Life without meditation felt painfully mundane to Leo, for he had become a maniac that could no longer sit idle and pass time cooking and painting like an ordinary person.
Meditation, that once felt like a challenging chore, had slowly become something he enjoyed—an addiction he couldn't shake.
Hence, now, in its absence, he felt like a drug addict in withdrawal, restless and irritable without his daily dose.
With the meditation manual safely stored at home, the constant urge to meditate, even for just an hour a day, gnawed at him, for without meditation, all his hard-earned new-blood cells were bound to die within 120 days, undoing months of painstaking progress.
The instructions in the marrow meditation manual were clear: until he reached a 50% replacement rate, his body wouldn't learn to produce the new cells on its own. And at his current 22% replacement rate, Leo could already feel himself regressing—his strength, reflexes, and vitality slipping away bit by bit.
'This is so frustrating… I'm going to grow weaker in the coming days,' he thought grimly, as seeking a distraction from his predicament, Leo shifted his focus to mastering [Blade Switch].
Blade Switch was, by far, the most complicated technique he had ever encountered.
While he had grasped its fundamentals in the game-world, bringing that knowledge into reality was proving to be a monumental challenge.
The technique worked by creating an accelerated mana pathway between two points in space, allowing the caster to traverse those points at nearly instantaneous speeds.
This gave the illusion of teleportation, though it did not break the laws of space and time.
The brilliance of Blade Switch lay in its ability to propel the user at three times the speed of sound.
For distances under 50 meters, this resulted in travel times so brief they felt instantaneous.
The method by which the technique achieved these speeds involved enchanting a blade with a mana thread that connected the caster's mana core to the blade.
This thread then acted as a super-elastic rope, instantly contracting when recalled, pulling the user toward the thrown dagger at staggering speeds.
However, the technique had its limitations.
Since it didn't involve actual spatial distortion or true teleportation, the path between the two points had to remain unobstructed.
Walls, barriers, or narrow gaps would result in injury—or worse, a complete failure of the technique.
For instance, if a dagger was thrown through a window and Blade Switch was activated, the caster would need the window to be wide enough to pass through unharmed, or they could end up stuck or injured trying to squeeze through the gap.
However, despite this limitation, Blade Switch was an invaluable tool in an open battlefield, where its speed and precision gave users a decisive edge.
Mastering it, however, required Leo to push both his body and his mana control to their absolute limits, for just understanding this technique's basic fundamentals was no child's play.
As per the skill scroll in the game, mastering the technique required mastering three different fundamental techniques—each as complex and demanding as the skill itself.
The first step was learning how to create the hyper-elastic mana rope. This rope served as the core mechanism of Blade Switch, connecting the caster's mana core to the dagger they threw. It had to be extraordinarily resilient, capable of withstanding the incredible tension created by pulling a human body at three times the speed of sound.
The elasticity and strength of this mana rope had to be perfectly balanced—too weak, and it would snap; too rigid, and it wouldn't provide the acceleration required for the technique. This required an extreme level of mana control and precision, as the rope needed to respond instantly to the caster's recall command without losing stability.
Thankfully for Leo however, he had already learnt how to alter the properties of mana and how to shape them into threads while he was mastering [Shadowbind] and hence he had some knowledge on how to approach this problem through trial and error.
The second step to mastering the technique however, was to learn how to reinforce one's body to withstand the immense forces generated during the journey.
The sudden acceleration to supersonic speeds could easily snap the spine or cause severe internal injuries if the body wasn't adequately prepared.
This involved creating a layer of mana reinforcement around the caster's bones and joints, particularly the spine, to prevent whiplash or structural damage. In addition to this, the user had to master the art of casting a barrier around themselves to minimize air resistance. Without this barrier, the sheer drag from the air at such high speeds could cause burns, tears, or even dismemberment.
The third and final step was attaching the mana thread to the dagger in such a way that the thread's pull didn't interfere with the dagger's flight path.
The thread had to remain tethered securely to the dagger, yet the dagger itself needed to remain unaffected by the thread's tension—free to fly straight and true. This required a delicate calibration of mana flow, ensuring that the thread's force only acted on the caster when recalled and not on the dagger itself.
A poorly executed attachment would result in the dagger veering off course or the thread snapping prematurely, rendering the technique useless.
Once these three fundamental techniques were mastered individually, the real challenge began: putting them together seamlessly.
Blade Switch demanded not just technical skill but also impeccable timing and instinct. The user had to throw the dagger, activate the mana thread, reinforce their body, and recall the thread all in one fluid motion—executed with split-second precision.
Even the slightest hesitation or misstep could lead to catastrophic failure, making this technique one of the most dangerous to learn but also one of the most rewarding to master.
And thankfully for Leo, the challenging nature of mastering the technique was the exact distraction that he needed in his mundane daily life, for he could place all his brains behind how to solve the problems he faced during training and remain entertained as he killed his non-gaming time.