Aza'zel slowly climbed up from the wet floor after setting his thoughts straight. Judging from the pain in his head, it would take him at least two hours before he could concentrate his consciousness once again to enter the inner world.
"Too strong," Aza'zel mumbled, a bitter smile on his pale face. He coughed, the echoes of his gesture filling the underground space, allowing his world of echoes to manifest within earshot.
Aza'zel sat cross-legged, surrounded by a host of dry rodent carcasses, his mind quick at work to process what had just happened. "They're really out to kill me, huh?"
His voice was undeniably soft and immature. However, it didn't lack a hint of craziness. The last time Aza'zel went crazy was when confronting what he believed to be his inner demons, never had he desired to go crazy against living people.
Even when he drank blood or killed other life forms, it wasn't him who did it—at least technically, it was the instinct driven by the mindset of millions of resentful souls, belonging to fallen totemic warriors.
Aza'zel was alarmed, he quickly realized that his mental state was being infected not only from the inside but also from the unbridled bloodthirsty nature of the outside world. If he went back to the surface with this train of thoughts, it wasn't far-fetched for the evil thoughts to wrestle control of his body.
A man driven by sheer instinct is no different from an animal, no matter what the driven motivations behind his instincts were.
Aza'zel slowly stood up and began going through the thirty-six martial forms in a deliberate, easy-going manner to promote blood circulation. This way, he would urge the bloodline energy he ingested to start healing his body and restore lost stamina.
Since Aza'zel wasn't planning on building up tension in his muscles while practicing, what was supposed to be a full hour of meticulous power regulation ended up in twenty minutes.
Feeling blood thumping through his body and toward the injured locations on his body, Aza'zel continued with the cycle, and very quickly an hour passed.
Aza'zel exhaled; his injuries were all healed now.
He looked in the direction in which the rodents came from based on the positions of their carcasses, and after some thought, he started moving in the opposite direction.
As much as he didn't like it, his survival in the sewers for the following few days would depend on these rodents and their blood. As long as he had enough blood to drink, he didn't need food or water.
On the surface, Butch busied himself as he inhaled deeply, a thick cigar resting between his lips.
A young man quickly approached, sweeping his glance over this topless fat man who had clear irritation written all over his face.
Butch spat and asked, "How are things?"
The man responded, "Assumed dead, though no corpse was found. They're planning to dispatch teams into the sewers three days from now."
Butch hummed softly and said, "Alright, kid. Fuck off and forget that I've ever asked."
The young man nodded and left.
Butch glanced up at the crimson moon with unprecedented tiredness in his turbid eyes. He sighed to himself, "Assumptions are just that, pitiful self-deception the distressed like to fuck around with… Fools, if that child did die, and Sax was telling the truth about his protector… Sigh…"
Butch didn't know much, but he knew that Saxon wouldn't feel helpless against an ordinary Raksha. If Saxon said that the stranger woman left him feeling like someone tiptoeing on a string, just a hair's width away from death, little was to be said of her power.
That kid's intuition was also quite sharp.
Butch shook his head and returned to the butchery, his footsteps heavy and rippling with waves that sent crumples of dust underground.
Aza'zel looked up with annoyance, his hair a nest for specks of dust. This portion of dust, accompanied by a hollow noise, was quite bothersome.
"Is Raksha Town hosting some behemoth of a beast or something?" Aza'zel murmured, continuing on his way despite the dissatisfaction.
He had been scouring the underground sewers for almost an hour now, and adding that to his hour of martial practice, he felt like it would be fine to return to his inner world and reflect on his fight with the blood puppet.
The moment he sat down and closed his eyes, Aza'zel appeared on his black throne once more. At the moment, the blood puppet was submerged in the ocean of blood with its upper body partially visible.
The blood was constantly solidifying its body. Thinking about it, Aza'zel assumed this was in preparation for when he could bring his physical body into the inner world.
He didn't immediately go up to fight the blood puppet.
Aza'zel closed his eyes instead, and thanks to how his perception could project to everywhere in this inner world, he immediately reviewed the scenes of the battle from earlier.
He would review the scene from multiple perspectives.
From his perspective while keeping track of his feelings at the time, the body gestures, and the fine control over source energy.
Then, he would switch to viewing the battle from the blood puppet's perspective and experience the same sensations, all the while simulating comparisons to find faults and errors with his executions.
He quickly found out that the tension built up in the blood puppet wasn't an accumulation of the thirty-six forms, but only the twelve forms of the first stance.
Could practicing the additional two forms in the first transformation stage be an excessive oddity?
If that were the case, then why were there three stances and not one? Unless the second and third stances respectively were designed for the second and third transformations?
However, doesn't that mean that there existed an additional stance dedicated for each transformation?
Thinking back, Aza'zel remembered that the three stances were provided to ordinary soldiers in the military.
Perhaps higher stances required higher military clearance?
No martial what, Aza'zel knew that following the blood puppet's example and the guidance of the Combat Technique Refinement feature wouldn't lead him astray.
With that thought in mind, Aza'zel resumed viewing the battle from three perspectives.
His personal perspective, the blood puppet's perspective, and the perspective of a bystander who viewed the battle omnidirectionally.
It was only a single exchange, but Aza'zel learned plenty from viewing the same scene from different angles while experiencing the spectrum of sensations that coalesced into this single exchange.
The intricacies in the art of combat were truly frightening, yet just as much as it was fascinating.
For example, Aza'zel realized that the blood puppet's attack used at most two points from the total power output of his punch, and for two reasons.
First reason: Conservation of power.
The puppet kept most of its power in reserve as a contingency in case Aza'zel executed a counterattack, deviated from the power of its first attack, or simply dodged out of the way.
Second reason: Concentrated power.
The same two points of power were utilized to dodge, then channeled towards the movement, and finally finished its journey through the blood puppet by residing at the bridge of its foot awaiting the impactful release.
The remaining eight points maintained passive dormancy throughout the tense muscles of the blood puppet's body, allowing the puppet freedom to withdraw the attack without suffering backlash and if necessary, increase the output of the released power.