"Home sweet home!" Though Ares wanted to test the body tempering resources, he did first chuck his body onto his bed and bring the massager back out for a while. This thing was addictive! Ares should have shown Hunter this gadget as it was simple but effective and he might have liked it! Not that Ares was willing to give this thing up, it was far too comforting to trade with and lose. It was like a rolling pin, smothering all the tiredness inside him and flattening it until it was dispersed into nothingness. Whoever made this thing deserved a raise... Plus, the great thing about it, was that it operated automatically and so Ares had his hands free to do whatever he pleased, namely pressurising the Primordial Blade some more or cultivating instead; whichever took his fancy in the moment. Also also, he could still cook inside the Blade while he was pressurising it so it was a triple efficiency sort of deal going on here. Thought it wasn''t much relevant, Ares did find that cooking food in the Blade while pressurising it made the process quicker! It was a neat trick but not something that would be game changing for any real reason. Combining it with the speeding up feature could make long prep-time meals come to completion way sooner but Ares had no issue with just starting sooner to get the same effect. It was a nice benefit to discover, though, so he wasn''t complaining! Faster food wasn''t a bad thing... Though he wouldn''t inform Aejaz about this otherwise he would constantly be questioning Ares as to why the food wasn''t ready instantaneously. It had limits! This greedy guts needed to work on preventing saliva from forming drool hanging off his lips around Ares'' food before he worried about how long it took to make!
Begrudgingly, Ares eventually put down the massager and went into the bathroom off to the side. A lot of body tempering resources were best used in a bathtub such as the one sitting before him. Forming a sort of medicinal concoction and then swimming in it was the bog standard method of absorbing the valuable nutrients from the plants. That or eating the resources, depending on what they were exactly, but this was a universally reliable way to go about it. Nine times out of ten this was correct so even if you didn''t know what kind of body tempering resource you''d come into possession of you wouldn''t struggle to use it. Handy but also somewhat of a risk. Body tempering resources were very capable of killing people who were too weak to actually take on all the energy they contained within them so it was extremely important to keep track of how your body responded to them. As a general rule of thumb, a body tempering resource was about three times as deadly as a normal cultivation resource of the same rarity and that weas just a starting point for measuring lethality. Not all of them hurt to use but those that did typically did a LOT because they altered the structure of the body in some way. Shifting about bones or tearing and rebuilding muscles was common and it was only natural methods such as that would be excruciating. Having your bones rub and grind against each other.... Not pleasant! Thankfully for Ares, he had no such resources at his disposal. The stuff he got from winning the international was the highest quality resources he had available and the rest was mostly just common stuff from the C.E.O that he''d received as a gift after their deal was made.
Ares was very tempted to just chuck all his resources into the steaming hot bath at once but figured that was unwise for a first timer. It probably wouldn''t be an issue but why even give the universe a chance to mess with him? He chose to first do the common stuff, that even mortals were known to use every now and then when they wanted a slightly better physique, and brought out what looked like a bunch of dead leaves from his Blade. ''Sanders'', that''s what these were. They didn''t actually make the user ''stronger'', it just refined the already existing muscle mass and made it easier to tap into the strength a person actually possessed. It also functioned somewhat as an internal body cleaner, loosening up joints and making the body feel lighter. For weaker cultivators this could observably increase their strength but it was so minor that not doing it really didn''t make a discernible difference for anybody else.
Body cultivator freaks in the early stages, the kind that started with flesh unfettering and went straight into skeletal structuring as their first two cultivation realms, could see some pretty impressive results but that was hyper specific and only one in every couple million would spare this much effort for such little reward so early on in their journey. It did build a decent foundation for further improvements, and served as good practice for resources that would hurt more, so it wasn''t all bad or a waste of time; it''s just that there were better ways of going about body cultivating if you were capable of finding opportunities in the first place. If you needed a measure as desperate as this to get anywhere then that spelled trouble as it meant the cultivator in question was pretty weak and / or weak minded and needed to correct that more than anything else the resources could fix. Sanders were either something you got over and done with because you happened to have some or, more likely, a crutch for beginners and they weren''t even fit for use on babies in the upper domains, that was just how worthless they were. Only people with no better options, in domains even lower than Sheryashka, would resort to such a thing and actually find it helpful or valuable. Still, Ares wanted practice and these things didn''t exactly do any harm to the body. Sanding down his insides, and making sure everything was clean, wasn''t a bad idea if he was going to absorb more stuff later so spending maybe an hour on this was perfectly acceptable!
Ares threw the leaves, hundreds of them, into the bath and watched on curiously as they became all mushy at their cores. The edges remained sharp, due the biology of the plant being pretty different there and more rigid overall, and that was what enabled these things to work properly. They would be absorbed into the flesh, the leaves would flow through the bloodstream, and the edges would scrape along the inside of the body. It wasn''t dissimilar to fine grin blue but, then again, a lot of body tempering resources did this and it was considered to be a common trait. Internal sanding served as an indicator that the resource was doing SOMETHING and could even be used to identify body tempering resources people had never heard of or seen before. If you ate something and it felt like sandpaper had invaded your body then congrats! You''d just discovered a brand new resource! That or you''d just eaten some kind of poison. The result would become clear soon enough when you turned into a corpse or became marginally buffer than you were a second ago!
The bath was bubbling with heat but that was also a necessity for the resources to work so, uncomfortable and somewhat painful though it would be, this step was paramount. The worst case scenario was that a person would be using resources that were hot by default as then the bath''s temperature would spike be nightmarish after adding said resources to it. Again, thankfully, these beginner resources didn''t really possess any complicated qualities so there would be no boiling alive, no freezing to death, no radiation poisoning, etc... Ares took off his clothes, stretched, and slowly got into the bath. It wasn''t so bad when it was just his legs that were broiling away in the hot water but, as he submerged more and more of his body, it got infinitely worse as the resources spread through more of his body. He even groaned a bit when the hole in his stomach was inundated with sharp leaves that spilled into his body and ran rampant. It was safe but agonising, way more than it should have been, so Ares had to grit his teeth and bare with the pain for a while. It would fade eventually and that was typically the sign that the resources had run out of benefits to provide you and you could jump out. This would still take a while yet, though, so Ares just had to power on through this and not run away.
This was important! Though his body wasn''t changing, and likely wouldn''t by the time he left, his Garmr form would greatly appreciate this! A normal person would maybe gain enough strength to lift an additional rock or two worth of weight... Nothing, basically, but Garmr? Ares wouldn''t be surprised if Garmr could lift an entire extra large car or small truck thanks to this medicine alone! That was just what being an adept and having such an incredible bloodline really meant. It wasn''t all sunshine and rainbows, however, as the quality of the body undergoing the resource absorption directly impacted how much it would hurt. Until Ares could transform into Garmr, he would have to suffer through immense pain very time he cultivated like this! Hell he might even have to do it with his human body even after he acquired Garmr depending on the nature of the resource and how it interacted with his adept trait so he wasn''t necessarily out of the woods. Ares, in his younger years, hadn''t expected body tempering to be something he cared about much but, now that he knew how invaluable it would be, he just had to do it and keep his complaints to himself. It would all serve him well going forward and he couldn''t just ignore it.
Garmr would fall behind on the strength front if Ares got lazy and that would be disastrous considering how powerful it should be. It was a form that could match destruction and 100% annihilation pressure, even utilising both to further itself, so giving up on it was a stupid decision that Ares would never stop regretting. So what if the hole in his stomach was making this unbearable?! He had more important concerns than the pain he was feeling now and that thought helped him prevail and stay in the bath without escaping for an hour straight! Had he left even a second before it finished then the absorption process would have been interrupted abruptly and drastically reduced the potency of the medicine. There was little to no leniency with body tempering and it was not for the faint of heart and the weak of will. Ares could be cowardly when throwing himself into such situations but, once he was in them, he would grow a pair and tussle with the pain for as long as needed. In that sense, he and Aejaz were quite similar but, actually, Aejaz would never do this. He could overcome cowardice if he felt like there was potentially a way to avoid whatever nasty fate he was expecting but guaranteed pain like this? Nope, he didn''t care about the potential benefits one bit! He was a stabby stabby thief, not some kid of circus strongman! He didn''t need muscles! He needed to be quick and stealthy! That was his excuse and, though Ares felt like the nitwit could have done at least a little tempering, he understood where Aejaz was coming from. Not everyone had to temper their bodies and most rarely did so it''s not like he''d be in a terrible position as a result of his stubbornness. He''d get by just fine. That being said, Enyo and Bellona really should consider doing stuff like this as strength did matter to them to a more notable degree. Bellona was obvious, she was a humanoid gorilla, one that could even use magic to further boost her own strength, and wasting all that power was a mistake. Enyo had her barriers but, if she wanted to wield her shield in last ditch scenarios where her barriers failed her, then every bit of extra muscle she could muster would be helpful.
Ares had already hopped out of the bath like a rabbit out of a boiling cauldron and was fanning his reddish body to try and cool down. HIs first run in with body tempering wasn''t ideal, given that damnable hole, but it had been alright overall. Hot? Sure. Painful? A bit but problematic? Not really. He didn''t feel faint and he was never going to die from something like that. It was comparable to becoming a pincushion for an hour and, even then, that was still somewhat of an exaggeration. Now would this remain true when Ares moved onto the rarer stuff? Nope, there was actual risk here but, provided Ares didn''t accidentally whack his head on the tub and fall unconscious, there was basically no way for him to bite the dust. It was marginally more lethal than the last batch of resources but that wasn''t saying much as neither were exactly known for their potential danger. Sure it was past the threshold where it could technically kill a person but the records of people who did die to these specific resources were sparse and mostly a result of non-related incidents like heart-attacks and strokes complicating the bathing process. Even with the hole in his stomach, Ares was still a far healthier individual than any of the people who''d croaked when using these types of resources so he''d be ok.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
As for the new resource in question, they were called juicers. They looked almost identical to blackberries but the liquid hiding beneath the skin of the fruit lookalike was beneficial to a cultivator''s muscles as it would seep into them and simulate long periods of training over and over again. This could be quite a tiring resource to take in and it was generally recommended to consume them either when fully rested or with stamina restoring pills nearby. Ares had pretty much not done anything strenuous today and he still had the pills from Allie if he truly needed them. There was a story about some guy whose body couldn''t move halfway through the bath and he drowned pitifully but that guy was a muppet. He was still in the early cultivation realms and you weren''t supposed to temper your body with these juicers until you had reached at least midway through mental accumulation. The guidelines for these types of resources could be ignored to some extent if you were a genius or just outright talented but it was still better to understand your limits and adhere to them than constantly try to defy them!
Ares wasn''t really fussed with the stamina requirement for the juicers, he felt confident he could hack it without any sweat... But there would definitely be sweat, alright, thanks to how hot the bath was going to get! The berries, annoyingly, packed a hint of spice in them so the bath was going to be hotter this time around for sure. Also, as it was a stronger and more potent resource than the sanders, it would also be more painful. Borderline excruciating even. Had Ares not had the hole in his stomach, it would have only been about as painful as the sanders were with the hole factored in. That was just the kind of difference being wounded made when trying to do body building via resources. Ares didn''t want to be inefficient and waste his time idling about, though, and this was also good for getting used to the kind of stuff he would experience a lot more of in the future. This would not be the last time he tempered his body, not even close, so familiarising himself with the stinging aches and the soft-torture now was the right thing to do. It would only get worse so trying to take it easy now would be doing his future self a massive disservice. He could put it off but that wouldn''t help him in the long run as his fate was inescapable!
"Ow!" Ares complained as he dipped a single toe into the water because it was seriously a terrible experience! It wasn''t the worst thing he''d ever gone through pain wise, there were plenty of other events in his life thus far that could take that title with ease like pulling out his own nerves or the pressure stuff on the fifth floor of the pagoda, but it was up there nonetheless! In fact, just based on this, Ares had a premonition that some of the greatest afflictions he would suffer at the hands of would be body tempering resources. He wasn''t wrong to think this either as some resources were known for being disgustingly painful and even capable of shutting off expert cultivator''s brains and killing them instantly due to the severe agony they could inflict. These types of resources could very well be the pinnacle of cultivation resources in general but it came with an appropriate cost and had to be handled with extreme care and caution.
Even somebody like Armageddon, of all people, could wind up struggling with some of the more legendary tempering resources if he wasn''t adequately prepared in advance and that was really saying something. He was, ignoring Garmr, debatably the physically strongest person in the world, with only the bare-fist exemplar coming remotely close, and even he wasn''t immune to it. There were other methods of training physically, that didn''t involve resources, but there was no substitute for what they could offer so, despite the risks, people flocked to these things with reckless abandon. The cultivation world was cruel and one hell of a rat race, falling behind because of fear was inexcusable and so, dangerous though they were, these tempering resources were sought after by a very dedicated bunch. Even if the cultivator wasn''t 100% committed to becoming a hulking mass of muscle, anyone who used these resources was generally seen as the ''real deal''. Even prodigies who were talented would be met with some scorn and contempt form their peers if they skipped out on these resources. It was like a rite of passage to becoming a ''good'' cultivator.
Ares took a deep breath and just went all out, throwing his entire leg inside the bath and grimacing as the pain came flooding in. It was a gradual process which, arguably, was way more problematic because, every time Ares thought to himself that it couldn''t get any worse, the heat just kept rising and the pain kept mounting. He would have rather it all just come baring down on him at once as this was pure mental torture! Ares didn''t want to deal with this every time he submerged a limb independently so he quickly got his entire body inside and braced himself for the result of his terrible decision. He didn''t scream or anything but that was mostly because the worst was yet to come. The calm before the storm, as it were. The juicers had only just begun to flow into his stomach via the hole and the rest of his body was slowly catching up with the heat that was assaulting him. He was feeling a bit sleepy too which meant the juicers were kicking in and it was just a terrible, TERRIBLE experience when everything culminated in a single moment of abject misery!
"AH @%&*!"
All manner of curses, so indecipherably vulgar even Kaleido wouldn''t be able to translate them, came flying out of Ares'' mouth as he hurled verbal abuse at the walls around him. All the pain had finally settled in, making itself home on Ares'' flesh and inside his organs while his skin had actually burnt a little in some places. It was a relatively cool day outside and here he was, practically inside a sauna in a dessert on the surface of the sun! With a radiator on in the background! While eating hot soup! This sucked and Ares was immensely regretting his decision to ignore the hole... Still, he was in and he''d sold himself the idea that he was not someone who ever quit halfway through trials and tribulations so he was going to stick with that narrative he''d woven from now until the end of time! He couldn''t quit anyway. Why? Because he was someone who didn''t quit halfway through, duh! It was a self-fulfilling cycle and so he distracted himself from the overbearing pain by cultivating!...
Ok, so that was definitely not normal and most people would think him insane for even attempting it. He was going to fail over and over again, there was no room for success when he was this distracted... Logically... And yet he was doing fine! Just dandy! His ability to cultivate in weird places and situations was really paying off here as he was able to perform this miraculous feat without really having too hard of a time. To do something most would consider impossible, and to do it without even really exerting too much effort, was crazy and just went to show how powerful the ability he was learning here truly was. This was a pretty major step in developing his passive cultivation and the feeling of finding a silver lining to this hellish experience managed to net Ares about thirty minutes of peace and satisfaction... After that, though? Well he had to come up with something new to preoccupy himself and there was only one moronic idea left in his pea brain... Surely what he was considering would only make the situation worse?!
...
...
...
Fuck it! Geronimo!
Ares closed his eyes, threw caution to the wind, and ducked his entire head underwater! He was going to practice physical enhancement underwater at a time like this... Well, not exactly. He couldn''t do enhancement here as that would push away the resource-laden water and make this entire endeavour pointless. What he was actually doing was messing around with physical pressure and normal pressure underwater as that would be nearly equally effective. It was more so about wading through the water with pressure and the smoother that process became, the easier enhancing himself would be. It was still the same entity he was weaving underwater, just a different manner and form so this was worth it! The pain and the distractions made it that much harder but, hey, that meant he''d have an easier time when he wasn''t struggling to cope with other issues plaguing him! This was extreme practice, and the conditions here were entirely unfavourable, but for what it was worth, did a brilliant job of preventing Ares from realising his scalp was almost getting set on fire! It felt like his brain was melting but the strain of using pressure underwater was something else he could focus on instead and so Ares managed to keep himself busy for the full hour...
Although Ares did occasionally have to raise his head out of the burning water to breathe, at which point the heat caught up with him and he felt incredibly dizzy. Doing this repeatedly over that hour long duration had left his head spinning... Staying in the bath was a bad idea so he stumbled out of it, hastily and messily put on some clothes, and collapsed on the bed. He had enough stamina for the bath but almost drowned for an entirely different, and entirely stupid, reason! This was the kind of dumb nonsense he would do every now and then that made Enyo and Bellona worry for his safety. The chances of this fool killing himself were honestly higher than the chances of literally anybody else doing it! Ares would receive a day long lecture had either of his wives been here to catch him pulling this stunt! He had a good reason for doing it but doing it was still not a good idea! Especially without supervision! The sisters would have been less annoyed, maybe not even at all, had Ares actually asked anyone to look after him just in case. This was pure recklessness and, honestly, he couldn''t even argue back at that point because they would just be right. In hindsight, though he was confident, he should have still asked Aejaz to knock on the door to check he wasn''t drowning every now and then. Ares hadn''t expected to dunk his own head underwater but he should have known that the dumbass he was, was prone to taking unfathomably imbecilic actions at whim... Oh well, he lived! All was well, Garmr had been improved even if not Ares himself, and he could just relax in bed for the rest of the day and recuperate while making dinner in the background...
FUCK!
... Or not. Ares had just felt a quick tap on his arm which could only mean one thing... One thing he really didn''t want to have to put up with right now! Rox had spotted the Firestarters. They were already making their move, one singular day after Ares had hinted at his absence, and so Ares was going to have to get up in this ragged state and go fight! What terrible timing... Though, actually, it could have been way worse. Had this happened when Ares was still in the bath he might have just had to send Aejaz in his stead as wasting the resources wasn''t an option! He still could send Aejaz even now but he wanted to be there himself, and see how the situation developed, so he had to drag his own lazy ass out of bed instead of doing it to his brother for once. He wasn''t going to take any risks though so he took one of the stamina restoring pills Allie made him just in case. He wasn''t exhausted currently but the last thing he wanted was to have his limbs feel like giving up mid combat!
Ares asked Aejaz if he wanted to tag along, to which he received a resounding NO from the guy who was engrossed in one of his new books, before stepping outside and activating Voidwalk. This was going to be his first major altercation with the Firestarters and, though it had come at a bad time, Ares was looking forward to making some progress on that front. They weren''t a problem he could allow to persistently fester for too long otherwise they would cause havoc and chaos, ruining his trip!... Of course that wasn''t the biggest issue with letting them run rampant but Ares wanted his holiday to be decently smooth sailing and these guys were complicating that! He wouldn''t stand for this so he took off and headed to the restaurant, ready to give them a very different kind of ''match'' compared to the ones they wanted!