Li Ke's so-called legitimate reason was indeed entirely professional.
He wanted to learn new, high-utility techniques.
However, he had absolutely zero interest in the standard hand-to-hand combat katas of the Shiranui lineage. Even if those specific moves weren't the absolute blueprint of the school and carried a lot of Mai's personal flair, they still felt incredibly awkward and counterintuitive to him.
So...
"So, you only plan on learning the mid-air redirection mechanics and the specialized strike format used to drive flame energy into a target's body?"
Mai Shiranui took a deep, calming breath. She had known all along that Li Ke looked down on the Shiranui school's baseline forms, but she hadn't expected him to completely cherry-pick only these two specific core mechanics.
"Exactly. You've seen my combat style before. The standard hand-to-hand forms you demonstrated simply don't fit my archetype," Li Ke explained with absolute seriousness.
His own approach to combat was built entirely around overwhelming aggression. He relied on catastrophic physical power, blinding speed, and hyper-reactive instincts to dismantle his foes. For any opponent within his weight class, his default solution was a single-strike instant kill.
If that failed, he would simply trade a minor hit, tank the damage, and impale them anyway.
When it came to life-or-death battles, he hated dragging things out. The absolute confidence provided by his hyper-balanced "stat-monster" build meant that in any even-tier engagement, he could achieve an effortless, crushing victory. Even if he had to fight a tier above his weight class, his defensive baseline ensured he wouldn't get instantly taken off the board.
Conversely, the Shiranui style focused heavily on high-agility evasions and waiting to exploit opening-based counter-attacks. That passive mentality clashed violently with his offensive doctrine.
After all, he excelled at creating fatal openings through raw pressure, not waiting around for them to happen.
"I honestly don't even know how to begin picking apart your logic," Mai sighed, shaking her head before offering a technical explanation. "Every single one of my execution patterns relies on chi. If you don't actually learn how to manifest and circulate chi, these mechanics are completely useless to you, aren't they?"
Her secret arts required a functional network of internal energy. She had no idea how many different energy variations Li Ke could currently channel. But in her mind, a normal practitioner would need at least several months of grueling cultivation just to awaken a baseline spark of chi before they could even think about executing advanced forms.
"We can figure that out with a quick trial run. As you know, even if I mess up and blow out my pathways, I can regenerate the damage... it just hurts like hell."
Li Ke extended his hands, gesturing for her to skip the preamble and get straight to the technical breakdown.
Mai rolled her eyes in exasperation. Taking a deep breath to center herself, she finally began reciting the oral formulas and internal cultivation maps of the Shiranui secret arts.
Only then did Li Ke realize that the Shiranui style's mid-air redirection wasn't a simple, mindless dump of raw energy. It required setting up specific transitional stances and bracing the skeletal alignment for an alternative trajectory the exact microsecond the initial leap was initiated.
As for the armor-penetrating flame strike, it wasn't a basic explosion of elemental power either.
"When you drive that volatile energy—which sits precisely on the threshold between physical chi and raw plasma—into an enemy's internal cavity, you have to use a specific frequency," Mai explained thoroughly. "By matching that frequency, you create an internal resonance that rapidly amplifies the destructive output. To a certain degree, it actually highjacks and converts the target's own internal energy to fuel the payload. Honestly, I only managed to master the fundamentals of this Super Special Move quite recently. Right now, I can only imprint a maximum of four energy nodes. The internal resonance and resource-conversion efficiency are still practically negligible when I use it."
Mai let out a deflated sigh. Her natural martial talent was undeniably exceptional, but she still struggled to properly execute a high-tier finishing art of this caliber.
Many of the ultimate forms within the Shiranui archives remained entirely closed off to her due to her physical limitations in raw stamina and pure muscle density. This was especially true for the Chou Hissatsu Shinobi Bachi. In its idealized, perfect execution, it was supposed to manifest nine distinct flame payloads detonating sequentially inside the target's body before erupting into a towering pillar of fire.
But due to her insufficient energy reserves and limited output ceiling, even during a flawless training drill, she could only force out four flame imprints at most to trigger the rupture.
"Ah, so that's the mechanical loop behind it."
Li Ke nodded as the underlying physics of the technique crystallized perfectly in his mind.
To put it plainly, the technique worked by utilizing a highly concentrated, localized spiral of chi to anchor a compressed sphere of energy inside the opponent's internal anatomy. The operational logic was remarkably similar to the mechanics of a Rasengan, though significantly less complex. Because chi naturally existed on the boundary between tangible physical force and intangible spiritual energy, executing this specific spatial compression was well within the realm of possibility.
In standard match-ups, if an opposing martial artist actively raises a chi barrier, the effectiveness of this penetration strike would scale entirely based on whether they read the incoming trajectory, the raw density of their energy, and their defensive mastery.
Naturally, under normal circumstances, a martial artist's defensive chi could never fully absorb a focused offensive payload. The very moment a strike managed to disrupt the internal circulation of their energy, maintaining any form of coherent defense became an absolute impossibility.
As for his own toolkit...
"Yeah, looks like doing this with pure fire is a total bust."
Li Ke attempted to mold his dragon flame into a compressed vortex, but quickly abandoned the effort. If he actually possessed the delicate finer-control to drive a localized, spinning plasma core directly inside a target's ribcage, he would be much better off just blasting them with raw, overwhelming output. He wouldn't need to overcomplicate the execution with extra operational steps anyway.
Thus, adapting this specific concept to his fire affinity was practically useless.
Fire lacked the phantom properties required to effortlessly pass through an opponent's physical outer shell without burning it first, making the penetration phase an outright logistical nightmare.
Next up was mana.
If he used magical energy...
A brilliant, deep-blue radiance coalesced around Li Ke's palm. The next fraction of a second, a volatile, swirling mass of raw mana surged into form. But before he could even attempt to shape it into an anchor node, a sharp, tearing agony ripped through his palm. The magical current instantly spiraled out of control, forcing him to reflexively hurl the unstable mass away.
The lethal cluster of raw mana exploded violently mid-air, unleashing a powerful shockwave that sent both Li Ke's and Mai's hair whipping back aggressively, rustling her tunic in the draft.
Li Ke stole a quick glance, only to confirm that she wasn't wearing her traditional Shiranui kunoichi uniform today. Silently leaving a mental one-star review for her outfit choice, he looked down to find his own palm completely raw and bloody.
Evidently, his precision control over raw mana was far below the required threshold.
Forget about establishing a harmonic frequency resonance—he couldn't even force the energy to hold its shape without blowing up his own hand.
"And it drains way too much focus. If I try to pull this off in the middle of a high-speed clash, it'll hijack a massive chunk of my tactical awareness," Li Ke muttered, his brow furrowing.
His dragon fire and Life Return techniques synchronized instantly. Pale flames wrapped around his hand as the torn flesh began to rapidly stitch back together. Standing nearby, Mai had instinctively reached for a roll of medical gauze, but she froze in her tracks as she watched his self-healing factor erase the damage in real time.
With fire and magic ruled out, only one final power source remained.
It was the specific energy variant that Li Ke currently understood best and controlled with absolute, flawless precision—his blood chi.
Under his flawless direction, an invisible thread of blood chi rapidly compressed into a spinning spiral, seamlessly passing into the wooden table right in front of him to anchor a perfect spherical node exactly as Mai had described. A microsecond later, Li Ke tapped his finger against an opposite corner, imprinting a twin payload.
The two energy nodes began to vibrate at an identical frequency. Through his hyper-sensitive awareness, Li Ke could clearly feel the blood chi voraciously siphoning some form of latent essence from within the heavy timber. Surprisingly, it was actually finding sustenance.
"Come to think of it... a Berserker's blood chi is fundamentally distilled life force, isn't it?"
The mechanical realization suddenly clicked in his mind. The very next instant, a torrent of crimson energy—behaving exactly like a pressurized geyser of molten magma—erupted violently from within the structure, completely obliterating the unfortunate table into a cloud of airborne splinters!
Mai stared at the empty space in absolute astonishment. Although she had already sensed that his crimson, blood-soaked 'energy' carried an incredibly dense, explosive pressure, she truly hadn't expected a mere baseline training test to pack enough destructive force to pulverize a solid hardwood table from the inside out!
"Fascinating..."
Li Ke rotated his wrist, a thoughtful look crossing his face. It appeared that the combat mechanics from the Arad continent were remarkably compatible with the martial arts principles of Mai's universe.
"Wait, didn't Ruohua teach me the foundational training methods for Nen Master chi cultivation back then? The underlying flow feels incredibly similar to how Mai manipulates her internal energy."
Looking at Mai, his mind instantly drifted to Ruohua—another exceptionally well-endowed fighter he knew from his journeys.
But that thought triggered an even grander realization: when it came to female martial artists across the multiverse, it was an absolute rarity to find one who wasn't packing a staggeringly massive chest.
"Now this is a truly remarkable discovery!"
Li Ke felt as though he had stumbled upon a fundamental truth of power conversion.
"You actually pulled it off... You managed to successfully manifest and manipulate energy outside your own body on the very first try," Mai Shiranui remarked, a hint of jealousy lacing her voice.
She had spent months of grueling, relentless cultivation just to master the art of projecting her internal chi as physical flame. Yet here was Li Ke, effortlessly achieving the exact same result in the blink of an eye.
"It's mostly because the specific energy I'm using is quite unique," Li Ke replied, studying his palm.
In the King of Fighters universe, martial artists rarely subjected their energy to secondary, fundamental transformations. In contrast, the combat mechanics of the Arad continent made this kind of fluid adaptation a baseline standard.
Li Ke surmised that this compatibility likely had to do with the precise ratio of spiritual and physical energy involved. Because of that structural alignment, mastering this particular technique hadn't posed much of a challenge for him.
Furthermore... it sparked a new, tactical hypothesis. If the mechanics were this flexible, could he potentially hijack and manipulate an enemy's own blood to attack them from within?
"Let's see what the manuals say about blood manipulation..."
Dredging up the foundational texts of the blood arts from his memory, Li Ke focused on the chapters regarding controlling an opponent's vital fluids. The very next second, his face fell.
The manual laid out the requirements in excruciating, literal detail:
"...By utilizing the parasitic attraction of the Ghost Hand, draw upon external vital essences to magnetize scattering traces of blood chi. Once gathered, funnel the raw siphon through the Ghost Hand to integrate it directly into the heart cavity, or violently discharge the accumulated energy through the corrupted limb itself..."
The methodology was written so clearly that anyone with a baseline brain could master it in a single reading.
But the fatal catch remained. Li Ke did not possess a Ghost Hand, and he had absolutely zero intention of intentionally crippling himself with a demonic corruption just to learn a skill tree.
Are you telling me these high-tier blood arts are completely hard-locked behind having a demonic arm?
He felt thoroughly speechless. But upon closer reflection, the restriction made perfect logical sense. On the Arad continent, the overwhelming majority of practitioners who studied these crimson arts were Ghost Knights. In fact, the absolute progenitor of the Berserker path was the very source of Kazan's syndrome—the literal origin of the Ghost Hand itself.
The blood arts and the Ghost Hand were a match made in heaven. Anyone afflicted with that specific curse could seamlessly transition into a Berserker with minimal effort.
However...
Li Ke stared at the stray droplets of blood pooling from his earlier training injury, a sudden thought sparking in his mind.
"Wait a minute... blood is mostly composed of water, isn't it?"
If his memory served him correctly, plasma was over eighty percent water. That meant if he could precisely attune his sensory awareness to the moisture bound within a living target's blood, he could theoretically bypass the blood art restrictions entirely and yank the fluids straight out of an enemy's body using raw elemental control!
Eager to test his theory, Li Ke immediately initiated a trial run. Rather than relying on the restricted blood arts to circulate his internal fluids, he activated his Waterbending, focusing his consciousness entirely on the water content locked within his own right arm.
The next millisecond, hundreds of microscopic crimson beads erupted across the surface of his skin. But along with the moisture came a sudden, agonizing wave of excruciating pain. The elemental pull wasn't just targeting surface sweat—it was violently seizing the core moisture bound inside his actual flesh!
As the blood and water were forcefully dragged outward, the skin, muscle fibers, and deep fascia of his arm began to rapidly shrivel and dehydrate at a visible pace!
Sensing immediate danger, Li Ke forcefully shut down the elemental flow. His pale dragon fire instantly blanketed his arm, working in tandem with a surge of Life Return to rapidly stitch his tissues back together and restore his cellular hydration.
Even with his high-speed recovery, the damage was horrifyingly severe. The elemental traction had caused deep, structural trauma to his bone density, vascular networks, and nerve endings. If he hadn't possessed the combined healing factors of the dragon flame and Life Return, his right arm would have been left permanently crippled and useless!
Li Ke stared down at his fully restored limb, a lingering sense of dread catching in his chest.
"What a terrifyingly volatile power! Li Ke, did you just try to use your Waterbending to forcefully manipulate the moisture inside your own living tissue?"
Mai lunged forward, grabbing his arm to inspect it. Her eyes were wide with genuine worry, yet she couldn't help but marvel at the sheer, absurd potency of his self-healing dragon fire.
"Yeah. I didn't think the raw traction would be that catastrophic," Li Ke muttered, his brow furrowing as he analyzed his arm.
He found the mechanical output difficult to reconcile. His fire affinity had very little to do with the rules of Toph's world, but his Waterbending was a tangible, authentic art acquired directly from that dimension. If the native masters of that world possessed this level of lethal, internal tracking capability by default, it made zero logical sense that the Fire Nation could have easily hunted them down to the absolute brink of extinction.
"There has to be a heavy structural limitation here."
His eyes narrowing, Li Ke spun on his heel and marched out of the room, with Mai following closely at his heels.
He didn't head for the courtyard. Instead, he made a straight line for the estate's kitchen, quickly tracking down a live chicken to serve as a baseline test subject. Focusing his intent, he attempted to directly draw the internal fluids straight out of the living animal.
However, the connection remained entirely severed. The attempt was a complete failure.
Li Ke couldn't sense any of the water inside the chicken's body. It was as if an invisible barrier completely shielded the animal's internal anatomy, cutting off his sensory awareness from the substance itself—the water.
Refusing to give up, Li Ke grabbed a kitchen cleaver and cleanly chopped the chicken's head off. Yet, even with its head severed, the lifeless body still resisted his attempts at fluid manipulation. Paradoxically, if he unleashed his raw blood chi, the pooling blood would naturally gravitate toward his aura, but his Waterbending remained completely unresponsive!
It wasn't until the chicken's body went entirely limp and its severed head's eyes rolled shut for good that the restriction finally dissolved. Only then did Li Ke successfully harness his Waterbending, sensing the moisture locked within the dead flesh and drawing the blood up to form a hovering sphere in front of him.
Indeed, until the creature was completely and utterly dead, he couldn't perceive or manipulate its internal water content at all.
"..."
What a useless limitation!
Li Ke griped internally. However, his honed instincts whispered that if he could find a way to forcefully breach that protective barrier enveloping a living organism, he would unlock the power to freely control the water inside anyone at will.
Right then, a crucial realization flashed through his mind.
In the lore of the Avatar world, elemental bending was fundamentally defined as an extension of the soul harmonizing with the natural elements.
"In other words, a living soul exerts a natural interference field over its own internal elements... That must be it. They say blood is the currency of the soul, so as long as a creature is alive, its blood is shielded by its life force, or perhaps even houses a fragment of the soul itself. Since this is a supernatural multiverse, it's only natural for rules like that to exist."
Li Ke rubbed his chin, looking at the chicken that had just been instantly drained of all its blood, feeling a wave of disappointment.
If this was the baseline rule, his Waterbending wouldn't be able to synergize with his high-tier blood arts anytime soon.
"If that's the case, I can currently only use my own blood as the catalyst to trigger those internal detonations. That's going to bottleneck the raw destructive output significantly."
Feeling slightly deflated, he handed the carcass over to the dumbfounded kitchen maid. Turning around, he noticed Mai Shiranui looking equally deep in thought and tilted his head in confusion.
"What are you brooding over?"
Mai forcefully suppressed the shock brewing in her heart, offering a smooth, completely unbothered reply.
"I'm just curious about how many hidden tricks you actually have up your sleeve. Why does it feel like you can constantly pull out some bizarre, random ability?"
Li Ke pondered her question for a moment. He realized that if he casually mentioned his supernatural, 24-hour physical stamina without any cooldowns, Mai would probably flee the room in pure terror. He wisely decided to list a far more peaceful capability instead.
"I can also cook."
"Huh?"
Mai shot him a deeply skeptical look. His culinary pride instantly provoked, Li Ke took a massive stride forward into the kitchen workspace and snatched the cleaver right out of the young kitchen maid's hand, earning himself a thoroughly annoyed glare from her.
Though he hadn't formally graduated from the prestigious Totsuki Culinary Academy, he had still amassed an endless array of advanced cooking techniques. Most importantly—
He happened to be carrying pure MSG and specialized seasoning blends custom-made by Erina Nakiri right in his spatial inventory!
While Li Ke was busy unleashing a cooking style that Erina would have legally classified as a catastrophic biohazard, Shinobu Kocho and Mitsuri Kanroji were finally wrapping up the Pillar emergency council meeting.
It wasn't that they were actively hiding tactical data from Li Ke; rather, the strategic details discussed were things Li Ke had already made clear he had zero interest in.
The focus of the council was deciding who would remain behind to garrison this territory, who would guide Li Ke back to the Demon Slayer Corps headquarters to formally meet the master, Kagaya Ubuyashiki, and how to allocate their remaining logistics.
That was precisely why Li Ke had chosen to skip it.
After an intense debate, the Pillars final consensus was to have Kyojuro Rengoku remain stationed here to recruit and train a fresh batch of slayers. Tengen Uzui would also stay behind to anchor the local garrison, securing the perimeter and purging any lingering remnants of the alien abominations while Rengoku slowly recovered from his horrific injuries.
Initially, the strategy dictated that Mitsuri or at least Shinobu should hold this position, given that Tengen had already fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Li Ke, and Shinobu's medical expertise could significantly accelerate Rengoku's recovery.
However, the moment the council reviewed the exact spatial map Li Ke had retrieved, the leadership was forced to abruptly rewrite their defensive deployment.
The explanation was chillingly simple: they were terrified that the horrific female abomination might find a way to resurrect itself.
The markers on that recovered map were terrifyingly clear. They mapped out exactly what the entities across the three territories were coordinating, hinting at a deep, sinister web of tethers beyond anything the Demon Slayer Corps currently understood.
Reflecting on the purple corruption that bloomed in the wake of the monsters' appearance, the Pillars came to a grim conclusion: these alien abominations were actively trying to terraform this world into a cosmic nightmare. Given the stakes, the resurrection of a fallen high-tier entity was entirely within the realm of possibility.
Since Shinobu's raw combat output was too low and Mitsuri Kanroji lacked any firsthand experience fighting that specific entity, the burden of holding the local line fell entirely on the remaining Pillars.
Should that monstrous female entity find a way to reconstitute itself, Tengen Uzui—who possessed actual combat experience against it, even if it was just the experience of being instantly overpowered—would stand his ground alongside Kyojuro Rengoku to initiate a counter-assault.
They were actively gambling their lives on the hope that if the creature did resurrect, it would return in a severely weakened state.
It was a bet paid in human blood.
"Aww, what a shame. I was really hoping that during this shift rotation, I'd get to check out some of the local street food stalls," Mitsuri Kanroji let out a heavy sigh, looking thoroughly deflated.
Though the Entertainment District had been heavily pulverized during the conflict, the local train station infrastructure meant the nearby warehouses were still packed with a vast array of high-quality logistics. A regular garrison could never support a luxury district of this size without substantial supply chains. Because of that economic hub, the quality of the local culinary treats and confections vastly outmatched anything available at the isolated Demon Slayer Corps headquarters.
At the very least, sweet treats were in far higher abundance here.
For an insatiable glutton like Mitsuri, that silver lining alone was enough to keep her motivated through the darkest times.
"Aren't you worried you'll just scare off even more suitors? You have to realize good eligible bachelors are already in incredibly short supply these days," Shinobu laughed gently, nudging her pink-haired companion.
Mitsuri's dense, high-performance physique was fueled entirely by her jaw-dropping caloric intake.
Her daily diet was nothing short of legendary. A single meal for her easily eclipsed the combined rations of three professional sumo wrestlers, yielding a unique muscle density that was eight times that of an ordinary human. This specific genetic anomaly granted her transcendent strength, but it also proved to be an absolute dealbreaker for traditional matchmakers.
Even her unique hair color was the direct biological result of her eating 170 sakura mochi every single day for eight consecutive months, permanently dyeing the strands into a vibrant blend of pink and green.
Between her staggering food bills and her unnatural hair color, every single suitor from her arranged marriages had fled in sheer panic. In fact, her primary motivation for joining the dangerous ranks of the Demon Slayer Corps was simply to find a community—and perhaps a husband—who could look past her eccentricities and accept her for who she was.
That was precisely why she held the title of the Love Pillar.
As for the scarcity of men, the math was painfully simple.
The overwhelming majority of the volunteers rushing to join the Demon Slayer vanguard were young men, and the regular army conscripts were entirely male. As the war against the supernatural threats intensified, the mortality rate among military-aged men had skyrocketed. The surviving demographic tilted heavily toward women, making a genuinely good, reliable man an absolute rarity in this era.
Having her deepest insecurity laid bare, Mitsuri pouted unhappily. While a few of her past blind dates hadn't minded her unique hair color, the exact microsecond her staggering food orders hit the table, they would invariably scramble for the exit.
Yet, she had absolutely no choice in the matter. If she didn't consume that massive volume of fuel, her hyper-dense muscles would leave her starving and completely incapacitated.
"Ugh... Shinobu, you're mean!"
After a brief, dramatic whine, Mitsuri clasped her hands together and let out a wistful sigh.
"If only there was a man who didn't mind my appearance, cooked absolutely delicious food, could actually beat me in a fair duel, never judged me for how much I eat, and could easily afford to keep me fully fed... that would be absolute paradise!"
Mitsuri listed her dream criteria aloud. Under normal circumstances, Shinobu would have playfully dismantled her unrealistic standards with a sharp tease, but right then...
"Wait... strip away the cooking part, and doesn't Li Ke fit every single one of those boxes flawlessly? Actually, knowing his ravenous appetite, he wouldn't just 'accept' her eating habits—he'd probably want to devour her whole, wouldn't he?"
As that exact realization flashed through Shinobu's mind, an intoxicating, rich aroma suddenly wafted through the corridor. The smell was so profoundly savory that the exact microsecond the scent hit her nose, her mouth involuntarily flooded with saliva.
She whipped her head around to look at Mitsuri, only to discover that the pink-haired girl's gaze was already locked onto the hallway, a glistening trail of drool visibly gathering at the corner of her lips!
Shinobu instantly developed a profound, catastrophic sense of impending doom. The very next second, the kitchen doors swung wide open, and Li Ke stepped into view, casually balancing a massive, steaming pot of slow-braised meat in his hands.
The heavenly, mouth-watering fragrance was radiating directly from the pot!
Trailing right behind him, both Mai Shiranui and the estate's young kitchen maid wore expressions of absolute, trance-like bliss. It was blindingly obvious that neither of them had any hand in crafting this masterpiece.
The truth was laid bare!
Her danna—her partner, Li Ke—was a culinary genius!
The exact microsecond that fact registered in her brain, a howling, sakura-colored hurricane erupted right beside her. A pink-and-green blur tore down the hallway, rocketing straight toward Li Ke's position. The projectile was, without a shadow of a doubt, Mitsuri Kanroji.
How could a legendary, world-class epicurean ever hope to resist the ultimate temptation of a master-tier dish?
"Ah... yep, it's over."
Shinobu covered her face with both hands, letting out a long, defeated groan.
She knew with absolute, mathematical certainty that it wouldn't be long before Mitsuri Kanroji legally changed her name to Mitsuri Li!