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"Welcome to the void... We have been expecting you."
Lloyd blinked several times, and he looked at the abyss around him.
"Ohhhhh fuuuuuuuck MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Lloyd cried out while falling to his knees. He had been training for this exact moment for the last month, yet just when he gave himself a day to rest, he was forced to fight again.
"Oh well." Lloyd's hand reached out, grabbing the staff into his hand and turning around to see the abyss disappear, being quickly replaced by a forest of trees with blue leaves.
However, unlike before, he was no longer stuck wandering around the middle of the forest, since it only took around 10 minutes for him to find the general direction he wanted to go in.
It took barely another 5 minutes for him to find the dungeon's exit, and while he was gloomy about losing sleep over something like this, he quickly found a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
"This might actually be doing me a favor. I've been stuck in the same core commandment for a month now, but now that I am here, killing the monsters in my void walk will give me enough void energy to cultivate my core to an efficient level." Lloyd muttered to himself before the sound of rustling made him look to his side.
Lloyd narrowed his eyes for a moment and had his staff ready at hand. He quickly channeled mana through his body as one of the techniques instructor Yung had taught them flashed in Lloyd's eyes.
Moving the mana to all the right places, Lloyd waited for a little longer.
Lloyd quickly formed two small blades at the top and bottom of the staff.
Seeing that the monster didn't want to come out of its hiding place, Lloyd lung forward and stabbed the bush it was in, yet the monster saw him coming, quickly dashing back before lunging at him.
Lloyd, was not surprised in the least by its way of attacking. Getting a good look at it, Lloyd recognized it as a monster resembling many of the feline attributes.
"Lion? Leopard?" Lloyd asked himself, yet it didn't really matter to him in the end.
Flicking his wrist upwards, Lloyd performed one of the moves that instructor Yung had taught them, instantly cutting the feline monster in half and taking its void energy.
However, instead of trying to cultivate it straight away, Lloyd simply kept it in his body since he heard more rustling around him.
Lloyd spun on his heel and sliced down the incoming monsters. Each one was the size of a small 1-seater car, yet their speeds weren't anything to mess with.
However, by now Lloyd had already unlocked mana vision, and even though it was a little hard to see with all the mana sources around them, such as the trees, the leaves, the grass, and even parts of the rocks around him, Lloyd could still easily see the monsters that were coming toward him.
They attacked from all sides, yet while it might have been a little bit of a struggle for Lloyd if he was using his katana, the staff was made for situations like these.
Spinning the staff around his hand, Lloyd sliced, stabbed, and even exploded the monsters that were coming toward him, causing him to become stronger every time he killed one of them.
He felt their life force and mana merging and entering his body just to become void energy and move toward his core. Lloyd knew that if he let the void energy move on its own, it would have strengthened his core significantly on its own and probably even to a good extent.
However, Lloyd didn't want his core to be just 'good.' He wanted perfection.
He wanted the perfect core that would take him the furthest in the long term. He didn't want to look back at this day and blame himself for his laziness, so he kept the void energy away from his core and simply waited until he was free to cultivate it.
Half an hour passed quite quickly as Lloyd stabbed his staff into the head of one of the fallen monsters, held it by the middle, and used it like a pole, allowing him to quickly use his built-up momentum to spin on it and land a devastating kick onto the monster's head.
The monster felt itself being sent back several meters, but before it could regain its balance and attack again, Lloyd took out the staff, spun mid-air, and stabbed it in the head like he had with the other one.
Lloyd instantly looked around, waiting for the next monster to come for him, but it never came. Lloyd was a little confused, but after looking at the bloodbath around him, he could not help but sigh.
They were all in the late first commandment, but that shocked Lloyd. The monsters here had outstanding talent, or whatever the monster equivalent of their human talent metric was.
Despite being in the late first commandment, it felt like he was fighting a half-step second commandment, some even feeling like they had the power of a human with one topaz seal.
"Well, it explains why I got my ass beat last time I was hear." Lloyd sighed.
Moving away from the blood bath, Lloyd sat on the ground cross-legged and closed his eyes.
Lloyd felt the void energy being increasingly attracted toward Lloyd's core the longer it stayed inside his body.
When Lloyd finally sat down to cultivate, he let go of the void energy and allowed it to seep into his core.
The void energy took a few minutes to be purified, and Lloyd's mana was completely purple for the first time since he had reached the first commandment as void energy ran through his mana channels and veins.
The mana within his veins and channels got all sucked into Lloyd's core, and he began to circulate it within.
The mana got condensed to the sides of the core, reinforcing the core itself and making it strong than ever.
Lloyd could feel that his purification process was becoming fast and much more efficient. The mana he circulated around his core became purer and more powerful by the second.
It was then that he realized something too. He felt too comfortable. He felt like breathing even though he didn't need to. Every time he took a bit of energy into his core, the feeling of warmth spread through him like blood coursing through a live body.
The mana in this realm wasn't normal mana... Since the void walk was technically located in the void, this could be considered a void bubble, and therefore, the mana inside it would most likely be tainted by the void element.
However, while this would have been a haven for any void walker, Lloyd couldn't access its full abilities.
He wasn't really there, after all. Only his soul was there. Every time he kills something and takes its energy, it instantly goes to his real body since it's more of a life force thing than a physical body thing.
Cultivating in the void was like was weird. Even if he cultivated his body, the changes to his body would only occur once he left the void, not while he's in the void. And it wasn't like he cultivated at the same time in both the void and the outside world.
He quite literally just has all the cultivation benefits instantly sent to his real body the moment he wakes up, and he had a feeling that such a phenomenon had something to do with the fact that his outside body was just a shell that hid whatever was inside him.
He never understood it before, but when he saw what was beyond his shell, it all began to make sense to him, like the fact that he never got his injuries transferred to the real world despite them being essentially the same as cultivating his body.
Lloyd continued cultivating for over half an hour as his core became more powerful by the second. By the time he had opened his eyes again, he was already 50% of the way to having an early first commandment core.
When cultivating, Lloyd just remembered what he saw about making and cultivating a core in his epiphany. He repeated the movements with amazing precision, ensuring he didn't mess up in even one part of the entire section.
Little did Lloyd know that the reason for the cultivation technique he saw during his epiphany being so advanced was because Eris had assisted him in creating it after showing him the basics of her own cultivation technique.
Lloyd's eyes quickly flared as he felt his mana run through his eyes and create the effects of mana vision.
"There you are." Lloyd grinned before dashing toward the huge mana source in the distance. According to the lightning orb he had collected from the goat with the third eye, the place Lloyd was looking at was most likely going to be the location of the next orb.
Not only that, but it would also be a ticket to boosting his control, understanding, and power over the lightning element.
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