Lin Mu looked at his hand and clenched and unclenched his fist. There didn’t seem to be any difference from before and it seemed to be the same as usual.
"It is normal. I’m not feeling any strain or pain in my arm." Lin Mu replied.
"That’s good. That means your body is now strong enough to bear it." Xukong spoke.
"Back to the technique then." Lin Mu muttered before entering the stance again.
Lin Mu sensed the spirit qi within his dantian flowing into his meridians as soon as he initiated the technique. The speed was actually faster than with vital energy and the spirit qi wisps quickly entered his arms.
But at this moment Lin Mu was in for a shock as the spirit qi wisps that had entered his arm did not stay in the form of wisps. Instead, they started swirling together and collided into each other over and over until they merged together.
The merging process was quite fast and soon enough, the spirit qi wisps had condensed into the liquefied form. Now instead of fifty wisps of spirit qi, there was a drop of liquid spirit qi in his arm.
"What!?" Lin Mu uttered with shock and lost his concentration.
But because of this, his control over the technique wavered and the drop of liquid spirit qi that had formed dissipated, turning back into wisps.
"Ouch!" Lin Mu yelped.
It was as if someone had pinched his arm quite hard and it had become tensed for a moment. Still, a second later the pain faded away and his arm returned to normal.
"Oh? This is interesting." Xukong spoke with an elated tone.
Lin Mu used his spirit sense and checked his arm to ensure that it was fine. He checked the muscles and meridians of his arm and found them to be the same as before. No damage had been caused to them because of his mistake.
"What do you mean, Senior?" Lin Mu questioned.
"Looks like the centripetal force that the technique generates is strong enough that it can condense the spirit qi wisps into a liquid form. This is rather unique, and I have seen few other techniques that can replicate this effect. I have to say, the creator of this technique used a rather ingenious method to extract more power from a cultivator than should be usually possible.
Though the drawbacks of this technique are rather obvious. You need a strong body to be able to use this technique without any injury." Xukong explained.
Lin Mu intently listed to Senior Xukong’s explanation and absorbed all of it. He started contemplating on it and was made to snap out of his thoughts by Senior Xukong when he spoke up.
"Can you bring out the booklet of the Boulder collapsing fist for me to see?" Xukong asked.
"Ah yes, Senior." Lin Mu hurriedly replied before withdrawing the book from the ring.
Xukong saw the tattered state of the booklet and then read the contents. His attention was pulled towards the part where it said that there were no minimum requirements needed for one to practice the technique.
"Hmm, this is rather unusual. The technique is written in the common tongue rather than Dao script. This shouldn’t happen, unless..." Xukong spoke and trailed off.
Lin Mu waited for five minutes for Xukong to speak, but received no answer.
"Umm, Senior?" Lin Mu spoke up.
"I can’t come to a conclusion fully, I need you to use the technique more," Xukong replied.
"Alright." Lin Mu answered before entering the stance and performing the technique.
He didn’t let his concentration waver this time and execute the technique perfectly. The spiral of spirit qi was formed in his arm the same as before and condensed the spirit qi wisps into a drop. But it didn’t end here. The drop then continued spinning until it could not maintain its spherical shape and elongated to form a long needle like shape.
The two ends of this needle were tapering and looked sharp, while the body of the needle looked like a strand of thread that had just been spun. Considering that this ’needle’ was formed from a single drop of spirit qi, it was rather thin being even thinner than that of a single strand of hair.
Lin Mu was only able to observe all these changes because they were happening in his own body and he had been seeing it from the very start. Having observed enough, Lin Mu executed the technique and punched the air in front of him.
"Boulder collapsing fist!"
A low but sharp sound was heard as the spirit qi needle left Lin Mu’s arm and shot forward. The effect that appeared was quite different from before. There was no fist outline but rather a colorless needle of qi that had been released.
It was not even visible to the naked eye and Lin Mu could only sense it with spirit sense. The needle of spirit qi soon made the air surrounding it revolve around it and created a faint vortex that traveled in a straight line.
The vortex met with the tree and dissipated. There was no shocking effect and it looked rather anti-climatic. None of the branches broke, and neither did the leaves fall.
"Huh, did it fail?" Lin Mu muttered in confusion, seeing the technique dissipate.
"No... Rather, it did better than I expected. Go ahead, take a closer look at the tree." Xukong suggested.
Lin Mu nodded and went up to the tree. He looked at the point where the spirit qi needle had hit and tree and found a small indent there.
’Is this it?’ Lin Mu thought before using his spirit sense to observe more in dept.
He then saw that the indent was merely the surface bark of the tree that had been impacted by the air vortex that was surrounding the spirit qi needle. The actual effect was masked by this, as he saw a tiny hole that had been bored into the tree.
The hole’s diameter was less than that of a hair’s and it went all the way from one side of the tree to the other side. The tree in question had a diameter of about half a meter and had been pierced cleanly through.