Tom had difficulties measuring his own progress. But he was sure that, as the months wore on, and as his continued practice of the Five Petals Dance drew him closer to mastery, his overall strength and swiftness were improving.

A part of him yearned for an opponent worthy of his efforts but what little competitive spirit he had was overshadowed by his innate desire to avoid any kind of pain and live a care-free life.

He did however, find ways to amuse himself.

A trick Tom often used to gauge his newly obtained speed involved shaking a low-lying branch of the sequoia tree and watching the awl-shaped leaves tumble to the ground. He found that, with some concentration, the descent of foliage could actually be stalled, as if he were watching the scene through a slow motion camera.

And, as far as his physical prowess was concerned, he could measure his gains by leaping high into the air and noting the distance traveled. Though it was an inexact science, it was still preferable to the alternative – laying waste to the only tree in his pocket realm by nailing it with a brutish punch. The thought often crossed his mind but he could never bring himself to harm his own creation.

When the sequoia tree was a year old, its cones finally ripened. Even with his limited knowledge, Tom was still surprised to find that the pine cones had went from mossy green to a brown tint before adopting a light orange hue. Some even had a hint of yellow in them.

Other than wonderment, there was nothing Tom could glean from these strange phenomena. He shrugged it off as yet another oddity unique to his pocket realm and immediately set his sights on rearing a forest.

He peeled away the cone's scales and collected a handful of nuts from within. The rest of the day was spent planting them just beneath the surface of the soil which he dug out with the tips of his fingers. He buried each seed about a dozen meters apart, thinking that the sequoia's massive six meter girth and thirty meter reach was more of a sample than an outlier.

A few years later, on a particularly boring day, Tom lay under the canopied shade of a thicket, tossing a pill bottle up and down. Though he had yet to open it, he was in fact deliberating over whether he should consume them one at a time or all at once.

There was no mention of soul infusion pills in the jade slip Ah Wei had given them. He presupposed that a beginner cultivation manual, which was what he had more or less been provided, would not contain any information about esoteric medicine.

He knew the pills were intended to help him break through a bottleneck. But since Tom had no basis for comparison, he couldn't pinpoint which level of the qi condensation stage he had arrived at – although he was certain that he had encountered a spiritual roadblock.

It could be that he was having trouble moving beyond either the third, sixth or the ninth level. Given that most of the spiritual energy he had garnered was channeled into the pocket realm itself, and that none of the magical effects of the Five Petals Dance had materialized yet, he tentatively placed himself at the third level of qi condensation.

There was one other use for the soul infusion pills.

They could give him a temporary burst of power, enough to manifest strength and speed many times greater than what he could ordinarily wield. The effects would gradually subside as he assimilated the overflowing energy that it granted, through meditation. The extent to which the qi they unleashed could be absorbed depended almost entirely on latent talent.

He decided that since he probably didn't have much talent, he would use the surplus energy to advance to the next level while simultaneously taking on the combat puppet.

In other words, he would kill two birds with one stone.

Having made his decision, Tom reluctantly paid the combat puppet a visit.

It was as it had always been: seated within a clearing, its legs interwoven, hands resting on its knees and its tubular neck tilted upwards, as if it were waiting for heaven to pour mana down its wooden throat.

There was a bare patch in the area around the still figure, in a circumference of roughly five meters, where the grass had withered into nothing and refused to regrow itself.

It was now obvious that the puppet was meditating in much the same way as a cultivator would. By absorbing the spiritual energy infused into the atmosphere, it drained the qi that was needed for vegetation to grow in that particular spot. If left unchecked, it would swallow the entire world to further its own existence.

Though it had grown stronger with each passing moment, the difference in their cultivation speed was vast, such that Tom was experiencing a feeling that he had seldom felt. The sensation revved up his heartbeat and made his palms sweaty, but somehow kept his mind clear.

He wanted a fight.

Something altogether different than the vicious beatings that had haunted him in the past. Because in this battle, he would choose the time and place and assure his own victory.

Plopping open the glass bottle, he gulped down all ten of the soul infusion pills and imbibed them one after the other. In less than a minute, his qi flow was reversed, flooding his spirit veins and tearing open his spirit pores. Steam erupted from his ears. He was then beset by a terrible fever that mottled his vision. With labored breathes he clambered onward, occasionally swaying to and fro as he inched into the circle where the combat puppet slept.

He raised a wobbly fist and struck the bald face of the puppet with all the strength he had. A tremor passed through its ligaments into the ground, quaking the surface of the earth. The shaking fit lasted only for a moment, before four puppets melted out of its skin and emerged in each cardinal direction.

The quartet moved in sync.

They launched a flurry of fist strikes from all sides. Tom furrowed his brow in response and focused his gaze on the path of their winding arms. In his eyes, their movements slowed to a crawl, and gave him enough time to dig in his heels and leap into a flying side kick. A jet of flame shot out of his toes and bored a hole through the puppet's chest. It flew dozens of meters back and skidded into a crumpled heap.

Tom deftly dodged the follow-up strikes and performed a round-house kick, hitting a puppet on the square of its chin, shattering its head into a mound of splintered wood. An arc of water was shaped by the momentum of his kick and sliced through the two remaining puppets, cutting them in half.

Tom nearly leapt with joy.

It was his first time effectuating the Fire Shot Kick and the Water Sling Kick. To add to his achievement, he had done it in quick succession and in a moment of intense pressure.

His gleeful smile turned into a frown as he watched the puppet that was still meditating tremble yet again. This self-induced seizure gave birth to eights puppets that scuttled into formation.

Tom hadn't lost a shred of confidence and eagerly ran into the fold.

Among them, was a trio that moved in a peculiar fashion. Two of them held onto a single puppet that straightened his legs and spread his arms wide, like an eagle in takeoff. They lifted him up and swung him forward, throwing him into motion with blinding speed.

Tom reacted too slowly and was bowled off his feet as the puppet's head slammed into his chest. It's upper body was cracked by the force of the impact. When Tom landed several meters away, he shoved its lifeless frame off and scrambled to his feet.

He caught a few glancing blows as he escaped their encirclement and retreated to a safer distance. While he ran, he wiped the blood from his forehead and tried to widen the gap between their forces just as the puppets propelled their teammates with tenacious speed like human bullets in a kamikaze attack.

Tom spun around and lifted his knee as high as he could to stomp down with all the strength he could muster. Instead of the usual rigidity, his heel was absorbed by liquefied soil, which splashed into the air, forming a massive mud barrier. Four puppets collided into its base and naturally fused with its element. When the mud hill was plopped down by gravity, the puppets were nowhere to be seen.

Tom smiled from ear to ear.

The Mud Heel Kick was shockingly effective against wooden puppets. So, he shamelessly spammed them with the same kick over and over until he stood alone in the middle of a swamp.

His playful mood was soon ruined as sixteen puppets neared him. To his amazement, half of them attacked their compatriots, ripping off their arms and legs. They then used the stripped torsos as shields and the residual body parts as swords.

Tom was dumbfounded.

He knew that the puppets would go to great lengths to defeat him, but he could never have imagined such tactics. Nevertheless, he kept spamming them with his Mud Heel Kick. Its usefulness quickly diminished as they swung the disembodied limbs with stunning fervor, slashing through the rising mud barriers with ease to nip at his knees and shoulders.

Because his injuries were piling up, Tom grew increasingly hesitant. He was starting to contemplate the idea of letting them land a few hits, in the hopes of abating their fury.

"If I let them win, surely they won't kill me."

But then he recalled the years of torment he had endured throughout his childhood.

He had always been too afraid to fight back. And, in those agonizing moments he would imagine himself somewhere else, as someone other than who he was. His life had only begun to change when he fought back in the barn, when so many of his peers had ganged up on him.

He realized that there was one thing he feared worse than death.

He feared the treadmill of pain: that nothing would change. That he would remain the same coward that tried to appease others by allowing them to hurt him.

Tom let out a guttural roar and pounded his chest. Not to intimidate the unfeeling puppets, but to psyche himself up. He buried his fear and doubt along with his former self, and replaced those emotions with anger and bloodlust.

The puppets seemed to sense the changes in him. Every one of their painted faces transformed into a splatter of harsh lines, as if they were seething in rage.

Tom broke into a run.

He rushed towards the nearest puppet and slid into a kick, imitating a soccer tackle. His body was lifted slightly off the ground as a gust of wind picked him up and flung him ahead. The puppet that had stood in his way was whirled aside. The flimsy strings that bound it together were torn, dismembering its joints and numbing its movements.

The fighting resumed with Tom's renewed assault. He would throw up instant mud walls to block attacks, while dashing with the wind in and out of the fray to avoid injury, and charging in again with blazing kicks. When he was caged in, he would decimate their ranks by slinging water blades to destroy two or three puppets in one go.

An hour of fighting had him drenched in blood. His wounds were no longer superficial as red lotuses were beginning to bud between stitched flesh.

He had managed to defeat five waves thus far. Unfortunately, the next wave was already underway and had over a hundred puppets streaming across the field to meet him.

"At this rate," he whispered through a toothy scowl, "I definitely won't make it."

Tom had been saving his trump card for the final showdown, having believed from the start that the meditating puppet was a boss-type monster that would show itself on the battlefield after its minions were completely defeated.

And yet the onslaught appeared to be endless, and the ruthless strategies the puppets employed made them difficult to contend with despite the apparent power disparity.

Tom chided himself for holding on to such a childish belief.

He then took a deep breath and raced towards the center of the frothing mass of puppets. Picking up speed, he sprang into the air and twisted his hips to spin himself around. The spiraling drop kick usually ended a dozen or so meters from where it began, but on this occasion, electricity sparkled on his skin and bathed his body in a cloud of light.

His form was immediately wrapped in a ball of electricity that gave him an unprecedented surge of speed. He cannonballed through the crowd, beelining to the meditating puppet.

The resulting collision was an explosion of commingled power, inundating the entire pocket realm in white light.

Tom was thrown a hundred meters back, where he rolled to a stop, dislocating his spine.

Most of the lead puppet's figure disintegrated into ash, except for the head, which stabbed into the sky before bouncing off the edge of the pocket realm. It then careened to the ground, where it stayed perfectly still as the painted expression of hatred slowly faded away.

While Tom was twisting in agony, the puppets were quivering in pain. They broke apart, bit by bit, until they were no more than motes of dust.