Blake ran from Ulfreld with a spring in his step. Thankfully, the Elder didn’t follow him.

  After a few minutes of running, Blake turned and made for his training clearing, where he’d spent so many days before learning the Black Palm. Now, it was time to practice Augmentation and enhance his movement in a more cohesive way by using both halves of the Cloud Body Lightning Fists technique.

  (He would also need a better name for it, he promised himself, but that could come later.)

  First, he climbed to the top of a tree. He held it with one hand, then pushed his feet against the trunk and prepared himself. After a deep breath, he took a glance at the technique slate, then activated the strength-enhancing side.

  It boosted his density, too. The tree leaned over. His body grew so cold that the tip of the tree began hardening. It cracked, threatening to snap with how brittle he made it.

  Then he launched himself. The tree’s tip shattered and exploded in his wake, and he arced up into the air.

  As soon as he began dipping, he reversed the cycling technique. Weight lifted off his body, and he rocketted forward through the air, extending the leap much farther than he would’ve otherwise managed. Trees whipped by below him, and a trail of black sparks streaked through the air behind.

  But he wasn’t entirely weightless. He crashed down about twenty seconds later, body smashing through trees. He put the technique back in its original rotation and boosted his strength again, then sprang off another tree. There were a few branches in the way, but it didn’t matter to his enhanced body and augmentation. The trees exploded into a mess of bark and pine needles. Nothing pierced his skin, let alone broke his bones.

  He repeated the process. It wasn’t quite flying, but with the proper timing, his leaps grew longer and longer.

  Then he added in his staff. Instead of springing off trees like they were diving boards, he used his staff to help redirect his movement and launch himself over the forest. Each launch lifted his heart, and his chest surged with joy.

  But there was still a limit. He’d travelled in a twenty-mile diameter circle around the pavilion with his various leaps, but that was about as far as he could go before the black lightning created an unmanageable degree of char within his meridians. It probably would have been deadly—or crippling—to a regular cultivator.

  But Blake had River. He didn’t need to be close to her to trigger the ability, and he’d used it a few times to cleanse his channels, but the buildup accumulated too quickly, and eventually, he had to stop.

  He returned to the clearing, however, to find her waiting for him. She stared up at him expectantly, and he tossed her a handful of oats he’d kept the other day. As she lapped them up, he said, “So, do you feel it when I use your echo ability?”

  “Echo ability?” River looked up.

  “When I heal myself.”

  “Sometimes. It feels like I am becoming hollow. I can still move, but I cannot make myself disappear.”

  “You seem to be getting better at speaking, too,” Blake said. “Are you getting stronger?”

  “Perhaps?”

  He chuckled. “Well, I guess I’ll just keep feeding you, then.”

  She looked up. “Blake is a good friend.”

  “Well, I’m good at bribes, that’s for sure.” He sat down and crossed his legs. “Sorry for all the draining I was doing this morning. I was learning a new technique.”

  “I saw. It needs a name.”

  He sighed. “Oh, not again…”

  “Serpent’s Cloak,” she said with certainty.

  “I—” Blake scrunched his eyebrows. “Wait, that’s actually good. What happened? How long were you thinking about this?”

  “As soon as you launched yourself.”

  Blake grinned. “Alright, well, I’ll be back tomorrow morning, and I can keep practicing. Serpent’s Cloak it is.”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  ~ ~ ~

  In the afternoon, Blake set out the fiendberries on the desk in his room and analyzed them. He had twelve of them and four more stages to progress through if he wanted to finish Body Tempering. So three berries per stage seemed reasonable, especially considering how poisonous they were supposed to be.

  He delayed for a few seconds, then popped three of them in his mouth. He didn’t bite down—he just held them in his cheek for now—but he could already tell they were going to be bitter.

  Then he set off toward the isolation chambers, where he would pretend to get through the next stage. He planned to complete all of ‘Organ Function Improvement’ in one go, and at least if he pretended to use an isolation chamber, it would be slightly more explainable to the rest of the Hunters.

  By the time he had set up his isolation chamber and stepped inside, the berries were starting to dissolve, and it took all his effort not to swallow the black liquid that dribbled out the rupturing cells.

  Until he made it to the center of the room and sat down cross-legged. The door shut, and he closed his eyes, then bit down on the berries and swallowed.

  Nothing happened.

  Had he misjudged the situation? Were they not poisonous enough? What if it was because he was part-fiend, and they couldn’t hurt him? Or was it going to take hours before the poison began working, and he’d just wasted contribution points on an isolation chamber for no reason?

  But before he could try anything else, a cramp sliced through his stomach. He shouldn’t have felt relieved, because he’d just ingested a horrible poison capable of killing most people with a few bites, but hey, you couldn’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. It just so happened that those eggs were his organs.

  The premise was similar to muscle reforging, however, it focussed on the organs in his gut and chest. Fiendberries were perfect for the task because they (in theory) would melt everything except his brain. They went after the other organs first.

  He could’ve gone on and on about the pain. It built slowly, tearing apart his insides, and he chased it with Honour.

  But it was becoming so standard, and in truth, it didn’t feel so bad. Not anymore. It was more like his early memories of his mom dragging him to the dentist. Eventually, the scraping started to feel good because you knew it was getting clean.

  And because you knew everything would heal afterward.

  Much like the muscles, his reforged organs melted then reformed out of their original orientation, but with the help of River’s echo ability, they healed right back up, putting them back in their original orientation.

  Blake simply had to time his use of the ability. It couldn’t heal everything at once, and he had to use it to fix the most critical of errors.

  Like when the poison reached his heart. It killed the flesh instantly, melting the organ and damaging it beyond repair, before eating through it and melting it into a slurry of biomass. It took all his effort to keep his mind together and awake. He pushed Honour through it, but that didn’t restart the heart.

  It just wasn’t in the right shape.

  Only when he triggered River’s Echo ability did his heart begin quivering again. The muscles were almost in the right place, the organ function almost restored.

  His head grew light and his vision darkened, and he began swaying, but before he passed out, he slammed a Black Palm into his chest. Dark lightning arced up from the floor and blasted through his heart, defibrillating it, and his eyes shot wide open.

  It was working again.

  He was still alive.

  The other organs weren’t as critical, and he finished well before his time in the room was up. But for good measure, he pretended he was still meditating. No one seemed to notice the Black Palm that he’d used, or at least, no one came to interrupt him.

  And when the bell rang, and he left the room and pulled his shirt back on, his rank seal showed the Body Tempering stage five. That received a few suspicious glances from the attendants, but Blake blazed past them. He hadn’t eaten all day, and he was starving.

  ~ ~ ~

  “So how does it feel, Senior Brother?” Froskur asked. “By the fates, I have to keep calling you senior brother still…just when I thought I was catching up, you do this in a week.”

  “You are going to hurt yourself, Senior Brother,” Iver added.

  “It’ll hurt more if Heron kills me,” Blake countered.

  “What was it, Senior Brother? Did you find some shady elixirs while you were out in the mists?” Iver asked.

  Blake shrugged.

  “Bjarke, that kind of risk will cripple your cultivation,” Froskur said. “You’ll build up so many impurities and strain your meridians, and you’ll end up so much weaker than before.”

  “I need to survive,” Blake said, justifying it. He knew he wasn’t doing anything wrong—he was just using a type of cultivation that felt like it was made for him. “But in all seriousness…I don’t know what’s different about my organs. I mean, I don’t feel tired. I’m probably getting more out of this food.” He patted his belly for good measure.

  “It is supposed to feel unnoticable, Senior Brother,” Iver added. “That is, until you get yourself stabbed. Your organs will heal faster. You won’t need as much sleep, and you can survive longer without food and water. And more importantly, every nutrient goes twice as far. Your organs will work twice as fast.”

  “So you’ll be heading to the washroom soon enough,” Froskur said.

  Blake cleared his throat and went red in the face. “I…uh, in fact. Yeah I do kinda have to go to the washroom. Like, really badly, now that you mention it.”

  “Well, then go!”