Iron

What nick was unaware of was that the reason it was so painful was because unlike most cultivators who have minor heart demons due to them being well informed about the dangers of cultivation nick had several powerful heart demons as a result of being tossed into the deep end by the system with no buffer period to safely readjust. the peace of mind technique used the heart demons to refine the soul and as a result the strength of the heart demon determined how effective the technique was , meaning the reason for such extreme agony was because nick only had major heart demons so the refinement was far larger than it normally would be. if a normal cultivator were to use this technique they would only refine about a quarter of a percent of their soul whereas nick refined an entire one percent making the pain three times higher than normal. after catching his breath nick thought about using the phoenix rebirth but since the system still listed it as him being too weak to know about he decided against gambling with the unknown. in the end nick worked on refining his body as he had a feeling that he would need it.

Nick spent the entire day refining his body but only just broke into the next tier since like all cultivation it became harder and harder to advance the further you get. nick noticed that the fiend energy that was hard to notice before was now capable of physically leaving his body in a sort of dull red coating with a similar feeling to the feeling given off by a creature with a higher tier . nick named this phenomena the fiends suppression since it was based on fiend energy. the fiends suppression was not the only change that occurred when he reached iron tier as the moment he did runes crawled across his skin each representing the laws used to refine nicks body. the runes fused with each cell of nicks body which immediately boost his vitality to a terrifying level so potent in fact that nick had the feeling that even if he lost a limb it would grow back on its own with a small amount of time. nick knew that if such a thing were true he had to hide it for as long as he could because it would turn the world upside down if revealed.

Nick found it ironic that his body refinement had actually reached a higher tier than his qi cultivation since his qi cultivation was only at void chasing while the iron tier for body refinement was at the void entering tier. this imbalance bothered nick a little but not enough to go out of his way to fix it. walking out of the room nick stretched causing thunderous sounds that disturbed the surrounding air before admiring his dull grey skin that had a slight metallic tinge to it.