The transition from a desperate survivor into a practitioner of mixed combat, which he called Gutter Flow, had not been a path of sudden enlightenment. For Mason, it was a bloody, frustrating grind.
In the beginning, Mason had tried to mimic the Yaoguais' movements with the clumsy imitation of a fan watching a master, only to be punished by the weight of their honed skills and martial realization. He had lost count of the times he had been sent sprawling across the silver water.
Compared to the humans who were still fighting in the war against the Red Dragon, Mason was undeniably weak. He was a mere mortal, after all.
Were the soldiers of the Nightmare Army also mortals? Yes, but there was a vast difference between Mason and a soldier of that legion. He lacked their decades of training and the supernatural reserves of a true warrior. Nor was he an official Jiang, beings who were mortal yet possessed a rank far beyond his own. He knew that, ultimately, ranks didn't matter... it was how one displayed prowess and understanding during combat that truly classified one as strong or weak.
Yet, that understanding had not prevailed during his first two weeks. What was he missing?
Training? No. He had seen people become strong from mastering a single trick.
Determination? To Mason, determination was a lie sold to those about to die. In the Stone Slums, he had seen men with more determination than anyone else get their throats slit for a loaf of bread. If pure will could win a fight, the world wouldn't be littered with the corpses of heroes. Words like conviction, purpose, and will meant nothing in the heat of battle.
Was it "martial realization"? As far as he knew, realization applied to all styles of combat, whether street fighting or formal martial arts. He knew street-fighting realization was rigid and rough, as it had no logical structure. It was based on letting go of all definitions and allowing a vast nothingness, harboring enmity and anger, to devour you, just like the Yaoguais.
By tapping into that, he was able to dive deep into their predatory senses and find the hidden essence of martial arts itself. He discovered that martial realization wasn't universal. Everyone and everything possessed a different realization, which was what made different martial arts unique.
This was why Judo, Shaolin, and Karate all stood on different pillars of logic. One was the art of the falling leaf, utilizing the opponent's momentum, while another was the path of the iron wall, meeting force with unrelenting hardness.
Mason realized he had been trying to grasp the Yaoguais' skills without understanding his own uniqueness. He was trying to graft a structured, disciplined realization onto his own chaotic soul, like trying to fit a square peg into a jagged, broken hole.
The breakthrough only came when he stopped trying to replace his street-fighting instincts and started using them as his foundation. He realized that a martial artist's Anchor was just a more disciplined version of a thug's Brace.
With this, he created his own realization. Soon, he began to see "the string," the thin line connecting the structural perfection of martial arts with the pragmatism of predatory combat. By finding this connection, he could use the Yaoguais' own realization against them. He would use their rigid predictability to set his traps and his own "nothingness" to deliver the final blow.
The Halberd-wielder's mid-fall recovery was a masterful display of kinetic redirection. To any other Mortal-rank combatant, it would have been the end. The skeleton's weight shifted with the precision of a falling mountain, its center of gravity coiling to drag Mason down and shatter his face against the silver water.
A month ago, this would have been where Mason's story ended. He would have fought the descent, flailed against the skeleton's iron grip, and had his skull turned into a red smear.
Instead, Mason allowed his muscles to go slack for a fraction of a heartbeat. By letting go of his resistance, he vanished from the Yaoguai's "radar." To the skeleton's refined senses, its target had suddenly lost all mass, causing the creature to overextend its redirection.
In that infinitesimal gap between life and death, Mason pivoted. Using the Anchor in his back heel, he channeled the collective momentum of their fall into a singular point. He caught the skeleton's grounded leg while simultaneously driving the pommel of his blunt sword into the creature's jaw.
The Yaoguai's head snapped back. The weight it had cultivated turned against it, wrenching its own spine out of alignment.
Mason landed first, his boots clicking softly on the silver blades. He didn't wait for the creature to hit the ground. He stepped into the skeleton's personal space, where its rigid training assumed no one could stand, and delivered a strike that was purely his own.
It was a blunt, heavy blow. Instead of a clean martial strike, Mason slammed his sword down like a guillotine. He aimed for the precise point where the skeleton's movement was knotted: the cervical vertebrae.
The sound of the skeleton's neck snapping was like a dry branch breaking in a silent forest. The head, still encased in its rusted helmet, spun away into the bone-like trees, while the eight-foot body collapsed into a heap of useless calcium.
Mason stood over the remains as a small smile appeared on his lips.
[You've slain a Transgressed Vessel: Undead Skeleton, Lamp of Dread]
[Martial Arts Assistant loading... 40%]
[Active Statistics Increased]
He had long since grown accustomed to the titles. Most Yaoguais he killed possessed one, which meant the Fate System still recognized them as having been human.
What pained him was that he still hadn't unlocked his Assistant. He had figured out that each kill increased the progress by one percent. That meant he had to kill sixty more Yaoguais to finish the job.
"Not happening soon," he muttered. To top it all off, he was still stuck at Level Zero. "After all my kills... what a rip-off."
He dismissed the floating scroll and bent down to examine the bones. He noticed a dragon emblem on the halberd, another soldier of Jumong. He had seemingly only been killing Red Dragon soldiers lately.
What exactly could have led to such a catastrophic war?
His thoughts were interrupted by the sudden, distant clangor of swords.