【Year one — you open the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art and begin feeling out the meaning within it word by word. You are no longer the complete outsider you were when you first encountered martial arts. Years of cultivation have given you your own understanding.】
【Year two — you nod thoughtfully and decide to skip the parts you can’t follow, planning to work backward from the later explanations to make sense of the earlier content. You feel quietly pleased with your own cleverness, and turn to the second page.】
“…”
Watching the notifications pass, Shen Yi finally gave up any remaining hope.
Demon lifespan wasn’t really the main problem — killing a few more demons would always make up the deficit. What was genuinely difficult was the accumulated negative emotion from years of failed progress inside the panel, which would come rushing out all at once when the derivation ended.
The harder the technique, the stronger this was.
Especially during stretches of no progress — the density of despair was enough to feel like drowning.
【Year 234 — your mind is entirely occupied by boundless confusion. You begin to question whether you’re suited for martial cultivation at all. No — you decide the content in this book has nothing to do with martial cultivation. You are clearly a genius at body refinement. Why are you wasting time on something this useless.】
Shen Yi stopped feeding demon lifespan in.
He closed his eyes and worked through the nausea that had come with the notifications, waited for the feeling to settle, and then looked at the panel again.
Over two hundred years. In exchange for a head full of question marks.
He was about to start again when a dark-robed figure stepped into the courtyard.
“General Jiang — you’re here?” Jiang Chengyun jumped to his feet. He’d assumed she would stay at the royal estate at least one night — and even if she came back to the War Temple, Jiang Qiulan was a Demon Suppression General. She should be in the right-hand offices.
Jiang Qiulan’s manner was as even as always. “The Princess is planning a banquet to celebrate the prince. She’d like to invite both of you. Tomorrow evening — the Prince of Ji will be back at the estate by then.”
Jiang Chengyun’s expression shifted slightly. “The Princess is inviting us to a banquet? Including me?”
The surprise was clearly about the second part. The royal household wanting to build a connection with General Shen was entirely expected — but what reason would they have to notice an ordinary silver-bell demon-hunter?
Jiang Qiulan shook her head. “Not the Princess. The prince.”
She glanced sideways at Shen Yi as she said it.
Jiang Chengyun still couldn’t quite follow the logic, and was about to ask — but Jiang Qiulan had already stepped into the room and sat across from the young man.
“If there’s anything you don’t understand, you can ask me.” She had trained the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art herself.
“…”
Shen Yi caught up with the obvious in the same moment. He’d grown so accustomed to deriving demonic techniques that he’d nearly forgotten the greatest advantage of human martial arts.
This was a path other people had already walked. He didn’t have to feel his way from the beginning.
And a practitioner who had gone ahead of him was sitting right there.
He stopped standing on ceremony immediately. He organized the confusion in his mind into specific questions, carefully, and then began asking.
Jiang Qiulan listened quietly as Shen Yi worked through them. After half an incense stick’s worth of time with no sign of him stopping, something unusual finally moved through those clear eyes.
She had only been at the estate for a few hours. Not months.
And he already had something to say about the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art.
What kind of comprehension speed was this — no wonder he’d been able to learn Jiang Yuanhua’s prized Jade Liquid technique in a matter of days.
“That should be most of it.” Shen Yi paused, took the cup of tea Jiang Chengyun had been holding out, and let the warmth sit in his throat for a moment.
Despite having organized his thoughts in advance, the questions were still disorderly. Jiang Qiulan listened once without interruption, considered briefly, then picked up the technique manuscript. Slender pale fingers moved to the pages as she went through it with him, word by word.
Jiang Chengyun refilled both cups, his expression somewhat lost.
Who am I. Where am I. What are they talking about.
On reflection, he decided to just nod along — not nodding would look odd.
With that settled, he nodded at intervals, manufacturing a look of deep absorption.
“Could you make that a little more specific?” Shen Yi looked up.
If the original Heaven-Devouring Art was a pile of iron nails with nowhere to take hold — even having this woman chew through it first and pass it along, what he was receiving was still iron shavings. Hard to swallow.
“I—” Something that was nearly discomfort crossed Jiang Qiulan’s fine features.
“Never mind. Please continue.” Shen Yi read that she’d done her best, and that he simply wasn’t keeping pace. But iron shavings were still more manageable than iron nails.
He committed everything she’d explained to memory. “Let me work with it a little.”
Worried he’d forget, he opened the panel quickly and started feeding lifespan in.
Watching the young man fall into concentrated thought, Jiang Qiulan went quiet and stopped interfering.
About every cup of tea’s worth of time, Shen Yi would surface from the thought, raise a new question, and go back under.
Each time, something surprised moved through Jiang Qiulan’s mind. The speed of his understanding could only be called frightening.
Some of his questions were remarkably elementary — but a brief explanation was all it took, and in a moment’s reflection, he was drawing out implications she hadn’t explicitly stated.
This was exactly what it looked like to have no foundational cultivation knowledge whatsoever, and be pushing through entirely on raw comprehension.
She watched his face quietly, genuinely curious what kind of mind could be sharp enough to make even her feel, very slightly, inadequate.
Time passed.
The last time Shen Yi came back to himself, a flash of something clear moved through the black eyes.
【Year 679 — you have finally fully grasped the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art. You also understand at last what distinguishes the Heaven-Devouring inner core this method produces from an ordinary inner core — an extraordinary difference. You begin attempting to condense—】
Jiang Chengyun had just finished brewing a new pot of tea when he noticed Jiang Qiulan slowly rise.
“General Jiang — are you stopping?”
She looked at the young man with a somewhat layered expression, her gaze resting briefly on the dark blade at his waist, then moved outward to look at the sky. Something quiet and reflective was in her eyes.
According to the case records — he had killed the ape demon in Baiyun County, and brought back an old friend’s blade.
She had never set foot in Yangyang Prefecture. Not out of fear of those Threshold-stage small demons — only because she hadn’t wanted to let certain things become settled past.
The pace that never dared to stop was chasing a guilt that lived at the bottom of the heart.
If she had tried just a little harder, back then—
Until Shen Yi appeared in the ruined temple on Xitai Mountain, and she’d felt, for a brief moment, something unclench. Like an old friend had come back carrying a familiar blade and fallen into step beside her.
But what she was looking at right now had finally made something clear.
Shen Yi wasn’t a substitute for anyone. Like the dark blade that was about to be replaced — Qingzhou couldn’t hold someone with this kind of talent, and she herself still had to keep moving.
“…”
Jiang Qiulan pulled her clear gaze back. Her voice was quiet.
“When you’ve received your new weapon — would you give me that blade?”
Shen Yi’s expression showed brief puzzlement.
She had helped him considerably — tutored him through this, and before that sent three Condensate Perfection demon lords to land at his feet. He didn’t have any attachment to a blade from a Threshold-stage demon. He simply didn’t understand what a core-nurturing stage practitioner would want with something like that.
“I’d like to keep it as a memento.” She seemed to have never asked anyone for anything. Seeing the young man’s uncertain expression, she added the explanation.
Crack—
The teapot in Jiang Chengyun’s hand hit the floor.
He stared, at a complete loss, then something urgent flared in his eyes.
How could this be — two exceptional practitioners like this, instead of focusing on surpassing the old guard, now getting into this sort of thing?! What are they thinking!
(End of Chapter)