By the twelfth lunar month, the weather had become increasingly cold.
Moreover, as the year-end approached, nearly all businesses were about to close.
In Luting County, the streets saw visibly fewer merchants and travelers, and the business at Yuelai Inn had also dwindled significantly. Other than some regular customers who occasionally came to support the business, there were hardly any travelers stopping by for lodging.
One day at noon, after Yang Ge had sent off the only table of diners, he became completely idle.
As usual, he pulled out a piece of rough paper and a small piece of charcoal from under the counter and carefully wrote down the mental method of the "Eighteen Frost Blades".
Speaking of which, the three martial arts techniques he had learned were all passed down by the Five Ghosts of Yan Yun, but each focused on different aspects.
Chaotic Wind Leg emphasized build-up and vigorous, expansive movements.
Floating Snow Palm emphasized movement technique, with agile and delicate movements that balanced firmness and gentleness.
The Frost Blade focused on true intent, with straightforward movements that were overflowing with killing intent.
Let’s not talk about Chaotic Wind Leg for now.
Though Yang Ge did not dare to boast that he had completely mastered this leg technique, to say that he had grasped it by eighty percent was without a doubt accurate.
Of course, what often distinguished a mediocre practitioner from a master was this last ten or twenty percent.
But to fully master this last fraction, let alone to surpass the original, would require spending a vast amount of time and engaging in real combat.
Even with Yang Ge’s talent, there were no shortcuts.
As for Floating Snow Palm, Yang Ge’s progress was extremely slow.
This palm technique encompassed a great deal of knowledge about Yin and Yang, the Five Elements, Tai Chi, and the Eight Trigrams. When fully mastered, the practitioner could move like a ghost, with energy fine as spider silk. A single palm strike could fracture into thousands, interplay illusion with reality, and interchange at will. From the opponent’s perspective, it was like facing a blizzard from which there was no escape.
But Yang Ge found it incredibly difficult to even understand the complex concepts of Yin and Yang, and the Tai Chi Eight Trigrams, not to mention integrating those concepts into his movement and palm techniques. Naturally, his progress was very slow.
Therefore, the greatest gain he had made in this technique so far was not in the movement or the palm technique but in the internal cultivation method "Snow Drift Secret" which accompanied this palm technique.
This inner strength technique seemed tailor-made to complement the movement and palm techniques of the Floating Snow Palm. Its effectiveness in increasing inner Qi was very slow; in fact, one could say that even the most basic cycle of circulation increased inner Qi faster than cultivating this technique.
However, this inner strength took a novel approach in the control of inner Qi. When cultivated, the inner Qi immediately divided from the Dantian, entering several meridians at once to circulate and intermingle, eventually converging back into the Dantian like rivers returning to the sea.
If the circulation diagram of a regular inner strength technique were a twisting, continuous single line without overlap, then Snow Drift Secret’s circulation diagram would be a spider’s web, with the Dantian at the center of this web.
With this technique, when fully mastered, the inner Qi can be refined as tough as refined steel or as soft as silk wound around a finger, transitioning between Yin and Yang in a single thought.
Of course, from the traditional martial arts philosophy, where cultivating inner Qi is the primary goal and controlling it is secondary, this inner strength technique was undoubtedly unconventional — focusing more on the minute rather than the important, somewhat like losing the watermelon while picking up a sesame seed.
After all, everyone’s time and mental energy are limited. If you spend more time and mental energy on enhancing control over inner Qi, naturally, you’ll spend less on increasing your inner Qi. When one has passed the stage of vigorous and fast accumulation of strength and energy, aspiring for a breakthrough would then be less effective...
But as the old saying goes, there is no best, only the most suitable.
For Yang Ge, who never worried about his inner Qi growing too slowly but rather about it increasing too rapidly—accidentally opening the metaphoric bridges between heaven and earth and stepping into the True Essence realm—"Snow Drift Skill," which might seem a bit unorthodox, was comparable to a top-tier divine technique!
As for the Frost Blade...
This blade technique was very mystical.
Technically, it was even simpler than Chaotic Wind Leg.
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Even considering the six special moves beyond the basic blade moves, along with the corresponding inner Qi circulation diagrams, they were definitely not more challenging than those of Chaotic Wind Leg!
But the way to practice this blade technique was quite puzzling...
It required practitioners to swing a blade three thousand times daily to nurture killing intent.
It also required practitioners to cleanse and refine their killing intent by understanding that "the blade you wield is not a blade, the life you take is not killing".
It was repeatedly emphasized that the practitioner should maintain the pure state of mind of "frost kills all vegetation, everything returns to stillness".
In plain language, that means: you should be aware that you’re wielding a blade, but you can’t regard it as just a blade; you should know that you’re taking lives, but not really regard it as taking lives.
From Yang Ge’s perspective, there was a bit of a pretentious flavor to this blade technique, as if to say, "Destroying you has nothing to do with you."
What’s more puzzling was, just when Yang Ge thought he couldn’t grasp that pure intent of killing depicted in the manual and was considering giving up on this technique to avoid driving himself crazy... he split a wooden post with a single strike.
The blade was a finger-wide elm blade.
The post was a waist-thick ironwood post.
They were about one foot apart.
The inner Qi had not been controlled by him but had naturally followed the blade; with one stroke, a flash of snowy light, and a crack, the post split cleanly into two halves!
And the split was clean and smooth, without any splinters!
He himself was startled by the strike.
But before he could feel pleased, he found that he couldn’t split it anymore—not even the bark of the post!
Isn’t that mystical?
Even more mystical, the mental method that accompanies the Frost Blade is called the "Evergreen Skill," which involves visualizing a cypress resisting the harsh cold and heat of all seasons, perpetually evergreen, and using this to refine the killing intent within oneself.