Opening the Dragon Refining Arts, Dyon immediately set out on memorizing it. He understood that despite this being a trial, his grand teacher had used an odd path of time will in order to create this world. That meant that everything in this time had a basis on historical truth, and that went for the techniques as well. This was why Dyon did his due diligence in looking over ancient formation arrays and the theories behind it. Now, he would do the same for this Art.
About 2 or so years ago by now, considering how much time Dyon spent in the first trial, Dyon had had a good talk with Zabia about his goals for the future. One of them was his idea of using the millions of bronze and silver dragon reverse scales that he had gained from the Daiyu tombs to outfit his Demon Generals with them. He believed that this sort of intimidation ability would be great for the battle field.
When Dyon had thought through this, he could hardly imagine how powerful armies of the Drago-Qilin lands were. But, the truth was that he thought too much of them.
While Dragons could all, in fact, use Dragon Soul domains to intimidate and lower the battle power of their enemy, because of the innate arrogance of the Dragon race, their reverse scales obviously followed suit. Because of this, whenever two Dragon Souls overlapped, they would actively try and weaken each other. If the difference was too great, the weaker of the two would immediately shatter. As a result, Dragon armies refrained from using their Dragon Souls in large scale combat situations and would only do so in one on one fights.
Understanding this, some might wonder why reverse scales were so important to Dragons then. In a world where conquering lands was so important, why invest so much in a technique you could only use on a small scale?
The reason was two-fold. For one, it was a matter of prestige deeply ingrained into their culture. The second reason was much more reasonable, though.
While reverse scales had the function of projecting a Dragon Soul, which wasn’t a soul attack at all, ironically, it also had another function. It was the storage place of a Dragon or Qilin’s blood essence! The most potent and important blood source in all creatures was found in this place. Knowing this, is it not obvious now why forming a higher grade reverse scale was so important to them?
Body cultivation could be aptly renamed blood cultivation, and no one would object. The truth of body cultivation is simply tempering one’s blood essence and fusing it with your bone marrow through a highly painful process. Using this method, your blood essence would increase the quality of your normal blood, thereby strengthening your whole body in response.
However, much like energy and soul cultivation, talent varies drastically between different individuals. At the moment, Dyon wasn’t making efficient use of his newly gained body cultivation talent because he wasn’t using his own blood essence as a base, instead, he was using the Demon Sage’s. This wasn’t a bad thing, per se, mostly because the Demon Sage had reached such a high level of attainment in body cultivation. However, if Dyon managed to find a way to meld his blood essence base with the Demon Sage’s, there would be a vast improvement, not only in his speed, but also quality.
Dyon understood this concept long ago, it was just that it was too difficult to do. In truth, he didn’t even know if it was possible, he had only thought of it fleetingly before focusing on other things.
At the time this thought crossed Dyon mind, he had been thinking about what would happen if he had managed to integrate all three blood essences within him to 100%. At first, he naively believed that if he did so, he would have the stacked power of all three masters. However, after doing some preliminary research, he learned that he was wrong, and the reason was because of this concept of fusing blood essence bases.
Because the Demon Sage’s blood essence was of such higher quality than Dyon’s master or his martial father, their effect when coupled with the Demon Sage would be completely blocked out. For an analogy, imagine taking a cup of any size and filling it with golf balls, at a certain point, that cup would become full and unable to take any more. However, there would be a lot of wasted space within that could never be used. Here, the cup symbolizes a cultivator’s bone, while the golf balls symbolize a lower grade blood essence like Dyon’s master’s since she hardly focused on body cultivation.
Then, say with that same cup, still filled with golf balls, you then began to pour small marbles into it. Wouldn’t you then fill much of the empty space? This could be said to symbolize Dyon’s martial father, since he was a qilin, he spent much more time on his body cultivation. However, the Demon Sage’s bodily essence would without a doubt be the finest grain of sand!
In the end, the cup filled represents the peak power attained by all three blood essences fused together. However, the marbles and gold balls hardly help in increasing one’s power because much of the work is done by the sand!