Since Kai had been imprisoned in the Astral City, it had been two months.
During this time, he had managed to fine-tune his regimen. Usually, he would gather fruits and put them near him, and then enter Asura's Inferno. He was already much stronger now, and could inflict several wounds on the Torture Kings at once. Sometimes, he even managed to inflict substantial damage.
When he finished the slaughter cycle, he would quickly start eating the fruits that were overflowing with energy and absorb it from the outside at the same time. Thus, his recovery speed became even faster. He also constantly tried to improve the quality and speed of energy absorption and assimilation by looking into its Essence.
At this stage, Kai's Energy Vortex was already noticeably larger than that of a normal master. It was simply amazing!
But it also posed a problem... The slaughter cycle could now last for about seven hours before Kai exhausted the energy to the end. And considering that the flow of time felt slower in Asura's Hell. It felt to Kai as if he had just spent twenty-four hours there.
In order not to lose track of time, Kai drew a line a day on the ground.
In two months, he had already explored the entire castle, and even found several vaults with pure energy stones. There wasn't some incredible amount of them there, but in the outside world, it wouldn't be a bad fortune.
There was nothing else interesting in the castle, it seemed that time had already destroyed everything. Therefore, he carefully stacked all the energy stones into his ring and stopped searching further. It seemed like it was just a waste of time.
Kai even managed to descend to the dungeon that contained the Astral Alchemy Emperor's legacy. Behind a wall with a mural of fire, there were exits leading to a huge underground cavern. It seemed to be the size of the Emperor's entire castle.
Looking up from above, Kai saw a flame the size of a grown man's head burning in the air in the middle of the cavern, in the center of the huge array. He immediately realized that it was the Astral Sacrifice Fire.....
It looked like a black flame with sparks of a dark purple color flashing out. Looking at it, Kai even started to get a slight headache. When he finally recognized what this flame looked like, he realized why the entire Astral City had this particular design. It seemed to mimic exactly the Astral Sacrifice Flame.
After looking a bit from afar, Kai turned around and walked out of there. He realized that it was too early for him to try to seize the Emperor's legacy.
Right now, Kai had a clear schedule, allocating five days to cultivate uninterruptedly in Asura's Hell. After each such marathon of five days, Kai came out stronger. His entire body, reflexes, and mind became sharper!
After that, he would allocate three days, to study the Art of Arrays. His method was very extravagant. No one else could do it but him. Moreover, Kai had incredible research material....
When Kai was thinking about how he could train his array skill, other than needing to increase the 'lint', he remembered the cube in the throne room. The array on it was just incredibly complex. Trying to replicate it would be idiotic, and Kai understood that very well... But copying its details was another matter entirely!
The arrays were made up of many different small elements. And in the array on the cube, these elements were countless! Kai looked at them with his ability to see the essence of energy. And began to try to replicate the simplest elements. Thus starting with the simplest and most basic, in two months he had made good progress in his research.
He realized that even if he learned how to draw even a fraction of the elements correctly... Then learning how to draw the arrays he had seen in the Border Beast City would be a cakewalk for him.
As he developed his array art, he even decided to give a name to his ability. He wanted his unique characteristic to have its own name, so he decided to give it his own name. His ability to see energy and its nature, he named it....
The Eyes of Essence!
By now, he already had perfect control over this ability. He could use it or stop it at any time.
Kai also came up with his hypothesis. He hypothesized that true energy was like fundamental matter. That is, energy is the basic substance that makes up the writings. And only then are they assembled into streams. It is precisely these streams of writing that ordinary people mistake for energy.
Because of the fact that people do not have the opportunity to see the essence of Energy, they cannot understand something so subtle and imperceptible.
The attributes and variations of energy, in turn, depended on what kind of writing their streams consisted of. It was something like the mastery of arrays, but much more subtle and fundamental! In fact, the 'feelings' and 'meaning' that had to be infused when drawing an array were also the writings that Kai had seen.
In the end, both martial artists and array masters used energy in their foundation. Each learned how to use it by trial and error, without being able to understand the true nature of energy.
Cultivation techniques, helped to give the energy its "attribute", its "type". The masters of the arrays tried to give the energy their "feelings", their "meaning" through drawing techniques. No one realized that at the heart of everything were these writings, what Kai called the Essence of Energy!
Having come up with this hypothesis, Kai decided that for convenience he would continue to call the flows consisting of the writings energy, so as not to stand out from the crowd. And the writings, which in fact were the real energy, he would call the Essence of Energy.
As he thought about it, he wondered if the Astral Alchemy Emperor knew about this or not. Were his Eyes of Essence something unique, or had the current civilization simply lost knowledge of such things? But for now, he decided to put these questions aside.....
Thus, after five days of Asura's Hell, three days of practicing with the cube and the Eyes of Essence, Kai would move on to the next stage.
He would allocate two days to practicing the Dance of the Shadow Marks. The second stage of this technique, was to extend the range of the technique.
Kai was constantly trying to create a mark farther and farther away. When he went beyond the radius, exceeding his capabilities, it was incredibly difficult to continue creating the mark. It would often collapse, he couldn't complete it. The entire training consisted of continuously creating the tag as far as possible. Once he expanded the possible radius, he would start to increase it again.
The second stage of the Shadow Mark Dance could be considered mastered when Kai created a mark a hundred meters away from himself. In this, he could no longer be helped by his Eyes of Essence. All that was needed was diligent training and overpowering himself.
Similarly, Kai's full training cycle was ten days.
He tried and exhausted himself completely time after time. Kai realized that his life depended on his peak strength. Under the pressure of potential death, his development took much greater strides.
Likewise, endlessly cultivating in isolation wouldn't work. A master's training could not continue without different life situations and contact with other beings. There had to be a balance everywhere in this world. Otherwise, monks and hermits could become masters commanding the world time after time. To evolve life, one must contact other life.
Realizing this, Kai decided that he would evolve until he reached a dead end. When he realized that it was impossible to continue evolving in isolation, it would become pointless to stay here.
He decided that the day his cultivation slowed down, he would try to break out of here. Kai didn't know what kind of test the Astral Alchemy Emperor had left behind.
But Kai would do everything he could to get out of the Astral City. He would put his life on the line!
In the meantime... He would continuously evolve!