After the first twenty-four hours, it didn’t take long for exhaustion to seep into Ethan’s body and mind.
His sword felt strangely sluggish in his grip, and his aura responded in unnatural, broken pulses.
He needed ti to adapt, dying several tis in rapid succession. It wasn’t until after the first seven days that sothing finally changed.
It was as if his mind had found a different rhythm.
He began to feel everything with clarity, from the precise path of his sword to the tension coiled in every muscle, down to the subtle way his aura answered the slightest flicker of his intent.
After the first month, the ntal fatigue that had been building up simply vanished, dissipating like mist beneath the sun.
In the second month, he left the hell of endless combat behind and entered more elaborate simulation scenarios: sieges and ambushes, where he led much smaller forces on what amounted to suicidal missions.
In thirty days, he fought a total of seventy-three battles, achieving only ten victories.
Over the following thirty days, he repeated the scenarios. This ti, however, he erged victorious in forty out of the fifty simulated battles.
During those two months, Ethan also learned much more about the true nature of the Hell Soldier Portal.
It was, without a doubt, a simulation.
He could talk to the soldiers, hold surprisingly deep discussions, and learn entire strategies from them. He had even won several battles by following the guidance of seasoned veterans.
Still, they weren’t real.
Whenever he pressed a little harder, seeking deeper information, the minds of those soldiers would falter, like a generative text model hallucinating.
Ethan had no knowledge whatsoever of arrays, and Goldenveil itself didn’t have a single master of that art either, and although he didn’t dwell on it much, it remained a gap he wanted to fill urgently.
If he couldn’t do it through the system, then as soon as he reestablished contact with his mother, he would ask her to send him an array master.
Pushing those concerns from his mind, Ethan resud his training.
For the next six months, all he did was lead armies, duel formidable enemies, and die dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tis.
The first deaths were traumatic. But he soon got used to it.
The human mind was extrely adaptable. With the simulations suppressing ntal exhaustion, Ethan had no trouble coping with the loneliness of being surrounded by what were, in essence, just soulless NPCs.
The fact that he could leave whenever he wanted also helped a lot.
In the tenth month, already missing his wives terribly, he entered the last scenario he had set up; Training duels.
And so, another two months passed.
"Ah... I’ve improved a lot..." Ethan’s voice echoed through the silence as he stood atop a training platform of distinctly oriental appearance.
As the recognized master of the Hell Soldier Portal, he held complete control over the place, which greatly facilitated his training.
With a sigh, he glanced at the array’s information, checking the number of mana cores consud.
In total, the array had cost just over two hundred and fifty lower-grade mana cores to sustain five hundred soldiers divided into three groups, all under a tenfold temporal distortion.
He alone, under a three hundred and sixty-fivefold temporal distortion, had already consud more than fifty.
The price was high, but considering the prospect of using it to train individual specialists, Ethan felt quite satisfied.
With a gentle smile tugging at his lips, he readied his sword.
The fourth form of Imperial Fencing, that was now fused and transford into the Golden Dragon Emperor’s Fencing, was already powerful in its own right.
In essence, it consisted of six movents capable of conjuring, alongside the user’s blade, a second invisible edge woven from pure aura.
It was, without a doubt, a treacherous technique, though not so difficult to neutralize for third-stage experts who were already anticipating it.
Still, the sixth attack carried six extra aura blades with it, making the final strike truly dangerous, even if it couldn’t pierce armor properly defended by a third-stage warrior’s aura.
With a sigh, Ethan summoned a warrior at the peak of the third stage.
The figure materialized before him in a surge of golden light, fully armored from head to toe, the heavy shield already raised in hand.
"Take a defensive stance and hold out with all your strength," Ethan instructed in a cold tone, adjusting his grip on the sword hilt.
The third-stage warrior rely nodded, lifting the mighty shield before him, his feet planting firmly into the ground to anchor his stance.
Ethan took a deep breath before exhaling slowly, letting his aura flow through every nerve in his body.
Unlike the fourth form, which unfolded across up to six successive attacks, the fifth form boiled down to a single, decisive strike.
’Five blades in one...’ Ethan repeated ntally, and his sword began to tremble under the weight of the concentrated aura.
A golden dragon erged around the blade, followed by another, and yet another, until five gleaming creatures orbited the steel.
The five images, sculpted from powerful golden aura, spun slowly around the sword’s edge as, from a cherry tree beside the platform, a small leaf broke free, drifting lazily through the air.
The mont it touched Ethan’s blade, it was shredded into dozens of tiny pieces.
"Resist!" Ethan shouted, and charged forward.
His feet tore into the platform’s floor with a sharp crack, and his body crossed the distance in the span of a single blink.
The blade struck the steel shield in an explosion of golden light and the third-stage warrior held out for a single second before yielding.
From Ethan’s blade, the image of the five dragons poured over his opponent like a curtain of golden smoke whipped by a gale, enveloping every inch of his body.
A sharp crack echoed through the arena as the shield shattered into glittering shards, followed by the muffled, tallic sound of armor being pierced before the full power of the attack finally struck the warrior’s chest.
When Ethan’s blade finally ca to a stop, it was buried deep within his opponent’s chest, a massive, bloody hole torn clean through the body from one side to the other.
That warrior was forty-five levels above Ethan, and yet he couldn’t withstand even a single blow.
The Imperial Fencing of the Fallen Sun Empire was truly terrifying, especially now that it had been fused with the draconic sword art of Aerick’s master.
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