Chapter 33: Chapter 33

After returning home, Ron lit the fireplace as usual, let his body rest, and detached his consciousness to return to his true form, the Light Orb.

Currently, the most important and urgent matter for him was to organize the First Sword Stance of the Ice Sword Art into a Secret Pattern program that could be directly executed on the surface of the Light Orb.

He repeatedly recalled the sensations from today’s and yesterday’s daytime Sword Stance training. Most importantly, he relied on the perspective of his Light Orb to recall the changes in the relevant Secret Patterns from those moments.

After repeated comparisons, Ron discovered that a portion of Transcendent Secret Patterns would naturally form on the orb’s surface during Sword Stance training.

And after the training concluded, only a small fraction of those Transcendent Secret Patterns were drawn in by the Body Secret Patterns, merging with specific Body Secret Patterns. These were, in fact, the very bodily structures and tissues strengthened by the First Sword Stance.

Therefore, the key to converting the First Sword Stance into a Secret Pattern program lay within those naturally generated Transcendent Secret Patterns.

Ron had a rough idea of how they were produced: it should be a specific method of circulating Life Energy that enabled their generation. But the problem was that Life Energy was not a concrete, existing energy, but rather a hypothetical, virtual energy.

What it reflected was merely the process of change in a certain transcendent phenomenon.

Ron simply couldn’t control Life Energy, or rather, he couldn’t make Life Energy circulate according to his will. If he didn’t care about these specifics, it wouldn’t be difficult; the Sword Stance training itself would consume Life Energy.

“I just want to figure out the First Sword Stance. Is it really this hard?”

As long as he figured out the First Sword Stance, the rest would naturally fall into place, yet he was stuck right here on the simplest First Sword Stance!

This involved far too many variables that Ron couldn’t control, and they had an exponential impact. Even if he wanted to try his luck, it would be extremely difficult to find the correct one among infinite solutions.

After pondering back and forth, he decided to focus his main efforts on the Body Secret Patterns. Transcendent Secret Patterns were merely a blanket term he had defined himself to distinguish them from Pollution Secret Patterns and Body Secret Patterns; they didn’t form a system at all.

Furthermore, they appeared and vanished at random, completely beyond his control.

He wanted to organize the Pollution Secret Patterns, but because his foundation was truly too shallow, a single misstep might set himself ablaze. So, at the end of the day, only the Body Secret Patterns were the most suitable for deep exploration.

“No, wait, I should have thought of this earlier!”

Ron suddenly became excited. He abruptly realized that there was absolutely no need for him to delve too deeply into the so-called Transcendent Secret Patterns. Did those transcendent Knights in reality have a Light Orb perspective like he did?

Weren’t those transcendent Knights, every single one of them, grown from ordinary people?

It was highly likely that by simply focusing on themselves, transcendence would naturally follow!

Just like how, when maintaining the First Sword Stance, Transcendent Secret Patterns automatically appeared on the surface of the orb.

For a moment, Ron became exceptionally thrilled, and the glow of the Light Orb correspondingly became much brighter.

…

By re-examining the state of the Body Secret Patterns when maintaining the First Sword Stance, comparing it with the daily state, and combining it with the speculation that fully mastering the Twelve Sword Stances would inevitably lead to becoming a Transcendent, Ron quickly found what he was looking for:

A kind of momentum that was very difficult to discern on the physical body, but had a clear manifestation on the Body Secret Patterns of the Light Orb’s surface!

“So that’s it! I understand! I completely understand!”

For a moment, Ron felt a sudden rush of enlightenment, as if a veil had been lifted. One could imagine that this was exactly how the ancients felt when they achieved enlightenment. Right now, he was genuinely experiencing that very feeling.

He completely grasped the essence of the Sword Stance. The so-called “Sword Stance” appeared to be a static state on the surface, but in reality, the body had already begun to consolidate its internal forces, and this force was on the verge of bursting forth but hadn’t yet been released.

It was precisely because apprentices could not fully control their own bodies that they were unable to maintain such a state.

Actually, the instructors had even gotten it wrong!

It wasn’t that completely mastering the Twelve Sword Stances would allow one to become a Formal Knight; rather, only a Formal Knight could completely master the Twelve Sword Stances, or any specific Sword Stance.

From this perspective, one could even say that as long as someone fully mastered the First Sword Stance, they could become a Formal Knight.

Of course, because the bodily parts strengthened by the First Sword Stance were quite limited, a Formal Knight achieved in this manner would obviously belong to the weakest kind.

However, a question arose:

Could one first become a Formal Knight and then turn back to make up for the bodily parts that were not fully strengthened beforehand?

Based on Ron’s own understanding of the Sword Stance, he believed it was possible!

So how exactly could one become a Formal Knight?

The instructors said that to become a Formal Knight, one had to fully master the Twelve Sword Stances, but these two things were essentially the exact same thing, which was:

mastering the body to form a combined internal force.

In the traditional martial arts terminology of Ron’s homeland, this was referred to as 【Whole-Body Force】.

Through training, the various parts of the body were made to work in coordination, gathering the strength of the entire body into a single point. Whether throwing a punch or a kick, it involved the cooperation of the body’s entire structural organization, rather than just localized muscle power.

However, Ron’s homeland was a modern, technological society where traditional martial arts had long since declined, becoming more akin to dance. In any case, Ron himself had never seen anyone able to train to the point of forming their entire body’s strength into a unified force.

There were only urban legends like “a mother lifting a car bare-handed to save her child.”

And another way to say “urban legend” was simply “rumor.” Ron didn’t believe these tales, but he didn’t reject the theory of the body’s internal combined force, though he wasn’t entirely convinced of it either.

Take breaking down a door, for example.

If you pushed it with your hands, whether it could be pushed open depended only on the friction between your shoes and the ground, or rather, on the weight of the person pushing the door.

The heavier you were, the easier it was to push open. (Ignoring whether your hands hurt or not~)

But if you shouldered the door, you could add the kinetic energy of the human body’s movement. Theoretically, as long as the speed was fast enough, you could smash a hole straight through an iron plate.

If the person shouldering the door was restricted so their body couldn’t separate from the door, they could still utilize kinetic energy, which was the energy generated by the shift in their center of gravity.

This was what Ron had previously believed to be the essence of the body’s internal combined force.

And now, this understanding of his had been updated. The theoretical realm of his homeland’s traditional martial arts seemed to have truly found development in this world, actually managing to integrate the forces within the body into one.

Of course, if explained with a theory he was more receptive to, it would be:

the method of generating power had become more scientific, reducing unnecessary resistive movements.

The First Sword Stance was merely a simple straight thrust with the right hand, but in the instant the strike was launched, every part of the body had actually already made preparations, forming the most fundamental combined force.

The reason ordinary people couldn’t maintain the state of a Sword Stance was that their control over their body’s interior relied mostly on the subconscious, requiring macroscopic movements to guide the changes in their internal tissues and structures.

A Knight, however, could already control their entire body. While perhaps not down to the fine details of every single nerve or cell, they could at least control the entirety of their body to form a unified force.