Midnight Shower

Jack chuckled to himself and quickly moved through the trees with expert movements. By the time the unknown child screamed, Jack was already a fair distance away. Still, he was close enough to hear it and he couldn't help but smile. Truth be told, he enjoyed performing that little prank. In fact, he could have simply snuck past the boy after tripping him up the first time, but he simply couldn't help himself from pulling the boy's hair!

It was too hilarious!

What Jack didn't know, however, was that the boy he had just pulled a prank on was the fifth, and youngest, son of Redris Calles, Kerio Calles. That stone house was the home of Redris' fourth wife and Jack had narrowly avoided the small number guards patrolling the area because they were distracted with an unrelated incident. That said, they wouldn't have been able to spot him even if they had been there.

Whatever the case, Jack's small act of petty childishness would cause him a lot of trouble down the line and would ultimately result in the complete annihilation of the Calles household. However, in that moment, Jack was blissfully unaware of the small commotion he'd caused with his actions.

Jack kept moving for about two hours before he actually made it to the poorer district of Groamburk. The reason he aimed for those areas was twofold: firstly, less prying eyes; secondly, easier to find an empty house with a well he could use.

As soon as he arrived there, Jack sent out his spiritual sense and quickly found an abandoned edifice whose structure showed that it had once served as workhouse a few streets from the southernmost walls surrounding Groamburk. He made his way there.

The building was old and decrepit, but its core structures were intact. In truth, the workhouse itself had all the signs of once having been a superb construction. Its pillars were strong and made from a strange metallic alloy which was then covered in concrete. Although they looked to be made from stone at a simple glance, Jack could easily identify its superior craftmanship thanks to his strong spiritual sense.

The workshop was two stories tall; the lower floor had been the main workshop area whilst the second floor was built as a storage room. Its exterior facade had fallen apart due to the advent of time and lack of care, which meant that there were a few holes in the walls and there were lots of vines growing chaotically on them; the interior side of which had many moss-covered spots. The windows were narrow and placed far up on the wall, giving the workshop some valuable privacy. On the eastern wall was a large furnace that, despite the passage of time, hadn't degraded in the least. In other words, it just needed kindling and it would be fully operational.

On the northern wall there were some desks and empty spaces above them which had evidently served as a place for storing tools of different shapes and sizes but which had long been looted. In fact, besides the furnace and a few broken clay bowls scattered across the floor, there wasn't much of anything left in the workshop. Thankfully, the front door was still mostly intact even though the lock had long been forced open.

Jack turned and examined the entirety of the workshop and was genuinely satisfied with it. With a bit of remodelling and repairs, this once abandoned workshop would serve as an ideal space to practice his martial techniques as well as forging, alchemy, and array formations. In his current weakened state, the workshop would become a safe haven for his endeavours.

In that moment, Jack decided that he would press Jadelere into purchasing this building and he himself would turn it into a workable structure.

Additionally, there was a well with a complex piping structure next to furnace which was Jack's current objective. These pipes pumped water from the well into a large container that could be opened up in a shower-like manner that must have served as a source for quenching water yesteryear, when the workshop was still fully operational.

Whatever the case, it would now serve as his own shower; something he missed dearly after thousands of years in the Abyss.

The piping, much to Jack's regret, was damaged and no water was pumped up no matter how much he fidgeted with the operating dials. He spent a long time trying to identify the source of the problem but he was ultimately unable to do so. It seemed this would be a problem that would require a diligent inspection into the root cause of the matter. He could only surmise that the reason the pumping was still in place was due to its inherent malfunction; otherwise it made no sense that it would still be there.

However, now was not the time for such an endeavour.

As such, Jack contented himself with pulling out half a dozen buckets of water and filling the container over the furnace manually. Once he was done, he quickly undressed and activated the mechanism for the water to wash over him. Although the water was cold owing to the lack of heat in the workshop, it still felt extremely refreshing for Jack.

The water washed away the remnant gunk of impurities on his skin and made them flow towards a drain on the floor. Just the feeling of being clean was amazing. However, Jack couldn't just leave like that; he entered a meditative state and remained like that under the flowing water, allowing the enlightenment that he'd gained during his recent breakthrough to fully incorporate itself into his dao.

The flow of water helped him achieve that; a habit for his previous life on Earth.

Afterwards he picked up his clothes and, just to be sure that there was no remaining smell, he washed them too. It was a pity that he didn't have a change of clothes to slip into while he waited for his used apparel to dry, and he had no desire to walk the streets of Groamburk completely naked. Therefore, he only had one option left to him.

Jack put the damp clothes back on and began practicing a rather complex martial technique he had discovered whilst wandering the Abyss Library: an unnamed technique that had been lost to the ages which he had dubbed Exploding Fist; a simple name that failed to deliver an accurate image of the power contained within this technique. That said, Jack held a belief that overinflated names are actually harmful to a technique's true essence and that only those who practice it over and over again can bring to the limelight.

Exploding Fist was an ancient technique belonging to an extinct race that boasted superior bodies. It worked by igniting the power of every smidgen of qi in one's body into a burning essence that, once unleashed, exploded with unimaginable potency by concentrating all that power into a single, small, point. This point could any part of the body that the user chose; and when the technique was mastered fully, one could hypothetically extinguish a star simply with a flick of a finger.

However, the practice of this technique required an extremely powerful body or the user would break down under the stress of the energy channelled so wantonly through the user's meridians. It also demanded insanely high comprehension skills. Luckily, Jack had both.

Jack entered a horse stance and slowly raised his fist into a horizontal blocking motion. Although his movement was slow, every single muscle in his body was tensed up and exercising full power, and the qi from inside his dantian was revolving throughout his meridians like a thousand unleashed horses; this meant that he had to control every ounce of his being to keep everything in check and balance.

Maintaining this constant degree of pressure, Jack transitioned to a frontal kick, held the position for a few seconds, then slowly spun around whilst raising his other leg into a heel kick. Once he finished turning, he spun back on the balls of his feet and struck out first with his backhand and then with an elbow.

For the next hour, Jack changed from one position to the next whilst keeping up the extreme slowness of the motions. He went from high, crane-like postures, to low, crouching, tiger lunges. The drain on his muscles quickly became intense, despite the amazing condition of his body, and the qi inside him rumbled like a storm. From this, it could be seen the quality of this technique.

By the time an hour had passed, the energy inside Jack had reached a bubbling point and a great heat was being generated from inside his body. The heat was so strong that a steady stream of steam started emerging from his pores. The steam was his sweat driven by the qi within him that needed a place to vent itself; like a locomotor that has achieved a peak number of revolutions.

This was an after-effect of practicing the Exploding Fist technique because of the way it ignited the qi inside one's body. Next came the most crucial step: releasing the pent-up energy into one point.

Jack spread his legs apart, keeping his centre of gravity low, he then straightened his legs whilst raising his right arm and struck down with his entire strength. He turned his arm inwards during the downward motion so that the point that struck in front of him was his elbow.

Even though he halted his elbow right in front of his hip, the energy contained in the strike was released and punctured a hole in the ground with a large bang!

The hole was three inches in diameter and Jack's spirit sense revealed that it went down a bit over two feet. And this was considering that the floor of the workshop was made of reinforced stone built to handle the heat of the furnace! The power of that strike could easily be imagined.

Jack could only surmise that if his strike had landed on a person, they would have had a large cavity blasted in their chest even if they wore a full set of armour. That said, the technique still had two very pressing downsides. The first was that the Exploding Fist technique, although inherently powerful, needed him to warm up for an hour before he could pull it off. In that sense, it wasn't a useful technique. However, Jack was certain that if he practiced it regularly, he would be able to summon that level of power easily. If he were in dire straits, he could always conceal himself, prepare the technique, and then lash out with explosive power and carry out a surprise attack.

The second drawback was an issue of energy. Just this one strike had depleted almost half of the qi he had remaining, which was a non-negligible amount in the slightest. He could only continue cultivation and make up for this drawback with both quality and quantity of qi.

On the positive side, he now had experienced the full changes that his body had benefitted from after his meridians had been fully reforged. Not only could they cope with ten times the amount of qi flowing through them, the flow itself was almost instant, as if the qi would appear exactly where he needed it with just his summoning of it. Furthermore, his speed of absorption of the world's natural qi had increased by leaps and bounds.

If a normal martial practitioner heard of this astonishing feat, they would only have one word left in their vocabulary to describe Jack: devil.

Jack stretched his muscles and massaged a few bits of his body out of old habits in order to drive away the stiffness, but his body had become incredible and there was absolutely no need for him to do it. In fact, because he'd reinforced his internal organs following the method described in the Harmony if Everything, Jack's heart wasn't even beating too rapidly.

And this was considering he was still a three-year-old child!

Jack went out of the workshop and examined the night-sky. From his astronomy lessons with Jadelere, and judging by the position of the stars, Jack guessed that the time was nearing three in the morning. It was time for him to return to the Hare Manor.

He checked his muscles one last time and then nodded in satisfaction when he confirmed once more that they were in peak state. Then, he moved his boulder, which he had grown slightly attached to, to the second floor of the workshop. In order to avoid any complications from his activities, he decided to inscribe a few advanced runes that would conceal any traces he'd left behind.

It never hurt to be cautious.