103 Chapter 103

In the following days, Amon focused on cultivating and training his arts. He no longer had to do missions to collect the required monthly points. Madam Lin had negotiated this with her father. One-time access into the Lin Tome Chamber was hardly a proper reward for a member who had scored first place in the White Cloud Tournament for the Lin clan. She argued that if outsiders hear of the Lin clan's treatment of the youth who had taken the first rank, it would harm the Lin clan's reputation. After a debate, Lin Weida gave in to his daughter's demand. Not only did Amon no longer need to do the missions, but he was also granted monthly wages. Although the wages only gave out a small number of aer stones, Amon didn't complain. He had stolen a decent amount of aer stones from the secret dimension. Amon welcomed the freedom, he had less than two years to prepare for the royal academy. His daily routine was training martial and arcane arts in the morning, experimenting with poison tome in the afternoon, and cultivating in the night. Aside from training his available arts, he also tried to learn the remaining two arcane arts from Hei Gong. They were arcane arts of the fire and metal elements, respectively called Flame Lance and Iron Fist. These arcane arts were still too complicated for him, arcane arts would be easier to learn after he reached the Transformation stage. He only managed to grasp the most basic understanding of them, getting into the Beginner mastery. He needed to focus a lot of time if he wanted to master them enough to be able to properly use them in a battle, like what he did when he learned the Water Slicing Ring. He didn't have that luxury of time at the moment, so he put their study on hold. Instead, he studied three new arts. The first was the Concealed Ghost Body, a transformation art that he had planned to learn when he browse through the pyramid legacy. He reached skilled mastery rather fast. At this mastery, he could mask his presence to cultivators of the same stage. Of course, on the surface, this art was rather pointless considering those in the Human realm had not yet developed the ability to sense other cultivators' energy. But Amon had experienced some cultivators who had the arts to detect someone despite being in the Human realm, such as Lei San and Si An. The latter was the failed assassin sent by San Guo to assassinate Amon in the past. With this Concealed Ghost Body, he would be able to hide from someone who had those kinds of detection art. The second new art was Infinite Phantom Slash. It was an art utilizing a dagger or a short sword. It was similar to the Endless Concealed Slash that he had gotten from Lin Weida. But after he had a better understanding of arts, he estimated the Endless Concealed Slash was only a low-tier practitioner grade, which was the lowest grade. No wonder Lin Weida gave the art to him. The Infinite Phantom Slash, on the other hand, was of the high-tier practitioner grade. Since the two arts were similar, his understanding and expertise in Endless Concealed Slash helped him to quickly learn the Infinite Phantom Slash. In just a short time, he had reached the Expert mastery of the art. At this level, his dagger slash out rapid ten slashes with unpredictable angles and covered a large area around him. This art also used minimum aether, so he could execute them often. This would be his main art when in a melee confrontation using weapons. The third and last new art that he learned was the Poison Claw art. This art was considered a transformation art more than a martial art because it transformed one's hands into a poisonous weapon. The lethality of this art depended on the poison it was infused with. The higher one's mastery of this art, the stronger the poison that one could infuse with the art. When he was only at the basic mastery, he found that he could only infuse this art with the weakest of poison. Only after reaching Skilled mastery that he could infuse the first poison he had learned from 101 Primal Poison Tome, the Black Slaughter Poison. The process was similar to when he was engraving the poison into his throwing knives. Except in this instance, he was not carving a word of power onto his hands. The Poison claw art he trained served as a substitute for word of power. The art made the skin and flesh of his hands become absorptive of the poison. He had to submerge his hands completely into a liquid that had been fused with the poison of his choice. He would then leave his hand submerged for a long period while circulating the aether on his hands following the art's instructions. If the poison was too strong, his hands would be ruined by the poison instead. Thus, he would need to carefully gauge the level of the poison he could absorb. He would have to do such training daily for a long period until the poison completely fused with his art. After months of non-stop training, his hands finally absorbed enough essence of the Black Slaughter Poison. The poison hid under his skin and would be excreted when he executed his Poison Claw art. His hands would turn black then. Amon continued training the art until he could turn his hands poisonous in a split second. His opponents would be caught off-guard if they dared to come near. Still, his claws' penetrative ability was not as good as his knives. So, against enemies who had strong defensive arts, his claws might have trouble breaking through the skin to inject the poison. He saw some offensive claw arts in the library within his black space ring, he wondered if he could combine one of those arts with the poison claw to make it more deadly. But he put the plan on hold first until he got used to this Poison Claw art. His poison study also underwent a significant advancement. The plantation inside his black space ring was still at its infant stage, but some of the ready ingredients he had harvested inside the secret dimension allowed him to do lots of experimentation. With increased knowledge, he could understand more of the recipes in the 101 primal poison tome. He crafted the Thousand Dream Poison which used the Phantom Inducer Pouch, a poison sac that he harvested from the Mind Demon who had trapped him inside an illusion world when he first entered the secret dimension. This was a non-lethal poison that caused strong hallucinations. This poison was effective against the Mystic stage. Even the Spirit stage would be affected to a certain extent, but only for a short duration. He successfully engraved this poison into three of his throwing knives. This hallucination poison might be useful to create a distraction. Another non-lethal poison recipe from the 101 primal poison tome that he had managed to produce was Fragile Bone Muscle Poison. This poison weakened the target. It could affect up to the Mystic stage as well. Amon didn't engrave this poison into his throwing knives. He didn't see the point of weakening his enemies when he could have killed them with the same strike. Another recipe that he had learned was a lethal poison. It was called the Cold Stiff Poison. This poison used all three ingredients he had acquired from the secret dimension, the Three-legged toad's poison sacs, Four Seasons Worm, and its main ingredient, ice lotus. The ice lotus was a poisonous plant that released deadly poison clouds at night. He had harvested this lotus during the day and also taken some seeds and planted them inside his black space ring's plantation. This Cold Stiff Poison was deadlier than the Black Slaughter Poison. While Black Slaughter Poison was useless against the Spirit stage cultivator, this Cold Stiff Poison could still affect them to a degree, even if it could not kill them as well. Those who died of this poison would have its body turned extremely stiff and also very cold, as if frozen. Amon tried to fuse this poison with his Poison Claw art at first but found that this poison was too strong for his current mastery of the art. So, he kept practicing with the Black Slaughter Poison. Amon managed to engrave four of his throwing knives using this Cold Stiff poison. With this, in his arsenal, he had eleven poison knives. Four laced with Black Slaughter poison, three with Thousand Dream poison, and another four with Cold Stiff poison. Because his engraved throwing knives were getting fewer, he went and bought new ones. But he only bought normal throwing knives, because the engraved ones were rare and expensive. He applied the engraving process by himself, imbuing them with a word of power that enhanced their sharpness. Although it was only a low-tier engraving, it would have to do for now. After he was done with the engraving process, he had thirty engraved throwing knives aside from the eleven poison knives. He also bought more wooden bolts and applied engravings on them, increasing their sharpness so they could puncture their targets more easily. The engraving process took much time and meticulous work, but Amon persevered. He never had a problem focusing when needed. With these arsenals, his fangs were now sharper. Inside the library in his Black Space Ring, there were also some books about talisman creation. However, he decided to not dabble in that field yet. Spending too much time on too many subjects would just reduce his time on the others. Perhaps if he had hit roadblocks on the others then he would start touching on the subject. As for his cultivation, one year after he came out of the secret dimension, he finally reached the peak Strength stage. He was now at the same level as the Lin clan's youngest top prodigy, Lin Xiaolong. It was one and a half years since the White Cloud Tournament. Only half a year left before he attempted to enter the royal academy.