Hartley's first encounter battling a saint left him rattled. Before entering his cultivation room he stopped and stretched, his earlier exertion still weighing on him as he exhaled.

There was no doubt in his mind that gravity manipulation alone wouldn't be able to injure a saint as it did with those below the saint realm.

A saint's physique seemed almost impenetrable by those in the lower realms of cultivation. No wonder the saint had called him an ant.

To his dismay he also concluded that his time domain would be just as useless.

If he couldn't hurt the opponent, even if the opponent was a sitting duck frozen in time, the outcome of the battle was already set in stone.

He took some consolation in knowing that gravity could still restrict and affect a saint's movements as was evident with the saint in the back mountains.

How could he find a way to injure a saint? Hartley stood for hours contemplating that thought.

Hartley spent a day meditating to consolidate his breakthrough, then entered his inner world. He remembered advice once given to him by Kang: the closer you are to the saint realm the more important it is to find ways of using minimal effort for maximum output.

Hartley stood in his inner world, his skin faintly glowing blue and his golden-blonde hair of his mother's heritage hovering around his head like clouds around the sun.

After taking a deep breath he brought down 250 gs of gravitational force onto the earth. With a sudden boom, a hundred meters around him was flattened instantly, the earth quaked, rattled and cracked. Every tree in this diameter turned to splinters and were forced down into the bare earth, not even a blade of grass could escaped the wrath of gravity.

Black energy started blaring out viciously like a raging storm of black fire around him.

It was was if the very seams of the mortal plane were coming apart like a cheap robe, causing the black energy to lash out more ferociously at the gravity field that was violating the laws of the mortal plane.

Hartley was encased in his sphere which turn to a solid blue like an egg shell protecting him from any harm.

Why was it so important to find to find ways using minimal effort for maximum output? Hartley stood still in his sphere observing the chaotic maelstrom of black energy raging more violently than he had ever seen. Then the answer struck him like a bolt of lightning.

Black Energy!

It was the most potent and uncontrollable energy in existence. Chaotic and volatile with impartiality, it was the blood of the mortal plane. It ensured the balance of the plane acting as a protector to extinguish forces that were breaking the threshold of power for the realm.

"What if I could control black energy indirectly?" Hartley struck up on an idea.

It has to be known that there was nothing new under the sun, Hartley was far from the first person to have this thought. The problem was that the people before him who had a similar thought process had perished miserably fooling around with this unpredictable power.

Not even a saint would foolishly come into direct contact with black energy, but Hartley had one advantage they didn't have and that was his inner world. His inner world that perfectly simulated the real world was the perfect lab to conduct such life threatening experiments.

He was the ruler here and a with a thought everything would reset back to normal.

Others who had gone down this road before him had been erased from the world with the slightest miscalculation or error in judgement, no one ever got a second chance to observe, learn and make adjustments when it came to black energy. It was literally suicide to even be curious about this energy.

After two days of just standing and watching the behavior of dark energy Hartley had some insights as to how it behaved. At first it seemed like just a random explosion of energy that just appeared at the place you least expected it.

Soon Hartley figured out that by just barely breaching the laws of the realms he could see the ripples in space where the black energy was most likely to appear. In another two days he became adept at knowing where to punch out to make these ripples appear where he wanted them to.

Hartley would then send out a mini sphere the size of a basketball to surround the ripples where the black energy would appear and then as quickly as possible pump in tremendous elemental power with his spiral circulation technique, blue spiral lines would circulate and weave around the sphere suddenly causing and eruption of black energy turning the sphere black.

At first the black energy would just writhe and roil violently siphoning off the blue energy until there was nothing left then disappear to nothingness leaving the sphere translucent and empty once again.

Hartley even had the sphere explode a few times like a nuclear bomb around him literally rocking his world....

In a majestic castle in the east of the capital, under the dark night skies a dim candle light gleamed through a narrow window in a high tower on the north side. An old man sat at his desk scribbling down some notes on a piece of parchment. In a castle full of luxuries the man spent most of his time reading in this small dank room, the floor would creak when stepped on, and the door would squeak when opened but the room was kept looking like a commoners abode by choice.

The man was tall and sturdy, sporting a full head of white hair he resembled the young prince in facial features. The man sat in the silence of the gloomy room reading reports and writing the odd reply.

A knock came at the door and he answered "come in", the squeak of the door disturbed the dead silence in the room as the door slowly opened letting the bright light from torches mounted in the hall invade the dimly lit interior.

"Your highness Prince Dong, the princess is here to see you." said a tall man dressed in a black military robe as he delivered a formal bow.

"Hmmm." The prince grunted affirmation while keeping his eyes glued to the parchment laying on his desk.

A beautiful mature lady dressed in a green and white bell-shaped gown strode pass the guard as he retreated and closed the door, returning the room to being barely illuminated.

"Can't you get some more lights, it's so moldy and depressing in here, I wonder how anyone can stay sane spending so much time in this horrible room." The princess complained as she stepped forward into the room.

The eldest prince finally prised his eyes away from his parchment.

"What can I help you with sister?"

The princess snorted in annoyance before replying to his abruptness.

"The lord of the western hills, Baron Hongtian requests our aid in dealing with him....."

"I'm afraid we have bigger fishes to fry, that little runt will have to wait until I get things in order here. These merchants are being extremely troublesome, but his time will come soon, don't worry about him." Said the prince cutting her off while his eyes turned back to the parchment on his desk.

Undeterred by the prince's remarks she continued, "Did you know his wife is Zhi Ruo, daughter of that traitor Zhi Kim? A man declared an enemy of the kingdom by you yourself. How will it look when word gets that they've been living happily in the western hills under our noses. Furthermore those dirty commoners in the hills are flocking to his fief like moths to a flame, it won't take long for his influence to grow in the region."

The name Zhi Kim brought memories flooding back to the elder prince, the trusted bodyguard who his sister had fallen in love with and had consequently grown to hate, a man who wouldn't abandon his family even when the wealth of the kingdom was dangled before his eyes, an assassination attempt that ended with the man's wife dead and him and his daughter missing, it seemed so long ago yet his memories were still so vivid.

She walked over to the desk and stood beside the eldest prince, her silhouette was barely illuminated by the single candle at the far end of the simple wooden desk. She continued to press her point with a scowl on her otherwise beautiful face.

"We have an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone and in the process taint prince Jian's reputation for having an enemy of the kingdom under his banner."

After thinking things through for a minute the eldest prince replied, "just have our allies in the west deal with the youth, we have more pressing matters to attend to right now."

The princess shook her head unwilling to pass up this opportunity, "the nobles in the west are scared of the brat, apparently the back-bush bumpkin isn't as weak as everyone thought, not even Baron Hongtian is willing to step foot in the western hills unaided."

That last statement from the princess got Prince Dong's undivided attention, the last thing he needed was more strong opposition sprouting up in these chaotic times. It was best to nip these potential problems in the bud early on.

He knew from experience that wrestling back power from nobles who had tasted it could be notoriously harsh, in recent times he nearly had to run a few neighboring fiefs into the ground to keep those nobles too big for their boots in line....

In his inner world, Hartley breathed slowly. He had completely lost track of time, his inner world had no night cycles it was permanently tinted blue from the Star that sat in the sky. He stood surrounded by 6000 kilometers of fertile lands.

On a rocky windless plateau Hartley's left hand turned to a blue flash as he whipped it out to the side and away from his body producing rumblings and faint ripples in front of him, lightning-quick he then punched out, a dark sphere with blue lines appeared a meter in front of his fist, the rumbles increased in volume shaking the ground.

There was a black spot of dark energy the size of an pigeon egg at the sphere's center surrounded by countless blue lines that swirled and wriggled around the unstable black nucleus, extending and spinning like a fan blade to the outer edges of the sphere like a plasma globe.

The dark sphere twinkling with bright blue spiral lines almost looked like fancy decoration belonging on the mantle of a prestiged noble house.

The core of black energy suspended in the center of the sphere snapped and crackled intermittently changing forms trying to devour the blue spiral lines spinning so fast that they seemed to be stationary.

This was the most black energy Hartley could trap and manipulate in his sphere so far, after all the harrowing accidents resulting in explosions that could swallow up his whole inner world, he wouldn't dare try more than this in the real world.

The dark sphere with blue lines flew ten meters in a blink and exploded with a horrendous roar, there was a flash of black that attracted ever more roiling black energy. The ground shook and waves of rippling quakes spread out over the rocky terrain like wind blowing across fluttering linen sails.

Debris rose to the sky blotting out the blue rays of the Star sitting above.

When everything was settled there was a trench one hundred meters deep splitting mountains rivers and forests. The destruction stretched to almost half a kilometer.

Stood in his sphere that twinkled with blue Hartley smiled, he had created a new technique. Hopefully it would work just as well in the real world.