Expanding Knowledge

Deon succeeded in using the platinum skin, muscles, bones and tendons spirits. He used all of these spirits under the 4th stage of the gold class suffering for time spirit.

The 4th stage of the suffering for time spirit produced a 40 times acceleration, whilst it caused the user to suffer through 3,333 times the pain of the standard spirit activation.

Unfortunately, the spirit was less effective since he was using the gold class suffering for time spirit with the platinum class body tempering spirits. The reduction in effect was even more prominent compared to before, and in the end, Deon only managed to accelerate his usage of these spirits by around ten times.

When Deon first began using the body tempering spirits back at the military academy, the other recruits would always complain about the pain they experienced whilst activating the dense muscle spirit. The burning pain made it such that they were unable to endure more than a single minute of activation before losing the will to go on. They couldn't endure more than half an hour of total activation each day, but even this would wear down on them overtime, so most would only activate the dense muscle spirit for half this time.

Compared to Deon who had activated the spirit for 2 hours each day, those recruits were simply too useless.

Deon never gave up due to the pain, he only stopped when his origin energy or his mental stamina ran dry. Honestly, the pain of using the dense muscle spirit was nothing to him, and that was back in the academy, when he had only just become a shaman.

Deon's pain tolerance was simply inhuman.

Bronze class, silver class, gold class, platinum class…each class of body tempering spirit was more painful than the last, though Deon hardly even noticed the difference.

The pain from the original body tempering spirits was nothing to him, but multiplying this by 3,333 times was quite taxing on the mind.

As for his current origin energy consumption, it was barely worth mentioning. The amount of origin energy expended when using a 1-Star spirit was almost insignificant to a 2-Star shaman. In fact, Deon's recovery rate was so impressive that he didn't even need to leave a free slot to recover his energy from using 1-Star spirits!

As an initial stage 2-Star shaman, Deon soul space could support two 2-Star spirits, one of which would have to be his core spirit. Alternatively, he could use his core spirit and ten 1-Star spirits.

Normally, a shaman would leave an empty slot to support the recovery of their origin energy, but Deon didn't bother with this right now.

Currently, Deon had his 2-Star core spirit and ten 1-Star spirits bound in this soul space, yet his recovery rate still surpassed the consumption. If he added another 1-Star spirit, this balance would be flipped, but right now, his recovery was sufficient to accommodate all 11 of his spirits.

In theory, ten 1-Star spirits should be about as draining as a single 2-Star spirit, but in reality, there were other important considerations. For one, actively using 1-Star spirits as a 2-Star shaman would not deplete much origin energy at all. Unless Deon activated all ten 1-Star spirits simultaneously, the depletion was not really significant.

Of course, if he actively used his core spirit, his origin energy would deplete rapidly and would not recover properly. But for now, Deon was not using his core spirit, so his current situation was fine.

After using four of the platinum class body tempering spirits, Deon didn't immediately continue on to the mythril class versions, because he had just began reading a new book, one of the 12 intuitive language books, titled 'Body Tempering Spirit Recipes: Ranks 1 - 3'.

By the time Deon finished the book, he realised that he had been misunderstanding something when it came to body tempering type spirits. This book did indeed contain the recipes he knew, the 1-Star to 3-Star, ordinary class to mythril class, five body tempering spirits…but it also contained another 66 recipes of completely unrelated spirits, all of which also had the effect of strengthening the body!

"So it turns out that there really are other body tempering type spirits! Some of the other body tempering spirits will hinder my progress with the five major body tempering spirits…but every spirit in this book can be used on top of the ones I'm already using!"

Deon quickly calmed down. Whilst he was excited to learn this, in the end, there were better ways to spend his time than delving into the alternative body tempering spirits.

Anyway, his main reason for pursuing body tempering was to increase his body's internal talent, there was not much point in spending his time on these other spirits.

And so, Deon continued to read. Out of the 12 books written in the intuitive language, three were related to body tempering and three to consciousness tempering.

Deon read through yet another book on body tempering.

"Let's see, this book is called 'Body Tempering Supplementary Spirit Recipes: Ranks 1 - 3'…"

Deon's reading speed was improving as time passed by. By now, each page took him just 2-3 minutes to understand 100% of the details, but only half of that to understand 99% of everything on the page. The final 1% took longer thanks to the obscure and somewhat poetic writing style that shamans tended to use to present their refinement recipes. Deon didn't understand this practice at all, it was quite tedious.

By the time he finished the book, Deon's eye twitched.

"This…if I had known these recipes 1 year ago, just how much trouble would this have saved me?" He muttered to himself bitterly.

Sometimes, he really wondered why Blood God made things so difficult for him. If he had just divulged these recipes directly to his inheritor, Deon could have saved so much time and effort!

Deon now understood what was meant by a supplementary spirit.

"So the 'suffering for time' spirit is actually a body tempering supplementary spirit…but it turns out that there are 98 other 1-Star supplementary spirits, all of which can decrease either the time or difficulty in using the body tempering spirits!"

Deon was especially drawn to the 31st listed spirit. It existed as a 2-Star and 3-Star spirit between ordinary class and gold class. It was one of the most situation specific spirits he had ever seen…

"2-Star bronze class suffering compression spirit…this spirit forces a passive 1-Star bronze class body tempering spirit to rapidly accelerate its progress, causing the pain to increase proportionally, all the way until the spirit's usage has reached completion."

Deon's eyes shone brightly. He singled out this spirit because it was the most relevant to him right now!

"The refinement is tedious and using up an expendable 2-Star spirit just to accelerate the use of a 1-Star spirit is crazy wasteful, but for the amount of time it will save me, it's absolutely worth it!"

Deon glanced at the bronze organs spirit in his soul space and smiled wryly. Even after all he'd done with the suffering for time spirit, it still had well over 2,000 hours of standard use remaining until its completion.

Avoiding the ever increasing temptation to begin refining spirits, Deon tentatively turned to the third and final body tempering book, 'Body Tempering Natural Spirits'.

This was a slightly smaller book compared to the others, after all, there were far more artificial spirits in this world than there were natural spirits. Many of the 62 natural body tempering spirits discovered and known by Blood God would indeed be very useful to him, but Deon had never encountered such a spirit before. Even so, it was good to learn these things, as he would now be able to identify such a spirit if he came across it in the wild.

The consciousness tempering books were very similar, there were three books; spirits, supplementary spirits, natural spirits. There were far fewer supplementary spirits and hardly any natural spirits, but it was still useful to know all of this.

Deon continued, reading all 12 of the intuitive language books. The other six books written in the intuitive language were completely unrelated to body tempering or consciousness tempering.

'Top 100 Essential Natural Spirits: 1-Star'.

'Top 100 Essential Natural Spirits: 2-Star'.

'Top 100 Essential Natural Spirits: 3-Star'.

'Enhanced Refining Spirit Recipes: Ranks 1 - 3'.

'Guidance for Better Refining Technique'.

'Advice, Musings and Notes'.

The first three books included the spirits which, in Blood God's opinion, were the best natural spirits on the continent. He already knew about most of these spirits since Blood God had mentioned many of them before. There were certainly a few interesting spirits, but they were all too rare…

"Well, I did find a vital flower spirit by pure chance that one time though, so it's good to know about these things." Deon nodded to himself.

'Refining Improvement Spirit Recipes' was the most exciting read for Deon, despite half of them just being the consciousness tempering spirits already mentioned previously.

The text didn't just repeat the recipes for these spirits at least, it also explained how and why these spirits could be used to improve his refining ability. Combined with the 'Guidance for Better Refining Technique' that Deon read through repeatedly, he felt that his refining technique had somehow already improved, before he even tried to implement and practise these new ideas!

Besides being a notorious demon that killed countless people across the spirit continent, Blood God was also known for something else…he was an expert spirit refiner, one of the best to ever appear in shaman history!

Even a simple book written by Blood God on this topic could inspire countless new ideas in Deon's mind, causing his refinement ability to gradually develop and improve.

Unknowingly, Deon became engrossed in the spirit refinement guidance for multiple days straight. He forgot to eat, drink or sleep for a full day and half, but his body wouldn't suffer from just this much.

In fact, Deon became so absorbed with his studies that he didn't even notice that he had company.