"I did it!" Tie Zhu exclaimed with a grin of satisfaction as he succeeded in creating two small spatial rifts. However, as expected, the rifts were short-lived, quickly dissipating into nothing as he lost control over them. Despite the disappointment of their brevity, he was still largely satisfied with his progress.
With renewed determination, Tie Zhu began to run the technique again, resting only briefly before starting once more. "Haah... huff... huff..." he breathed heavily, his focus unwavering as he poured his spiritual essence into the creation of spatial threads.
After three more hours of intense effort, Tie Zhu's persistence paid off. Currently he successfully created spatial rifts large enough to accommodate tennis balls, and was able to keep them open for a full ten seconds before they destabilized.
However because he had been so focused on practicing the Rift splitting technique, he had unfortunately used up all the spiritual essence within both his beast core and Dantian. In fact, during the exhaustive session, Tie Zhu found out that not only was his Dantian able to store spiritual essence but his beast core could do so as well.
The whole time Tie Zhu was practicing the technique, Wang Yazhu had been silently observing. Although he somewhat expected Tie Zhu to learn the technique he hadn't expected him to grasp the basics so quickly. At most he expected that Tie Zhu would take at least a few days to reach his current level. Because Tie Zhu had surprised him over and over again he had somewhat grown accustomed to it so that his reactions now were not so exaggerated.
After lying down flat on the floor for a few minutes, Tie Zhu finally sat up in a crossed legged position. Sensing that his body had been emptied of spiritual essence he thought about cooking more of that mysterious meat to once again fill his body with spiritual essence. However he quickly decided against it as he recalled he had huge reserves of Spirit stones.
'Before when I tried transforming the Spiritual Essence from the meat I was only able to effectively create fire threads. Maybe if I use spirit stones I will be able to create more elemental threads.' He thought to himself. Previously he assumed that his affinity for fire was just higher, however with the elemental tracer it didn't seem like that was the case, meaning that the problem must have been in the meat.
After taking out a high tier spirit stone from the spatial stone, Tie Zhu immediately began rapidly absorbing the rich spiritual essence from within the stone. Because he could not ingest the spatial stone like he did with the meat, he had to absorb the essence through the pores on his skin in accordance with the Primordial Heavenly Devouring Technique. Although it was difficult at first he quickly got the hang of it as he now had a greater understanding of the technique and its principles.
It had only been a minute before the spirit stone trembled and cracked, dissipating to a fine gray dust. Tie Zhu had completely absorbed the last of the spirit essence as he once again felt it coursing through his body. After seeing that he had completely absorbed the pure spiritual essence, Tie Zhu immediately began transforming it into elemental threads. Just as he thought, he was now able to create elemental threads of different elements more easily, however when he went to combine the separate threads into a single larger one they seemed to repel each other before dissipating into nothingness.
Regardless of how Tie Zhu had tried to fuse the elemental threads together they refused to cooperate and form a single elemental thread. In this matter Tie Zhu had actually wasted four high tier spirit stones over the span of one hour.
'Maybe I will just have to simplify things first' He thought to himself as he gave up the idea of fusing multiple threads together, instead choosing to only create lightning and space elemental threads. Although the process was much more difficult than only absorbing one thread, Tie Zhu finally succeeded after another hour.
Just as he had previously expected, the fused elemental threads seemed to provide a much richer energy source for his Beast core, however the pain he felt running through his body had also intensified as he felt his body being cut up from the inside while he was being constantly barraged by paralyzing electrical currents. He almost shuddered at the thought of fusing multiple elemental threads as he had tried earlier as he recalled the debilitating pain that it had caused him yesterday.
Feeling that his body was once again filled with abundant spiritual essence he planned on practicing the Rift Splitting technique once again. However this time he wanted to not only increase its size but to be able to forcefully close them, slicing anything in its way.
"Knock, knock, knock!" He had barely started practicing once again when suddenly a banging on his front door. He did not plan on answering the door since he was so focused on the Rift Splitter technique, thinking that whoever was knocking would just go away. After a brief pause of silence Tie Zhu thought that the person knocking had given up so he once again closed his eyes as he prepared to create another set of spatial rifts.
Tie Zhu barely had a chance to materialize the elemental threads before an angry Tao Keke barged in through the front door.
"Where have you been, and why didn't you answer the door!" she yelled furiously as Tie Zhu scrambled to his feet. But as she continued to berate him, she suddenly froze in disbelief. The person standing before her looked almost unrecognizable compared to the Tie Zhu she knew. Though his facial features were vaguely familiar, the dramatic change in his physique left her utterly bewildered.
"Wh.. Who are you, and what did you do to Tie Zhu!" She asked nervously.