He went back to the forest the next day. He upgraded from just weak Magical Beasts to Early-Stage Magical Beasts as well. He didn’t want to go against any Middle-Stage Magical Beasts with his aura yet because he knew he wouldn’t be able to do much.
He spent most of the day using his Twilight Veil Slash against them. He commonly paired that with the Shadow Step to get to his opponent quickly without it noticing so his proficiency in that was improving as well. He didn’t realize it because he wasn’t practicing it in the training room in his mind space, but it was growing little by little.
At the end of the day, he had hunted 10 Magical Beasts. Before going, however, he stayed back for one last hunt. He was going to hunt a 2nd Circle Magical Beast.
He needed an abundance of Aura Gathering Pills to reach the Late-Stage of 1st Circle Aura Knight. However, he was out of money with his previous purchase. With all of his Beast Cores going to feed his Elderwood plant, he needed to hunt a 2nd Circle Magical Beast to buy an Aura Gathering Pill every day.
He had 4 left, but he needed to plan for the future when he was going to take them together to break through in one training session. So he looked for an Early-Stage Magical Beast to hunt in the Outer Forest. Since it was only the Outer Forest, most of the 2nd Circle Magical Beasts there were not stronger than that. He found his target very quickly.
It was an Early-Stage 2nd Circle Frostmane Panther. He wasn’t too worried about dealing with it because he was not alone and could use magic. He had been training his magic for long enough. With the recovered magic from the Elderwood leaf as well as his daily training, he was almost a Middle-Stage 2nd Star Mage. He would need to do more than train normally to cross that barrier, but it meant he was stronger than a normal Early-Stage 2nd Circle Magical Beast.
He started confusing the panther early on by popping around it using his Shadow Step. Since it was darker as it reached the end of the evening, it was easier to execute the Shadow Step. He easily got behind it and cast a Flame Burst. In less than 5 minutes, he was able to kill the panther. He was also surprised by how easily he could kill the panther.
He took the Beast Core from its corpse and went back to Solhaven. He had his cloak with him so he could mask his face on the way back. He went straight to the Thousand Treasure Tower to sell his Beast Core. After he got 80,000 Starcoins for it, he went back to his house without actually buying the pill. He was going to buy all of them at once.
It was still around 8 PM when he got back, so he took an Aura Gathering Pill to increase his aura first. Once he did that, he then switched to training his magic. Even though he was close to crossing to the next minor stage, he refused to take a leaf from the plant yet. He wanted to stick to his plan.
This schedule persisted for the rest of that week. By the end of it, he was finally done with training his Twilight Veil Slash. He had reached what he expected to be around Intermediate proficiency with the technique. Since it was not magic and aura instead, he was slower at learning the technique. His monstrous talent in magic didn’t translate to aura.
Along with his Twilight Veil Slash, his Shadow Step also ranked up. He was now at Expert Proficiency at the Shadow Step, which meant that it was almost like a second nature to him. Almost. He could travel through the shadow world like he was swimming at this point. There was still room for improvement that he recognized.
The only reason he realized that he had reached expert proficiency was because he felt that it was easier to travel through the shadow world so he checked the training room in his mind space to see if there was any progress. As he expected, there was.
Other than that, he also reached the Middle-Stage of the 1st Circle Aura Knight. He had been taking one pill a day till he ran out. Once he ran out, he started hunting two 2nd Circle Magical Beasts a day for two days. With all that money he bought 15 pills.
He bought the first 8 pills when he ran out of pills and used half of them that day too. He used the other half the next day and that brought him to the next minor stage. He still had 7 left, which would not be enough to take him to the Late-Stage, but it would bring him very close. He would only need between 2-4 pills more to reach that stage.
Compared to him, Daphne was already in the Peak-Stage 1st Circle Aura Knight. She was only taking one pill every two days compared to him who was trying to take 20 in the span of one week. She wasn’t taking them as much as him not only because she didn’t have as many, but because it was bad to take those many.
Because Leo’s body was weird, he was able to take those many pills without exploding. If it was anyone else, they wouldn’t be able to take that much aura as a 1st Circle Aura Knight. Leo talked to Daphne to ask if she needed anything else before she attempted to break through to the 2nd Circle, but she didn’t ask for anything.
She was planning on consolidating her breakthrough for an entire month before planning her breakthrough to the 2nd Circle. There was still a lot of time for that. She was not in a rush.
Leo decided that he needed to break through to the Late-Stage quickly to focus on his magic training, so he decided to go to the Thousand Treasure Tower to sell all the jewels and gold that he had in his dimensional ring. he only took out a few that totaled 300,000 Starcoins. With that money, he bought 6 more pills and got ready to train.
With 13 pills with him, he started taking them one by one for the next three days. He spaced them out properly so that he wouldn’t explode either, so it took that long. He reached the Late-Stage of the 1st Circle Aura Knight like he wanted to with 3 pills left. He gave them to Daphne in case she needed them to consolidate her foundation and finally did that last thing he had left – water his tree.
He had been saving the Beast Cores for the entire week, which meant he had around 50 1st Circle Beast Cores that would probably be so much nourishment to the plant that he would be able to see it grow a lot. He didn’t do it immediately though. He was planning on going to the forest one last time to hunt a few 2nd Circle Magical Beasts to use their Beast Cores too. He was now preparing for his short one week isolation training.