34 - Adjusting

As Su Tao went into the dimension of his eyes, he expected there to be some sort of change, but to his great disappointment, there was almost no change whatsoever.

The only thing that he saw was different was that the tiny white particle of light in between his eyes was now twice the size, but it was still barely even visible. He also felt that the pulling on his consciousness was a little stronger, but that was it.

He expected the balls of eye power to at least get a little bit bigger, but they didn't. He could not help but wonder what exactly it was that made them grow in the first place. It previously seemed like they got stronger as he did, but that no longer seemed to be the case.

As there was nothing more to see in the dimension of his eyes, he left and went back to his body.

The next thing that he wanted to try was to experiment with how well he could hide the aura of his inner energy within his body. However, he was surprised when he tried to sense the aura to begin with.

The watery inner energy that had gone through his body while he was breaking through had left an aura on him, but he realized that absolutely no aura whatsoever escaped from his dantian. He found this extremely odd.

Normally, when one had just broken through, their control of their inner energy was terrible and it would seep out of their dantian, giving off an aura of inner energy that they couldn't stop. However, when Su Tao tried to sense the inner energy leaking out of his dantian, he found that there wasn't any energy leaking out at all.

But then, when he used the black blood to try to sense the situation of his body, he realized that the dantian itself was stopping the inner energy from leaking out.

'It looks like my dantian gained the ability of the black blood to trap energy as well.' He thought to himself in surprise. He could not help being happy from this.

This meant that, because the dantian had the ability to trap inner energy and aura, no inner energy would leak out no matter how bad his control over it was.

After all, even though he could use inner energy to make a barrier on any part of his body, it did not mean that he had the ability to completely control it. After all, he had no experience whatsoever in this sort of thing, and it was completely different from controlling Qi.

Even if his control over his body was extremely precise due to his eyes, this did not in any way translate to inner energy.

But moving past this point, he then tried to use the black blood in his body to isolate and dissolve the watery inner energy in his body, and to his pleasant surprise, it worked without taking much time at all. It seemed that because it was his own inner energy, it was much easier to dissolve.

Of course, he only tried to dissolve the aura, and he found it easier than dissolving the aura of the poisonous woman and the lightning man who were both high tier silver ranks.

He had no other reference to compare it to since these two were the only ones he had fought with since he discovered the ability to cover his aura, and the beasts that he hunted didn't have a specific element to their inner energy due to just eating random plants, which made it extremely impure.

He could almost instantly dissolve the aura and actually the inner energy itself of the beasts that he killed in the forest with the use of the black blood due to its extreme impurity. As such, they naturally could not possibly be compared to a person who only cultivated only one kind of element.

As such, he had no point of reference.

But at this point in time, he had a goal. He wanted to familiarize himself with the use of his inner energy and make it so that he could use it in the way he wanted to. He also had a thought to try to use the power of his eyes on top of his inner energy and see the effect it brought.

As he thought about this, he directed some of the watery inner energy out of his dantian and sent it to his fists. He could send it to his whole body, but he chose not to at this moment.

The moment he did so, he could see many areas that were weaker than the rest and many areas that would break apart very easily. Controlling the inner energy, he tried to strengthen these areas.

After a while, he managed to be able to control the inner energy in his fists without any flaws, so he moved on to the rest of his body. Another while later, he could make sure that there were no flaws in the inner energy barrier across his whole body.

Most people couldn't dream of moving this fast, but he had the advantage of his eyes which could see every weak area and every single flaw that he could fix, allowing him to move many many times faster than others.

He then moved onto the lightning inner energy, and he found that this inner energy was the exact opposite of the watery inner energy.

The watery inner energy was able to allow the user to easily purge other energies from their body and allowed a limited healing ability. The way it attacked was usually flowing through the flaws of the enemy's defense to get into their body and impede them. Its forte was obviously defense.

However, lightning aimed to destroy everything in its path, and it was extremely fast. It would use pure power to break through the enemy's defenses and go into their body, wreaking havoc and disabling them temporarily.

As such, when Su Tao tried to control the lightning inner energy in the same way as the watery inner energy, it instead got extremely chaotic and started to hurt him. As such, he quickly stopped and instead tried to figure out what the lightning inner energy was best for.

He quickly discovered that he could use it within his body to increase his speed while he could use it outside in the form of the inner energy barrier to make explosive power and a numbing energy that would go into the enemy that would disable them.

He found that the lightning inner energy would not properly make a solid barrier, but it was rather specifically to attack. Lightning was just too chaotic and random to make a solid barrier that had no flaws in it. Attacking was its main forte, and it had terrible defense.

However, if Su Tao combined these two, he would have a strong defense and a powerful offense, which was a perfect combination.

But when Su Tao then tried to use both inner energies at once, he was annoyed to find that the powers were clashing in his body, and they were not working together.

However, the next moment, he found that the black blood in his body interacted with the two energies and prevented them from clashing, and after that, they did not clash anymore even when the black blood was not interfering, which he found extremely weird.

However, this meant that he would be stronger, so he didn't care at all.

He found that as long as he did not use the two different inner energies at the same time in the same place, he would not have any issues. This meant that he could still use both, as long as he didn't overlap them.

As such, he quickly tried to use the watery inner energy to cover his whole body except his fists while his fists were covered in the lightning inner energy. To his joy, it worked without any issues, and his whole body was protected while his fists would have stronger attack power.

He could not stop himself from getting overjoyed.

Then, he wanted to see what would happen if he merged the power of his eyes into his inner energy, so he took a sharp rock and cut his palm.

The watery inner energy had a healing factor on its own, so it already started to heal before the power of his left eye got involved. However, it was much slower than the power of his eye.

But as the power of his left eye arrived and piled on top of the watery inner energy, it started to heal at a visible speed. Anyone that saw this would be astonished.

Normally, it would take a day to a week of time for a cut like this to heal for a normal person, but it was completely healed in a matter of only a few minutes while not using much energy from his watery inner energy or the power of his eye.

Su Tao was extremely happy with this. The healing speed was at least one and a half times to two times as fast as before.

Then, he tried it with the lightning, and the result was not nearly as good. Because of the low quality and purity of the lightning inner energy, the power of his right eye was only boosted by one and a quarter times.

He then tried to use as much of the power of his right eye and his lightning inner energy at the same time as he could, and he punched a nearby tree.

Normally, he would only be able to cause a little bit of singeing and perhaps burn a bit of it, but when he struck this tree, it directly broke apart, leaving a large chunk of the trunk missing and the area around the missing chunk was burning.

He was satisfied with this strength, but he was also a bit annoyed at the same time.

The power of it was equal to a hit from someone that was a stronger low tier two star silver rank as opposed to just barely meeting the qualifications to be at the two silver star level. This was a bit stronger than before, and he was happy.

However, he felt that even thought he had tried to use as much as he could, he couldn't use all the power of his right eye in this one hit, and he was left with a quarter of it left. He felt that this was the limit of what he could use at this moment.

But he was still happy because this meant that he could unleash his most powerful hit and still have some power from his right eye left after doing it. This meant that he wouldn't be helpless after using this hit like he was before. On top of that, he had his inner energy, which was much more plentiful than the power of his eyes.

Inner energy came from the dantian, and the density of it within the dantian determined how much of it was capable of being in there. This was what was mainly upgraded through the ranks as well as the quality and purity of it.

Only after your inner energy's purity, quality, and quantity were high enough could you actually break through to the next rank. This was comprehension, as all of these required skills, methods, or techniques to improve, and the better you could comprehend them, the better chance you would have to reach the next rank.

This was why their were tiers within one rank. It was based on the quantity, quality, and purity of the person's inner energy, and this was why there was such a big difference between the tiers. It did not necessarily refer to 0%, 25%, 50%, and 75%.

It was a distinction between strength, which meant that Su Tao could technically be considered to be a stronger low tier even though he had only just broken through.

Each tier would be separate from one another, because the quality, quantity, and purity would all have four minor breakthroughs in the one star silver rank, and this continued into higher ranks. This breakthrough was relative to the power of the user, although not by a lot.

So some low tiers might be stronger than some middle tiers. Some middle tiers might be stronger than high tiers, and so on.

In other words, the tiers were small breakthroughs in each rank that did not correspond to the actual breakthrough progress of the cultivator, but they were a distinction of strength between them.

(I worded that really confusingly but I think you get the point)

If he used the power of his eyes, he was equivalent to a high tier, but that would not last long.

Then, Su Tao spent the rest of the day further adapting to his power and experimenting with how he could use it with the black blood and the power of his eyes.

The next day, Su Tao went to look for lightning resources. He was not optimistic about finding anything good enough, but he could at least find something to help with the low purity and quality of the lightning inner energy in his body.

He ended up searching for resources for a total of three days, and he ended up finding a good one.

Most of the lower level resources were now useless to Su Tao, so he only picked the higher quality of them. However, he had managed to find something on the level of the water moon lotus for the element of lightning.

He found this oddly appropriate considering that today was his birthday. He was now sixteen.