Chapter 115: Chapter 115

Ron wanted to advance to Knight with a one hundred percent Whole-Body Force state. It wasn’t that he had suddenly changed and begun pursuing the absolute limit, but rather that while there were indeed various crises at hand that made him desperate to enhance his abilities, those crises were still far from reaching a point where disaster would strike tomorrow.

Take the recent matter of the decisive battle against the cultists. That would happen at least three days from now, and whether Ron and the other apprentices would even be called to the front lines remained unknown.

Most likely, they would simply do rear echelon work, just like last time.

As for the process of advancing to Knight, according to Jason’s description, it didn’t require much time. As long as one reached the requisite state and possessed the will to advance, it could be completed within three to five minutes. Afterward, getting further acquainted with one’s body might take an hour or two.

But that was still very fast.

In other words, whenever the need arose, Ron could completely make an emergency advancement right before the moment struck. He didn’t necessarily have to wait until his Whole-Body Force progress reached one hundred percent.

But until then, there was no harm in pushing his Whole-Body Force progress as far forward as possible.

Every increment of progress he made now would mean one less increment of time spent shoring up his foundation later. The math was clearly in his favor.

…

Gazing at his expanded attribute list, beyond his Whole-Body Force progress, Ron also focused his “gaze,” or rather his consciousness, on the two entries of 【Breathing Technique Synchronization】 and 【Physical Enhancement】.

The synchronization progress of the former had already reached 76%, which meant he had more or less exhausted all the accumulated gains from his previous Ice Breathing Technique inheritance.

76% was only a preliminary estimate. Starting from around 70%, every single percentage point gained going forward required almost as much effort as all the cumulative effort spent before it.

Ron understood that without undergoing another Breathing Technique inheritance, relying solely on the experience from that one session, he probably wouldn’t be able to push his synchronization progress above 90% before advancing to Knight.

Furthermore, this was a ratio. As long as he underwent another Breathing Technique inheritance, his current synchronization progress would be recalculated based on both inheritance experiences combined. He estimated it would drop below 60%.

Essentially, unless he reached a point where he could advance no further and had ample time to research and ponder the Breathing Technique, the odds of him pushing this progress to one hundred percent were slim.

Ron planned to undergo another Breathing Technique inheritance in the near future, at least before the territory’s decisive battle against the cultists.

However, this fell under the category of important but not particularly urgent. After all, his current Transcendent Level had already reached Level 3, which was sufficient for him to advance to Knight.

As for his Physical Enhancement progress:

Ron’s current progress was Level 2 at 30%. Once the progress bar filled and he reached Level 3, it would mean his body had met the minimum standard of a Formal Knight, which was what this world called the “Second Limit Breakthrough.”

Of course, even so, a body at this degree of refinement still couldn’t grant immunity to the damage inflicted by swords and blades. At most, it would mitigate the harm, and it still wouldn’t compare to the Wastelanders Ron had encountered before.

Perhaps only upon reaching the Intermediate or even Senior Knight level would one possess the monstrous physique of a Wastelander, who could survive having their heart torn out.

Because Ron had been burning through Ignition Potions, his Life Energy was almost constantly at a high level. This also meant that his body enhancement speed had reached the absolute limit of his current Transcendent Level, or rather, the limit of his Breathing Technique’s tier.

At most, in another month or so, he would possess a Formal Knight-level body.

Of course, before that happened, Ron would certainly have already advanced to Knight. At that point, he might become this world’s sole anomaly:

A man who was already a Formal Knight, yet whose body was still at the apprentice level.

This would make him the weakest Formal Knight in history, but only temporarily. Or to put it another way, he could very well be considered the strongest apprentice.

Later, once his physical enhancement caught up, he could potentially become the strongest Junior Knight.

…

Whether it was Whole-Body Force progress or physical enhancement, neither was particularly convenient to work on at night. During the evenings, what Ron did most was research the Breathing Technique and study Secret Patterns.

Since his Breathing Technique had more or less hit the bottleneck of his current stage, he had no intention of researching it further until the next inheritance ritual.

Therefore, the Secret Pattern research he conducted tonight was, more specifically, a somewhat radical experiment concerning Pollution Secret Patterns.

Had he not already confirmed that the Radiant Maxims had a miraculous effect on Pollution Secret Patterns, Ron truly wouldn’t have dared to make this decision. But now, he dared!

On the surface of his true Light Orb, Ron’s consciousness first focused on the Body Secret Patterns, and then swept across the Pollution Secret Patterns that lay just outside them, covering nearly the entire surface of the orb.

Ultimately, he selected a cluster of Pollution Secret Patterns that existed within the Body Secret Patterns. Then, using his consciousness as a guide and his will as a fulcrum, he slowly moved them through the Body Secret Patterns.

During this process, this cluster of Pollution Secret Patterns continuously merged with the surrounding Body Secret Patterns it touched, then separated, then merged again. Only when passing through Transcendent Secret Patterns did they fall dormant, as if entering hibernation.

Ron had noticed this phenomenon previously when transferring Pollution Secret Patterns. Back then, he had simply assumed that Pollution Secret Patterns and Transcendent Secret Patterns were incapable of interacting. But now, he understood:

It was likely that these two types of Secret Patterns didn’t belong to the same system at all. Unless under circumstances of being “referenced” or “annotated,” it was exceedingly difficult for them to coexist within the same Secret Pattern Program.

However, at present, Ron himself had a mountain of tasks to attend to and simply couldn’t spare much energy to research Pollution Secret Patterns. This risky experiment he was conducting was actually in service of his daily training and his research on Transcendent Secret Patterns.

Soon, that cluster of Pollution Secret Patterns, originally situated within the Secret Pattern group representing human skin tissue, was finally moved to its designated position through Ron’s tireless efforts:

Right inside the Body Secret Pattern group representing “Ron’s” pupils!

Afterward, while maintaining his perception of his true Light Orb, Ron channeled a portion of his consciousness into a shallow immersion within “Ron’s” body. This degree of immersion wasn’t even enough to make the body stand up, but it was more than sufficient to glean the body’s sensory input.

Ron focused intently. In the darkness, he seemed to discern a subtle anomaly from the Pollution Secret Patterns drifting discretely through the surrounding space. A portion of the Pollution Secret Patterns suspended in the environment had begun to converge toward Ron’s body, appearing to entangle themselves around him.

At the same time, the Pollution Secret Patterns originally entangled around the exterior of Ron’s body also began to exhibit changes. Due to the scarcity of sample data, Ron couldn’t yet discern the underlying pattern of these changes.

But the fact that it had produced this reaction was already enough to prove his hypothesis:

It was indeed possible to achieve a visualized attribute panel of the physical body by transferring Pollution Secret Patterns!

All that remained was to map the changes in the external Pollution Secret Patterns to the various pieces of information on his attribute panel one by one. Additionally, he needed to account for the possibility of others detecting the anomaly, which meant he had to consider encryption or some other countermeasure.