Chapter 12 - Strange Dream.

After getting into his room, Raymond just collapsed onto his bed and fell asleep. That night, Raymond had a peculiar dream. In the dream, Raymond could see himself from a third-person perspective, much like that of a movie. With a shiny silver sword in his hand, Raymond was leading an army of more than 5000 cultivators who were fighting against a large number of demonic beasts. With a swing of his sword, hundreds of beasts fell to the ground, dead.

When he looked around, Raymond saw a world that was on fire. The ground was littered with corpses, and the blood formed rivers along the ground. Before he could get time to digest what he had witnessed, Raymond woke up. With fine beads of sweat lining his forehead, Raymond was practically panting when he woke up. Disturbed by the state he was in, Raymond tried his hardest to calm down.

It took him almost an entire minute before his heartbeat went back to normal, but his mind was still disturbed. With a lot on his mind, Raymond decided to take a shower, he needed to get rid of the sweat after all. The cold water was like a bright ray of sunlight, dispelling the darkness in his mind. He had finally managed to calm down. The ominous dream was something that Raymond had no way of understanding, for now, so he decided to "forget" about it until he could properly digest it.

Since he had managed to calm down, Raymond decided to cultivate for a bit, and strive to break through to the 2nd revolution of body-refining as soon as possible. He had already filled two of his energy channels to the brim, so the next step was to fill up the third energy channel. This process was both slow and boring, but Raymond had long prepared himself. He knew that the path of cultivation was both long and arduous.

To fill up the 3rd energy channel took Raymond a total of 6 hours of just absorbing and guiding spiritual energy. Needless to say, this was beyond boring, but Raymond still persisted. The only thing he needed to do now before he could break through the 2nd revolution of body-refining was to connect all of his 3 energy channels together. After connecting all of them together, his energy would revolve around his 3 channels, and in turn, give birth to new spiritual energy when he used up his reserves.

This process was highly dependent on comprehension as opposed to the talent of the body, which was why it didn't even take Raymond an hour to complete it. When he had created his first energy cycle, Raymond felt a sense of accomplishment. Now that he had reached the peak of the first revolution of body-refining, Raymond decided to train his martial arts. After sitting down for so long, his body had long turned stiff; he needed to stretch his legs a bit.

When he grabbed hold of his sword to walk out, Raymond could feel a strange connection to it. To explain it would be difficult, but he felt like the sword was a part of him, a little like a lost limb. He wouldn't feel complete without it. To Raymond, this was a strange feeling. He had only started practising with the sword the day before, did he really need to feel incomplete without it? Something was strange, and Raymond didn't know what it was. He could pretty much guess that it had something to do with the strange situation that happened the day before, but that wasn't really a hard conclusion to come to.

With doubt on his mind, Raymond walked out to the courtyard once again. This time, he was going to focus on training his Basic Fist Art and Basic Footwork Technique. Even though they weren't supposed to be his main techniques, he wanted to at least train them to the rudimentary realm. Martial arts skills could be trained to different levels of mastery, and these were named: rudimentary, intermediate, advanced, perfection and transcendent.

To reach the rudimentary level was just to get a grasp of the technique, and be able to use it in battle. In comparison, the transcendent level was something completely different. To reach the transcendent level, a cultivator would first have to train his technique to perfection, and then go one step further. At this level, a casual attack would transcend the limits of the technique's power, evolving into something completely different altogether.

Before training the Basic Fist Art and the Basic Footwork Technique, Raymond tried swinging his sword for a bit. After using a few moves, Raymond was baffled. It seemed like he had already reached the intermediate level of mastery the day before, even though he had only trained for an hour. Not only that, but his sword had a peculiar swiftness and sharpness to it. This made his technique even more powerful than it should be at the intermediate level.

What Raymond didn't know was that he had managed to achieve enlightenment the day before. If other cultivators knew of this, they would probably wish him harm out of pure jealousy! Receiving enlightenment is something that most cultivators only get to experience at most once in their lifetimes. To receive enlightenment the first time he ever swung a sword... just the notion itself was absurd.

Although Raymond was a little confused by the whole situation, in the end, it could only be a positive thing. Since he now had an idea for where his mastery was with the sword technique, it was time to start training his other techniques. Since he already had one method of attack, Raymond decided to start training the Basic Footwork Technique first.

The manual containing the Basic Footwork Technique was a lot easier to understand than the Azure Wind Sword Art, and Raymond grasped it almost immediately. Putting down the book, he picked up the Basic Fist Art and read through it as well. Like the Basic Footwork technique, the Basic Fist Art was also easy to grasp, and after reading through it once, Raymond had already formed an understanding of it.

Without wasting any additional time, Raymond started to train both of the techniques at the same time. The most important part of the Basic Footwork Technique and Basic Fist Art was stability. There were no fancy tricks to learn or anything like that. They were both very straightforward. Because of their straightforwardness, they were relatively easy to understand and practice. The only "difficult" part was how to use your muscles, but compared to the Azure Wind Sword Art, Raymond found it pretty easy.

After half an hour had passed, Raymond was still shuffling around the courtyard, throwing out punches whenever he saw fit. Beads of sweat dripped from his forehead, and his limbs were starting to feel sore, but he kept going anyways, he felt like he was pretty close to achieving the rudimentary level of mastery for both techniques. To his astonishment, that last little push he needed ended up taking half an hour more.

But in the end, he managed to break through to the rudimentary realm for both techniques.. With a satisfied smile on his face, Raymond looked up at the sky. His journey in this world had just begun!