Chapter 19: Sovereign

Lance felt refreshed as he opened his eyes, he felt as if he had a good night's sleep and hadn't just had a deathmatch. He almost felt good enough to ignore the little beast's derisive words. Almost.

'Finally woke up, eh? If you kept sleeping, I would have had to pour water on you and I don't see any water in the surroundings, pity you woke up, you would have been blessed otherwise by my divine water. Oh? And after keeping this Lord waiting for so long all you did was progress your weapon mastery a bit? Hmph useless!'

Lance again closed his eyes as he kept tried to control the urge to strangle the beast. He went over his gains to divert his mind.

His weapon mastery had reached the initiate realm but his mind didn't linger on it too much. He instead felt like he had gone through the fight again, but this time as a spectator and in slow motion. He saw all the small mistakes he had made, he felt each swing and thrust. He saw how Gong Yu maintained his advantage. His mind had made a dozen plans on how to defeat him easily without using his weapon mastery.

He understood that he had been to conservative, he had felt afraid of being hurt, of losing. But in hindsight, these were the distractions that were blocking him from moving forward. The mysterious realm his mind entered had provided him a way to overcome them.

Lance stood up as his swords formed in his hands seamlessly. The blades lit up in an ominous light as he slowly started swinging them. The light this time was much denser than before, last time he had felt his swords whooshing through the air. But this time there was only silence, he felt as if the swords were cutting through the air. Lance tried to stab a sword on the cavern wall but he stumbled. He had expected some resistance and had put the force of his whole body on it, but the sword immediately sank into the wall till the hilt. He slowly extricated the sword as he looked at the wall.

A deep cut revealed itself but it was a little jagged. He realised that it was due to his stumble, the glow on his swords slowly went away as exhaustion immediately overcame him.

'Enough playing around, now go fight some cultivators. This is the best time to reach the late skin stage.'

"But my body needs to adapt to the .....", Lance's voice trailed off as he checked his body. A few small and thin pathways had formed in his skin, these pathways were ethereal ones. The pathways formed wouldn't be exposed outside even if he cut open his skin. These pathways were actually very similar to the blood vessels in his skin but just existed in a different dimension.

He had learned that as he progressed through the skin stage essence energy pathways would start forming, they were exactly the same as the blood vessels of a human body. These pathways carried essence energy to each and every cell in the body. As cultivators progressed, their bodies lost their dependence of nutrients from food and started to utilise essence energy for survival. As cultivation increased, each and energy cell in the body became stronger so they needed a more powerful source of energy than food. Due to this, humans had used the ingenious method of forming a network of essence energy pathways.

In the ancient times, when humans had just started on the path of cultivation, they could only crudely use essence energy. They saturated their bodies with essence energy to fulfil their increased bodily needs. This led to most people simply dying since their bodies couldn't tolerate such forceful methods. After a millennium of tragedies, a genius in his desperation had created the method of mimicking the blood vessels already present in his body. But even that too worked only till the peak muscle stage. After that stage, the essence energy needs of a body had an explosive growth, so much so that even the pathways could not cope with it. So, people came up with the idea of increasing the thickness of the pathways but this failed as the pathways simply collapsed after a point.

This led to another streak of desperation among the humans as cultivation was the only way for them to protect themselves from the beasts which too could cultivate. Spirit beasts could cultivate naturally from birth, even though their progression was slow it was constant. A stagnation in the levels of human cultivation meant death for them.

So, the humans then tried to copy the spirit beast's method of cultivation. Spirit beasts did not have essence energy pathways. Instead, they used blood itself as a container for essence energy. After a few more years of trials, humans finally succeeded in merging their energy pathways with their blood vessels. Though crude and inefficient, they finally had a way to move forward.

A few humans even tried to skip the way of forming pathways and directly use blood vessels as pathways for essence energy. But human bodies were weaker than spirit beasts, human bodies simply could not tolerate the amount required for survival.

So, the humans used essence energy pathways till the peak muscle stage then merged them with the network of blood vessels to reach the blood stage.

His teacher had once solemnly said, "We are able to cultivate so easily only because of our ancestors' efforts and sacrifices. They experimented on their bodies to further refine the method of cultivation, all so that we can survive."

"Humans were once the peak race in the cosmos. Our bloodlines were once so powerful even ancient spirit beasts feared us. But humans had too much infighting, after hundreds of star cycles, we were weakened to the point that beasts overwhelmed us after they joined together. Humans understood their folly but it was already too late. The rulers were made into slaves. Our bloodlines were mixed with beastly ones, further weakening us."

"They kept a careful eye on us, human rebellions were crushed before they could even take form. Instigators were brutally tortured and their mutilated bodies were hung on city walls to remind us of our failures."

"At last, after a hundred millenniums of atrocities, a human succeeded in overthrowing a kingdom. He was once a slave of a royal family ruling this world, but he bided his time. He used schemes to turn the different races against each other and staged a coup. Even though he finally won, it was only after a huge civil war in which nearly the whole kingdom was destroyed. His soldiers and brave generals' names were lost to time, but his name still resounds in every human home."

"Raj Veer Chauhan, the first human sovereign."