There is just no chance for mercy if her master finds out what she did. Not even the other heralds who were still alive were willing to forgive her.
She chuckled when she thought about them. She said, "Surely they too must have sensed that the lord of the Mountain Sitting Dao has awakened. I wonder what their reaction will be if they find out that their master is dead."
The master she was talking about was having a great time cultivating. He was in his cultivation room marveling at the progress of his cultivation technique.
He said to himself, "This is even better than I expected."
He had tested it and discovered that he gained 0.1% mastery of the Everlasting Wood Art every day. He determined this by stopping the two phantoms from working for three days and kept track of how much progress he was making on his own.
Then he stopped practicing for another three days and let the phantoms do all the work. Using this method, he discovered that they were making a progress of 0.3% every day.
So each of them was adding a mastery of 0.15% a day. That's 50% more than what he can achieve on his own.
His best guess was that unlike him, they don't get distracted while they work. He, on the other hand, will get distracted and pause occasionally when he cultivates.
There is also the fact that it is not necessary that he learn something new every time he cultivates. The best he can do is familiarize himself with the technique and slowly get better at it.
He doesn't dare to try new things for fear of injuring himself and crippling his life seed. But the phantoms don't have this fear. They can try anything without fear, which allows them to learn new things and comprehend the technique faster than him.
So in total, he makes 0.4% progress toward mastery of the Everlasting Wood Art. That means that it will take 250 days, instead of 1,000 days, for him to master it completely.
Each increase to his mastery of the Everlasting Wood Art improves his cultivation speed by that amount. So once he masters the technique completely, he will have a 100% boost to his cultivation speed.
His normal cultivation speed is 0.012 cycles per second. That means it requires 83.3 seconds for him to complete one cycle.
If he is to fill up his life seed with energy, he will need 100 units of internal energy, which is equal to 100 cycles. So it will take 8,330 seconds or 138.833 minutes to regenerate all of his internal energy.
This time is very important, as it not only determines how fast he cultivates, but it also determines how much rest he needs in between battles.
As it is, he needs 2 hours and 19 minutes of rest between each battle. That can be long or short depending on the situation. But it is always better if it is shorter.
The current environment of his cultivation room can improve his cultivation speed by 100% and cut the mental energy he needs to cultivate by half so he can cultivate for twice as long.
He won't have these conditions outside on the battlefield, but his mastery of his cultivation technique will stay with him wherever he goes.
If he can gain a 100% boost to his cultivation speed through the mastery of his cultivation technique, he will be able to reduce his rest time to 1 hour and 10 minutes no matter where he is.
If he then combines that with his high mana concentration environment, he can gain another 100% boost and reduce that time to 46 minutes and 20 seconds.
That is the time it will take him to gather all of his internal energy and feed it to his life seed. So if he doesn't rest and only cultivates every day, he will be able to feed his life seed 31 times every day.
He needs to feed his life seed 10,000 times before it can reach the second transformation of the second mortal coil. If he can maintain this output, it will take him less than a year to reach the second transformation.
Compared to others outside the sect who can barely refine their life seed 5 times in a day, he is flying. They will need 5 years and 6 months to achieve one more transformation, while the talented ones require 3 years, but he will only need 322 days.
That's at his highest speed, though. He is still a long way from that, as he hasn't completely mastered the Everlasting Wood Art yet.
He has only spent three months or 90 days out of the 250 days he needs to master the Everlasting Wood Art completely.
Currently, he has only achieved a mastery of 36% and gained a boost of 36% to his cultivation speed, not 100%. So it will take more than a year for him to reach the second transformation.
The good news is that cultivation after that will be at his maximum speed and can even be faster. This is why he is excited about gaining complete mastery of the Everlasting Wood Art and why he is looking forward to the benefits of a better cultivation environment.
This is what has the highest priority in his life currently. But he can't let go of the need to earn merits for Mountain Karma and Mountain Foundation.
After tasting the sweet benefits of Mountain Karma and Mountain Foundation, he found it hard not to try and gain more benefits from them.
He has thought long and hard about how to solve this problem, which is one of the reasons why he is slower than the phantoms in comprehending the Everlasting Wood Art. Fortunately, the time he spent thinking about this problem didn't go to waste.
He was able to come up with a solution despite the constraints of his current situation. That solution is to have someone reopen his dojo and teach people in his stead.