The thunderous crash of the bisected granite dummy echoed through the Sword Pavilion, a sound of finality that seemed to shake the very foundations of the ancient building. Bhim stood frozen amidst the settling dust, his prized battle axe lying forgotten at his feet. His mind, usually a straightforward landscape of strength and strategy, was a whirlwind of utter confusion.
He had dedicated his life to the Mountain-Cleaving Axe Art. After more than a decade of brutal, back-breaking training, his ultimate strike could leave a three-foot-deep gash in a granite dummy. He had considered that the pinnacle of destructive power.
Amrit, with a single, silent, effortless swing of a common training sword, had cleaved a ten-foot block of solid stone in two. The cut was so clean, so perfect, it defied the laws of physics as he knew them. It was not a feat of strength; it was an act of conceptual erasure.
Bhim looked at his younger brother, who was calmly inspecting the obsidian blade as if nothing remarkable had happened. The intrigue he had felt earlier was now being eclipsed by a primal, instinctual fear. Arjun had been humiliated, but Bhim was utterly terrified. Arjun's pride had been broken; Bhim's entire martial worldview had been shattered.
"How?" The word was a choked whisper, all the rumbling power gone from his voice.
Amrit turned to him, the obsidian sword resting lightly in his hand. "The technique is called One Sword. It teaches that a true cut does not break something, it simply… separates it."
The explanation was as cryptic and nonsensical as the act itself. Bhim didn't understand the words, but he understood the result. He bent down, his hand trembling slightly, and picked up his axe. He looked at the heavy, powerful weapon, then back at the impossible cut on the granite. His life's work. It felt like a child's game. Without another word, he turned and walked out of the pavilion, his heavy footsteps lacking their usual certainty. He needed to be alone. He needed to rethink everything.
Amrit watched him go, a flicker of something unreadable in his eyes. He had not intended to shatter his brother's spirit, but it was an unavoidable consequence of his own rapid ascent. The world would either bend to his new reality or break against it.
He looked down at the transformed sword in his hand. The [Crit] had turned it into a peerless weapon, but that wasn't the point. The point was the principle. The system allowed him to take a fundamental concept and apply it perfectly. He now had a peerless attack. Next, he needed peerless movement.
Tucking the scroll of One Sword into his sash, he left the pavilion, carrying the newly christened "Obsidian Kiss," as the name surfaced in his mind. He didn't return the sword to its rack. It had been reborn through his Prana; it was his now, soul-bound in a way that no forging process could replicate.
His destination was the Royal Gardens, a sprawling expanse of meticulously manicured nature behind the main palace. It was a labyrinth of winding paths, serene koi ponds, ancient willow trees, and pavilions designed for quiet contemplation. It was the largest open, yet secluded, space within the palace walls—the perfect place to practice a movement technique.
He found a quiet, mossy clearing, surrounded by a dense grove of bamboo that swayed gently in the breeze. The air was fresh and cool. He laid the Obsidian Kiss on a patch of soft grass and unfurled the second scroll he had taken: Ghost-Flash Steps.
Like One Sword, this scroll was an outlier. The first two-thirds of the text were a brilliant, intricate explanation of how to use Prana to manipulate the space immediately around one's body. It described creating micro-bursts of force against the air to achieve explosive speed, and creating "spatial friction" to stop on a dime. It was a work of genius.
The final third, however, was a mess of frustrated notes from generations of cultivators who had tried and failed to decipher the last, crucial step.
"The final step requires a 'Void Resonance'… what does that even mean?"
"The energy expenditure is too high. The technique is a suicide pact."
"My meridians ruptured. This path is flawed."
The technique was incomplete, a broken bridge. No one could cross it.
Amrit smiled. The system didn't need a bridge. It could fly.
He sat cross-legged on the mossy ground, the scroll in his lap. He had no intention of following the instructions step-by-step. He would do what he did with One Sword. He would absorb the core concept.
System. Comprehend the principle of 'Ghost-Flash Steps'.
[Profound Action: Studying an Incomplete Conceptual Movement Art.]
[Target: Ghost-Flash Steps (Fragment).]
[Crit Chance detected…]
[…Triggering a 10,000x Crit!]
[System Note: Incomplete data detected. Applying Crit to conceptual extrapolation. The system will complete the technique based on its core principles and the fundamental laws of spatial manipulation.]
A torrent of information, even more complex and profound than the one from One Sword, flooded Amrit's mind.
He didn't just understand the existing text; he saw where it was meant to go. The concept of "Void Resonance" bloomed in his mind not as a mystery, but as a simple truth. It wasn't about resonating with the void; it was about creating a momentary, personal void—a tiny bubble of warped space—and letting reality itself violently pull you across the gap to fill it. It wasn't about moving through space; it was about compelling space to move around you.
The system didn't just fill in the blanks; it rewrote the entire manual, optimizing every step, correcting every flawed assumption, and creating a technique that was ten times more efficient and a hundred times more profound than the original author had ever dreamed.
In a single instant, Amrit became the sole, peerless master of a complete, perfected divine movement technique.
He opened his eyes. The world looked different yet again. He could now perceive the very fabric of space, the invisible grid upon which reality was painted. He could see the stress points, the pliable pathways, the energetic currents that flowed through it.
He stood up, his body feeling light as a feather. He took a breath, letting a thread of his Spirit-Prana circulate according to the perfected method now ingrained in his soul. He focused on a spot thirty feet away, beside a weeping willow tree that trailed its branches into a koi pond.
His intent was simple. Go there.
He took a single step.
For an observer, what happened next would have been impossible to comprehend. Amrit did not run. He did not leap. He did not blur.
He simply vanished.
One moment, he was standing in the center of the mossy clearing. The next, a faint pop like a soap bubble bursting was heard, and he was standing perfectly still beside the willow tree, his robes not even rustling from the movement. There was no gust of wind, no displacement of air, no trace of his passage. He had ceased to exist in one spot and begun to exist in another.
Amrit looked back at the empty clearing where he had been standing. A smile touched his lips. This was the true Ghost-Flash Step. It was not speed. It was translocation.
He tried again, this time focusing on a stone lantern on the other side of the pond. Pop. He was there. He looked at his reflection in the still water of the pond. There was no ripple.
This technique was more than a tool for combat. It was the ultimate expression of freedom. No prison could hold him. No army could surround him. He could be anywhere he willed himself to be.
He spent the next hour in the garden, and it became his personal playground. He took his first step, and then a thousand more. He flashed from the top of a pagoda to the center of a stone bridge, from the heart of a bamboo grove to the edge of a lily pond. He moved with the silence and suddenness of a thought, each translocation as natural as breathing.
With each step, his control became more refined. He learned to shorten the distance, flashing just an inch to the left to dodge a falling leaf. He learned to chain the steps together, creating a disorienting, impossible dance where he appeared in a dozen places at once. He was a ghost in the sunlit garden.
As he practiced, a thought surfaced, triggered by the system's note. The system is limited only by my imagination.
He was using the technique to move his own body. What if he tried to move something else?
He stood on the edge of the pond and looked at a small, smooth, white pebble resting on the bottom, shimmering under two feet of clear water. He focused his intent, not on himself, but on the pebble. He visualized the Ghost-Flash principle, the creation of a tiny void, but applied it to the stone.
Come here.
Pop.
The pebble vanished from the bottom of the pond and appeared, perfectly dry, in his outstretched palm. Not a single drop of water had been displaced. The surface of the pond remained as still as glass.
Amrit stared at the pebble in his hand, his heart beginning to hammer in his chest. A cold, terrifying, and exhilarating understanding dawned on him.
This wasn't just a movement technique anymore. At its highest level, it was a form of telekinesis. Or, more accurately, teleportation. He could move objects with his mind.
What were the limits? Could he move a person? Could he flash his brother's sword out of his hand and into his own? Could he teleport the air out of an enemy's lungs? Could he teleport a small piece of an enemy's heart a few inches to the left?
The possibilities were as boundless as they were horrifying. He was not just learning to be a warrior. He was learning to be a god of spacetime, one small, critical step at a time.
He closed his hand around the warm pebble, the immensity of his newfound power settling upon him. He had taken his first steps into a much larger, and much more dangerous, world. And he had a feeling that this world would soon be taking its first steps toward him.