be difficult. However, he could certainly refine the technique, both his formation and control of it afterwards. Then he would know whether or not he was wasting his time… but he doubted that a truly worthless technique would be in the Tenebach library. Especially one of the darkness element, which they could easily vet for basic functionality. All he had to do was keep practicing so he could see how this ‘gravity’ actually worked.