Sword Qi

Jiang Ting sat quietly by the stream, cultivating the Dragon Body Technique. Having gained knowledge of his previous life, he intended to make up for the errors he had made in his past life. The first and foremost was cultivating quickly to compete with his peers. While the importance of one's cultivation foundation was spoken of by all cultivators, few actually practiced what they preached. Most found it more convenient to balance it with cultivation speed. After all, if young talents reached a higher realm quicker, they would be prioritized for development and given more resources. Even for veteran cultivators, ascending to a higher realm would give them the strength to battle for resources.

Jiang Ting, in his hot-blooded youth, and burdened by the incident of his grandfather leaving, had chosen to rush his cultivation with decent foundations, much to the marvel of his instructors. However, this caused him to often run into well matched or superior opponents when venturing outside the village. After all, what the villagers deemed an extremely solid foundation was merely excellent outside, with great scope for improvement, which geniuses from stronger factions did achieve, thus allowing them higher combat strength at the same level, as well as enabling them to walk further on the path of cultivation even with similar talents.

Thus, Jiang Ting was insistent upon pushing his foundation as far as possible, creating the strongest foundation he possibly could. In order to achieve this, he had to practice every technique at his disposal to the furthest extent possible, no matter the time taken, no matter how far behind his peers he fell in terms of cultivation level.

With such determination, Jiang Ting set his mind to the Dragon Body Technique.

The Dragon Body Technique's first phase used sword qi to refine the body. For this, the precondition was that one must be able to comprehend sword qi.

As for sword qi, it is merely a form, or attribute of qi. Qi was the energy source permeating through the fabric of the universe, which cultivators utilized to exert strength and mystic arts of godlike might. Of course, such an energy was not so easy to comprehend, as seen by the fact that so many villagers in Fudi village were still doing lifestyle jobs or studying as academicians instead of pursuing the martial path. Of course, it was also possible to utilize such paths to step into cultivation, but that was a rather roundabout way best left to those with immense talent or fortune.

It seems that Jiang Junjie had the foresight to realize that in the middle of these mountains, where spiritual qi was relatively sparse in concentration, comprehending qi would be rather difficult. Hence, he strictly ensured Jiang Ting's adherence to his daily training regimen all these years. The physical training, along with strengthening the body, would make it more sensitive to qi, while the sword training would allow him to eventually transform spiritual qi into sword qi.

In his past life, Jiang Ting had entered the martial section of the academy and had taken merely a month to sense spiritual qi as opposed to the other children, who would often take years to sense qi, or just fail altogether. Even the record in Fudi village was of 4 months prior to Jiang Ting's arrival. Of course, the village academy, due to its remoteness, did not possess the techniques to impart any training other than body refinement. As a result, Jiang Ting neglected his sword training. Of course, years of training with the sword at home made him grow attached to swordsmanship. Thus, with 8 years of half-hearted training, he stumbled his way into transforming his spiritual qi into sword qi at the age of 20, thus successfully becoming a swordsman recognized by everyone.

However now, with his comprehension from his previous life, his path to reaching his previous levels was relatively easier in terms of comprehension, although the amount of time spent to develop a truly astounding foundation would be nothing short of enormous. Even so, being able to sense spiritual qi and sword qi right away was undoubtedly a huge boon. As such, Jiang Ting had directly began using sword qi to temper his body using the Dragon Body Technique.

The sword phase was the first layer of the technique. Even though the constant destruction and regeneration would keep bringing about a slight increase in strength every time, the improvements made in such a way would eventually decrease in effectiveness and inevitable stop. At that point, one must break through the bottleneck to practice the next layer, at which point a different method of tempering would be required. According to Jiang Junjie, core disciples of the Jiang clan might cultivate the first layer of Dragon Body Technique till initial stage of mastery to prepare for cultivating any sword techniques that were too dangerous to cultivate, but the Whispering Blade's requirements were unclear since it was only acquired by the Jiang Clan a few decades ago and Jiang Junjie was quite old by that time, and had decent physique cultivation which, along with his cultivation of the sword which was already at a very high level enabled him to comprehend the first sword of Whispering Blade without needing to further temper his body. Yet the first sword was the limit, the second sword had immense requirements on the body. Since Jiang Junjie practiced other techniques, he didn't bother training his body for this sword. For the same reason, nobody else in the Jiang clan cultivated it either.

Hence Jiang Ting could be considered the first of the Jiang Clan to actually train in the Whispering Blade. The first layer of the technique was quite simple. It simply required the usage of sword qi along its mandated method to destroy the body. Procuring medicine for regenerating the body had no requirements from the technique itself, although any prudent man would be severely overprepared before accepting such a lethal undertaking. As such, Jiang Ting's training began.