Sam was over five thousand times more durable than a normal human at this point, a truly staggering amount. He raised his hand, withdrawing all of his Dao energy and mana, and then brought it down on the asteroid below him. Without even a whisper of pain, the entire celestial body cracked in half as he drove a relatively invulnerable wedge into the rock, in the form of his hand.
Sam leaped to the other side, nearly floating off into space as he slightly misjudged the gravity. A quick teleport fixed that problem, however. This location seemed like as good a place as any to practice his skills, out in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t like there was any sort of time limit on the Tower, and after his absolute domination by Granthar, he was feeling more in touch with Death than ever before. It was easy as an E Ranker to feel invulnerable, what with millennia of life, the strength of a demigod, and all sorts of powerful abilities, but there was always something greater out there that viewed you as nothing more than an insect.
Sam’s lip twitched as he looked off into the void, images of his battle with Granthar replaying themselves in his mind. He had been brutally dismembered, without being able to do anything about it. Not only had Granthar done that without any sort of effort, but without even locking down space. Teleportation meant nothing against a foe whose every motion was on a higher plane of existence to your own. Only Arnus’ presence had allowed for the defeat of Granthar, and even then, the man had died in the process.
With a grimace, Sam set his eyes on a nearby asteroid, and resolved to improve his control over teleportation first. There had to be a way to reduce the cost for group teleportation, and if not that, then the cost of unguided leaps through space. As it was, teleporting to a location he had already been in without a line of sight was dozens of times more expensive than teleporting to a visible target. Sam still had no idea why that was.
Sam opened up a rift below him and popped out on another chunk of interstellar rock, gauging the cost. Twenty miles of teleportation barely took a fraction of a percent of his total Dao reserves, which quickly regenerated itself. In contrast to this, teleporting back to his original location without looking at it took almost half of his reserves. As space warped around him, Sam peered off into the vagaries of the world of the Dao, trying to find out what was happening.
The first time, he wasn’t able to see anything. Nor on the second, third and fourth times. On the fifth try, however, he felt a tug on his Dao that wasn’t present during line of sight teleportation, and followed it. A thin wave of the Dao expanded out of his body every time he tried to teleport based on his body’s memories of space, searching in a wide cone along the approximate path he took.
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So that’s how it works. My body remembers the space it occupied, but my Dao still has to find a resonance point. In contrast, teleporting to a visible location means that I can manually search for resonance.
Knowing this did nothing to improve the costs however, which meant that he needed to find a qualitative increase in his understanding of his teleportation. There had to be a way to make teleportation useful, as Gordanus had teleported halfway across a planet without any sort of issue. Assuming that the man had a peak stage Dao Seed, that still meant that he didn’t have enough Dao energy to make up for the increase in distance.
Sam slowly found himself sinking into a semi-meditative state, similar to how he pondered the Dao. He had a lot of time on his hands here, with a maximum deadline of a few years to return to Earth before the universal tournament. He had no plans to stay that long, of course, but he certainly would make as much out of it as possible. The time for rapid advancement was over, as he already was in Challenge Mode. The last few floors had proven that he could easily die if he faltered or overestimated himself. It didn’t matter how quickly he advanced if he died along the way.
A few hours passed, with Sam figuring out a means of lowering the costs. As his body already knew the location he needed to get to, coupled with the fact that he always teleported to that exact location, that meant that he was achieving something similar to line of sight teleportation, but with far less efficiency.
It took him over a hundred teleportations, but he realized that if he forcefully narrowed the cone of questing Dao energy, he could reduce the costs proportional to the volume of that cone. Even reducing it by a quarter noticeably reduced the strain on his Dao consumption. Unfortunately, this was an imprecise science, and quite difficult to pull off. It required the entirety of his focus to manage, and sometimes failed, even at that. In its current state, the skill was pretty much worthless for combat.
Sam didn’t even try to practice his group teleportation, notwithstanding that it wouldn’t work here. It was by far the most Dao energy expensive ability he possessed, bottoming out his pool for a mere mile of transportation with passengers. The way it worked meant that he was forced to pay a potency tax for everyone involved, not just surrounding them with his Dao, but essentially replacing them with it on a grand scale. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to transport them through a portal keyed to his own concept. It was an ability that had no easy workaround, save for technique. Just like with guided teleportation, there were likely different levels of skill.
Happy enough with his current progress, Sam flickered off into the black, using the asteroids as reference points to teleport. Thousands passed by, blending into one long road of grey beneath his feet. Nothing of interest caught his eye, until an hour had passed. A tiny flicker on the monochrome surface of an asteroid caught his enhanced eyes, and out of curiosity, he teleported over, finding himself standing in a strange position, with both feet sunk into what looked like solid stone.
