‘Creation of fire, wouldn’t that be through friction?’

Indeed, mortal fires, as they are described, are created through either chemical reaction or friction. ‘But that wouldn’t be case here. After all, how am I supposed to create fire through friction if I don’t have physical materials.’ In the novel, there was a scene where Lin Ming had to utilise the Concept of Creation to turn extremely volatile form of energy into something that was bearable. ‘Turn one type of energy into another, as well as extreme Annihilation causing Creation?’ The clues turned in his head as an idea slowly formed in his mind. ‘Lets give it a try.’ After a few minutes of working out the details, Lin Ming stretched out his right hand, with his index finger and thumb pinched together.

All his skills were still active, including Divine Sense, which was focused on his dantian instead of the candle in front of him. Under the guidance of Mana Control <Passive> as well as all of his skills, he drew out almost half of his true essence and sent it towards his arm. Almost as soon as it came out of the dantian, it started to weaken. By the time it had reached his wrist, only 10% of the initial true essence remained. There he split the true essence into two streams, further dividing them. At this point however, the true essence had gained a lot of momentum, travelling at breakneck speed. He barely had any time to pull his hand back as the true essence seemed to gain life and shoot out of the tip of his fingers. The collision of the two streams happened just in front of him. It had happened in the blink of an eye. The two faint streams of true essence, barely the thickness of a single strand of hair, collided together, creating a giant fireball the size of a person’s torso. It traveled across the room, barely reducing in size before making its way out of the open door and into the courtyard, where it traveled halfway across before dissipating into a burst of fire.

‘W-what was that?’

It took him a few moments to gather his thoughts, before he was able to think clearly again. Then, just as he had finished gathering his wits, a notification appeared.

[Congratulations on creating an attack martial art!]

[Lin Ming’s Fire Martial Art has been created]

‘A new martial art? Wait, I can create skills like that?’ He hurriedly opened up his skill window and brought up the skill.

Lin Ming’s Fire Martial Art <Active> Lv. 1

10 MP

A martial art created by Lin Ming, it utilises and integrates the first three laws of the Concept of Fire. User can emit true essence from the index finger and the thumb, creating a fireball that deals 100 points of damage. The mana used can be adjusted according to the user. +10 points of damage for every point of MP utilised by the skill.

‘Wait a sec, I’m pretty sure I invested 300 points of mana in that move just now. Then why does the skill say only 10 MP?’ Lin Ming assumed the same posture as before, sticking out his right hand and pinching the index finger and thumb together. Then, instead of manually activating the skill, he used his thoughts and let the Gamer ability activate it. He observed a tiny wisp of true essence flow out from his dantian, one that was only a fraction of the strength of the original true essence strand he utilised. That was when he felt it, or rather saw it; a twitch. His muscles located around the area twitched, just slightly. So slightly in fact that he probably wouldn’t have been able to feel them twitching if not for the Divine Sense focusing in on them. This tiny twitch didn’t do anything except transfer a small amount of kinetic energy into the true essence strand. The strand seemed to gain momentum as it began speeding up. Just as it reached top speed, the muscles around the strand twitched again, causing it to speed up again. This process repeated itself again and again until the true essence’s speed was literally faster than he could perceive. As such, when the tiny wisps of true essence collided, the fireball created was just as huge as before, but this time using only a fraction of true essence.

‘This is something ridiculous.’

Lin Ming gulped as he stared at the skill window. Not only had the Gamer ability optimized this martial art, but it had also used an aspect of the law of Blazing Heat he didn’t think about; getting kinetic energy from his muscles to empower the true essence. It was the speed and energy of the true essence that determined the size of the fireball. In order to optimize the fireball, he needed to use the least true essence to create the greatest effect. As such, increasing the speed was the only way to improve efficiency and the Gamer ability had provided him the most optimum version.

‘I-if I can create and optimize all my skills like this then I don’t even need to worry about the Magic Cube.’ After some intense struggle, he finally managed to bring his excitement under control. ‘I think this actually solves my conundrum about body tempering.’ If he took body tempering at face value, it simply means strengthening the body through repeated stressing and healing. He could simply go to the forest at the foot of the Great Zhou Mountain and punch trees before using his Gamer ability to heal, that would technically temper his fists. Naturally using his true essence to temper his body was a better idea as it would temper holistically and allow greater increase in strength. ‘I can use my Divine Sense to probe materials to try to understand concepts contained in them, then apply those concepts to create a method that can holistically temper my body from the inside out. I only need to use it once to convert it into a skill, that would then be optimized by the Gamer ability.’ Even if it was shabbily put together by him, the Gamer ability would turn it into a perfect skill. A grin spread across his face as his imagination ran wild trying to figure out the kind of skill he could try to create. Naturally, his eighth grader syndrome began acting up.

‘I could try to understand blood qi and the way the heart blood is produced. If I can create a body tempering skill that increased my heart blood, then my strength should naturally increase. Or what about vibrations? Like the original body tempering method used by Lin Ming, I could incorporate the resonance and vibrations in the body to strengthen it.’ It took him a lot of brainstorming before he was finally able to calm down and decide on a proper idea.

‘The Eight Trigrams would be the best concept to base the martial art skill on.’ However there was a huge problem if he wanted to use this as the basis; it was more than difficult to observe the yin and yang concepts. ‘What do these words even mean physically? How the hell do they manifest in reality?’ He was clueless to this. Yet, he didn’t want to give up on the idea. ‘Whatever, even if I end up not completing this skill, I could still use the five elements to initially temper my body.’ Making up his mind, Lin Ming focused back on the Concept of Fire to try to understand the next level of the concept; Law of Manifestation.

Ekeriel

Please refer to my note on the previous chapter. Tldr; I accidentally uploaded the wrong version of the chapters.