“Take as much time as you need. After all, you’ve only spent a little to complete the first step.” After saying these words, Jekyll returned to where he previously sat, looking in Valyr’s direction as he watched the man go through the process of completing the second step.

“Haah…” Looking at Jekyll for a bit to see if the man would tell him anything else, Valyr eventually returned his focus to the row of training dummies before him, letting out a faint sigh as he recalled the words Jekyll had mentioned regarding the second step. “First is to skip the discernment part and head straight to the discovering part.”𝒐𝚟𝑳𝐞xt.𝓬𝑜𝑚

“In other words, I have to find a way to expedite the process of discernment in a way that I would be able to discover more weak spots in the same amount of time.” Muttering these words to himself, Valyr thought about how he was going to go about doing so.

Fortunately, it did not take long for him to obtain his answer, bitterly smiling as he thought to himself, ‘There’s no way to go about it other than to do it over and over again.’

“Huuu…” With the thought in mind, Valyr activated the hyperfocus ability of Gambler’s Discerning Eyes, returning his vision back to one where he would be able to discover the imperfections that the training dummies inherently had.

Just like before, he gradually weaved through the various layers of imperfections on the training dummy in order to eventually discover one of its weak spots. However, unlike before, he took note of the imperfections that he discovered, as well as the ones that were similar among them.

With that, he wondered if omitting them would allow him to expedite the process, deciding to test it out on the training dummy beside the one he had just identified.

Whoosh!

Once more, he weaved through the layers of imperfections on the new training dummy to find its weak spots. Though, this time around, he began to attempt omit discerning some of the imperfections in the process, hoping that he would discover the weak spot faster.

Unfortunately, instead of taking less time to discover the weak spot, he took more time to discover it, having to find imperfections that were more glaringly obvious before even being able to pinpoint the location of the weak spot.

Though the result of his first attempt at omitting part of the discernment process was considered a failure, Valyr did not give up, deciding to try the idea once more on the other training dummies that made up the row.

One by one, he would try a different approach in omitting part of the discernment process, though the core of it still remained more or less similar to the first idea he originally had. Surprisingly, he began to make a bit of progress with this approach, gradually finding more and more areas where he could omit the discernment process and arrive at the weak spot earlier.

“Hmm… I feel like I was omitting more than I could during my first attempt, hence why it took longer to discover the weak spot compared to the attempt that had no omission at all.” Gaining more and more information on how he could optimize the discernment process, Valyr decided to time his next attempt at finding the weak spot, which now unsurprisingly took a considerably lower amount of time to discover.

Briefly taking delight in the fact that his thought process was finally heading in the right direction, Valyr swiftly returned to work, knowing that there was still a long way to go before he would be able to find multiple weak spots within the same amount of time it originally took him to find a single one.

“I would probably need to reduce the time for discernment down to around a fifth or a sixth of what it originally was before I could proceed onto attempts involving the search for vital spots,” said Valyr to himself, only for him to continue whittling down the time it took for him to discover weak spots.

In what originally took him a couple of minutes to discern, Valyr was eventually able to reduce the time down to a minute. Then, after taking a bit more time, he began to take less than a minute, even reaching the 30 second mark at some point.

Unknowingly, four hours had passed since Valyr began his quest for greater efficiency.

…

With how much time had passed since Valyr began, the young man had finally gotten a thorough idea of what imperfections he could omit and what he couldn’t, staring at the training dummy before him with a solemn gaze.

Whoosh!

“The metal shard at the back of the training dummy.” Within a few seconds, Valyr swiftly went through the discernment process and found one of the dummy’s weak spot, letting out a long sigh of relief as he could finally move onto the next part of the second step.

Searching through the weak spots to find the vital spot.

“Huuu…” Letting out a long and drawn-out sigh to calm his nerves down, Valyr pushed the hyperfocus ability of Gambler’s Discerning Eyes to its limits once more, relying on the information he had gathered thus far to find a weak spot within a few seconds.

However, unlike before, where he would move onto another training dummy to find its weak spot, his eyes remained affixed on the current training dummy, moving his attention away from the dark red circle he had discovered for now as he aimed to make more dark red circles appear within his vision.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

With how much Valyr had refined his discernment process, it did not take long for the second weak spot to appear within the young man’s field of vision… then the third… the fourth… the fifth…

In just a couple of minutes, over a dozen weak spots were quickly discovered by Valyr on the training dummy before him, giving him the feeling that making a move against even one of those would inflict a great amount of damage on the training dummy.

“Haah…” Taking yet another deep breath to not let his nerves get the better of him, Valyr then used the weak spots he had discovered to find the weak spot that had more importance amongst the others, the vital spot Jekyll had mentioned earlier.

“Not that one… not that one either…” Combing through the weak spots one by one, Valyr gradually began to notice that the weak spots could actually be classified into three categories: weak spots that only affected the surface-level imperfections, weak spots that also affected another weak spot, and weak spots that affected multiple weak spots.

Finally knowing what he had to look for, Valyr continued discovering more and more weak spots on training dummy, keeping an eye for weak spots that fell under the third category he had discovered.

Fortunately, after a few more minutes of intense searching, the young man had found the weak spot he was looking for, its marking within his vision now a pitch-black circle.

Ding!

You have gained insights on using ‘Gambler’s Discerning Eyes’ to a higher degree of proficiency.

The skill ‘Gambler’s Discerning Eyes’ has shown signs of awakening.