Path to Transcendence

Chapter 87: Anyone Want an Arm?

Julius didn’t advocate self-mutilation. If any normal person did it, he would make sure they were mentally alright, and maybe see if they needed to check themselves in somewhere. But he wasn’t normal, so in his case, he believed it was acceptable.

How many people had a healing skill that could regenerate limbs at will? It was not like he was permanently damaging himself or anything of the like. However, he was just a little curious, you know?

He had questions regarding how his advancement to Tier 2 would affect his healing. He might have already known that Drasil had some sort of effect on his healing, but there was much more he wanted to test.

Since he was Tier 2, that technically meant he had a Fire, Kinetic, and Life Affinity Body. Therefore, because Affinity Bodies made mana flow through one’s body more easily, it was possible that life mana would be able to heal his body more effectively. He didn’t try to get his hopes too high, but a man can dream.

He would like to say that he had hesitated as if it had been a hard decision… but nope. He had cut off his arm so swiftly it had surprised even himself. It was at that moment did he began to seriously contemplate his mental health. He was pretty sure that sane people didn’t lop off their own limbs so eagerly.

That was what was alarming. How eager he was to do it. All in the name of science and experimentation.

He had chosen to do this in a room much like the one he used for his advancement, so there was a shower and everything to clean up the mess he was already causing. No one could call him inconsiderate.

There was so much blood already gushing out of his arm, spraying around the floor. It looked like a scene straight out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. He made sure to strip naked as well, he didn’t see a reason to dirty his clothes. Although the uniform was supposedly self-cleaning, he didn’t know if there was a limit on how much it could clean and he didn’t want to test it today.

Julius waited for a second, just observing his arm splatter blood around and his former limb limply lying on the ground. It was quite weird seeing his arm just sitting there, knowing it was his.

However, he decided he had waited long enough and sent a nice thick stream of life and fire mana into [Pseudo-Phoenix Renewal]. He felt the skill activate in a fury and quickly spread to his arm, or where his arm used to be.

The very end of where he had cut it was engulfed in soft red flames. He was very taken by surprise by how fast he saw his flesh being repaired. It was almost twice as fast as it had been before and it was already very quick.

In a matter of several seconds, he could already see the bone to his elbow being reformed, and the tissue around it regenerating with a frightening intensity. In less than half a minute, he had completely regrown his arm back to what it had looked like a few minutes ago. Even the scars from his previous burn were there. He had thought that they would have been removed if he took off the entire arm, but it seemed he was wrong.

There was something that he wasn’t quite understanding about his healing skill.

An interesting detail that he almost missed was how after the last time he had lost his hand and it had regrown back, he felt like there was a sort of stiffness that he had to get used to. However, now his hand felt like it had never left.

If there weren’t a pint of blood and a lone limb lying on the floor next to him, he would have never guessed what had happened. His advancement to Tier 2 did make the healing process much more smooth. The skill seamlessly flowed through his body and to the injury, much more efficiently than when he was Tier 1. Also, the “sparkly” mana he sensed from Drasil did a lot for him.

Julius still had zero clue about what might have happened with Drasil, but he could tell that his life mana, at least the one that was used on himself with [Pseudo-Phoenix Renewal] was of a higher quality than the one before. So he kept on doing it, trying to see if he spotted anything.

Julius looked at this newly healed arm and back to the dozen limbs that were leaking blood on the ground. He was still curious and tried to see why his mana was acting like that, so he repeated the experiment a couple of times to observe the process.

He tried many things, varying from different limbs, to changing the way he used the skill, anything he could think of he attempted.

He even tried to use the skill with Drasil no longer inside of his core, but the effects remained the same. Which was nice, but also disproved his theory that Drasil was the one that was making the change inside of his core. It was still probably likely that Drasil had something to do with it, but as for how, well that was the million-dollar question.

Julius only took a couple of hours testing out his various experiments so he still had plenty of time for other training. He took off his ring, and promptly began practicing his aura control. Tier 2 had made some massive improvements to the strength of his aura. He could feel the distinctive power that allowed him to identify other Tier 2s.

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As he trained his aura control, he realized that he hadn’t been utilizing his newly acquired aura strength in the most optimal way. With the increase in power, [Empowerment of Will] should have been more effective. Julius had not been able to bring out the full measure of his new aura. If his previous aura was like a branch of a tree, his new one was like a carefully crafted wooden spear.

It actually made controlling his aura much more challenging than just half a day ago. He thought that he had been getting a good grasp on his control, but with the change, he was back to square one. He had been getting used to using a Tier 1’s aura, but now that it had gotten stronger it was like using a broadsword after he had been practicing with a wooden training blade.

If this was how difficult it was suppressing his aura at Tier 2, he could understand why Tier 3s and Tier 4s cannot completely suppress their aura. A little leakage made sense and was already admirable as is.

That made Declan and Professor Youma even more impressive. Those two people Julius had never even sensed a whiff of aura unless they wanted him to. Their control must be absolutely insane.

The rest of the time Julius spent trying to get a handle on his aura. He had even tried the vortex technique he had come across in Professor Youma’s class, but it was a complete fail. He almost drowned himself in his own aura when he attempted in with his new aura. It was already really hard before, but now he wasn’t even able to get it started before it turned on him.

By the end of it, he could see why those Tier 2s he had seen around the campus hadn’t reigned in their auras, even if they had an aura skill. If they didn’t take the time to practice their aura control, then they would have to deal with their aura splashing around or use items like the ring he was wearing to prevent it.

On another note, he did end up taking a quick nap at least. It wasn’t on a bed or anything, he just used a mat meant for meditation exercises but it wasn’t that bad, he had slept on worse. He hadn’t gotten any sleep for the past couple of days, and he remembered the conversation that he and Declan had. The newly improved healing skill had actually made his need for sleep even less than before, and now he found it hard to fall asleep. Most times, sleep came really easy to him, this was the only time that he had to really make a conscious attempt to relax himself and let sleep take him.

When he woke up, it was already almost time for breakfast, so he washed his face with some water and headed on over to the cafeteria for some breakfast. However, he spotted the pile of detached limbs from the night before that he had forgotten about. With a swift burst of fire, he burned the limbs to ash. Julius wiped the imaginary sweat from his brow. He could hardly imagine how a maintenance person might react if they were to come in and see a mound of cut-off arms and other limbs shoved off in the corner.

Unsurprisingly, his mandatory classes weren’t that exciting. The only thing of note was that during his Tier Advancement class, Professor Youma had noticed that Julius had advanced. Julius didn’t think anybody could notice with the ring on, but Professor Youma had definitely been able to tell. He even gave Julius a nod of approval.

It wasn’t until his sword training elective with Professor Hashen that something interesting happened.

[Swordsmanship lvl 9 -> lvl 10]

It hadn’t been that long since he got the skill, but it still felt like it had been forever. He had been practicing the skill every night for hours.

Skill [Swordsmanship] is evolving… possible advancements: [Sword Mastery], [Blade Mastery], [Penetrative Thrust], [Sharp Edge], [Wide Slash], [Mana Slash], and [Aura Slash].

There were many skills that he expected to show up. The books he had read told him that [Sword Mastery] and [Blade Mastery] were almost always an option when evolving the skill. There were apparently some good rare skills that evolved from them later down the road. Some people chose the general upgrades for skills like [Sword Dance] and [Sword Instincts], two very good rare skills that were core skills for any swordsman.

However, in Julius’s case, he didn’t want to focus on swords, he may use them occasionally, but he was already getting spread too thin, and adding a sword specialization on top of everything would be foolhardy.

[Penetrative Thrust] was a funny one. He wondered if there were any other ways one could use that skill in a manner that didn’t revolve around swords and how effective it would be if used in that way. Would the skill recognize anything as a sword and then add the effect to it? If so that was a horrifying thought.

[Sharp Edge] was a skill that he had actually been interested in. It was a plain-sounding skill at the uncommon stage but there were so many skill evolutions that he could see being useful. He had been looking at the [Razor Edge] skill in particular.

Actually, when he thought about it, both [Penetrative Thrust] and [Sharp Edge] would be great additions to his constructs. They would add another layer of offensive power to his constructs. He kept that idea in mind, he didn’t mind grinding another general weapon skill to get one of them and see if they could synergize with his other skills.

[Wide Slash] on the other hand, wasn’t a skill that he had recognized from any other readings. It sounded like a name that would show up in most skill evolutions, but maybe he just overlooked it. It did sound like a good skill if he was focusing on swords, but he wasn’t so he quickly forgot about it and focused on the skills he had been looking forward to.

[Mana Slash] and [Aura Slash] were what he had been anticipating. They were some of the most commonly acquired skills because of their compatibility with such a wide variety of other skills. Julius was hoping that one of them would be able to synergize with his other skills, but it was a toss-up between the two.

He had been leaning toward [Aura Slash] but [Mana Slash] was also a very good fit for his mage-focused skills. Plus he felt like [Empowerment of Will] could do many of the same aspects if not better than [Aura Slash].

To be honest, he could also do many of the same things as [Mana Slash] even without a single skill, so that wasn’t a fair comparison. But he also didn’t want to synergize or evolve [Empowerment of Will] with his other skills, at least not yet. It was already rare+, which indicated how good it was on its own, and he didn’t want to take the risk of losing it for something that was worse.

So many choices, and so many different paths he could take.

A little frustrated at now knowing what he should do, Julius walked around the campus grounds, trying to sort through his options.