Chapter 103: Learning Techniques from Anime - 3

The two of them exchanged cautious blows, each strike and parry restrained to the limit.

Willem, like a huge black monkey leaping and darting wildly, attacked with all his might.

Bai Yuxi, meanwhile, did his utmost to suppress the leakage of energy from his own body as he defended.

Once they had grown familiar with each other, the two gradually began to quicken their pace, and in an instant their sparring rang with sharp cracking sounds.

“No, no, no! I’m done!”

“The gap in our energy levels is way too big, and your superactive rebound is too strong. My superactive reserves are draining far too fast!”

After exchanging dozens of moves back and forth, Willem, panting hard, stumbled to a halt and waved his hands in protest. “This is impossible to fight! If I attack you, I’m the one who suffers for it!”

“Hey, Blackie, you’re a little too weak, aren’t you?”

Bai Yuxi, after finally getting a feel for it, said rather disappointedly, “That’s all it takes to wear you out?”

“Of course it is! I’m only F4!”

Soaked in sweat, Willem snapped in exasperation. “Can I compare with a human-shaped monster who doesn’t even know what level he is?”

“Then what do we do?”

Bai Yuxi glanced helplessly at Maya and Xia Youyou, who were watching from the side. “How about you two come over?”

The two girls exchanged a look and, eager to try, went to fetch practice weapons.

Maya chose a short staff, its energy conduction rate comparable to the short sword she usually used, while Xia Youyou took a bundle of small rod-like weapons.

“I’m coming!”

With a shout, Maya, who favored speed and close combat, lunged forward at once and slashed down.

Xia Youyou, by contrast, favored explosive ranged attacks; without a word, she shifted laterally and sent a storm of short rods flying from her small hands, all aimed at Bai Yuxi’s vital points from head to toe.

After sparring with Willem for a while, Bai Yuxi was warmed up and invigorated. He lifted a hand and fired off two shield-like bursts of energy.

One burst knocked aside the incoming rods, while the other blocked Maya’s strike. Yet though his shield was a defensive technique in name, it still carried the impact of particle bombardment.

When the difference in energy levels between the two sides was too great, it could still cause real harm, just as he could blast those plasma toads to death with the same shield.

So, in order to let the two girls last a little longer and not exhaust their superactive energy as quickly as Willem had, Bai Yuxi had no choice but to switch on his overclocked mind state and compress his energy output further, to one ten-thousandth, even one millionth, truly entering the stage of particle fine control.

This was a tremendous challenge even for Bai Yuxi himself, because he found it difficult to remain in the state of all-things insight for long.

He could only activate his overclocked mind in the instant of attack or defense, concentrating the calculations and control on compressing output, so as to avoid placing excessive strain on his brain with this extraordinarily powerful ability.

He had tested this before.

With his current abilities, he could maintain the all-things insight state at full power for no more than ten seconds.

After thirty seconds, he would begin seeing stars from cerebral hypoxia; after sixty seconds, his nose would start bleeding and his vision would darken.

But if he focused as much as possible on a single task, he could extend the duration of the ability.

For example, with a weakened version at ten percent power, he could maintain all-things insight for more than a hundred seconds.

And like now, using only a feeble one-percent version of all-things insight solely to calculate particle fine control, he could sustain it for over a thousand seconds!

Best of all, Bai Yuxi discovered that in battle, he did not need to keep his overclocked mind running the entire time.

He only had to switch it on in the instant of calculation, and then he could use the ability for a very long period!

Or perhaps this millisecond-scale way of using such a short-lived power could be called “checkpoint resume”?

It was just that achieving this was far from easy, and he would need a great deal of practice...

The instant Bai Yuxi entered the all-things insight state, his eyes went blank.

Everything in the surrounding space seemed to have been pressed onto a pause button, slowing down to a crawl. Or perhaps this state should be called the legendary bullet time?

Within that millisecond-scale flow of time, his brain spun madly.

He judged the angle, particle scale, and all the other parameters of the incoming attack.

Then he analyzed and calculated exactly how much energy output would be needed to offset the other side’s damage.

Bai Yuxi’s vacant eyes suddenly contracted, and he returned from that millisecond microscopic world to normal.

“Ha! Take this: my Three Hundred and Twelve Point One Five One Five Style Shield!”

Shouting excitedly, Bai Yuxi threw out a punch at the short staff Maya was swinging down toward him.

One ring after another of faint energy ripples blossomed outward, as many as fifteen layers in all, startling the girl.

Maya instinctively tried to retreat, but her body could not keep up with her thoughts. Before she could move, she was struck squarely by the shield-like wave of energy.

Willem, watching from the side, and Xia Youyou, covering the flank, were both startled by Bai Yuxi’s actions, thinking he had gotten carried away and made a mistake!

Yet Maya, blasted backward by the energy ripples, merely took a few involuntary steps back before steadying herself and looking up at Bai Yuxi in astonishment.

She could sense that Bai Yuxi’s earlier punch, though imposing in momentum, had only released energy on the order of thirty-some degrees—an intensity below F1-level combat power.

For someone like her, who had already advanced to F4 and whose own superactive energy level had exceeded six thousand four hundred degrees, that was hardly a threat.

What mattered most was that the repulsive force generated by the particle density of that punch was not as strong as she had expected, and it had not even caused any extra superactive consumption from a particle density difference.

“What’s going on?”

Maya blinked her large blue eyes and looked at Bai Yuxi in confusion.

“What’s with your ‘Three Hundred and Twelve’?”

“Shouldn’t it be ‘One Ten-Thousandth Output, Twofold Particle Bombardment,’ the ‘One Twenty-Two’?”

Willem, who had helped name the technique, was now just as baffled. “One-thousandth energy output? Who are you trying to kill?”

“Haha!”

“Take my move: Three Hundred and Twelve Point One Five One Five Style Spear!”

Bai Yuxi did not explain. Instead, he shouted the name of the technique in a thoroughly over-the-top manner and threw a punch at Willem, who had stepped in close.

The black foreigner nearly peed himself in fear. He had personally witnessed Bai Yuxi’s destructive power at one ten-thousandth output; now that it had become one-thousandth output, would one punch not turn him into minced meat?

Willem instinctively tried to dodge, but how could he evade Bai Yuxi, whose physical data far surpassed his by an amount he could not even fathom? The punch came down hard onto his raised arm.