The Sword Emperor Transmigrates

Chapter 166

I don’t like that its metal attribute is too strong, though, Leonard thought.

Most metal weapons were the same, but this divine sword went far beyond that. When he put in the slightest bit of fire energy, which metal energy had a destructive relationship[1] with, the sword vibrated and convulsed.

At Leonard’s level of skill, he would be able to wield it with techniques that required deep understanding, but Demigod Tier experts had to make their bodies and swords into one. He wouldn’t be able to maintain that unity if he used a clashing elemental energy.

That was the biggest drawback of the sword being made from Pollux’s fragments. He could only use it with the Western God Style.

Shing. When Leonard inserted the sword into its exquisite sheath, the pressure in the air disappeared.

It was worthy of being called a divine sword.

The sword itself held such power, regardless of what its wielder willed. Sensing this, Leonard fastened it to his waist.

I don’t have any duties anymore, so I should focus on training for now, he thought. He no longer had to give martial arts lectures, which had taken away a lot of his personal time. Nor did he have to go to the training ground at a specific time or settle for meditation.

He unpacked his few belongings and left the Forest of Swords and headed to the White Dragon training ground, which he could use however he liked.

Perhaps he’d spar with someone or spend some time testing out his techniques and ideas. He hadn’t forgotten about the things that teaching the Black Dragon Knights had inspired, so it could also be nice to test those out too.

“There’s no one here,” he said aloud. Unfortunately, the Ivory Forest, the place where the White Dragon Knights trained, was completely empty.

Perhaps they’d discovered a bunch of Void Deities, or perhaps there were many members who were recovering from injuries. Leonard could only guess.

He stepped into the training ground. Instead of unsheathing the divine sword, he dumped out the swords he had been storing in his subspace pouch. Just as five swords were about to clatter to the ground, he stopped them with his mind and put them into position.

I still have a long way to go until my technique is flawless, so let’s practice Sword Manipulation. Though Leonard’s conventional swordplay was flawless, wielding a sword with one’s hands and wielding it with one’s mind were different. Those skills didn’t directly transfer over.

He just needed time to fix that imbalance.

Five Elements Style, Five Swords Style

Sword Spread

Five swords gracefully fell into the shape of a wheel. Leonard hadn’t even lifted a finger.

This was the Five Wheels Formation.

The “Five Wheels” didn’t refer to the five relationships in Confucianism. It referred to the five elements in Buddhism believed to create all things: earth, water, fire, wind, and aether. While they were a little different from the Five Elements, there were also many similarities. If there were five swordsmen to represent this formation, the similarities would become much more obvious.

Shrrrr. The swords rearranged, creating the illusion of an imaginary opponent.

Though there were many names of martial arts techniques that didn’t have much meaning behind them, one couldn’t overlook how they referenced hundreds, no, thousands of Buddhist and Daoist scriptures.

That’s why it’s called the Five Wheels, Leonard thought. One could picture the formation as five interconnected cogwheels spinning together as one. Naturally, a cogwheel couldn’t move without moving the others as well.

The five swords moved like flowing water and fell into formation.

Five Wheels Embodiment

An apparition of an imaginary opponent formed between them. In Shingon Buddhism, it was believed that the human body could become the very “embodiment” of Buddhism. It was not a word they took lightly. They believed that the body was made up of the five elements[2] these swords represented. This wasn’t limited to the body of living beings, however. It was believed that these five elements were the origin of all things.

If the Five Wheels Formation could become an embodiment of this principle, that meant that Leonard’s swords were already moving together like a single living entity.

Clang.

The illusion was caught between Leonard’s five swords and shattered. It had only taken him ten exchanges to destroy it, even though he had created a Transcendence Tier martial artist, not just any random fighter. But this was inevitable. When a person was caught in a fully formed sword formation, they had no chance of winning if their opponent was as strong as them.

Even when the life point and death point of a formation were identified, it was hard to predict what would happen. The people of this world didn’t know how to do even that, which was why mystical techniques were completely unknown to them.

A Transcendence Tier expert is too weak for me to fight, but a Demigod Tier expert is too strong. Leonard had met and even sparred with a few Demigod Tier experts, though informally, but that wasn’t enough for him to simulate a battle with one.

Demian’s and Audrey’s unique traits were so profound that he couldn’t even guess their full capabilities, so there was no way he could perfectly emulate their movements when his Sword Manipulation wasn’t even perfect yet.

But then Leonard realized what he’d overlooked, and his eyes widened.

I can just embody myself as an expert in single sword techniques! That at least was a flawless skill of his, so if he created an embodiment of himself, he could fight an opponent of equal standing and meet his training goals.

Five Wheels Tathāgata

Tathāgata was another title for Buddha, and this formation was based on the Five Wisdom Tathāgatas.[3]The swords rearranged themselves to create an illusory copy of himself.

Leonard would defeat it just as Buddha had defeated Sun Wukong.

But it easily found the life point of his Five Wheels Sword Formation because the embodiment was a reflection of Leonard himself. He wasn’t currently using any techniques with heavy Buddhist influence, so the discordance of the formation and the mana created cracks and the life point wasn’t hard to spot.

Five Elements Style

Azure Dragon First Form: Thundershock

Leonard’s near-perfect sword formation cut through his opponent’s attack with a single strike.

At least, it almost did.

Since the sword formation was called the Five Wheels Sword Formation, it lost some of its power when there were only four. They tried to surround the embodiment, but the embodiment dashed out and channeled all its power into its blade. There was only one technique that was best suited for the divine sword.

Five Elements Style

White Tiger Thirty-Sixth Form: Mount Tai Crushing Strike

The embodiment used the White Tiger Form’s most powerful, most destructive attack, making the real Leonard’s legs buckle.

Though this wasn’t the case in the current fight, when Mount Tai Crushing Strike was used in a real battle at a close distance, the immense force of the attack would crush the victim’s feet. They had to avoid meeting it head-on at all costs, but if they were forced to do so, it was almost guaranteed to end the battle.

It was an irrationally powerful move.

Leonard stood his ground and reformed his sword formation.

Five Elements Lock Formation

This defensive technique had become enhanced by Castor’s authority, and it had even thwarted the centaurs’ cavalry charge. Now, it blocked the embodiment’s sword.

The fake Leonard tried its best to break through the formation, but it wasn’t an efficient move and consumed too much strength. If Mount Tai Crushing Strike was hindered in any way, real Leonard wouldn’t miss the opening. The embodiment used the repulsive force of the attack to leap thirty meters back to regroup.

“Hoo...” Leonard also stopped to catch his breath. Even if the embodiment was a copy of his very self, it wasn’t easy to deal with techniques that were starting to surpass the Transcendence Tier threshold.

He closed his eyes, his head throbbing with a burning pain. He could read five hundred possible moves from his opponent in a single moment. Since he was well aware of his own capabilities, both he and his opponent could respond with the appropriate move almost instantaneously.

But the rewards of this training method matched its difficulty.

My embodiment isn’t fully merged with the divine sword yet, so I have the advantage. But the fact that I couldn’t even overpower one sword with five and that my formation was disrupted shows how lacking my training is in Sword Manipulation.

His mastery in swordplay didn’t equate to mastery in Sword Manipulation. Herman, the swordsman he’d fought to the death with, had shown him that.

Even though Leonard had spent one lifetime wielding a sword, he only started to train seriously in most of his sword techniques after he’d regained his memories of his past life. It had only been three years since then, so his experience was understandably limited.

He was lucky to have had head-to-head battles with powerful enemies and strange encounters that sped up his progress, but he hadn’t had enough time to make up for his inexperience.

Leonard was still a diamond in the rough.

The only way forward is to take things one step at a time, he realized. He quietly accepted the reality of his situation.

In his current form, he was already several times stronger than Yeon Mu-Hyuk, and he couldn’t move forward if he continued to cling to his past legacy.

He had to work on polishing his own self, just like everyone else.

Leonard opened his eyes once he recovered his mental energy and rearranged his swords into the Five Elements Cross Formation. Knowing the weaknesses in the Five Wheels Formation didn’t necessarily give him the ability to fix them, so he simply changed his approach.

“Again.”

He once again created an apparition of himself with his mind, and it rushed at him at a frightening speed.

It was like a sword demon that could cut through everything, never missing.

The embodiment brought down Mountain Crusher to Leonard’s head, but he redirected it with two swords and thrust forward the three remaining swords to block it completely. The apparition saw it coming, though, and used Wind Hail Barrage to retreat and avoid the area of attack.

Leonard felt his head throb again as he and his opponent read each other at unfathomable speeds.

This is horribly painstaking, he thought.

He didn’t know how many times he had to repeat this training method, but it didn’t seem like something that would show results after a day or two. Still, his five swords moved in perfect order, each one playing its own part and stabbing and swinging at Leonard’s imaginary enemy.

This is where it began.

He might break through his limits in a single day, or he might not make any progress even after ten years. He had truly reached a wall that he had to crawl over. This was where his trial began.

* * *

On his first day back, Leonard’s nose dripped blood.

On his second day back, Leonard’s eyes were red and bloodshot.

He hadn’t used an excessive amount of internal energy or overworked himself, but his condition was still that bad. His upper dantian was much more developed than most Transcendence Tier experts, but he was utterly exhausted by the fourth day. That was how taxing this training method was.

...This has unexpectedly become a way to train my mind.

A few weeks later, he was sitting in the lotus position and emptying his mind, restoring the mental energy that was nearly depleted.

Over time, the process of emptying and refilling increased the capacity of mental energy. He hadn’t intended it, but he now trained his mind in a similar way to how he trained his body. Typically, it wasn’t this easy to expand one’s mental energy. It didn’t build up in the same simple way that muscle fibers did, but Leonard’s training was so extreme that he was already seeing effects.

My proficiency in Sword Manipulation is also quickly increasing. I think my current skill is just about equal to Herman’s.

His training was so intense that it quite literally required blood, sweat, and tears.

If he truly had no idea what was waiting for him at the end of it, he would have possibly stopped, but he knew that this would help him expand on his flawless swordplay.

He had already achieved this much in just one month after returning to the White Dragon.

Leonard hadn’t found any inspiration for his conceptual martial arts or any guidance for reaching the Demigod Tier, but his training was a huge help in digesting all the experience he had accumulated. At some point, even his meeting with Grace had been pushed to the back of his mind.

One day, he was sparring with his embodiment at the training ground as always, and he heard a voice he’d only ever heard once before.

“Oh? What an interesting training method. You’re not starting with one sword and adding four more—your five swords are already moving as one. I was wondering why you only train with five swords, but now I understand.”

Leonard turned around. He wasn’t very surprised to see her, but his guard was up. She shouldn’t be so insightful about his technique when the concept of the Five Elements didn’t exist in this world. There were even people in murim who didn’t know that the Five Elements were about being unified as one, just like the Three Aspects and the yin-yang.

Grace met his gaze and smiled. “I must have scared you. Sorry. My schedule is very unpredictable, so I couldn’t set a specific time and date.”

This was the Blue Dragon Commander, one of the seven most powerful knights in their outstanding family. As Leonard studied her with his Dragon Eyes, he noticed what was off.

Her presence was too subtle.

It’s as if I’m looking at water or wind...

She was like nature itself.

That was how he would describe it.

Each and every one of her movements was hard to perceive. Not even invisible killers who’d reached the peak of assassin arts were this elusive.

If she took a few steps forward to pretend to greet me and then stabbed me instead, I don’t know if I could react in time. As he was thinking this, he felt a sense of déjà vu.

He’d felt this before.

“Oh.”

Her ability was similar to No. 4, Dillon, his classmate at the adolescent training facility. But while Dillon was only able to follow the flow of nature, Grace was a part of nature itself.

If she hid somewhere and remained silent, Leonard would never be able to find her, even if he put serious effort into searching for her.

She was a different type of monster from Demian and Audrey.

This family continues to surprise me.

He barely knew the contours of the commanders’ abilities, let alone their secrets. And there were still four of them he hadn’t met yet.

Leonard once again felt just how terrifying the Cardenas family was.

“It’s nice to meet you, Commander Grace,” he said. He’d seen her at the Hall of Dragons, but this was the first time they were meeting formally. n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

She laughed, understanding his intention. “Ahaha! Yes, it’s nice to meet you.”

And that was how the Blue Dragon Commander had suddenly appeared.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuxing_(Chinese_philosophy) ☜

2. Technically six; consciousness is also considered an element http://www.shingon.org/teachings/ShingonMikkyo/rokudai.html#:~:text=The%20causal%20origination%20of%20the,wind%2C%20space%2C%20and%20consciousness. ☜

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Tath%C4%81gatas ☜