Fighting sects became a daily routine for Alex now. Every day, he arrived at a new sect, fighting its strongest fighter. By now, he had started asking each one to start with their battle array so that they could get to it right from the start.
As a result, Alex got to see various different types of arrays across the many sects.
Some arrays made their fighters stronger and faster, while others made Alex slower and weaker. Some arrays gave an element to their fighters' attacks. Some created illusions in the mind of their enemies. Some suppressed the mental strength of their enemies.
There were even some formations that seemed to give their fighter the property of a beast, making them battle ready.
Alex fought with each one, winning almost all of them. In the past month, he had fought nearly 24 different sects, spending only a week out of the month in cultivation. During those 24 different battles, he had won 21 times.
The other 3 times were when the array was far too potent against him that he simply could not fight at all. He would have to force his Intent to fight against the array, and that was not what he wanted when he was concerned with improving his Sword Intent.
While Alex failed 3 times, the battle had been close 6 other times. Each time the battle was close, he gave the fighter the Elixir out of sheer respect. As a result, he was out of 9 jars of Elixir in a month.
That was barely a fifth of what Whisker brought from the underground in a single day. If anyone learned just how ridiculously easy it was for Alex to make Elixir, and just how diluted the version they were receiving was, they would likely want to kill him then and there.
The second battle Alex had properly lost had been one where their battle array was suspiciously close to that of what the Sunwardens used in the Palm Haven. It was an array that directly attacked one's mind, making it hard to focus on anything.
Those people were also way better trained than those tribes folk outside of the inner desert, so it was far worse a fight for Alex. He had struggled against the fighter there for half an hour before he eventually lost.
Despite how quickly he lost, however, Alex found his Sword Intent to have grown the most during this time.
Upon realizing that this was a great way to improve his Sword Intent, Alex began splitting his Origins in order to bring pain and effort to each fight. This was nowhere near as potent as a battle array consisting of nearly a hundred different people, but it was something still.
It was after he started doing this that he had a harder time winning against his foes. Still, as time went on, he stopped losing as much.
The 3 times Alex had lost, it had been toward the start of the month. He had lost all 3 times in the first 2 weeks, and gotten close to losing 5 times in that same time. In the third week, he had only once had such a close battle.
After 5 battles in a row with weaker sects, Alex had realized he just wasn't losing anymore. He hadn't gotten so strong that no opponent met his level anymore. It was more so that his opponents were starting to become weaker.
He only then realized that coming upstream had been the wrong thing to do. The stronger sects were to the south, downstream.
It was then that Alex took his first break after over 3 weeks, and decided to cultivate hard for the next week or two. After he was done cultivating, he would go back downstream and go find the stronger sects.
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