Sign-In System: Starting With Invincible Physique-Chapter 6: Rare Grade Martial Art
Chapter 6: Rare Grade Martial Art
Rhain parted ways with Seris and returned to his room.
He was sitting in his mat, thinking about the system.
In the hours since its activation, Rhain had pieced together its basic architecture through observation and the sparse information it had provided.
It was not a conversational system. It did not answer his questions.
It presented options, delivered rewards, and remained silent.
Fine. He could work with that.
What he understood so far was this: the System operated on sign-ins. Two types.
The first was the Daily Sign-In. Simple, reliable, predictable. Once per day, he could sign in from wherever he was.
The reward was random — no location requirement, no special conditions. Just a daily roll of the dice
He had already used his first sign-in during the transmigration event, which had given him the Abyssal Sovereign Physique.
The second had been the location-based sign-in at the Outer Disciple Quarters, which had yielded the Essence Gathering Pill.
Which brought him to the second type.
Location Sign-In.
These were tied to specific places.
The question was: where were those locations?
As if responding to the direction of his thoughts, the System interface flickered at the edge of his vision.
A map materialized.
It was translucent, showing the outline of the Azure Cloud Sect’s compound sketched in faint silver lines.
On the map, several points glowed with blue dots.
Rhain counted them.
Herb Garden. Battle Arena. Sect Library. Sect Master’s Hall
Four sign-in locations within the sect. Four one-time rewards that could be claimed.
There were others — dimmer, harder to read — but these four were the clearest, the most defined. Primary nodes.
But access was the problem.
The herb garden was tended by inner disciples and overseen by an elder. Outer disciples were not permitted entry without explicit assignment.
The battle arena was only open during scheduled monthly sparring.
The sect master’s hall was the most restricted area in the entire sect — even inner disciples needed formal summons to enter.
Rhain dismissed those three for now. Not permanently. Just for the moment.
The library.
His gaze lingered on that node.
The Sect’s Library was also strictly restricted to Inner Disciples and Elders, but its outer perimeter wasn’t heavily guarded.
He didn’t need to go inside.
He just needed to be close enough to the building to trigger the node.
That would be his first target.
......
Having made up his mind, Rhain arrived before the sect’s library.
Ding!
[Location Sign-In detected: Azure Cloud Sect — Library.]
[Sign In?]
Yes.
[Location Sign-In Reward: Rare-Grade Martial Art — Shadow Flicker Step.]
A pulse of light detonated silently behind his eyes.
Information poured into his mind — not gradually, not in fragments, but all at once.
A complete technique manual, imprinted directly into his consciousness with surgical precision.
Stances. Breathing patterns. Essence circulation routes. Footwork sequences. Application theory. Combat integration.
Shadow Flicker Step.
A movement art that utilized darkness Essence to create burst-speed movement.
At lower realms, it wasn’t true teleportation, but to the untrained eye of a weak cultivator, it was indistinguishable from it.
In Aethermere, martial arts and techniques were graded strictly: Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic.
There were undoubtedly higher grades in the wider world, but Rhain had no idea what they were. To someone in the Azure Cloud Sect, a Rare-Grade technique was a priceless treasure.
According to the original Rhain’s memories, there was only one Rare-Grade martial art in the entire Azure Cloud Sect, fiercely guarded and practiced solely by the Sect Master and perhaps one or two elite elders.
Now, Rhain had one.
....
After achieving his target, Rhain returned back to his quarters, sliding the iron latch into place.
He reviewed the technique in his mind.
Shadow Flicker Step operated on a simple but elegant principle: channel darkness-aspected Essence through the meridians of the legs and core, compress it to a critical density, and release it in a controlled burst.
The practitioner would appear to flicker. One position to another, separated by a brief smear of shadow. At higher mastery, the movement would leave afterimages — phantom silhouettes of darkness that could confuse opponents and disrupt targeting.
It was, in essence, a technique built for the shadows.
And the Abyssal Sovereign Physique had an innate darkness affinity.
Rhain felt the alignment immediately.
The technique’s Essence circulation routes mapped almost perfectly onto his physique’s natural energy pathways.
Rhain began practicing.
He started with the stance — feet shoulder-width apart, weight centered on the balls of his feet, knees slightly bent.
The technique manual specified seven foundational stances, each corresponding to a different directional burst
He cycled through them slowly, letting his body memorize the geometry.
Then he added the Essence circulation.
Dark energy flowed from his dantian, spiraling down through his core meridians and into the network of channels in his legs.
The darkness Essence responded to his physique like water responding to gravity.
It flowed without resistance, pooling in the designated channels with an eagerness that bordered on sentient.
No blockages. No friction. No rejection.
Where a normal cultivator would spend months just learning to route unfamiliar Essence through unfamiliar pathways, Rhain’s body accepted the technique as if it had been designed for it.
Perhaps it had been.
He moved.
Swish.
He vanished and reappeared three paces away, his back almost hitting the opposite wall.
It was crude. Unrefined.
But it worked.
He spent the next few hours drilling it relentlessly. Moving from corner to corner. Refining the bursts.
By the time night fully settled over the sect, he had grasped the fundamentals. He could execute functional flickering movements in rapid succession.
It was still rough, but it was already faster than anything an Essence Awakening cultivator should be capable of achieving.
Exhausted, Rhain sat cross-legged on his rotting straw mat.
It consumes a lot of energy.
For now, I can focus on cultivation.
Now was the time to test the power of the Abyssal Sovereign Physique.
He closed his eyes and breathed, sitting in the lotus position.
The void in his dantian awoke.
Essence — the thin, diffuse energy that saturated everything in Aethermere — began flowing toward him.
The pull was staggering.
His newly forged pathways easily handled the violent influx, refining the impure ambient energy into thick, dark power with terrifying efficiency.
If anyone could have seen it, they would have felt the ambient Essence in the outer disciple quarters thin perceptibly — drawn toward a single point like water spiraling into a drain.
The amount of Essence he was absorbing was staggering.
A normal Essence Awakening cultivator would have ruptured their pathways from the sheer volume.
Yet, his cultivation level climbed at a crawl.
Rhain quickly understood why.
The Abyssal Sovereign Physique was a bottomless pit. Its capacity, its density, its sheer power meant that it required exponentially more energy to advance than a normal mortal physique.
More than ten times the Essence. Maybe even more.
If he had a normal body, the terrifying amount of energy he absorbed tonight would have pushed him straight to Essence Awakening Level 3, perhaps even Level 4.
Instead, the void slowly expanded, compressing the gathered Essence until it formed a secondary ring of dark light within his core.
Hours passed.
Rhain opened his eyes as the first grey light of dawn crept through the cracks in the wooden door.
His dark grey irises glowed faintly.
Essence Awakening — Level 2.
He had leveled up after a single night of raw cultivation.
Rhain also realised the ridiculous amount of Essence he required for a breakthrough.
But he didn’t resent it.
This was important for a foundation strong enough to crush anyone within the same realm.
It was foundation for his invincible path.
