"Right now, every day I temper my body with blazing flas, like slting steel, refining myself until my body can endure more and more. Over and over, I'm reborn with tougher, denser skin and muscle."
"These days, I can feel it… I'm not at the end yet. The day the scorching fire can keep burning and it feels as easy as breathing… that's when the Fire-Tempering thod will truly be complete."
"I don't know if, by then, I can surpass a Supre Grade Blade. If I still can't… then I'll have to find another way to keep hamring my body into sothing even stronger."
"If I want to train my body beyond even a Supre Grade Blade, I can't relax for a single day."
Tengetsu Ares had never slackened when it ca to forging his physique. If anything, he poured most of his ti into it.
But after his battle with Rocks, he realized sothing blunt and unforgiving.
His body still wasn't close to truly invincible.
And in the short term, there was no way his physique could leap forward enough to completely ignore the Yami Yami no Mi.
Three feet of ice never forms overnight. Water doesn't drill through stone in a single day.
"I need stronger, more varied ways to fight." Ares knew that if he wanted to defeat Rocks, he had to improve in every direction.
Truthfully, he did have plenty of combat thods.
With that "cheat" assisting him, he'd learned techniques from countless monsters.
Whitebeard. Shiki. Rayleigh. Zephyr. Garp. Sladar. Chinjao…
Almost everyone he crossed fists with, he stole sothing from.
But…
He still hadn't reached true mastery. More often than not, he relied on the sheer dominance of his physique using raw physical advantage to make every strike terrifying.
"Maybe I should fuse the strengths and characteristics of all these techniques… then combine them with my own specialties, and turn it into sothing that truly belongs to ."
"Only what suits is the best."
He felt like he was grasping at sothing, but he couldn't quite put it into a neat explanation.
What Ares didn't know was that he'd stumbled onto a truth countless "learned n" on another world had already summarized:
Borrow the stones of other mountains to polish your own jade. Take the strengths of a hundred schools to fortify yourself.
But he wasn't a scholar.
So in plain terms, all it ant was
I need sothing that's mine.
"Besides that, I need to spend ti developing my Devil Fruit ability. The Mythical Zoan: Azure Dragon form has insane potential, and I still haven't brought out everything the Azure Dragon fruit can do."
He'd noticed it for a while.
He'd had the fruit for over two years, yet most of his daily focus was still body training. He simply hadn't invested enough effort into developing the Azure Dragon fruit.
Now he'd decided he would.
"And then there's the three types of Haki too… Why does it feel like I have a mountain of things to train?" Ares laughed at himself. Looking at it like this, he realized there really was a lot he still needed to learn.
"I need to plan it properly. For example, when I temper my body, I can temper my Armant Haki at the sa ti… and even think about Devil Fruit developnt while I'm doing it."
"When I'm training combat techniques, I can also train Observation and Armant."
"I need to combine it all and waste not a single second."
Ares felt that training like this would maximize his efficiency.
If he could keep executing this plan…
He believed he only needed a year for his strength to undergo a massive leap.
He opened his eyes, switched off the lamp, and lay back on the bed.
Then another thought surfaced, and he murmured softly, "Right… that extra mory that appeared in my head before. It might help a lot too."
"I don't know where it ca from… but every ti a new mory appears, I feel like my spirit becos fuller, stronger."
"And that mory… it didn't feel complete. It was only a small piece of sothing much larger. If I could know the whole thing…"
With questions swirling in his mind, he sank into sleep.
Over the next few days, Ares carried out his training plan. Every day was packed to the brim.
Even though his division captain position had been revoked, no pirate with a functioning survival instinct would dare order the infamous Tengetsu Ares to do the petty errands rookies handled in the Rocks Pirates.
This ti, Ares trained with unprecedented seriousness.
Once, in a drunken state, he'd trained Armant Haki backwards, forging a unique power of his own: Blood-Red Armant Haki.
Now, he started over from the beginning cultivating the proper Armant Haki.
True Armant Haki had multiple applications: hardening, emission, and coating.
Ares mastered all three quickly.
It barely took any ti at all.
First, his baseline strength was already absurd. His control over his own energy and Haki far exceeded that of ordinary pirates.
Second, he had that "cheat," letting him absorb techniques from the countless enemies he'd fought before.
After fully mastering true Armant Haki, Ares understood Haki more deeply. And he gained new insight into Conqueror's coating as well Armant coating and Conqueror's coating shared similarities.
The difference was simply the source of the energy.
Ares sank into training.
…
On the island, inside a blacksmith's shop.
"Strange… Ares hasn't co these past few days," Shimotsuki Koshiro muttered, sitting on a stump and smoking his long pipe. "Before, he ca every single day to learn weapon-forging techniques and what I've learned over the years."
"Maybe the chaos on the island a few days ago kept him busy."
Koshiro made a guess, then frowned slightly. "More and more pirates are gathering here. It looks like sothing big is about to happen. I left Wano to see the sights of the sea…"
"I've stayed on Hachinosu long enough. It's ti to go."
The thought of leaving Hachinosu rose in his heart. He could sense a storm approaching, and he had no interest in being swept into it.
"Haa…" Koshiro exhaled a thick cloud of smoke. He tapped the pipe against the stone block, knocking off the ash.
Then he stood, went back to his room, and packed his things.
"I should say goodbye to Ares."
He'd spent a fair amount of ti with Ares. During that period, Ares asked questions humbly, almost intoxicated by the craft of forging. Seeing him like that made Koshiro think of a certain daimyō from the past.
And Ares had treated him with genuine respect and care.
No matter what, before leaving, he should bid him farewell.
When Koshiro finally found Ares, Ares was still imrsed in training his Armant Haki.
But unlike anyone else
He was using Armant Haki to punch his own body, again and again.
Boom
Boom
The dull impacts sounded like muffled thunder, nonstop.
Seeing that, Koshiro stared, slack-jawed, and blurted out, "So this is how he tempers his body?!"
He knew Ares' dream was to forge his body into sothing beyond even a Supre Grade Blade.
He also knew Ares' training thods were insane.
But witnessing it with his own eyes
A fist coated in Armant Haki, strong enough to shatter a small mountain, slamming into Ares' own body
It still shook him.
Hearing about it was nothing.
Seeing it was a different kind of horror.
Ares acted as if he didn't feel pain at all. His fists fell like a storm of raindrops.
Koshiro's scalp went numb. He couldn't even make his feet move.
"What a lunatic…!"
"No wonder his dream is that outrageous."
"Monsters have monster dreams
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