He'd been here 6 days at most, but being in such an intense area with each second in constant battle, time seemed to flow almost too slow. Right now, it almost felt like he had been here for half a year.
And once he'd actually entered the mid section of this place, things escalated very quickly. Outside most of the adversaries he had to face were little better than beasts. With their physiques, they were faster and stronger than him, but their fighting style was simple albeit ferocious.
The monkeys here however had real skills. In the outer region he could finish dispatch several primates within seconds as long as he didn't find himself in a precarious position. But here, he actually had to put a lot of focus in facing each one, sometimes having matches lasting several minutes before he could actually find a weakness in his opponents techniques and time himself well enough to reach it. If two came at him at the same time, at most he'd last 10 seconds before their overwhelming physique surpassed his technique.
It was a good place to develop his skills, but he had to admit that it was quite stressful at the same time. In almost all the fights here, he was the passive party, focusing on counters and locks in order to actually have a fighting chance. He couldn't trade blows with them considering how tough and fast they were. Just considering their strength, if his fist clashed with theirs, he'd be crippled from the elbow down in three exchanges. This wasn't including the use of their techniques.
The simplest of those was strength augmentation. But he had to learn the hard way that the smallest of increase on their part was not something his body was made to handle. Really he had scraped by with his life intact so far, and although it could be said that he had entered the middle he was only fighting on the edges of the border.
Somehow though, this spree of masochistic behavior had continuously brought forth some form of growth for him. For most people, the growth of mana or chi in their bodies were somewhat slowed by their body's constitution. The pathways these energies needed to circulate through the body could be narrow or altogether blocked.
But somehow for this man, the constant breaking of his body in several areas had created an anomaly that none from any of the worlds have seen.
Even if a person were able to dual cultivate mana and chi, these things usually existed quite exclusively in the body, never having an interaction with each other and for good reason. The tearing up of Zhao Wei's body in Drasas could be considered a mild reaction of such a case. In most cases it wouldn't be a surprise if the person blew up while taking an area the size of a city block with him. And why wouldn't it, these were quite literally two forces that had a nearly infinite number of uses, most of which were considerably destructive in effect.
And now, these two extremely violent energies were mingling within him, crossing paths into the other's stream every time his body was torn apart. After all, The healing vines weren't exactly doctors, even if they healed the body, they couldn't promise the process wouldn't be messy. And little by little these energies began to get mixed up into each other's streams.
At the start it broke down his body at an increased rate, by right he shouldn't be alive by much past a day. But generally he didn't last more than 3 hours before turning up half dead on the field of battle and being thrown back into the cocoon of vines. And after being healed of this thing several times, the paths in his body was getting tougher while at the same time being forced open by their violent reactions. Being beaten to a pulp by the apes, especially at an accelerated rate in the middle area was quite literally what was keeping him alive while at the same time making him more resilient to it.
In the span of a few days, the energies in his body was growing exponentially and there was little to suggest it was stopping any time soon. All he felt however, was simply the increased weight of his shackles as they continuously absorbed these energies and grew heavier the longer he fought.
Under these weights of metal, where the cold steel touched his skin, the thing was breaking. Little by little it had began to crumble from the sheer quantity it was absorbing, no longer able to cope with the growth of it's user. By now, each of these shackles weighed like a bus but it was being ignored by the man as he dodged each of his adversary's advances.