A little earlier, Nirl
In front of Alain were all kinds of villagers, from old people to children, from healthy people to disabled.
Alain was there as a result of his quest.
[Training villagers - Classic quest
Completion Rate: 0%
Reward: One energy unit per percentage]
Alain started with the basics. Or to be more precise, his ''basics". That is the foundation of his thinking on cultivation and fighting in general.
Then he would organize a few fights and rectify their mistakes.
Only then could he tell himself he was being useful, and not by simply following the system for rewards.
And to tell the truth, Alain was fit for this job. After all, he was previously an expert in two-handed combat, not hesitating to show all the slyness one would expect from an old veteran of the battlefield. And the last 10 months had allowed him to develop a fighting style that included some tricks for amputees.
''Like you all know, in a fight, the most important thing is and will always be the body. That may seem obvious, and it is: The body is after all the only way we have to use our energy center, the only way we have to use our weapons, to dodge, and to live.
But then what is the point of knowing this?
What I am trying to make you understand is that mastering one's body will always remain the key element. Turning away from this will make you make fatal mistakes, in which all the strength you possess won't be enough to save you. Even if one uses less strength, as long as he uses it smartly, he will be better than someone who just had strength.
And that's also how society was constructed. People with strong understanding are sought after because their chances of survival are much greater than others.
So it becomes more profitable to invest in them. And if you don't invest in your body, you will lose your life.
This is why cultivation is secondary, as is energy.
Having great reserves of energy is useful, but the more you learned how to fight and become strong, the more you realize how time seems to expand before you, letting you see all the mistakes of your opponents.''
He briefly thought about his fight against the boar that had happened 11 months to a 1 year ago.
''That's why it's better to first exploit the automatically created energy of the energy center to strengthen yourself rather than concentrating on filling it up constantly, exhausting one's concentration. It's better to use this concentration to improve oneself in a real fight.
Most of you have already participated in fights, and generally, that wasn't fatigue that made you lose, but rather inattention and lack of fighting strength. And war is the same thing. If you don't know how to position yourself, you will die before knowing it.
You have to know your limits, and for that, you have to obtain full control over your body.''
He looked into the eyes of each group of people for a short while before continuing.
''You have to understand the strength of a human. If we can't beat beasts or demonic creatures without cultivation, we have to exploit our advantages. Because the energy center only fills itself with humans, demons, and angels, we must focus on technique.
The best way to increase our energy production is actually to make your body, the one that collects it, understand that you need more. And to do that, you have to exhaust it to the last drop.
But few are able to do this because it also depends on one's body's natural talent.
In any case, controlling yourself will always be useful.
Controlling your body to better control your energy, and controlling your energy to better control your energy center. That's what we're going to try to do today.''
The audience nodded and the training begins.
...
''Try again ! It's only when you're the most exhausted that you succeed the best!'' Alain insisted.
The person in front of him was exhausted. His forehead was sweating madly as he barely managed to stand on. Yet he continued striking down again and again with his sword.
In his head were popping series of questions, wondering if it was really worth it if this training really was useful, and so on.
These were all temptations and reasons to give up.
That's why he needed more than ever someone to encourage him, and Alain was one of these things that told him to hold on. The main motivation being the atmosphere next to him. Seeing the others at the same stage holding on, he didn't want to just quit.
'What did he say to me again? Ah yes, to convince someone, you have to answer all his internal questions before or while he thinks about it. Otherwise, he'll never be convinced.' An image of Louis crossed Alain's mind.
Alain could easily imagine what he was thinking, having experienced it himself, although he was careful not to be too harsh or too slanted with his words. He had progressed since the days when he trained like this, and the words that would prompt him to continue today weren't the same words that prompted him to continue when he was young.
''Beasts aren't the only ones who can improve themselves by training their bodies, humans too - like angels and demons - are also perfectly capable of it. It improves your body slightly, but don't worry, that's not all.''
The blond man in front of him showed such a reddening of his forehead that Alain suspected that he probably didn't understand everything he was saying.
''Forcing his body to follow a simple banal movement, a swing, makes it easier to control. It'll instinctively become more able to follow your thoughts in every and any situation.
More than that, this exercise leads your body to make it follow logical guidelines, that is, the patterns that you have created and will create, and not just thoughts going through your mind.''
in fact, other than a body that didn't follow the desired movements in time - condemning the person - the worst that could happen was a body that followed unconscious thoughts related to a situation.
For example, the body should never be allowed to consider suicidal thoughts or needs to choose between thoughts during a fight. That was the same as seeking death.
This exercise also trained on willpower, a very important variable in war. The more you tended to keep your mind up, the more likely you were to survive.
Yet Alain knew that this was only a novice's exercise. To become truly strong, to move away from the classical level and become a real fighting force - a Knight - one would have to resort to other techniques.
And when you didn't have them, or couldn't have them because of a lack of resources, talent would decide the result.
To overcome this obstacle, some people chose to create their own path, even before becoming a Paladin.
And this was Eloise's case.