AIR Chapter 174

Chapter 174

I punched and I dodged and punched back. 

I was evenly matched for the most part. Pain seared through my body, actual pain, pain so strong that it would burn a demigod into nothingness. 

Again, that was the seduction of power. It was why most God level beings thought so lowly of mortals. We felt what they felt but on a whole different level. As we grew and cultivated, so did our senses and abilities. We fought more, hurt more, sensed more. 

We were more. 

Just a fraction of this pain could drive everyone in this entire world mad. It could drive the very realm insane. 

I closed my eyes and shook it off. 

Pain based attacks were very effective. The best way to cause damage was to break something, particularly your object of attack but pain was a second favorite. 

Though it was a demonic dao, cultivated most by the Mother of Pain herself, the dao of suffering was a good one. 

At higher levels, laws and daos blurred line with one another, so the law of pain is an actual thing. In essence, it revolved around the reaction life had to negative things. It was the urge to stay alive, the guardrails of life and the early screams of death. 

Pain kept you safe, pain kept you going. It was the long splotch of grey that separated life and death and using it, one could almost hurt a person. Immense discomfort was a form of damage all its own.

In its purest form, pain could at least reduce attack. 

The Mother of Pain, An Lie Kei, was said to be one of the strongest of the Imperium, if for her pain causing abilities alone. If my pain was this intense, imagine what the Mother of Suffering could create.

It couldn’t be imagined. 

That was the beauty of cultivation, the absolute power of it all. What mortals feel, what any being below Imperium feels is nothing more than a shadow than what it could be. 

I moved. 

He struck, I dodged. Left to the torso. 

Pain in my hand, returned. 

He hurt, but pushed through it. 

Equal in strength. 

We were moving faster than light, faster than this realm could handle in some ways, but those were waves, remnants of power, not the impact itself. The punch landed into the reflection and the reflection absorbed the qi. 

I absorbed the qi. 

In a way, this was external cultivation. I was pushing the qi from one part of me, to another. 

We were both one being, but with two different minds and bodies. 

Our final strikes landed in each other's chest. 

No time had passed within the realm. This realm was too slow to document us and our impacts were absorbed before it could even see them. 

And then I was whole again. 

Time resumed. 

There was wind that traveled from me and out into the valley. A small wave of barely noticable change. It was nothing really, just the feeling of qi and air settling back into the vacuums that I had left in my fights. 

“Interesting,” I spoke. 

The plan was complicated. 

I had been giving splitting techniques some thought. 

Multipresence was a common thing out there in existence, but I hadn’t really given it much thought. But recently, I had been going over what I knew about it and specifically the times I had seen it used. 

Forn’s father used splitting techniques and Wukong and the Tome used them as well. Though, I didn’t know if they qualified as techniques in their hands instead of natural abilities. 

I had to put effort into this.

But I could use this Reflection technique as a splitting technique. 

It would require some work, but not nearly as much as anything else I had planned. I’d be done in a day, maybe two. 

It was a matter of working with the technique. 

Surprisingly, space didn’t matter, not as a physical thing anyways. But the distance between me and the reflection was always non-existent. We were the same soul, literally. If one was out in the void and the other was here, then my soul would act as if it was one singular point. 

Relative to me, my reflection existed simultaneously. 

This was a good technique to traverse the void, but there was one problem with it. One, this was a reflection, not a separation. Separation techniques worked better as they guaranteed that the damage on one being wouldn’t reflect on the other. 

Forn’s father had separated his violent predatory nature from his caring one, and the two of them, while functionally being one being, were able to be different enough that if one perished, the other would still remain. 

It lessened the risk of death. 

But this was a reflection so any damage my reflection took could easily be passed onto me. 

The second problem was the soul. For a soul to act as an anchor point across existence, it would require a certain level of strength.

 Up until now, my soul was unstable, but my recent growth in dao and rank allowed me to stabilize it a bit more. 

And growing my dao would be complicated here, out there in the grandness of existence, I could do more and grow. I could feed my dao properly. And those acts would reinforce my soul and that was the goal for now. 

I would also put Wriendler through some tribulation and help it break into the twelfth rank. And while I was doing that I could focus more on building a functional defense array here as well. 

I would also consider buying stuff. I had a good amount of wealth still, after all. And there were still markets throughout the multiverse that were safe to visit. 

The reflection technique still needed some work. It was designed to work within Ez and was specifically meant to create a reflection that only worked as a sense of self. It didn’t double my attack power or allow me to do anything at a higher level. 

Functionally, it wasn’t a bad technique, but it was designed for one thing and I would be using it for another. I needed to find a replacement for it out there. 

That wouldn’t be too expensive. Splitting techniques were fairly common. The downside was that if an enemy knew how your splitting technique worked, then they might be able to figure out its weakness and counter it, attacking both versions of you all at once. 

So the more common techniques were considered useless. 

I’d cross that bridge when I got there, which would probably be sometime next week at this rate. 

“One thing at a time,” I told myself. “Or two, I guess.”