Birth of the Demonic Sword

Even if they were in a group, Noah, Don, Jordan, and King Elbas had to take care of their training and projects separately. The cultivation journey was a path that experts had to walk on their own, and the occasional team-ups could only last as long as they didn't need to take care of their power.

The four didn't separate. They remained in different spots of the same region to focus on their cultivation or complete projects. King Elbas and Noah had to work with the black mineral, while Don and Jordan had far more serious matters to attend.

The two hybrids were in a unique period of their cultivation journey. Don had to begin the preparations for his breakthrough, and Jordan needed to fill the vastness that separated her from the eighth rank.

Their decision to accept Theodora's orders came from that peculiar state. Traveling the Immortal Lands with Noah was a new experience that could help them gain insights into the next level of power. The two hybrids had chosen to leave the Legion to take a break from the stillness of that organization.

Safety was the enemy of the experts that strived to reach the higher ranks. Even gods couldn't escape that rule.

Noah relied on his Divine Deduction technique to complete the new blueprint. His dark matter would remove the structural limitation given by the octopus-like creatures' bodies. Once he replicated those beasts with his higher energy, he would mass-produce the peculiar darkness that filled their black mineral.

Noah rested in a cave dug on a corner of the region. The area was mostly empty due to the presence of the Void Zone nearby, and his aura fended off the few creatures that were brave enough to venture into those lands.

The dark world filled the entire cave as he floated among his higher energy. Noah sat cross-legged in the air and cultivated while the workshop kept multiple replicas of the octopus-like creatures active.

His aura leaked in the environment to create primary energy that the dark world pushed toward the fake tentacles. Strands of that peculiar darkness then flowed out of the fake creatures' heads and converged in Noah's chest.

Noah had created a system that allowed him to continue his training while he mass-produced the peculiar darkness. His attention was elsewhere while his technique filled the strange diagram with energy.

'How long will it even take?' Noah wondered from time to time.

The energy required to activate the diagram was immense. The amount of energy absorbed by those lines would make any gaseous stage cultivator pale, but the process was nowhere close to its end.

Noah eventually felt forced to create more copies of the inhabitants of the Void Zone. His curiosity toward the strange diagram affected his training since he would often lose focus to check the lines' status.

He had martial arts to improve, spells to evolve, and techniques to develop, but his mind could only think about the diagram. The more energy it absorbed, the more Noah's interest increased.

Even in that annoying state, Noah managed to improve in some aspects. He managed to develop an initial form of the "embodiment of power", but the changes on his body were minimal.

The creator of those forms wanted to obtain a body that even hybrids would envy. Yet, that was Noah's starting point, and improving the technique meant reinventing it in his case.

His only advantage was that he already had vessels for the dark matter. Noah only needed to find a way to make his tissues feed on his darkness and mental energy, but the task was harder than it looked.

After the events with the Eternal Snakes, Noah's body had already reached a limit in the number of different features that it could accommodate. The exploration of the Evolution Pit had also purified all his tissues, which left him with nothing to improve.

In theory, he had already reached the peak. He had the strongest type of body. He only needed to nourish it to obtain far more power than his peers.

'Maybe I shouldn't try to make it a permanent state,' Noah thought at some point. 'The "embodiment of power" was the individuality of a human, but I can't be sure that the expert was on the right path. He even died before completing the procedure on himself.'

Doubts formed in Noah's mind as the failures kept piling. He even wondered whether his ambition was playing tricks with his mind again as that trend continued.

'Maybe I can turn it into a technique,' Noah concluded. 'Something similar to a secret art that doesn't have drawbacks. A skill that behaves like innate abilities.'

That path seemed more reasonable, and it also suited his abilities. Instead of creating forms that could permanently improve his body, Noah would aim to create a temporary boost that used all the energies in his body.

Only his personal arts managed to do that. Spells and martial arts always failed to use primary energy, darkness, dark matter, and mental energy at the same time, but his innate ability gave him an advantage with that technique.

'I wonder if I should change the way my innate ability works,' Noah wondered. 'The black vessels come from the black hole, so the main issue would be to find the right mixture of the four energies.'

Noah's experiments changed course after that decision. He began to test how the primary energy, darkness, dark matter, and mental energy interacted. He planned to find a mixture that could provide more power than all of them once it flowed inside his black vessels.

The diagram continued to absorb energy while Noah was deep inside his experiments. He would focus on the lines from time to time, but he eventually became so used to that procedure that he managed to forget about it.

Whenever Noah recalled that he was creating that peculiar darkness, he would make more copies of the octopus-like creatures to increase energy output.

The diagram absorbed a massive amount of darkness on a daily basis. Noah didn't even dare to calculate how much primary energy he had wasted for that project.

His cave had become a massive underground structure due to the energy that he had continued to absorb. The dark world filled every corner of the area, and countless creatures floated inside it as they continued to produce the needed darkness.

The underground structure enlarged and became deeper as that process continued. Noah had yet to witness that amount of destruction in the Immortal Lands, but the scene didn't faze him. He would eradicate entire continents to obtain the energy that he needed.

The diagram eventually showed signs of activation. Noah had lost track of the passage of time by that point, but he had a vague idea of how much energy those lines had absorbed.

In terms of the maximum capacity of a dantian, the diagram had absorbed enough energy to refill a solid stage cultivator. Noah's dark matter could match that amount of power with a week of accumulation, but it was strange that a single divine item would have such high requirements.

'Don't tell me that it's something in the eighth rank!' Noah exclaimed in his mind as the absorption continued. 'If only Shandal knew that he had found such a promising item.'