Chapter 302: An Interesting Opportunity
Feeling frustrated, Zou Tian walked through the village. If he used Hide Presence, no one could see him, but the perception of random people walking about was so low that it would do nothing to train his technique. Trying to use his spycraft knowledge to blend in would be equally fruitless as everyone knew him by sight. He couldn’t walk ten feet without someone greeting him.
There was simply no way for him to train either of the techniques in the village. He needed a test run before reaching Sixth Flawless Flowing City, somewhere safe but where he wasn’t well known.
The obvious solution was Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town.
That training wasn’t his primary goal, though. With the introduction of the Shadow Time dilation room, his first objective was to advance to Foundation Establishment. Master had originally said it would take Zou Tian fifteen days to reach that realm, but the calculation hadn’t taken into account the cautious, stair-stepped use of the room.
So far for the day, he’d completed two ten-hour sessions with one more to go before nightfall. Tomorrow, he’d extend that number to four, but he’d have to talk to Master about being allowed to sleep while inside the formation. Otherwise, he didn’t know how he could handle a literal sixty-hour day.
Not to mention that the problem would grow worse when he reached ten hours of dilation—one hundred hours to him—per twenty-four-hour day. He couldn’t survive on one sleep period per one hundred fourteen hours.
His thoughts were wandering, though. The important factor for his plans was that, assuming all went well and he was allowed to spend that maximum of ten objective hours on schedule, he’d reach Foundation Establishment after seventeen more days. After that, he’d need a day to consolidate.
There was no sense in reaching that realm if he didn’t learn techniques to take advantage of the ability he’d gain to externally manipulate qi. After putting a lot of thought into the matter, he’d decided on three. The first would enhance his physical and spiritual sense. That one was dangerous, however. His Shadow aspect would hide his spiritual presence as a cultivator, but it wouldn’t completely negate any sign of qi used outside his body. Hopefully, the technique would be okay to use in small amounts, but it would still be a risk.
Luckily, he had Senior Brother Yuan Yaozu to help him test it.
The second one would give him a qi based attack. He would never be as good a straight up fighter as the twins or the purely martial sect members, but he needed a way to get himself out of a pinch if he ran into trouble. Master loved the idea of something called Backstab, which would let Zou Tian do double damage when he attacked while hidden.
He had no idea how such a thing would work, but it fit his skills well.
His final decision came down either to defense or movement. He wanted both, but he would already be carrying a lot of unmastered skills. With his ability to hide both from physical and spiritual senses, a technique that allowed him to extricate himself from a bad situation was simply a more logical choice than a shield designed to help him in straight up fights.