Noah dug a cave among the ruins of the city when he felt that his body had stabilized. The Hive had already decided that Elder Justin would be his replacement in the upcoming battles, so he could focus on recovering.
Elder Julia would send him detailed reports after every fight too. The Hive didn't want him to return to the battlefields unprepared.
Noah ate entire rank 5 magical beasts every week and divided their flesh between him and the Demonic Sword. It took his weapon one month before the cracks on its surface closed, and it could resume its position as a core item of his cultivation technique.
Days spent meditating and eating passed in the calm environment of the cave. The sound of footsteps often resounded from the surface, but Noah didn't mind them and continued his slow recovery.
He even analyzed his last battle against Peaceful Storm, which gave him ideas on how his battle prowess should evolve.
The power of the second form of his martial art was incredible. Fusing a martial art performed with a hybrid body and a spell gave results that surprised even him.
Of course, he had tested that attack when he was in the separate dimension, but he needed data from a real battle against a cultivator to understand how strong it was. It turned out that its power surpassed even his wildest predictions, which led him to explore that path further.
The conquest of the other Mortal Lands had provided to the organizations of Noah's world a broad series of techniques and spells that made use of the peculiar qualities of the natives. Most of them used their ability to control the "Breath" in the environment, but there were some that placed their superior physical strength as a core feature.
However, the members of the Bloodlines were simply too few compared to the Flawed Humans. With so many cultivators lacking a dantian, the development of martial arts that made use of their strong bodies progressed slowly. Also, that wasn't even their primary focus since their dream was to transform into perfect hybrids, which would render such techniques impracticable.
Noah understood their point of view, but he felt disappointed to find himself wandering again in uncharted territories. Developing attacks that made use of both spells and martial arts would be far easier if he could gain inspiration from existing schools.
'I guess I can only create a new kind of technique,' Noah thought as he evaluated the issue as he waited for his body to heal.
It wasn't a surprise that there weren't examples of his idea in the world. It was already hard to find martial arts that made use of the physical strength of a hybrid in the other Mortal lands. A school that added spells to those rare forms couldn't exist because there had never existed someone able to wield such power.
'Creating forms isn't a problem,' Noah evaluated as he thought about the diagram in his possession, 'But finding suitable spells is troublesome, especially for me. I feel that I lack the core materials needed for these new kinds of attacks.'
Noah had been able to recreate the Third Form of his previous martial art because he had a series of spells that met its requirements. However, doing the same for multiple attacks was hard since he would have to invent both forms and spells from scratch at some point.
'I can only focus on what I already have now,' Noah concluded in his mind, 'This project will have to wait for the end of the war.'
The war continued while he was busy healing. Even the four organizations involved couldn't fight too often, but there was at least a battle every two months.
The three invading factions would mostly fight separately and focus on different cities. Still, there were times when the armies had to join their forces to conquest specific locations that had troublesome defensive measures.
The Hive didn't suffer such heavy losses in the following battles anymore. It was rare for rank 5 cultivators to lose their control and involve the weaker troops. The events with Peaceful Storms had been a case, and it was mostly Noah's fault that he had decided to go all out.
The conquest of the territories under the control of the Empire proceeded slowly since the cities started to feature more defensive measures as the three armies reached for the north-eastern coast. Also, the injuries suffered by the heroic cultivators took time to heal, and the three invaders didn't want to deploy all their assets in that war.
It would be too easy for one of the nations to double-cross its allies, so the invading forces maintained stable defenses in their respective domains.
Noah came out of his cave ten months after his battle against Peaceful Storm. His body and the Demonic Sword had been fine for a while by then, but there wasn't any fight in that period, so he simply continued to cultivate until Elder Julia summoned him.
After a year of battles, the Empire had lost its control over the central areas of the new continent. Everything was going smoothly from the invaders' side, but the first real struggles appeared once they reached the valuable territories of their enemy.
The Council had fought its last battle over a barren mountain chain where the Empire had built a series of castles that worked as a formation. The outcome of that fight had been the total defeat of the forces of the Papral nation, with only its rank 5 Elders managing to escape the battlefield.
Generally speaking, such a loss would force an organization to reorganize and prepare a strategy. Still, the Council had decided to contact its allies as soon as its Elders returned home.
The defenses in that area were too powerful, which meant that they had to protect something precious!
The Elbas family and the Hive had agreed with that hypothesis. They had moved the focus of the war on that territory, uniting their forces again to form a massive army.
Noah had initially been surprised to see so many heroic assets deployed on a single battlefield. Still, he understood the reason behind the eagerness of the three forces when he reached the barren mountains.
The castles built on the mountain peaks seemed extremely dangerous, but none of the heroic assets hovering at some distance in the sky cared about them. Their attention was on the ancient aura radiated from somewhere in at the center of that mountain chain.
'Traces left by divine beings!' Noah shouted in his mind when he sensed that aura. He understood now that the Council had found one of the most valuable territories of the Empire during its advance, and it didn't hesitate to ask for its allies' help to seize it.
Any organization would generally try to conquer such an area by itself, but the Council knew that it couldn't defeat those defenses by itself. It needed its allies to break through one of the most protected areas in the entirety of the new continent.