After Weiss was done taking care of her duties as the lord of the territory, next she focused on the most important task that she had in her hands. And that task was for her become even stronger as a knight.
To become an official knight, one needed to condense a special organ called the "Life Core" or "Life Seed". This life core was the source of a knight's superhuman strength and abilities.
Depending on the secret arts used to create and develop the Life Core, it could strengthen different attributes of a person. There were a total of six attributes which were -
"Strength representing the physical strength"
"Vitality representing how much beating one could take"
"Endurance representing how much stamina one had"
"Agility representing how fast a person was in both body and mind"
"Dexterity representing how flexible ones body was"
And finally "Perception representing how strong a person's senses were".
The Heavy Mountain secret art of the Souran family was a technique that mostly strengthened the strength attribute of a knight and gave a minor boost to other attributes like endurance and vitality. It did not boost agility, dexterity or perception of a knight in any way.
With her small structure and somewhat weak frame, Weiss was not very strong physically. So this strength specialised secret art was not very suitable for her.
The nameless secret art that she had created by her own mostly focused on agility and perception while giving a minor boost to the dexterity stat.
It gave only the minimal amount of boost to the three remaining attributes of strength, endurance and vitality. So it was more suitable for her relatively weak body.
Even with a very limited amount of information available to her, the secret art that Weiss had came up with was perfectly suited for her and was also of a higher quality than even the treasure of the Souran family, the Heavy Mountain Secret Art.
It gave boost to all the attributes no matter how insignificant the boost was while the Heavy Mountain secret art did not give any boosts to half of the attributes at all.
Not only that but strength focused secret arts were the most commonly found ones too. So the superiority of Weiss's self made secret art was clear.
...
At first while starting out as an apprentice knight, a person needed to train these six attributes continuously with the use of the secret art to grasp the existence of their life force.
For an average person, this step might a few years. Geniuses could complete this step much sooner.
When someone had finally managed to grasp the existence of the life force in their body, then that person would become a senior apprentice knight.
After becoming a senior apprentice knight, one needed to continue training their body with the secret art while at the same time, they also needed to take control over their scattered life force.
When someone was able to control at least over 80 percent of the life force in their body, that person would reach the peak of the apprentice knight stage and would have the qualification to try to break through to the official knight stage.
This process could take someone from a few years to even a few decades.
Weiss's father, Baron Souran, did not have much talent as a knight so he took almost 25 years of training to barely control his life force and he even needed an expensive special medicine's help to accomplish it.
But even with the medicine, he was only able to control just barely over 80 percent of his total life force. Which was the worst kind of result.
While on the other hand, Weiss only needed two years to control not just 80 percent but full 100 percent of her life force.
And she had managed to do that while developing her own makeshift technique. Sometimes, difference between humans could be worse than the difference between humans and dogs.
But even after controlling the life force, the process of becoming an official knight was not easy.
To become an official knight, a peak knight apprentice needed to condense their life force to create their life core or life seed. This process was very dangerous and failing in this step had very dire consequences.
After failing in this step, at best outcome one could hope was to be critically injured and at worse one might even directly die.
There were not an insignificant amount of peak level knights who had died while trying to condense their life core.
This fact was something that Weiss was not aware of. When she was condensing her life force into a life core, the process was very easy and straightforward for her.
The whole process was slightly painful but that degree of pain was nothing to Weiss. Other than that, she had not faced any other difficulties.
The previous baron's diary had mentioned how difficult his own breakthrough was and how other apprentice knights feared this step the most.
But Weiss's own experience in this matter was completely different from the rest of the knights.
She only needed one hour to grasp the existence of the life force. Then she had started to control that life force while continuing to create her own secret art.
This process had lasted for two years. During that time, almost 80 percent of the time Weiss had spend trying to develop a powerful secret art that was suitable for her.
So the amount of time that Weiss had spent training with the secret skill was not much. But still she had managed to make a breakthrough to the official knight realm. This showed how insanely talented she was in the path of a knight.
Finally, she also had also not felt any danger during the life core condensation process. She was in constant pain while the life force was gathering at a single point but that was not a big deal to her.
Some of the experiences written in the baron's diary had mentioned instability in the newly formed core and some of the cores had even exploded at the very last moment.
But Weiss had not faced this situation at all. Her core was perfectly stable without a single fluctuations for the whole process. That showed that her foundation was very solid and strong.