Chapter 35- Progress

The horned Ranker raised his right hand forward, bringing forth the wooden dolls and archers again. However, there was a big difference this time. A transparent and bluish layer appeared, covering the entire training ground inside it.

"This is a moderately thick shinsu field. This will make the training much harder but it serves to increase the training's efficiency and to improve your shinsu resistance as well."

"As everything in the tower comes from shinsu and everyone uses it, having a great shinsu resistance is a vital requirement to survive the harsh competition in the tower." Locke explained patiently.

"That's why you will train here most of the time until you increase the number of bangs that you can control with precision and speed while you improve your shinsu resistance at the same time." He ended as he stared at the two regulars.

Seeing the ranker staring at them, Liu Guanyi and Xin simply nodded in understanding. They didn't complain nor bemoan about it, only eagerness to pass through it and improve.

It wasn't even life-threatening, it was only hard and tiring. So what there was to complaint about?

Even if they were full of talent, they had to strive to improve ceaselessly. If they were only laying and lazying around, how could they become powerful enough to become Rankers or even greater?

Seeing this, the ranker nodded in appreciation. "Very good. Let's begin the training right away."

However, in his mind, he contemplated. 'Let's see how much their potential is and how much they will improve in a couple of years.'

The training started just like the previous one with the exact same number of wooden dolls and archers. However, with the addition of the weights, their mobility was impaired pretty heavily.

Due to this, they failed several times in a row. It was mostly because Xin got hit by the arrows since they still had been using the previous strategy.

Liu Guanyi was still somewhat able to manage it with his full physical capabilities and very high shinsu resistance though it was hard, admittingly. Unfortunately for Xin, his physical strength wasn't even half of his after the breakthrough to the Nascent Warrior.

Carrying an additional a quarter of the weight that Liu Guanyi had on each of his legs was too much for his current strength. Furthermore, he didn't have the shinsu resistance that Liu Guanyi had, so moving fast in the field was an impossible task.

Due to those various reasons, it seemed that Xin had become the garbage teammate for now.

Realizing this, they changed the strategy with Liu Guanyi as the vanguard to attract most of the attacks coming from the wooden dolls and archers and Xin following behind, moving through the gaps that he had created.

They tried this several times and they performed much better but still failed all of them. Not even once they succeed with it.

The problem was that Liu Guanyi ended up getting shot by one of the archers after keeping up with them for a while. He had attracted most of the attacks, after all. And with his slowed agility and speed, he couldn't do anything even with his rich martial experience. This was training so he didn't use his Martial Techniques for this.

What was the use of the training if he used his Martial Techniques? Something that enhanced his physical capability "beyond" its natural extent. So if he used them, he was basically cheating on the training, and that wouldn't improve his basic, natural capabilities.

The other reason they failed was, Xin couldn't hold long after he attracted the aggro back to him after he destroyed a few heads of the scarecrows. Well, Liu Guanyi couldn't help much about it.

Both of them were now resting on the ground tired from the previous failures, they decided to rest a bit and think of another suitable plan to take them down.

Seeing the wooden dolls and archers, Liu Guanyi was in deep thought.

'The wooden dolls were too many and the archers can coordinate with them. It was easy but now… it's really hard. But this is much better, how training can be called "Training" if it doesn't truly improve the ones who do it?'

'It seems that to cope with these robots we have to do that.' He decided.

Liu Guanyi turned toward Xin, who was sitting nearby with ragged breathing. "Xin, let's do it with the Body Enhancement technique."

"Alright… sorry, I drag you down." Xin said with apparent sadness in his voice and his face dropping down.

Xin knew that although he wasn't, by any means, weak compared to the regulars in E-rank, it was obvious that he was the weakest among the three.

To be fair, he actually had advanced by leaps and bounds since he joined under Liu Guanyi's wing a few years ago.

When they were climbing from the 2nd floor to the 20th floor in the past three years, they met many descendants of the ten great families and Xin triumphed against most of them.

He trained diligently and ceaselessly every single day only taking a little rest in between to recover. But Liu Guanyi and Adori weren't exactly slacking either so it was easy to imagine what happened.

In fact, Liu Guanyi and Adori trained even harder than him since their physical abilities were frightening, with Liu Guanyi as the one who trained the most.

So it wasn't surprising that Xin kept falling behind and would most likely stay like that in the future indefinitely. This kind of mindset that always compared oneself to others wasn't healthy. No normal person should compare themselves to prodigies if they wanted a peace of mind that was.

Sometimes you would meet certain people like that. People that possessed unique and extraordinary characteristics that normal people didn't.

Some of them had scarily smart intelligence, meanwhile, some of them possessed incredible bizarre skills people hadn't seen before. This was true, Liu Guanyi had experienced it before.

When he had achieved many things and become a successful Martial Practitioner back in his world, Liu Guanyi had met an unexpected, yet quite remarkable person in the royal court of the empire.

She was a….