014: Heart-Seeker: One Breath Spike

It's been four days, and while Divyat had no other reason to stay put in the ravine, he more than made enough excuses for himself by saying he was training. But the truth was blizzard or no blizzard ,he had absolutely no where else to go. The divine sky Dao Sect was all he has ever known. He's never traveled, never even visited the towns and villages that were attached to vast plains and hills the sect once stood on. In all honesty he was waiting, holding on in some misguided sense of hope that someone from the sect would come look for him, which was why for an hour each day he left the Ravine, and trudged to the boundaries of the Ghadovara mountains and watched as the blizzard barrier raged on, looking for signs that someone had come through. But it was all still the same, he was still alone.

Due to that he had fallen into his training with a single minded focus, but the thing about being focused is that it's exhausting. And when he's had to rest, he was left with his thoughts. The solitude did not help matters at all, as bitterness, anger and anguish ran rough through him, twisting his thoughts and perception. Four days might not seem like a long time, but with the kind of head space Divyat was in, it was more than enough time for darkness to begin to brew within his thoughts. And the constant killing did not help his case, as in his body for training, he had almost completely wiped out the beast bat population in the Ravine.

The first move of the [Heart-Seeker] technique, was a bit hard to grasp for Divyat. And this was because it was incorporating aspects of Qi control and mastery, and it was a subject that while Divyat has done extensive study on, the term easier said than done would easily describe achieving. Qi was energy, it was life force, it was air, it was wind, earth, fire, stone, ice, lightning blood, and skin and bones. It permeated everything in all of existence and even beyond existence itself. It was the power to shape life and even shape death, to live against the will of the heavens and seize immortality from it.

This was Qi, and even though it was in his body, controlling it enough that he would be able to Summon forth a significant portion of it in an instant was almost impossible to even be a novice at. Plus he wasn't too sound mentally, so with his emotions being either suppressed during most of the day, or let loose as he would sometimes fall into screaming fits, with bouts of wanton murder against Beasts that could never fight back against him because he stayed way out of their sight, and was releasing a predatory aura that no common beast with stellar instincts would want to deal with. Never the less Divyat was stubborn, and it was from that stubbornness he was able to reduce the time needed to pull his Qi for the [Heart-Seeker: One Breath Spike] from 3-5 seconds to 2-3 seconds. His control over his Qi was also steadily refined, enough that now only half of the bats he attacks get turned into frozen popsicles, while the other half remained fresh.

His control though came mainly as a result of his [Tai-Chi Theorem] ,a cultivation technique that as of this moment, Divyat could perform 48 out of the 77 stances it had. A stronger body and advanced cultivation helped him push the technique to the boundary of what his body could handle. It tempered his new found strength and abilities, consolidating his gains and making his foundation more sturdy. Almost every training session ended up with Divyat feeling his meridians and bones getting stronger, his organs and tissues not too far behind as the technique also gave him greater mastery and control of his own body. Overall, Divyat had improved, he was a lot more capable than he was a few days ago when the sect was up in flames, but more than just capable, he was a lot more ruthless.

Divyat dived behind a boulder as one of the beast bats dive bombed him, after four days of shooting his arrows and retrieving them from frozen carcasses, Divyat pretty much a basic understanding of fights against aerial opponents. Not to mention bats were amongst some of the quickest fliers amongst the avian species, so sometimes it took all of his senses just to follow them, and these particular bats were beasts. They had scales on their wings, an outstretched talon and fangs almost as long as their bodies. He got up and in one quick motion ,knocked an arrow and sent it flying into the membrane like wing of the bat. It careened to the side where another arrow promptly met it in the chest, freezing that part of it's body and sending it crashing down, the bat already dead with it's insides already frozen to ice.

A trio of the beast bats came flying down, the darkness of the ravine, especially heightened by the fact that it was the middle of the night, doing well to keep them obscured from view. But Divyat now had terribly good eyesight, not to mention of all his senses, his hearing was a hundred times better. He ran forwards, seemingly heading to a dead end on the ravine wall. He pulled out two arrows, placing one in his mouth he knocked the other as he took two steps off the Ravine wall and turned, twisting his body as he angled his bow at the rapidly approaching bats, quickly drawing upon his Qi.

[Heart-Seeker: One Breath Spike!]

Icy blue Qi surged forwards from his meridians and, making use of Qi channels that have not been opened to empower the arrow, propelling it forwards like a bullet out of a gun. The bow was lined properly to stab through the skull of one of the bats and promptly into the chest of another right behind it. Their frozen carcasses falling from the sky before they even registered they were dead as Divyat took the second arrow from his mouth and knocked it just as his feet touched the ground. The final bat was in sight, and with it's demise there would be no more Beast Bats within the Ravine. But then not everything goes as planned.

*Scrererererererereeeeeeeeeee!*

Oscillating Sound waves smashed into him from above, completely disorienting him and causing his shot to go haywire, and leaving him open for the final bat to slam into his chest, it's massive fangs promptly digging into his sides, spraying his blood into the air. Divyat crashed to the ground with a loud yell, the pain from the bat biting into his body giving off heat and a burning sensation. It hurt, but not enough to take clarity away from him as he looked above him just in time to see a bat the size of a car come flying down for his head. All this while he has just been hunting small fry, it looks like the big boss has had enough of his wanton killings and have come to make him pay…and from what he could see….she had no intention of showing him any mercy.

*Boom!*