"Fine, it's not like I'm forbidding you from buying me new clothes..."
Ruohua truly cherished her current uniform because it had been a parting gift from her master. Back in Suju, an outfit like this was incredibly hard to come by; it was only in a place like Hendon Myre that you could manage to find one a bit cheaper.
The thong she had been wearing was already ruined by Li Ke to the point where she would never dare wear it again. If her top got defiled by him as well, then every time she looked at this outfit in the future, she wouldn't be thinking of her master. Instead, she'd be thinking of Li Ke's...
Li Ke's massive spear!
"Now that's more like it," Li Ke grinned, flashing a thoroughly victorious smile.
Due to the intimate delay, Li Ke and Ruohua never actually made it to Master Pungjin's training hall that day. Instead, they ended up cooking dinner alongside Seria and spending a remarkably warm, cozy evening together.
Over the next few days, the group focused entirely on buying supplies to fully furnish and decorate their new home. Li Ke also took Roche and Ruohua down to Pungjin's training hall, though to his immense disappointment, Master Pungjin himself wasn't around. They simply rented a private sparring chamber and began their daily conditioning.
Regrettably, the individual training chambers weren't entirely sealed off from the public. Because of this, Ruohua—who had switched into a completely modest, heavily covered training uniform alongside her brand-new Weighted Armbands—never gave Li Ke a single opportunity to successfully make a move on her at the facility.
Meanwhile, Li Ke temporarily dialed back his unbridled romantic bedroom activities with Seria. The girl was simply draining him way too effectively; when focused heavily on martial cultivation, it was generally best not to overindulge in those kinds of physical pursuits.
Li Ke's life rapidly settled into a highly disciplined routine. Just like that, a full half-month flashed by, and he finally managed to roughly master a fraction of the insights left behind by G.S.D and Agamemno.
In the mornings, he would spend three hours engaging in hand-to-hand sparring with Ruohua. In reality, he was actively instructing her; his rock-solid fundamentals allowed him to glean a much deeper understanding of basic punches and kicks during their sessions.
Furthermore, Ruohua's innate talent was borderline freakish. Whatever martial foundations Li Ke possessed were rapidly hollowed out and completely absorbed by her.
In the afternoons, Ruohua and Roche would attempt to engage in standard combat simulations under the active disruption of the Energy Disruption Device. While they struggled, Li Ke used the time to practice the swordsmanship styles detailed in the skill scrolls and Agamemno's journal, thoroughly drilling some of the exotic forms.
Unfortunately, when it came to a concept as profoundly esoteric as Wave energy, Li Ke failed to comprehend it entirely. He couldn't even grasp a single thread of a starting point. However, he had memorized the actual physical sword forms almost perfectly, largely because both masters had left incredibly detailed notes regarding how internal Qi was supposed to flow through each strike.
Still, just as G.S.D had warned him, Li Ke had to aggressively trim and modify a vast majority of the sword arts to fit his own physical constitution. Many of those specific sword paths were heavily predicated on utilizing the raw, monstrous power of a Ghost Hand.
"It makes sense. Even Blade Masters still technically possess a Ghost Hand; if they have it, they're going to use it. No one is stupid enough to completely seal away their own inherent power during a life-or-death fight. That would just be idiotic."
Staring at the scroll—which practically looked like a literal Blade Master skill tree from the video game—Li Ke couldn't help but shake his head.
Styles like the Secret Sword Art were honestly only optimized for people who had a massive, disproportionate gap in strength between their left and right arms. For example...
Heavy Qvod users.
However, while his progress across the other standard martial paths went smoothly enough, he remained firmly stuck at the absolute beginner threshold when it came to the ultimate Awakening skills. It was the exact same roadblock that prevented him from mastering the Blood-Qi Secret Technique: a fundamental lack of conviction. His raw willpower simply wasn't profound enough to awaken the inherent spirit sleeping within his blade, let alone resonate with it.
Unless, of course, he found himself locked in a desperate battle where he was forced to stake absolutely everything on the line.
This reality left him rather frustrated. Thanks to his backing, Ruohua had been relentlessly pushing herself through grueling daily training, and her progression rate was skyrocketing. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Energy Disruption Device, Roche's casting speed and stability had improved by leaps and bounds; she was currently attempting to learn entirely new fields of magic. It could be said that both girls were perfectly capable of continuing their rapid self-improvement strictly within the safety of the training hall.
But he, Li Ke, could not.
When it came to the physical forms, he could already unleash them flawlessly. After all, the core identity of a Blade Master's kit boiled down to basic slashing—faster slashing, slashing that unleashed sharp waves of sword-qi, jumping up to slash, and jumping up to aggressively slash, slash, slash. It excelled in raw, unadulterated simplicity. As long as a warrior learned how to coat their attacks with internal Qi to form lethal sword-qi, and mastered the internal circulation principles required to transition between forms, the only thing left to do was real combat.
Bloody, life-or-death combat.
Because these techniques were explicitly designed to slaughter an opponent, you couldn't exactly test their true limits in a controlled training hall without accidentally racking up a body count.
"Seriously... everyone else can steadily level up inside a training hall except for me."
Having concluded another grueling day of training—and having taken full advantage of Seria being busy cooking to pull the beautiful female Fighter into the bathroom for a highly intense 69 session—Li Ke let out a helpless, weary sigh as he dried himself off.
This bottleneck was precisely why he had purchased the specialized training equipment for the girls and fully guaranteed their food and housing.
Completely freed from the burdens of financial labor, the two of them didn't have to waste a single second of their days on mundane survival; they could dedicate every waking moment entirely to figuring out how to grow stronger.
Neither of their talent profiles was low to begin with. Operating without the anxiety of where their next meal was coming from, paired with a crystal-clear understanding of their respective evolutionary paths and the luxury of an overwhelmingly powerful sparring partner like Li Ke, their actual combat strength was naturally bound to explode.
Furthermore, long before they ever met Li Ke, they had already spent plenty of time slaughtering monsters in the wild simply because they couldn't afford to sit idle. Right now, they were in the prime state of accumulating and refining that latent experience.
Without Li Ke's financial backing, they would be drowning in endless chores, worrying constantly about buying and repairing gear, or stressing over food and rent. They wouldn't have a shred of time to focus entirely on pure training. If they carelessly took a bad injury in the wild, they might not even have enough coin to afford proper medical treatment or recover from a weakened state.
This was the exact reason why the vast majority of normal adventurers were forced to awkwardly cultivate their skills mid-combat against wild monsters; they simply didn't possess the financial capital to do otherwise. It was also why any truly powerful independent adventurer who survived that meat grinder was invariably a freakish prodigy.
Of course, Li Ke was well aware that he was technically improving too. He hadn't reached the absolute physical ceiling of his current realm just yet; his rate of growth had simply slowed down to a crawl, rendering it far less dramatic than the rapid explosions in strength being displayed by Roche and Ruohua.
"Man..."
Glancing over at his personal interface—which showed that he had already accumulated a staggering three million Energy Points—Li Ke couldn't help but let out a deep sigh.
"...I'm actually starting to feel bored out of my mind again!"
Because Ruohua and Roche were currently locked in a critical phase of rapid growth, Li Ke hadn't brought up the idea of setting out for a wilderness adventure just yet. As a result, he had no valid excuse to go hunt down the twin elemental mages, Binoche and Keraha, which left him feeling thoroughly listless.
As for simply pushing all the way and fully taking down Ruohua right now?
His raw intuition—or perhaps his core hunting instincts—told him that wouldn't be a wise move. It would only cause Ruohua to emotionally distance herself from him. He needed to play the long game and let the girl naturally, willingly accept the reality of his harem on her own terms.
And as for Roche, her affection meter hadn't even reached the baseline threshold yet.
"With no new girls to pursue and only an endless road of cultivation ahead, things get boring real fast! Besides, with Seria around, this massive pile of Energy Points is completely redundant anyway. Seriously, when am I finally going to unlock the ability to cross through worlds without having to burn through these points every single time?"