Dyon looked over to the unconscious collection of people from the sage's world for what seemed like the millionth time since he had taken them in. But, once again, he was disappointed in the results.

With a sigh, he stood and stretched his body. He walked to a lake in the inner world, soaking his body to ease the aches he had undergone in fusing with the essences.

'it seems like the only way to alleviate this lust is with true yin energy. The Celestial Deer essence was able to balance the demon qilin on its own to a certain extent, but with the sage's blood, the balance has been thrown off.'

True yin was a specific yin resulting from life forms that had an innate affinity towards it. This could be women, or fruits of that caliber. What it didn't incorporate were artificial yins which would include men who learned ice type techniques for instance.

Although this was also a form of yin, it wasn't a form pure enough to help Dyon. And, Dyon definitely wouldn't want that kind of help. He shuddered just thinking about it.

Dyon sighed, "It seems like I'll have to find some yin fruits. They should be able to help me incorporate the Celestial Deer Essence as well."

Dyon had no choice but to stop his infusing of the sage and demon qilin blood. Although his own will power was strong, he'd prefer to not even have thoughts he had to control in the first place. This was a bit disappointing because this would also slow his understanding of the Demon Emperor's Will technique, but a 2x boost would have to be enough for now.

Dyon let his body air dry to try and cool his body further, before checking on messages from Madeleine.

'it seems like Madeleine has broken into the 4th layer of wills for celestial will, seems she's surpassed me. And 26 open meridians? She sure works fast,' Dyon smiled, happy to see Madeleine was doing well.

Dyon knew that opening meridians slowed substantially as you progressed, mostly because the body was acclimating to being tempered by wills. As every martial artist knows, opening meridians requires understanding of wills.

You then use that understanding to nourish your meridians into opening. Usually, the more wills you use, the more powerful of a meridian formation expert you are at a given level. However, as you progressed, the will levels needed to continue opening meridians increased. And usually, for those without celestial will, tempering became muddied with impure energy because of the use of energy stones.

What Dyon had been confused about before was why energy stones were used if wills were what were needed to open meridians. However, what he learned with his research was that the meridians themselves were opened by wills, but, the paths between them needed essence to open because they were too fragile to handle the tempering of wills.

As you increased in levels in meridian formation, the paths became more and more fragile, so impurity becomes more and more important.

This was part of the reason Dyon didn't want to start on his path of energy cultivation too soon. He didn't like the idea of using energy to open his meridian paths. It felt like using duct tape to cover the hole in a billion-dollar yacht. If wills were what gave you your true power, why would you use a replacement like energy?

Now, energy was obviously important in the essence gathering stage and beyond since that was the process of actually filling your meridians with essence. But, you can easily imagine how pampering your meridian pathways during the meridian formation stage would only lead to weaker cultivation in the saint realms and beyond, and often make progression impossible.

It frustrated Dyon that no one had spent time on this problem before. Or, maybe they had, but, it was only available to those on an even higher level than the Celestial Deer Sect.

Dyon eventually shook his head, slipping on his usual comfortable sweats and white T shirt. He wanted to take his sword with him, but he decided to use a weaker sword for now. He didn't know why, but he just felt uncomfortable using a sword who had to nerf itself to his level.

So, Dyon instead chose a normal iron sword of similar build. It had no ranking as it was a regular weapon. Its length was still the same seven feet long and it was a sleek metallic color as opposed to the striking black of Dyon's original sword.

Dyon had also done this so that he wouldn't rely on the power of his sword, and instead refine his understanding of sword will. Battling with this handicap would help him improve faster, so he didn't give it a second thought after making his decision.

Strapping it to his back in a slanted fashion, Dyon called over Little Black, who stood over one meter tall now, as he prepared to go out of the inner world for the first time in more than a year.

**

Outside the world, oblivious to all of this, the silver-blue haired girl sat silently in a cave studying the same array plate she had been for the past year. It seemed like there was so much she could learn from it.

She had realized over her studies that this plate wasn't actually drawn in a conventional way. The master had actually used many clever short cuts that baffled her to no end.

Essentially, low level arrays like this couldn't actually change the laws of the world to sustain its effects. Instead, it used a myriad of tricks in order to reach the same results to a much smaller degree. For example, an amplification array.

High level arrays worked at the subatomic level to manipulate energies. Basically, atoms have different levels of energy they can release depending on what interaction they're displaying or what elements they are.

The smaller components of these atoms can be communicated with to change energy outputs. As an example, a noble gas is named as such because it is completely inert. As such, the energies it releases in reaction is practically zero since they never react.

However, if one were to use energy to change these noble gases into volatile atoms such as halogens which were known as the most reactive, all of a sudden you have so much energy you have no idea what to do with it. You essentially use arrays to communicate with the chemistry of these substances, and then use the energy released to fuel your own attack thus resulting in amplification.

Of course, whether the girl actually knew all of this was unlikely as these were concepts from the Mortal World. The way the Martial World viewed things was very different...