“Not especially” — as Shen Yi said it, he found he genuinely meant it, without a word of pretense.
“That’s exactly what I don’t understand.”
Senior Brother Zhu looked away, settled himself back onto the skeleton, and watched Shen Yi quietly. “You actually listened.”
When he’d offered that thread of white mist just now, Shen Yi had actually listened to the wandering wills within it with real attention — brow furrowed, but present from beginning to end.
That same white mist, in Zhu Jue’s own ears, had always sounded like meaningless chirping.
“…”
Remarkable talent paired with insufficient heart; and those who’d clawed their way up step by step usually lacked the talent — and were running short on lifespan. Whichever way you looked at it, it was a headache — a knot with no clear way to untie it.
No wonder Great Qian had only ever produced thirteen Spirit-Transformation cultivators across its entire history.
Shen Yi put the Lion-Camel slip back on the shelf.
So as not to draw attention, he kept the remaining slip in his hand.
The loft was somewhat cramped, but also very quiet.
He picked another corner and sat down.
His own situation, when he’d called it “not especially,” was, in truth, only marginally better than this skeleton-wearing senior brother’s — after all, he’d only been in this world for under a year, and had witnessed plenty of hardship, but as for how deep his understanding of it actually went…
Compared to those Demon Suppression Division officers who’d fought their way up from the very bottom, rung by bloody rung, he was still a long way short.
But his advantage was time. As long as the road wasn’t sealed off entirely, he’d work his way through it eventually.
Shen Yi looked at the panel.
【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 74,803 years】
This senior brother likely had two or three thousand years at most. He himself had more than twenty times that.
Technique in hand, resources not lacking.
If he still couldn’t break through with all that, he might as well find a block of tofu and end it.
But before any of that.
“Senior Brother — the first line of the Arhat Golden Body Method. What does it mean?”
Shen Yi had plenty of banked demon lifespan to work with, but there was no sense wasting it when there was a ready-made teacher sitting right in front of him.
“…”
Senior Brother Zhu was quiet for a moment, confirming this junior brother wasn’t making fun of him.
He rose and dragged a chest out from the corner, lifting out and blowing the dust from each item inside one by one.
Each one was covered in the same text, copied again and again — the handwriting going from neat to scrawling, until toward the end it looked barely human.
He’d lost count of how many times he’d copied out the Arhat Golden Body Method alone. If he hadn’t burned them whenever the box got full, the accumulated pile might have filled the War Temple itself.
He picked out the one with the clearest writing.
Sitting down beside Shen Yi, he began going through it word by word in a quiet voice.
Shen Yi’s comprehension was nothing special, but with his spiritual sense bolstering it, his memory was formidable. He made no effort to understand as he went — just committed it all to rote memory.
The understanding could be left to the version of himself inside the panel’s derivation.
“Still not out yet?”
Several divine spirits drifted back and forth through the armory.
Every now and then a glance drifted toward the loft in the corner.
The Deputy Inspector with the surname Shen had been in there two or three days now, and Senior Brother Zhu hadn’t come out either.
“What does that mean?”
A few of them murmured among themselves. The answer wasn’t hard to reach — they just couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe it.
In that little loft, what else was there to do besides cultivate a Golden Body method?
But—
The minimum threshold for cultivating a Golden Body method was the upper tier of Martial Immortal.
Shen Yi had only joined the War Temple about a month ago, and more than twenty of those days had been spent inspecting Song Prefecture.
Where had he found the time to absorb accumulated faith?
“Let me tell you something…”
One of the younger-looking divine spirits dropped its voice even further. “The whole reason Senior Brother Wu values Shen Yi so highly is because he could swallow golden-body qi in an instant — that particular constitution is perfectly suited to cultivating a divine spirit.”
Skipping the most time-consuming part of the process outright.
What remained was using accumulated faith to condense cloud-patterns — something that was purely a matter of talent, and could happen in a single moment of understanding.
“Tch. The road he’s walking — even smoother than Senior Brother Zhu’s back in his day.”
The other divine spirits shook their heads, and it was impossible to tell whether they were admiring the fact or implying something else entirely.
Meanwhile.
Inside the small loft, Senior Brother Zhu had just finished going through the entire Golden Body method. He looked over with a faintly puzzled expression. “Junior Brother, you haven’t said a word this whole time. Does that mean you understood all of it?”
“I prefer to commit it first and work through it alone afterward.”
Shen Yi bowed his hands in thanks. “If questions come up, I’ll come back and ask, Senior Brother.”
Left to puzzle through the method entirely on his own, he’d probably waste decades, maybe centuries of demon lifespan before he understood it… possibly more.
To share the distilled experience of thousands of years without the slightest reservation —
The skeleton senior might look vacant, but that kind of generosity was genuinely rare.
“Alright.”
Senior Brother Zhu gave a small nod, then simply dragged the skeleton over beside Shen Yi, adjusted one of the bony arms back a bit to make sure it wouldn’t be in the way, and settled back down.
No more talk of Golden Body methods. He slipped back into that meditative stillness.
Shen Yi closed his eyes and closed one hand around the Golden Wolf jade token.
He’d thought the thin, sparse accumulated faith remaining would be laughably insufficient — but after what he’d just absorbed and processed, his sense of it had shifted.
Finishing what was left might well be what it meant to begin the Golden Body method.
He drew on his banked demon lifespan and poured it into the Arhat Golden Dharma Form.
【Year 1 — You study this Spirit-Transformation technique, coming to appreciate what it means to transcend. Flesh and blood must inevitably wither; only a golden body endures forever. You have already formed some initial understanding of this method — what remains now is to digest it slowly】
The experience that predecessors had left behind was invaluable.
Especially in a situation like this one — bitter cultivation with no progress to show for it, every single word picked apart to the last stroke in the effort to understand.
Here and now, this senior brother’s thousand-odd years of grueling work had been handed over to Shen Yi, whole.
Whenever the derivation hit an obstacle, he’d stop and ask the senior brother sitting beside him.
The situation was a little like it had been with Jiang Qiulan earlier — except that compared to that woman, this skeleton senior had clearly spent far more time on it, and explained things in considerably more detail.
Detailed enough, in places, that Shen Yi came close to actually understanding it as he listened.
【Year 377 — You have made your way through the full method and achieved a thorough understanding. You begin your first tentative attempt at entry level, drawing on a thread of accumulated faith and examining it with care】
Condensing intangible accumulated faith into a solid golden body.
The process felt somewhat similar to what the Red-Eyed Demon King had done — but in practice, the difference was substantial.
Because what the demon king had condensed was armor and weapons — external objects.
What the Golden Body method was forging was the body one would actually inhabit afterward.
When something was merely an external tool, you didn’t need to worry about what it contained.
But a body saturated with a chaotic tangle of emotions — which divine spirit would dare move into a thing like that and not eventually end up consumed by inner demons, gone off the rails entirely?
【Year 1,800 — You have already digested a great deal of accumulated faith. Your mind is in a state of extreme turmoil; your expression shifts between savage and placid…】
Shen Yi sat with eyes closed, feigning deep contemplation.
Then his whole body gave a sudden, violent twitch, and an overwhelming surge of feeling far more intense than anything he’d experienced before forced its way into his mind.
He opened his eyes sharply, red mist rising in his pupils.
A killing intent so thick it had almost taken on physical form.
Shen Yi turned his head and looked at the skeleton beside him. “…”
(End of Chapter 234)