“I will see how many women I can gather that are willing to test this. It will take a few days for me to get them ready to learn again,” the chief said.
“Of course, take as long as you need, Chief. There is no hurry,” Alex said.
“If that is all, then the two of you may return.”
With the chief’s command, Alex and Gorang walked away. Even after they left, the chief and his counselors remained in the room.
“His explanations made it sound like they made sense,” the chief said. “But any of you think it will actually work?”
“Hard to say. I have never seen a battle formation where only a single person is the focus. All warriors are supposed to be equal, after all,” one of the counselors said.
“We should at least test it,” Inga, the man who claimed to have seen Death, said. “If we truly are wasting something good, then it would be better to fix it while we can.”
“Having the women help in testing it makes it so that we won’t be wasting any of the warriors’ time,” another one added.
“What are we doing?” Rona asked the group. “Why are we listening to an outsider? Did you forget what he looks like? If he’s not aligned with Death, then he’s tainted by it. We should take the pastes we can and send him away. He will only bring bad luck to us.”
“Stop being so skeptical for no reason,” the chief said with an air of annoyance. “He made a good suggestion. View it for what it is, and stop caring about the person.”
“How could I? He could be Death’s subordinate, its disciple sent here to show us the wrong way. We should not be giving him any more attention than we already have.”
The chief shook his head, refusing to listen to the man. He had made similar claims the other day too once Alex had left, so this was nothing new. The chief couldn’t understand why he was so afraid of Death when it was Inga whose life had nearly come to an end that day.
“We’re doing what I said we are. Have the news pass around that we’re looking for capable women who failed to become warriors within the last 5 years. Tell them we need to test something important.”
“Right away, Chief.”
Alex bade his farewell to Gorang and returned to his place. Since he had already made the pastes, there was nothing else left for him to do, so he could sit by and meditate for a while.
There were so many things to do, so he needed to start with something specific to focus on during his meditation.
There were really only two things he wanted to do right away, which were to find a good method of making his wish of a Sun Creation come true, and to improve all of the techniques he received from the Blood God’s Manual.
Alex tried to, and failed to, come up with a way to make the Sun Creation come true using Sunhearts. While very close to a sun, the Sunheart lacked a few fundamental aspects of the sun.
One such aspect was its ability to destroy things standing close to it. Alex had stood before the sun and felt the full force of its power. Even standing very far away, it was enough to burn him all over his body.
Another important aspect of the sun was its ability to give life. Everything in nature existed because of the sun. Without it, plants would have no way of surviving at all.
The sun both helped destroy and helped create, which was something the Sunheart was entirely missing. As such, he could not make use of it for his Creation.
So, Alex had to ignore that for the while and focus on his blood beasts. However, that was difficult too. Because blood beasts were such strange creatures which he didn’t fully understand yet, he couldn’t so easily improve the technique. As a result, he had to start a step earlier.
He needed to understand how blood techniques worked, so he had to start with something more simple, such as the Blood Armor technique.
Because the Blood Armor only created a singular armor around the person’s torso, Alex had wanted to improve it to completely cover his entire body in order to improve his defense. The issue with making a cover for the entire body had been due to the fact that a human body could not hold so much blood.
Thankfully, with the Undying Physique and his Dao of Blood aura, Alex could overcome that difficulty.
As such, Alex decided to start there.
Blood seeped out of his pores in a single thought, coming around his chest, shoulders, and back, solidifying into a hard crystalline material, made fully out of his blood.
Alex tried to make sense of what was going on at that moment, but he failed to even begin to understand what it was that caused the technique to work. The blood aura didn’t precisely follow any pathway in this case.
Alex frowned. The blood just poured out of his body, following no specific pathway. Or maybe it did, and he didn’t recognize the pathway. After thinking for a bit, Alex took back the blood into his body and tried again.
Alex tested it multiple times, and it very quickly became clear that it would take him years to fully understand what was happening, especially with the Storm God’s seal suppressing the full extent of his senses.
It was no different than asking a chef to cook a meal with half the utensils.
It would take a lot of time.
Late at night, Alex finally decided to stop. He didn’t want to, but part of the thing he needed to do every day was train his Intent as well. So, he spent the next few hours honing his Intent with a piece of rock in his palm.
Then, late after midnight, he attacked the Storm God’s seal a few times before falling asleep.