3 Awakening Breath

"Now, about that mental training. I don't have anything specific for your particular situation. I could teach you the final technique of Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist that I haven't taught you yet. I think you are finally ready for it, and it does require great amount of mental training to achieve. Maybe it will also get your mind off of your other problems." Bang said.

Boom was very surprised. He had thought he had already learned every technique there was in the old man's martial art, but it seemed that he had assumed wrong. He was pretty excited.

It had been a long time since he had learnt all his current techniques. For the last few years he had only been perfecting them instead of learning new ones. Not to say that he didn't like that too, but there was always a great sense of accomplishment when succeeding in a new technique for the first time. And with his talent he had usually learned them pretty fast.

"What's the technique called?" Boom asked expectantly.

"It's called Awakening Breath. It's a breathing technique that allows you to remove all your subconscious constraints and forcibly ignore your survival instincts. If you manage to learn this, all your capabilities will be heightened to the next level. Both physical and mental."

"IF I learn this? Does that mean that I might not?"

"I will warn you right now. This technique is extremely hard to learn and it goes against your very nature. Since me and my brother are the only ones who have ever learnt this technique so far, I'm not fully sure you're able to learn it, but I have faith in you."

"All right! I welcome the challenge. Let's do this!"

***

<<< 1 month later >>>

'Ugh, this is so damn hard.' Boom was frustrated.

He was currently meditating in his room. The first step in learning 'Awakening Breath' was to be able to completely free your mind from any unnecessary thoughts to focus only on one objective you set yourself. While learning to do this, you also needed to keep doing a specific kind of breathing that Bang had taught him. This special breathing was the key in mastering the state of Awakening during the later steps of training.

He needed to start with a simple objective, like moving from one spot to another. The speed didn't matter at this point. As long as he was able to do it while in the special mental state, he would be ready to proceed to the next phase.

Boom had prepared for this to be hard, but for the first phase to already be so difficult, he really wondered how his grandpa was even able to come up with this kind of technique. This only strengthened his view of Bang being the greatest martial artist to ever have been.

He meditated 5 hours daily, in addition to his other training and even after a month, he hadn't had any results so far. But the only thing to do was keep trying.

<<< 5 months later >>>

On the wooden floor of his room, Boom was sitting on his knees, hands placed on top of them, and his eyes closed. He then opened them and let out a deep breath, and looked directly on the floor, 4 meters in front of him. He rose to his feet, his mind at peace, completely focused on the objective of moving himself on that spot. Doing so without a hurry, moving one step at a time, very slowly. After 5 steps, he was there, and got out of his trance-like state.

"I, I did it. I finally did it..." He was incredibly happy and excited, even though it didn't show since he was really tired. Despite the training not being physical, it was still incredibly exhausting once he became closer and closer to succeeding.

***

The next step was to perform a more complicated task, which required more thinking and had many different ways to accomplish.

Boom started with the task of moving a longer distance than in the first phase and with a trip that required something more than only moving forward. For example, moving from his bedroom to the bathroom or from the dojo to the bottom of the mountain to the more complicated tasks of doing groceries. Then he moved on to playing games such as rock-paper-scissors.

And it seemed that accomplishing the special mental state for the first time was the hardest part, and complicating the tasks little by little was much easier. It still took 6 months until he was able to do such tasks with ease.

***

Finally, after 1 year of training, it was time to implement sparring to the mix. Boom and Bang were both in their usual fighting positions, ready to battle.

"Now, after being able to accomplish all the different tasks you have so far, sparring shouldn't be a problem for you now. This time you need to win by any means necessary. And by any means, I mean ANY means." The old man said.

"Fuuh" Boom let out a deep breath as he concentrated, managing to get into the focused state.

Then he attacked! His goal was simple, defeat Bang and that was the only thing he was focused on without any distractions.

The moment the sparring started, Boom was in awe at his own performance. He perceived every movement, both Bang's and his own, with a clarity he had never experienced before. He noticed that at the moment, the old man wasn't fighting in his usual way. He was mostly defending and none of his attacks were aimed at the weak points. Boom interpreted that as either trying get his guard down or maybe just wanting to keep the fight going as long as possible.

5 seconds into battle, which was a very long time considering it was a bout between two highly skilled Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist users, Bang finally made his move. For the first time ever against any of his students he made a move with the intent to kill. He aimed his index and middle finger directly at Booms heart.

Normally, this would cause any sane martial artist to make a move to dodge or intercept it. And since the killing intent was so sudden and unexpected, and in a simple sparring match no less, it would usually even cause fear, which in turn would become an unnecessary distraction.

But Boom felt no such thing. He responded to the attack by moving to the side just enough for the attack to not be lethal or do permanent damage. It would still hurt a great deal though, and he would need to recover from it for at least a month, even with his faster-than-average healing.

He planned on taking the hit and at the same time answer with a fist strike of his own, aimed at Bangs left flank.

The old man was forced to retract his attacking hand, just before making contact, to be able to deflect Boom's own attack.

"Enough!" Bang told his disciple to stop after deflecting the attack. That previous interaction had been enough for him to determine that the training had borne fruit.

"Did you notice?" He asked.

"Y-yes." Once he stopped the breathing technique, he realized what he had just done. He was able to make a decision that he would've never made normally. "I really was ready to take that hit and seriously damage myself, just for the sake of getting a hit of my own in. And even if I had managed to do that, there was no guarantee that I would have been able to beat you in the end..."

"That's true, but that was actually your best chance at winning the fight against me. At your current strength, you honestly don't stand a chance of hitting me even once under normal circumstances, let alone win. But with that split second decision you managed to make, you actually got a very slim chance to win me."

"Additionally, my movements were a bit faster than normal. What was that about? I haven't trained to do that yet." Boom also noticed that he was much more exhausted than usually and his muscles were sore. And this was only after one little sparring match. Usually, he would be this exhausted only after several matches.

"Mm, this is the next phase of training for Awakening Breath, removing all the subconscious restrictions of your body. Everything you've trained so far was to reach a clear state of mind to increase you mental capabilities during battle, and to be able to remove your survival instincts. And through that you've managed to remove a little bit of the restrictions in your body. Basically, you've achieved the layout for the whole technique. Now all you have to do is train and evolve the Awakening state into its conclusion. This step of the training is also the reason why I taught you the special breathing, since it is this very breathing technique that makes it possible to remove any physical restrictions in your body." Bang explained.

"You've probably now noticed that this technique is very dangerous to both you and your opponent. It is very taxing to your body, and will be more and more so once your mastery over it increases. That is exactly why this technique is only a trump card and should only be used when absolutely necessary and with extreme consideration." He continued.

"Yes, grandpa!"

***

<<< 18 months later >>>

Boom had now perfected his state of Awakening. For the past 2 years, in addition to his usual martial arts training, he had dedicated 1 hour of training for improving his Awakening state every day. Any more than that and it could've had a negative effect on his body.

While being able to remove more and more of his body's restrictions, he also needed to adjust Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist to it. Every time when using it together, his martial arts needed to be more fierce and mainly focused on attacking to be as effective as possible.

He had now mastered the 'Awakening' part of the 'Awakening Breath' technique, which meant that he still had to master the 'Breath' part in order to fully master the whole technique.

Being now able access the perfect state of Awakening, and having experienced it first hand, it made it much easier to lower the requirements to reach this state. And that, in fact, was the last step in fully mastering 'Awakening Breath'.

What Boom needed to do was very simple. He just had to repeatedly use his breathing to access the state of Awakening over and over again, but now he had to try to do it with minimum amount of breaths. When mastered, was possible to reach the Awakened state with just one breath, finally deserving its name, 'Awakening Breath'.

The reason why this was being done as a separate part of training, was because if Boom would've tried to shorten the time to access the state of Awakening, while also doing the other steps of the training the same time, was simply because it would have significantly slowed down the progress of those steps, resulting it to take more time overall to perfect this whole technique.

***

The last step took him 6 months to master, and Boom could now confidently say that he had fully mastered 'Awakening Breath'.

Despite this, the old man told Boom to still practice it occasionally, to adjust with his still improving, body, senses and mastery of martial arts.

In these last 3 years of training, Boom's Water Stream Rock Smashing Fist had become more and more a part of himself, and in consequence, much easier to use. The good thing about this martial arts was that it utilized everything, from his body and reflexes to his mind and senses. So all of his abilities improved at the same time as his martial arts did. Though he still didn't forget to do separate full body workout, speed training, or playing 'Go' and 'rock-paper-scissors' with his grandfather

And even though he still gets his ass beat every time they are sparring, his pure physical strength had already slightly surpassed Bang's. And in terms of skills, he is becoming closer and closer to him.