The Human Giant



Beneath the man's mask was a middle-aged man with long black hair that stuck to his face due to sweat. What made Yoze shake his head was the man's eyes were dull and lacked any signs of life.

He had seen eyes like these before when he had spiritually killed Martial Silver Thunder. That meant that this man was essentially dead and Yoze wouldn't be able to get any information out of him.

Not giving up yet he checked the other two men dressed in black robes and found that all three of them were spiritually dead but their bodies were still alive. Meaning he could get information about their identities through his talent marks.

"I'll see if those detectives could help me find out more about these people. If lucky I might find a clue about the person or group that did this." Yoze muttered to himself.

Seeing that there wasn't much more he could do at the moment, Yoze sat down to relax his nerves. With unknown enemies in his footsteps, he shouldn't panic lest he makes a mistake that could cost him everything.

Right now, Yoze knew that he needed to do things one step at a time. First, he planned on waiting until his talent mark recovered to figure out the men dressed in black robes' identities. After that, he would take the information to an investigator to figure out who these men were.

The second step was that he needed to focus on becoming stronger but he also needed to start Dreyer's and Tiki's training in martial arts today. Yoze even planned to start training Jewel as well. She was making good progress on her own but he wanted to see if his coaching could help her get stronger faster.

As for himself other than remaining vigilant for a few weeks in case of surprise attacks he needed to get stronger. Becoming a Blood Master is going to take some time as well as immortal cultivation and practicing witchcraft.

The only thing that Yoze could think of that could get him immediate improvement was breaking through one of his current techniques. He had three that he could reasonably attempt: the Big Golem, Iron Skin, and Boneless Man.

"Let's start with breaking through Big Golem first. It has been at its peak for a long time and has been extremely useful."

"Iron Skin can be broken through after, and lastly Boneless Man." After deciding on the order in which he was going to break through, Yoze stood up and took off his shirt.

He then activated his Big Golem's inner vigor and kept it spread out throughout his body. The moment he activated his inner vigor Yoze immediately felt a difference between when he didn't have Inner Vigor Manipulation talent and now.

He could sense the existence of each frozen strand of Big Golem's heavy inner vigor in his body releasing a heavy pressure from their sheer weight alone. It was a pure and simple force that held immense destructive ability.

It wasn't only the Big Golem's heavy inner vigor that roamed his body. There was also Iron Skin's metallic inner vigor, Boneless Man's stretchy inner vigor, and Armored Weapon Handler's thick inner vigor floating around randomly in his body.

Even though they all had reached the peak of their method they all had different quantities and even seemed to have a certain location in his body that they liked to stay around. The inner vigor with the highest quantity in his body was Big Golem and it was not even close. 

There was more than double the number of heavy inner vigor strands in his body compared to the other strands of inner vigor combined. It was so numerous that most of the heavy inner vigor couldn't move around and was stuck in place. 

Only less than half of it was able to float around in his body. So numerous that left very little space for the strands of inner vigor to move around.

The inner vigor that came second was the Armored Weapon Handler's thick Inner Vigor which was colorless and twice the thickness of the other strands of inner vigor. The thick Inner Vigor seemed to have a favorite location as a vast majority of the inner vigor was just beneath his skin.

The inner vigor that came third was surprisingly Boneless Man. The strands of Boneless Man inner vigor were much longer compared to other inner vigors and gave Yoze the impression that they were slick and flexible.

"With how big my body is, it makes sense that I have more Boneless Man Inner Vigor to lube me up compared to Iron Skin which seems to be stuck inside my skin itself." Yoze thought to himself.

Iron Skin was a body cultivation method that allowed martial artists to reach the peak of first-rate martial artists. However, it only covered a person's skin and not their muscles, bones, organs, or sensory organs like the eyes.

Even though it could help someone not get cut by a sword it wouldn't do much good at stopping all the force behind the attack. That glaring weakness was one of the reasons that Iron Skin had numerous variants.

Just like how Yoze was able to see the flaws and limitations of the method early on, thousands of other martial artists noticed the flaws and took their ideas on how to fix them. The most famous of course was Iron Muscles which attempts to solve one of the issues that plagued Iron Skin.

Extending the area where Iron Skin was located to not only include the skin but also muscles as well it was predicted to drastically increase the overall defense of the individual. This hypothesis worked well and it was agreed upon that Iron Muscles was just better than the original.

That was why even Iron Muscles still didn't allow one to break the barrier between first-rate martial artists and Blood Masters. It was placed a floor higher than Iron Skin on the same level as the basic Big Golem body cultivation manual.

If Iron Skin was considered to be on the weaker side of peak first-rate body cultivation then Iron Muscles would be considered to take its upper middle rank. Since Iron Muscles also built upon the foundation of Iron Skin it was considered the natural progression for martial artists that trained in Iron Skin to improve their fighting abilities 

As Yoze thought about Iron Skin and Iron Muscles he felt a wave of inspiration hit him. On the spot, he changed his mind to breakthrough Iron Skin and deactivated Big Golem, and activated Iron Skin.