He quickly started swinging and shaking the bamboo stick around, hoping to get the black sphere to come back out. Despite the repeated attempts, instead of coming out, a great weight descended on him, as his whole body felt restricted.
Whether it was moving the five fingers and fake thumb, opening his eyelids, breathing out air, or anything else that was usual to do when operating one's body, all actions of Zhu Xiaoye's, had a suppression to them.
The weight it caused, made him land on all four feet as the bamboo stick dropped next to him on the ground. Drenched in sweat, he started to recall the feelings he had before death in his first life. Absolute suppression and powerless while everything is slowly snuffed out.
He now knew that the black sphere was the rare artifact he found during his past life and why he felt it was familiar. To think that when he woke to this new life, he thought this was a treasure that would help him in reaching the top again.
Treasure? Who would call or see his executor as treasure? Killing him wasn't enough so now a trick was being played. Let him gain hope before crushing it ruthlessly. His eyes grew cold and hard. He had no intentions of submitting or dying before he achieved his goals.
The reason he didn't know the black sphere was the same suppressing artifact was that in his past life when he got near, it had already suppressed his sight and thought process. Even if he could think up dozens of ways to escape, the suppressing artifact didn't allow any resistance.
After all, how could one escape if the thought to escape couldn't even be thought? One would have to accept regardless whether they wanted to or not. But now the effect it caused, looked to be reduced greatly compared to the past.
At that moment when he thought of fighting it tooth and nail, the suppression disappeared. Shakily he stood up and looked at the bamboo stick. By instinct, he knew what just happened. The suppression artifact was following his thoughts and actions.
Though the control was kind of rigid like, because he thought to 'force' the sphere to come toward 'him', this ended up having the suppression come toward him instead. He could now tell that the suppression artifact was connected to him in the same way a soul bonding treasure was.
It would listen to his guidance but how far, he could not say. Stretching out his paw, the bamboo stick shot to him. He then took a few moments to get the hang of using and commanding the Suppression Sphere. This being the name he decided to call it.
After finding out how to extract the Suppression Sphere from the bamboo stick, he had a choice of placing it into his body or the bamboo stick. In the end, he chose to place it back in the bamboo stick.
With this, the bamboo stick could be used as a priceless weapon treasure and the suppression sphere easier to control. When he had placed it into his body, the control was even more sluggish than in the bamboo stick.
There were two things he wanted to do before hunting down beasts. First was testing the limitations of the suppression sphere and the second being, searching for some herbs that would build up the body constitution. As he was right now, fighting beasts wasn't possible yet.
If the two worlds weren't too much different, he would know the needed herbs to solve his situation.
Walking over to stand in front of a tree, he swung the bamboo forward. He held nothing back as he let the force of the blow impact the tree without a care to the damage it might cause on the bamboo stick.
Bang!
Tree bark flew off the tree as the bamboo stick struck. Sadly the tree did not fall as Zhu Xiaoye hoped it would. Using his ability to judge the force of his hitting power from past experience, he was able to determine it was only a ton.
This might sound like a lot but compared to normal animals from his past being able to have a hitting force of 9 to 10 ton, this result was disappointing. The only good thing he felt about this was, his past self at Skin Solidify Stage could only reach a hitting force of 500 pounds.
The current him had not even enter Hide Solidify Stage, which was the equivalent of Skin Solidify Stage for humans. Yet despite all this, his strength was four times greater than that. One must remember he was a genius within geniuses and had the best body a human could have at birth.
Even with these benefits, he still fell short to his current self. As for other people, they would be lucky to get a hitting force of 200 pounds at the Skin Solidify Stage.
Regarding realms for a beast cultivator, Hide Solidify Stage could be said to be the first stage of the Beast Transformation Realm. In total, there were seven stages in the Beast Transformation Realm. Each stage would maximize the potential a beast's physical body could achieve in strengthening.
The seven stages were as follow, Hide Solidify as the first stage, Flesh Solidify as the second, Tendon Solidify as the third, Bone Solidify as the fourth, Viscera Solidify as the fifth, Blood Purge Solidify as the sixth, and Qi Forge Solidify as the last stage.
If a beast could successfully forge Qi in the body, they would then be able to gain their own beast core when stepping into the True Beast Realm, the realm above Pseudo Beast Realm. The only easy known way of doing this was to consume beast cores.
The harder way was to wait for the body to develop small strands of Qi over time. This method could take years if not decades to achieve.
Zhu Xiaoye nodded his head as if to say 'as expected' after looking at the bamboo stick and checking for damage. The reason for this was, he had already speculated that by having the Suppression Sphere inside the bamboo stick, it would suppress force aim at it.
Sadly, he would still feel the force since the force needed to channel through the bamboo stick before the Suppression Sphere would know to suppress it. The next test he wanted to try was to see if the Suppression Sphere would apply the same effects to other things like it did on him.
Grabbing a tree branch, he pointed toward it with the bamboo stick. There were no results so he took the sphere out and tried again with this time pointing the sphere at the tree branch. Again he got no action. Running out of ideas, he used the suppression on himself, as light as possible.
There was finally a reaction as the tree branch cracked in, on itself. With a frown, he was beginning to realize that if he wanted to control the sphere any better, he would need to have greater strength. The current control just had too many restrictions to make use of the Suppression Sphere.
From all he was able to understand, he could only use the sphere for training and strengthening his weapon's durability. He decided that suppressing himself a little would give his body the chance to adept at using every single part of it to maximize the body usage.
The next action he needed to take was to find a herb that would help him enter the Hide Solidify Stage. With the increase, he would become stronger and besides strength, there would be a twice increase in his body's defense after hardening his hide.
Before he could leave, he saw a leopard that showed signs of being in the stage of Hide Solidify. This encounter would give him a good judge on how strong was an animal leveled higher than him. Just when he was going to attack, he paused.
He was now an animal, should he really be hunting down other animals the same way he would hunt them down when he was human? Not wanting to jump the gun, he waited to see what the leopard would do first.
The leopard, on the other hand, bared its fangs at him before licking its mouth. Did the leopard mistake him for being a newborn panda? Not only wasn't he that young, he already had a first life experience. There was still some skills he could use even at this level.
The leopard clearly had no sense of danger. With the leopard acting the way it was, Zhu Xiaoye could see exactly how the animal planned on attacking. As if to prove what he already knew, it leaped toward him with its mouth open for a biting attack.