3 Effort

Having woken up a while ago, Vesta had been lazing in the bed while planning her future cultivation path, having reached the peak of sloth path and continued its legacy, she was naturally extremely proficient in that aspect, once you reach a certain level of proficiency in a path you would develop a sort of natural intuition as to that specific path aswell as being capable of manipulating her cultivated sin to approximate other paths; that, along with her knowledge on the Witch Technique gave her a lot of inspiration in terms of modifying her cultivation path.

Cultivation is all about the foundation afterall, the most crucial of which being how you gather qi, the Witch Technique had introduced a lot of ideas surrounding autonomous gathering of qi, but the path you choose to cultivate usually defines how you gather qi in the first place, her original path, Sloth, had sucked others' efforts of qi gathering into her, aswell as generally instilling a lazy disposition to everyone around her while she absorbed their determination and passion, but as far as she could remember; there were only a select few cultivation paths that allowed for autonomous qi gathering, and most of those paths were underdeveloped or weak.

Having reached the apex of her path, she knew enough and had enough basic intuition to understand how sloth works in different scenarios and realized a crucial fact; with her attainment alone she could modify her initial path to make a powerful but autonomous qi gathering system; something you only made once and used the rest of your life to cultivate.

With her two qi turbine hearts, she modified the course and how it flowed in her body to follow the bloodstream, doing this now was of course a bit late, she had been impatient once she was reborn, and she would now taste the bitter fruit for it.

Changing the way qi gathers will scatter most of the qi foundation within the body; as a lot goes to waste when trying to form a new system, not to mention how you would usually cultivate a different path if you changed your qi gathering system, but because of her attainment within sloth path, she could modify it according to the principles of sloth to make a better system than the one she used originally, and save much of the cultivation base while doing it, she did drop to first realm middle stage though.

But the changes were worth it; her system would make the qi in her body automatically circulate the body along with her blood, doing this makes the circulation automatic and makes her body inherently stronger and stronger as she gathers more qi, this was inspiration taken from the Witch Technique, this would also refine the qi before it enters her abdominal qi core.

In addition she changed the gathering method of qi into a vortex, sucking all qi in the vicinity, it had previously been a stream collected from people within the vicinity, but due to no longer being a vampire she was now no longer physically predisposed to yin methods and could as such use methods the elves and mortals could aswell. This also meant she could take inspiration and use the methods of her previously recognized nemesis, a cultivator of the diligence path and a part of the high rank elven race; Angels.

Due to their paths being almost complete opposites, her attainment within sloth gave her a lot of ideas regarding diligence path cultivation and such, especially since it was her nemesis' path she collected a lot of intelligence about it in the past, looking for ways to crack it.

Having combined the paths with the Witch Technique to modify her qi gathering system resulted in that qi vortex gathering system, once the system had been completed she felt something almost click within herself; as if she was under great stress and the load was suddenly lifted... after thinking about it; the underlying knowledge she held about cultivation helped her understand some of what happened.

Her previous life had been as a male vampire, thus the yin was greatly imbalanced with the yang from birth and all the way til death; too much yin and not enough yang. Much like how the elves have too much yang and too little yin.

She was now a human; a perfectly balanced being like the witches, she had almost destroyed her potential by only cultivating yin(sloth), once a balance was reached she would suddenly feel a lot better as the body stabilized and exerted its' true potential.

It was a miscalculation done out of habit, but it could have severely limited her for the rest of her life.

Having understood the underlying reason she soon developed her cultivation in quite a different direction; cultivating both diligence and sloth in an attempt to combine the paths into a balanced path, so far there were only a select few powerful balanced paths, as humans had very limited potential in the first place; most of the balanced paths that remain are highly deteriorated remains of paths made by witches. Such paths include Spacetime, Yun(yinyang), Shadow(light and dark), Celestial(sun and moon) and a lot of lesser balanced paths of humans aswell as a few paths lost in the past.

But combining Diligence and Sloth to make a new path should make for a very powerful foundation; afterall both paths are very focused on making cultivation easier and more efficient.

The problem with combining paths however is to find the medium as it is called, it is the neutrality between the two paths, and the name sake of the combined paths, like Shadow path being a combination of light path and dark path, the shadow itself being the medium.

Of course; he already knew the medium,this had to do with his attainment, but he didn't know too much about it yet, he hadn't tried to do this before afterall.

The medium for Diligence and Sloth was Effort. Vesta would be pioneering Effort path.

Sometimes there would be several mediums between paths, at that point you usually develop the medium you believe will benefit you the most, in this case he could have tried to make Habit path, but such a path has very limited potential, as it relied very much on something mundane and affected it; so offensive techniques would at most be supportive as they disrupt techniques chosen by habit or help make a habit out of your own techniques, the path would make for a good support path; which wasn't very useful to Vesta.

She didn't choose an entirely new path either; this has to do with her attainment, developing your understanding of a path to the level he had would take hundreds if not thousands of years; it's not that she didn't possess techniques, but because she holds an overwhelming advantage if she cultivates sloth path. In anycase she would not really suffer from it as she could already imitate other paths using sloth because of her attainment; though it wouldn't compare to the original path.

All of this accumulated into her decision to create effort path. Creating a path was usually no easy feat to accomplish, but due to her attainment within sloth and by proxy diligence; she held a definitive advantage compared to other path innovators.

Not to mention the fact that balanced cultivation like this would result in way less exploitable weaknesses that an unbalanced path like sloth would have, one of which had already been witnessed. Sloth would in turn make you lazier as you progressed.

The fact she got as far as she originally did with sloth path was almost a miracle, there are also other exploitable weaknesses; Sloth path focuses more on cultivation and scheming than it focuses on actual battle; sloth path would get harder and harder in the later stages; and the scheming often came as a result of «greed for advancement» and «having nothing better to do», nevertheless, there were plenty of sloth-path techniques that helped develop this scheming direction of the path. It was among the better paths at scheming, though it didn't compare to wisdom path. He even had his own technique that was inherited from his predecessor, and further polished by himself in his past life, which was called the art of philosophy.

When he cultivated sloth originally he did pioneer a means of combat unique to himself; it was part of why he even managed to reach the throne of sloth in the first place.

The normal means of sloth path in combat was usually to make all of combat so honed and instinctual that you wouldn't need to think about it during battle, this meant you could spend that time during combat to scheme and strategize; something that made sloth cultivators inherently great commanders and cunning fighters.

Her own pioneered combat system differed in the fact that it used sloth to attack her opponents' minds, making them lazy to attack her, making them underestimate the power needed to attack her, and so on, she did incorporate it into the normal sloth means aswell, making her combat spawn a sort of domain; within which people struggled to even use their techniques correctly while she wouldn't even have to think about maintaining the domain.

But making purely offensive power was hard by only using sloth, so usually it would be cultivated along with a high power supporting path like body cultivation or sword cultivation.

Most combat would actually rely upon either body cultivation, soul cultivation or tool cultivation, since most paths didn't have inherent high power combat techniques. The most famous high power combat path being force path; a path cultivating the use of all forces, one can imagine the combat prowess of such a path.

Vesta had originally used tool cultivation or to be more precise; scythe cultivation in her original life, this had to do with mobility and range, because once someone enters her domain they would immidiately notice and try to exit, using the scythe as leverage to propel herself and attack before they could leave her range had been her main means of combat. A frightfully efficient means aswell, though it couldn't compare to some paths like body cultivation.

Body cultivation is one of the most powerful supplementary techniques for combat; but it was usually difficult and expensive to cultivate, this was part of the reason he did not cultivate it during his past life. This time he had the Witch Technique though, even if it was extremely expensive it would be worth it in the end.

But before he could reach major accomplishment within body path he would use a scythe if he could, it was afterall a big weapon, it would be limited in small spaces.

And body cultivation required great effort, perseverance and wealth, the first two was alright but the third was something he would have to obtain through dubious means, something which he would need combat prowess for.

But obtaining a good scythe was never an easy task, it was a very niche weapon mostly used by blood path and soul path as supplementary. In his original body he had been given a lot of scythes simply because he used them and ruled a domain, many of which had peculiar powers, he did end up gifting most of them to his hardworking subordinates though, as he wouldn't need that many scythes.

Some of them even reached her spies in the mortal realm, but she had no way to contact them now anyway, and if she guessed correctly; she was on a part of the mortal realm that was largely unknown to the mortal realm she knew. She had afterall never heard of the countries «Ashein» and «Cruoburg», much less seen the geography in their maps, though the barrens in the east did remind him of the barrens in the west of the mortal world he knew of.

But returning from the tangent; the new effort path would be vastly better by his own estimations than any of its two components, though he was not yet sure how.