As I'd hoped, by hand didn't react much to the knife. Instead of a rather deep cut, I was only left with a very red swath of skin and a long bump where the knife came into contact with me. Fascinating stuff. Just by thinking hard enough, and envisioning what I wanted to happen, I managed to shield myself from a knife.

I had no illusions that this would stop a real strike from a knife, be it a stab or a slash, but it was still incredibly interesting and a lot better than sitting next to the water doing nothing.

In my past, I always found great pleasure refining my skills gradually, and nitpicking was always a process that I enjoyed, if only partially. With a completely new thing to mess around with, my curiosity was sparked, and I could make very quick improvements because of my extremely low level of skill.

I quickly sat back down and started recording my experiment on one fo the later pages in the notebook. Everything that I thought would be useful, such as my estimation on the strength of the strike, how I'd prepared myself mentally, and other important factors. As soon as I finished recording, I jumped back into testing, preparing myself and going in once again.

-Now where is that line break when you actually need it?-

I quickly fell into a routine for my experiments, first thinking of something to test, testing it, and then methodically writing everything that pertained towards it. I immediately found that my hand wasn't used to writing English characters, and the little thing could only write barely legible characters, and even then it would start to cramp soon afterwards. I still couldn't use my left hand to write, I guess my preference for my right hand remained a constant.

Looking over all of my notes again, I summarized each set of them and then wrote down the major takeaways from my training session. I found that slow, regulated breathing worked the best, particularly when I exhaled when the knife made contact. However, whenever I focused on my breathing instead of what I was doing with the barrier, the knife did considerably more damage, even leaving angry red marks instead of just a bump.

I also found that pairing up my barrier with imagery really improved the effectiveness of the action. Taking the most obvious thing that came to mind when imaging a repellant, I pictured little bits of energy moving through my body to my arm, forming a row of interlocking shields. Then, just as when my knife made contact with my skin, I imagined the row of shields to push outwards, shurima shuffle style. Not only did picturing the results I wanted and pairing it with things I'd seen before allow me to slash with a lot more force then I initially thought possible, I also could prepare myself a lot quicker by speeding up my mental "construction" of the shields, and even simply retracting them in between strikes instead of rebuilding them completely.

As silly as all this felt, having some sort of visualization helped me immensely. My inexplicable skill with channelling focus didn't have any visible effects until after the fact, so I couldn't really tell how far along I was or what sort of preparations I was making. Having something that I could overlay onto what I actually saw really grounded my focus and attention, and allowed me to do what I wanted fatter and with less effort.

Maybe one day after practicing for long enough I wouldn't need to go through this process, but that day seemed to be very far off in the distance.

All in all, I was very satisfied with my findings and felt very accomplished. There wasn't much I could've done otherwise anyways, and the progress that I'd made was monumental. While I wouldn't be able to use the technique in combat just yet, having the background knowledge available opened up new opportunities, and if I continued to practice and refine it I really would be able to fight with it.

Finally closing my notebook, I lay down on the ground and took a moment to stare at the ceiling. Really, with the corridors outside of my little pool room being so hot, I felt extremely safe, and relaxed as well. The girl that'd tried to kill me earlier obviously had some sort of training as she walked on water and threw knives accurately, so I felt pretty good about my odds now. I just didn't want any more monsters like the rock. I'd appreciate that a lot.

I'd also appreciate a softer floor. I probably would've been more uncomfortable with my previous body than my current one, but my previous body didn't use a pillow, while I was still uncertain with the one I had now. The floor really dug into my shoulder blades as I lay down, but if I lay down on the ground, and focused on my breathing…

Slow, steady breathing. Deep breathing. Focus on the breath. The sand shift within you. Smirking, I decided to continue my train of thought. Feel the sand flow inside, outwards while exhaling, and going straight to the core while I inhaled. In, and out. I lay my hands on my stomach to better feel my breathing, the cold floor beneath me completely forgotten. I wasn't really thinking of anything other than my breath, and now that my breathing had slowed down, I could really appreciate the beating of my heart and the heat in my stomach. Smiling to myself, I asked myself to stop worrying about everything that was happening in my life and slowly drifted asleep.

-This is very crude, come on where is that feature-

I woke up to an aching body and an arm that felt like it was on fire. I sort of expected my back to ache after sleeping on a slab of rock for an extended period of time, but my burning arm was a complete surprise. Sitting up, I took a quick look at it and found that apart from the area where I'd been practising my barrier, the limb was fine. However, the areas that saw the most barrier usage were a very bright shade of red and hot to the touch. I also couldn't move the fingers in that hand without my vision swimming and my ears tearing up.

I guess whatever I did really agitated my hand, and now the limb was out of commission, probably for an extended period of time. Unfortunate, but at least I knew not to overdo it anymore. But how much was overdoing it?

More testing was needed to answer that question. However, I could gleam that the spots that were particularly red were a network of very small lines that stood out once I really stared at my hand. They didn't really look like blood vessels, but then again I had very limited knowledge on how my own body worked.

I was just very curious as to why my hands, in particular, would experience such an adverse and painful reaction - whenever I used the boost on my legs, I never experienced such adverse effects. Sure, it was possible that there was some aching in them, but that could be chalked up to a dozen other factors

In any case, I couldn't write in my notebook because I was testing the barrier with my dominant right hand. Heck, thinking complex thoughts were difficult because every so often a spike of pain would come out of nowhere and my thoughts would all be derailed.

Even feeding myself became exponentially more difficult, as I only had one had to work with.

In any case, I could still open the notebook and think over some of my notes, and try to look for alternative uses and things to test. Setting aside a page for future tests, I began writing.

While I did experiment slightly with stabbing motions with the knife and found that the knife wouldn't pierce because of the barrier, I never really tested its ability to absorb shock. Smacking a limb with the butt end of the knife sounded like a fine way to test it.

I'd also never tested if the barrier was really hardening the skin, or forming a barrier slightly over the skin. Due to how I was picturing the barrier to work, I'd assume that it applied a layer of protection over the skin, but the exact mechanics still escaped me. I'll try running the knife at a very extreme angle, and see if I encountered any resistance.

Still, all those experiments could wait. For as I was getting my brain working again I realized that the pool room was warm.

A/N Eh, still a rather small chapter. Next one should be larger though... Probably going to be able to release a new chapter before the end of summer, but don't expect anything haha. Just know that I'm actively working on this again, so even if the updates are slow they will still come! And with those updates, some more action! You can have to all bloodthirsty weebs!

As usual, hope everyone enjoyed this chapter. I'd like some feedback on how I handled some of this training stuff because even after a week it still looks wonky to me.

Thanks for sticking with me!