Time flies like a fleeting shadow; days pass, never to return. A new morning never dawns twice.
Three months had passed since Li Yan returned from the trading city.
On this morning, Li Yan stood in his courtyard, staring blankly at a large ancient ape that was busy watering the spirit field in the corner.
It was now deep winter again. The Year's End was only three days away. But in the Malevolent Spirit Sect, there was basically no difference between the four seasons. Perhaps it was just the climate, or perhaps it was the means of cultivators. There was none of the feeling of the harsh winter from his hometown, let alone the sight of heavy, drifting snow. Li Yan could only discern the changing of the seasons from the leaves of the ink bamboo in the rolling mountains.
In winter, the bamboo leaves were broad and dark in color, almost entirely black, giving a sense of weight and solidity.
In spring, the heavy leaves across the mountains would recede, and tender green bamboo shoots would grow—small, pointed, and fresh with the rain.
When spring gave way to summer, the bamboo leaves would slowly become broad and thick, turning a vibrant green that seemed to drip with color. Often, a small, brightly colored bird would stand on a bamboo branch, extend its thin, sharp beak, and with a gentle peck on a broad leaf, streams of green juice would flow out. It didn't mind the bitter taste at all, hopping continuously on the branch, its beak lightly tapping as it sucked the emerald juice, chirping happily from time to time.
After the autumn wind began to blow, the entire front and back of Little Bamboo Peak would be enveloped in a deep, dark green ocean. One could only see layers of bamboo waves rising and falling, dark waves rolling, completely obscuring any view of the peak itself.
'It's the Year's End again. Father, Mother, Third Brother, Fourth Sister...' Li Yan's thoughts drifted. As the ancient ape by the courtyard wall lifted a large ladle of water, creating streams of crystal-clear arcs, Li Yan felt as if he were standing in the fields again. Father and Third Brother, one guiding the plow and the other pulling, would reach the end of a row and smile at him while wiping away their sweat.
After a long while, the ancient ape finished watering, placed the bucket and ladle by the side of the field, and quickly came to stand before Li Yan. It grinned at him, then stood motionless.
Li Yan snapped out of his trance. Looking at the ancient ape before him, a look of joy slowly appeared in his eyes. This was the very puppet Bai Rou had given him. After returning, Li Yan had spent half a day cultivating the control technique and then began to practice controlling it. As he did so more and more, his control went from clumsy to familiar and smooth. During this process, Li Yan did not discover anything unusual about this puppet, let alone any unexpected findings.
However, when the puppet was restored to its full size, the densely packed Spirit Stone slots inside astonished him—there were as many as eighty.
With a pained heart, Li Yan filled the slots with eighty low-grade Spirit Stones. After practicing his control until he was familiar with it, he took the puppet to a remote spot on the back mountain. He commanded the ancient ape puppet to unleash a full-power attack at a stone wall a hundred zhang away. The puppet simply raised its long arms, crossed its hands, and quickly clenched them into a fist held high. When it reached the highest point above its head, a dazzling white light suddenly erupted from the fist, instantly illuminating the entire world in Li Yan's eyes and forcing him to instinctively close them. The moment he closed and reopened his eyes, the ancient ape puppet brought its clenched fists down from above its head with a fierce chop, as if to split the heavens and earth before it. As it swung down, the dazzling white light shot out from its fist, flying forward in a straight line with ferocious power. The next moment, a scene that left Li Yan dumbfounded occurred. Wherever the white light passed, even the thickest ink bamboo was blasted into flying ash. A deep groove, about four feet deep, appeared in the hard rock of the ground, stretching forward in a straight line, sending mud and stones flying. Finally, the white light struck the towering stone wall a hundred zhang away. Perhaps because of the speed, there was no sound at the moment the white light hit the stone wall.
After a brief silence, a thunderous roar echoed in Li Yan's ears. A ball of white light exploded, blinding him and illuminating the heavens and earth. The shock left the unprepared Li Yan dizzy, his ears ringing. It took him a long while to recover. When he focused his gaze again, he couldn't help but suck in a cold breath. A large hole, about ten zhang wide, had appeared in the stone wall a hundred zhang away, with dust and smoke still billowing from its mouth. Li Yan suppressed his shock and hurried forward to inspect it.
The large hole seemed bottomless, extending deep into the mountain. Li Yan finally used his Divine Sense to check it and found it was over one thousand seven hundred zhang deep. This sent a chill through Li Yan's heart; he never thought an attack from an early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator could be so powerful. From this, it was clear that the Foundation Establishment cultivators he had seen fighting in the Secret Realm were either holding back or had controlled their spiritual energy to such a fine degree that very little was leaked when attacking their opponents.
When Li Yan thought about how easily Gong Chenying and the others had handled attacks even stronger than this, from mid-to-late stage Foundation Establishment cultivators, he once again felt the immense gap between himself and the Foundation Establishment realm. He also felt fortunate to have luckily killed a Foundation Establishment cultivator. If it had been a head-on battle, he probably wouldn't have even had a chance to escape.
After the thunderous roar, tens of thousands of birds took flight from the forest. Not long after, while Li Yan was still staring blankly at the hole, Wei Chituo had already flown over as a streak of light, his face filled with rage. After understanding the situation, Wei Chituo looked at the puppet with envy in his eyes. He circled the ancient ape puppet several times, clicking his tongue in amazement from time to time, and finally left with continuous praise.
Li Yan was overjoyed to see this attack. For him, this was a life-saving measure. But when he inspected the ancient ape puppet, he felt a pang of heartache. The eighty Spirit Stones embedded in the puppet had dimmed by almost half after just one attack. This meant that eighty Spirit Stones were probably only enough for two attacks at most. Li Yan finally accepted this consumption rate with resignation; after all, it was equivalent to a full blow from an early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator. Fortunately, Li Yan was now considered somewhat wealthy and didn't have to worry about these Spirit Stones.
Li Yan had a guess that even this might not be the puppet's full-power attack. He only had low-grade Spirit Stones. What if it were filled with eighty mid-grade Spirit Stones? If that were the case, he didn't know if the puppet's internal formation could withstand the power of eighty mid-grade Spirit Stones. The thought alone made his scalp tingle. He planned to find an opportunity to ask Bai Rou about it.
This was also because Li Yan hadn't reached the Foundation Establishment stage yet and couldn't know for sure what the true power of a full blow from an early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator was.
However, what relieved Li Yan slightly was that as long as it wasn't this kind of attack, for example, just having the puppet do chores, the consumption of the eighty Spirit Stones was almost negligible.
Li Yan stood before the stone wall for a long time, and an idea slowly formed in his mind. He had always been unsure of his own combat strength since stabilizing at the tenth layer of Qi Condensation. He didn't want to test it against his senior brothers and sisters, as that would expose his secrets. Now, with this ancient ape puppet, he could conduct a simple test.
And so, under the control of Li Yan's Divine Sense, the ancient ape puppet attacked him, gradually increasing the intensity. Li Yan didn't dodge, but met the attacks head-on with his Immortal Arts. After consuming nearly three hundred Spirit Stones, Li Yan finally determined that he could take about seventy percent of this puppet's attack power. Eighty percent was already a great strain. When the puppet's attack increased to ninety percent, Li Yan estimated that even if he could take it, he would be severely injured. As for the puppet's full-power attack, Li Yan didn't even dare to imagine it and would never dare to try.
This was his record even with his spiritual energy being about twice that of his peers. From this, the gap between the Foundation Establishment stage and the Qi Condensation stage was clear. It made Li Yan think of how Wen Xinliang and the others had killed those two women in the forest with just a wave of their hands.
In the courtyard, Li Yan looked at the puppet, which was a head and a half taller than him, and his fondness for it grew. For Bai Rou to give away such a puppet was truly generous. As long as its internal formation operated normally, even with broken arms and legs, it would still have combat capability.
'Right now, I should be able to easily take eighty percent of its attack,' Li Yan thought. He had not slacked off in the past three months, traveling back and forth to the Secret Room in the Secret Realm every day, cultivating the Qiongqi Purgatory Art assiduously. When his spiritual energy was exhausted, he would sit cross-legged and cultivate the True Scripture of Gui Water. Li Yan also gradually discovered that these two cultivation methods were surprisingly compatible. Every session of body tempering was an excellent way to hone his physical body and the circulation of his spiritual energy. The spiritual energy cultivated by the True Scripture of Gui Water was extremely pure and abundant, able to support at least three cycles of the Qiongqi Purgatory Art each time. This allowed Li Yan's progress in the art to be extremely rapid. And the True Scripture of Gui Water circulated even more crazily in his empty spiritual energy "tank" after body tempering. Every time his spiritual energy was depleted, the True Scripture of Gui Water would swallow the surrounding spiritual energy like a great whale drinking water, quickly emptying the area. Fortunately, the spiritual energy in the Secret Room was seemingly endless, so Li Yan had no worries. And the spiritual energy cultivated anew would always be a fraction more condensed than before, making Li Yan feel his spiritual energy grow heavier and thicker, as if a small tree had grown roots.
What Li Yan didn't know was that when Gong Chenying and Zhao Min cultivated the first layer of the Qiongqi Purgatory Art, they could only practice once a day and needed to meditate and recover until the next day to continue.
After three months of such diligent cultivation, Li Yan had actually reached the peak of the early stage of the first layer of the Qiongqi Purgatory Art and was faintly showing signs of breaking through to the mid-stage. Now, even if Li Yan just clenched his fist, the air within it would be compressed and let out a series of muffled explosions. Li Yan tried attacking on the back mountain. With a casual sweeping kick, he could easily snap two or three of the arm-thick, tough ink bamboos. This was a clean break, not just bending them.
Previously, when Li Yan was at the seventh layer of Qi Condensation, using the Wind Blade Art on an arm-thick ink bamboo could at most knock it down or break it. The spot hit by the Wind Blade Art would crack and split into strips, making it unable to support the weight of the entire bamboo, causing it to fall to the side. But with his current tenth-layer Qi Condensation cultivation, he should be able to break them with the Wind Blade Art, but only two at most.
As his Qiongqi Purgatory Art advanced, Li Yan's appetite grew daily. He needed to consume two to four Grain Abstinence Pills every day, otherwise the hunger would make him feel like he could devour an entire elephant. Before cultivating the Qiongqi Purgatory Art, one Grain Abstinence Pill could keep him from eating for seven or eight consecutive days.
Although the Grain Abstinence Pills were effective, they tasted like chewing wax. But Li Yan didn't want to go to the Handyman Department up front to ask for food. He estimated that the amount he ate in one meal could equal what everyone there ate in a whole day. That would scare those handymen to death. This also made him wonder if Gong Chenying and Zhao Min were the same when they cultivated the Qiongqi Purgatory Art. But he didn't know that for them, completing one cycle of this art in a day was already their limit. How could they be like him, able to perform three cycles in one go? The consumption was unimaginable.
Such effort brought remarkable results. Li Yan could now easily lift a three-thousand-jin boulder with a shake of his arms, and a thousand-jin boulder could be easily flicked up with the tip of his toe. An ordinary tenth-layer Qi Condensation cultivator's strength was only between seven hundred and one thousand jin.
Clenching his fist, the invisible spiritual energy in the small courtyard grew restless. 'My cultivation has now reached the late stage of the tenth layer of Qi Condensation. Taking eighty percent of this puppet's attack shouldn't be a problem. I might even be able to try taking ninety percent without getting seriously injured, but that would require using the Qiongqi Purgatory Body. Perhaps when I reach the Great Perfection of the Qi Condensation stage, with all my spiritual energy condensed, plus the Qiongqi Purgatory Body, I might be able to barely take the full-power attack of this ancient ape puppet. But after that one blow, I would likely be completely exhausted and have no strength left to fight. It's better if that doesn't happen.'