Chapter 540 A Thousand Years
As he circulated Essence through his whole body, black reeking impurities began to ooze out of his body. The slimy mass trickled down his body where it formed a stinky puddle.
Blazing flames engulfed Dilan all of a sudden, burning the impurities down to its last atom. Dilan's skin was burned as well, but he healed quickly enough to survive the danger of the burning flames.
He grit his teeth in pain but ignored the problems of a mortal and accepted the pain while continuing to circulate the Essence from the surroundings inside him.
The City of Trials was rich in Essence and Dilan made use of the great opportunity as he learned the Perfect Essence Cultivation technique from its creator personally.
He was learning fast, but the technique was everything but easy. After a thousand years had passed inside the City of Trials, Dilan was still only at the Fourth Stage of the Essence Cultivation Technique. The higher the stage the higher the difficulty to practice the technique.
That was only obvious but Dilan didn't want to acknowledge that he was currently at an obstacle he couldn't overcome as easily as he had expected.
He would have to comprehend what he was missing and make changes to improve his exertion of the technique. The seventh stage was considered the Perfect Stage of the Essence Cultivation technique and the Great Wise was adamant that Dilan had to reach this stage before leaving the City of Trials.
Once he left the City of Trials, he would have advanced to the fourth Tier, and he would be granted with the opportunity to start practicing the Essence Cultivation technique at the Perfect Stage from the get-go. That would elevate his level and stats in the blink of an eye, considering if something as mundane as stats and level would still be important for him at that time.
"You're doing it wrong again. You have to split the Essence in 36 strands and intertwine nine strands together. The four Nine-Dragontail-Helix have to be completed at the same time. Afterward, you need to circulate them at the exact same speed. Why are you still doing it wrong?!?" The Great Wise shouted irritably. His face was red as he looked at Dilan before shaking his head.
"I am tryi–... Yes Sir…" Dilan wanted to retort but upon opening his eyes, he quieted down.
Every single Soul Shard was impatiently looking at him. They were all ready to beat the shit out of him, and they were just waiting for the Great Wise to finish his lesson.
'Are you guys all Sadists?!?' Dilan grumbled in his mind, just to keep his mouth shut. He knew that everyone just wanted to help him.
Unfortunately, that didn't help him because he was already trying his best to become better 24/7 without taking a single break in the last thousand years.
Dilan didn't even realize that so much time had passed because the time seemed to go at a snail's pace in the City of Trials.
5 years could have passed, 500 or even 5000, and nobody would really notice the difference.
Dilan's schedule in the first 100 years was monotonous.
He studied in the Library religiously. First, he would focus on a few subjects that could be found in the books he wanted to study before he would learn the content of the five techniques he was given by the Soul Shards.
They taught him every single detail meticulously and Dilan had imprinted the content of every single technique deep in his mind. There was not only the information of the first stage or step of the technique but every single step, the hidden tricks, the Unique stages he could reach when doing something special, which was mostly to bring him on the verge of death to unleash the hidden power within a technique, and much more.
All of this was very interesting but Dilan's head felt as if it would explode at any moment. The first 100 years were the most burdensome for his mind, but it was not as if things had gotten better after those 100 years either.
In fact, things had gotten a lot worse for the young and naive boy, who had gotten too greedy.
Only when the pits of hell opened did Dilan truly realize how calming it was to fill his brain with knowledge by sitting in a cozy chair in the library. It was far less taxing than trying to train a total of five techniques and get to know more about the Powers of the Ring of Infinite Elements Constitution and how to make use of his constitution perfectly.
He believed to be familiar with true pain, but that was all a lie.
Whenever he tried to exert the Lightning God's Fist technique, his arms were torn apart over and over again. His body was not even strong enough to summon the bolts of lightning that were required in the technique's first stage.
The first stage used much weaker bolts of lightning than the thunderbolts of the Godly Tribulation that were used in the last stage of the Lightning God's Fist Martial Art.
Dilan felt weak like never before, and he spent several hundred years destroying and strengthening his body all over again. His fists were slowly getting stronger, more resilient, and powerful enough to endure the power of the Lightning God's Fist's most basic bolts of lightning. However, even then his body was still being torn apart.
It was just that his arms were still intact and that it was possible for him to actually start exerting the technique, even if his body had to constantly heal him against the burning he sustained.
It took him another four hundred years before he could properly practice the Lightning God's Fist technique!
As for the other techniques, Dilan made negligible progress in trying to practice them in the first thousand years inside the City of Trials.
It was not even possible for Dilan to issue the first slash of the 72 Slashes of Destruction Sword Style. The Destruction Sword Immortal told him that this was only normal because Dilan didn't really possess the genuine Destruction trait, but the young Ascender didn't want to listen. He knew that his Ring of Infinite Elements possessed the Power of Destruction and that was more than enough for him to be certain that he could train and use the 72 Slashes of Destruction Sword Style in the future.
The Destruction Sword Immortal was of the same opinion, and the only thing he was concerned about was Dilan's impatience. Conjuring the First Slash of the Destruction Sword Style was the most difficult because it required the practitioner to step out of his comfort zone, and defy the Universe's laws in their entirety.
Demanding something like that from an existence that had yet to attain the status of a God was like asking an ant to lift an elephant. And that was exactly what the Destruction Sword Immortal wanted from Dilan, and he was certain that it was possible!
Dilan was not the only one with expectations from himself. Every single Soul Shard, who granted him the opportunity to learn their strongest Unique technique, had high expectations from Dilan.
And those expectations were growing the longer they watched him giving his utmost to attain more and more strength!