The moment he confirmed, the world vanished. If the first healing had been a warm furnace, this was being thrown into the heart of a star.
An unimaginable force seized his body, deconstructing it on a cellular level. He felt his bones turn to dust, his muscles unravel into threads, and his organs dissolve into a soupy mess.
It was the feeling of dying all over again, but this time, he was wide awake for it. He couldn’t even scream as his lungs no longer existed.
Then came the reconstruction.
Wisps of dark, silent energy—void energy—flowed from the system, weaving into his essence. They were the threads that stitched him back together.
His bones were not just reformed; they were forged, imbued with a dark, unbreakable lustre. His muscles were woven with fibres of pure strength.
His organs were remade, each one a perfect, humming engine of vitality.
The process felt like an eternity, but it was over in less than a minute.
Rhys gasped, falling to his hands and knees on the forest floor, his body drenched in a sweat that wasn’t sweat, but a black, foul-smelling impurity that had been expelled from his brand-new body.
He took a deep, shuddering breath. The air that entered his lungs felt different, cleaner.
He could feel the spiritual energy in the forest not just on his skin, but inside him, his body naturally drawing it in like a gentle whirlpool.
He stood up, feeling the difference. The previous strength was like wearing a suit of high-quality armour.
This was different. The power wasn’t on him; it was him. He felt like he could punch a hole through a mountain.
He walked over to a moss-covered boulder he had seen before. He didn’t bother with a cultivation technique and simply drew his arm back and threw a casual punch.
There was no explosion—hell, not even a sound. Rhys frowned.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, a web of cracks spread out from his fist, covering the entire surface of the multi-ton boulder.
With a deep groan, the ancient rock crumbled into a pile of gravel.
He stared at his fist. There wasn’t a scratch on it. Not even a red mark. He grinned, a wide, wolfish thing.
"Okay. That’s value for money."
Now for the next part.
He focused on the ’Comprehend Skill’ function again. He needed to be able to move without being seen.
’Basic Stealth’ was an unranked skill everyone in the family received, along with the ’Spark Fist’.
System, teach me how to be sneaky.
[Comprehend ’Basic Stealth’ to Perfection. Cost: 5 years of lifespan.]
Done.
A new flood of information entered his mind: how to control his breathing, how to shift his weight to make no sound, how to use shadows and natural cover to become almost invisible.
He tested it, moving through the dense undergrowth of the Whisperwood. He was a ghost. The leaves didn’t rustle, the twigs didn’t snap.
He could sense the lines of sight, the blind spots, the exact path to take to remain unseen.
Feeling confident, he turned his attention back to the ’Spark Fist’.
System, let’s do that one now.
[Cultivation Technique ’Spark Fist’ detected. Mortal-Grade (Low). Do you wish to comprehend to Perfection? Cost: 40 years of lifespan.]
Confirm.
The tsunami of knowledge hit him again, but this time his Void-Tempered body and mind absorbed it instantly.
He saw the technique not just as a martial art, but as a formula of energy manipulation, and he now understood every variable perfectly.
He found another, even larger boulder. He took his stance, but this time, he channeled the Qi his body was passively absorbing.
He didn’t just throw a punch.
He applied the perfected principles, twisting his wrist at the last possible microsecond, adding a specific vibration from his diaphragm.
FWOOM!
The attack that shot from his fist was no longer a ball of flame. It was a compressed, spinning drill of blazing fire.
It struck the boulder and didn’t explode on the surface. It bored straight through it, leaving a perfectly round, molten tunnel through five feet of solid rock before continuing on and vaporising a tree fifty yards away.
Rhys’s jaw hung open for a second before he burst into laughter.
"A Mortal-Grade (Low) technique... right."
Everyone in his family took decades to perfect this skill. His father was called a prodigy because he mastered it before he was twenty.
What would their expression be if they knew Rhys, the abandoned son of that same prodigy, had achieved perfection at sixteen?
And in the Body Tempering stage, no less.
Rhys laughed, imagining the scene. With this system, there was nothing he couldn’t learn.