"Real" training, as Qian Feng found out, meant technique training. Now, one would believe that no matter how brutal, the technique training couldn't possibly be as brutal as the body training he had experienced previously. They would be wrong.

According to the Iron Fox, before technique training could begin, certain skills had to be finely honed as the foundation. This entailed repetitive, boring, and tedious actions that wore heavily on the mind. For example, bouncing stones on alternating sides of your hand for the goal time of ten minutes. This took a day, likely because Qian Feng had to learn to accomodate for the Iron Fox's random, yet terrifyingly accurate, stone throws seeking to knock Qian Feng's own rock out of the air. The boy would just have gotten into the groove of it, and a pebble would be sent hurtling through the air at incredible speeds and Qian Feng would bite back metaphorical tears of frustration at having to start over once again.

From an outsider's perspective, though, the Iron Fox was actually pretty efficient, as Qian Feng learned to conceal his intent and act sporadically, making prediction very difficult.

There was a far more brutal exercise, too, of repeatedly throwing stones at Qian Feng and forcing him to dodge them for hours on end. The velocity and trajectory of the thrown stones changed drastically from toss to toss, resulting in what had to be a split section reaction, decision, and movement all together.

It took Qian Feng a few months before his foundational skills were up to his teacher's expectations. Then the true technique training began. This was where the Iron Fox's true skills as a teacher were put to the test, and, as Qian Feng later found out, they were up to par.

The Iron Fox seemed to be able to teach concisely yet still thoroughly, and would enable Qian Feng to understand a new concept within a few sentences. His pieces of advice made sense and improved his technique greatly individually.

That was not to say that Qian Feng was completely out of the clear in terms of training difficulty. The Iron Fox had deviously invented many different training schemes, that were painful, yet much to Qian Feng's chagrin, rewarding.

So Qian Feng trained and trained. The first few months of this were all basic skills, which Qian Feng found incredibly boring, but the Iron Fox said it needed to be done, and there wasn't much the boy could do to fight against that.

Finally, one day, when the sun was high in the sky:

"Tell me, student, what do you plan for your fighting style to be? With your affinities, there aren't many choices, but I would like to hear your thoughts on the matter."

Qian Feng smiled, knowing that this would signify the beginning of the training that would form the basis of his fighting prowess in the future. The boy answered immediately.

"I want to be able take a hit like a stone, but also give one out too. And conrol the movement of my opponents, too, with Earth-affinity skills."

The Iron Fox smiled, saying nothing. What that meant, Qian Feng was not sure, but what he did know was that from now on, training would be a lot more specialized.