A boy could be seen practicing. He channeled mana to different body parts through his mana veins and trained. He could feel that his body had become a lot stronger than before.
He could feel it being nourished and strengthened as he channeled mana through his body using mana veins. With time, his body was getting stronger; this change appeared after he had advanced into the Epic Stage.
When he transferred a large amount of mana through his veins, his veins expanded to some limit, causing him extreme pain before getting injured. Sometimes, they were a little away from bursting apart. It took a lot of time for them to recover.
Now he discovered that his natural regeneration worked on it as it saw them as a part of his body. He was astonished when he discovered that this discovery could help him temper his mana veins and make them bigger to allow them to transfer mana faster.
The more blood flowed through his mana veins, the stronger his body would be. He also got a crazy idea when he discovered this. To test it, he trained harshly for a while and injured his mana veins. Then, with hope in his eyes, he used his 'Recover' skill to heal them.
His curiosity got the better of him this time, and he soon discovered that he couldn't recover them by using it. This made it impossible for him to train Mana Veins for three days. He had only recently recovered.
In the meantime, he created a set of exercises to train his mana veins and temper them. This method used his passive regeneration and a large amount of mana to strengthen his body gradually.
It followed the principle of consistency, instead of training to his limit each day and then waiting for 3–4 days to recover. He decided to only train to the degree that his mana veins could recover with sleep.
Many other changes had appeared in his body; he was discovering them with time. Now that he didn't have anything urgent to do, he had some free time. He decided to do one final task on his to-do list for a while.
After fighting multiple battles, he discovered that he didn't have suitable Shadow Element battle art. He wanted to create one for many months but was busy and never had time.
He was now ready to use his enhanced abilities and knowledge to create deadly Shadow Element Battle Art. He wanted this technique to be similar to the Frost Nova Battle Art but more deadly.
As usual, he first sat down and took out his notebook. He wrote down what he wanted. He wants it to serve three requirements: Boost, Burst, and Boom.
First was Boost; he wanted it to boost his attacks constantly, like Frost Nova, but its power should be higher. In the best-case scenario, he wanted a technique that could stack with each attack, and each successful attack should grant him physical and magical penetration.
Burst, like its name, was a burst attack. Similar to the third technique of Frost Noval called Glacial Execution, which uses all the accumulated ice energy from the previous attacks and deals a massive burst attack,
Unlike Glacial Execution, he wanted it to charge faster and have a shorter cooldown. He was ready to sacrifice his power to achieve it. While Glacial Execution was a very powerful technique that, when fully charged, could deal massive damage and one-shot most opponents,
It had a lot of shortcomings that he discovered the more he used it. First, fighting with multiple opponents was unreliable as it was not an AOE skill.
The second was the time it took to accumulate energy to release its strongest attack. In most of the fast-paced battles, there was not enough time to achieve it.
The last was its cooldown. It had a half-hour cooldown, making it very hard for the user to decide whether to use it or save it for later.
The last thing he wanted to achieve was a boom. As its name suggests, he wanted it to be explosive and destructive. He didn't know how to achieve this effect but wanted to create a bomb-like skill that exploded.
He still didn't have any idea how he could achieve it or how he would use it, but he had a clear goal he wanted his last technique to achieve. Due to not having much time, he was only going to create three techniques.
He had a month to create it and master it. He might have lost hope if it were for any other element, but he was confident in his abilities regarding the shadow element.
He had the basic idea; next was the source. He had to decide which type of knowledge he would use. After thinking for a while, he decided to use shadow manipulation, arcane magic, and shadow runes to create these techniques.
The next step was to decide the fuel, which was easy. It would be mana, shadow energy, and will. He had decided to keep Will, as he wanted something to control the bomb for the last technique.
With a clear picture of the goal in mind, he started working on creating concepts for all three techniques. He kept working on it for days, only stopping to train his mana veins daily, do daily necessities, and meditate to recover his mental energy and rest.
Due to successfully creating multiple techniques and battle art, he knew what to do and how to be efficient. It took him a week to create concepts for all three techniques.
For the first one, he was going to use Shadow Essence, Penetration Rune, to create a layer on his weapon, which increases sharpness and penetration capability when infused with the weapon.
This was no big deal; the harder part was how to stack it. For it, he needed to create rules. He was not unfamiliar with rules; he had used them while creating his shadow zone.
Rule worked on the principle of equal exchange; he had to sacrifice one thing to gain another. Thinking about its concept, this question constantly lingered in his mind: 'I sacrificed the size of my zone for unlocking the ability to seal space and other abilities. What will I sacrifice this time to increase its power?'
To use rules in techniques, one needed to have a very high mastery of shadow energy and should have the ability to converse with shadows. He needed to tell Shadow how this rule would work. There were other criteria too, but fortunately, he cleared them all by a thin margin.
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