【Year twenty-one — you consume the fox demon’s beast core. The need for breathing exercises is eliminated, cultivation efficiency increases.】
【Year twenty-three — you swallow the flood dragon’s core again, restoring depleted reserves.】
【Year twenty-four — you comprehend: Jade Liquid · Flood Dragon’s Power.】
【Year twenty-seven — the jade dew across all twelve major apertures pours forth, converging in the qi sea, fragrant as the finest elixir… You successfully cross into early Jade Liquid Realm. Thunder-Wind Solar-Fusion Scripture: Minor Mastery.】
【Remaining Personal Lifespan: 146 years】
【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 1,473 years】
Raw, unrefined beast cores and demon cores — and they’d still cut the required time in half.
Shen Yi’s thoughts drifted for a moment.
He exhaled slowly, closed his eyes — and a pool of golden jade liquid appeared naturally in his inner vision.
Slightly viscous, gathered together, luminous. Like the finest imaginable nectar. Something in it pulled at him.
Above the liquid, countless threads of deep crimson wove together into a dense net, covering everything beneath. The heat was slow and massive, pressing down like the atmosphere of a furnace — weighty, oppressive, like the interior of purgatory itself.
“…”
The twelve major apertures drew the breath of heaven and earth in without pause, channeled it through the furnace, and let it fall as jade dew.
He opened his eyes.
He reached for the jade liquid and felt the change immediately. The density of it was incomparable to before. The same unit of time now moved ten times what it had.
Applied to technique, that was real, concrete killing power.
“Does this one also have something to do with Jade Liquid Realm?”
He reached for the last demon core, and then stopped.
He looked at his hand with surprise.
That sense of his own body being unfamiliar — he’d felt it once before, at the moment of achieving mortal peak. It had taken half an hour to adjust back then.
He remembered something and opened the panel quickly.
【Jade Liquid · Flood Dragon’s Power: Wield the divine strength of a flood dragon within a mortal body.】
Short. Extremely short.
And it made his breathing go unsteady.
That flood dragon had been ten zhang of body at full size. Even badly injured, it had absorbed nine waves of Heavenly Astral Blood-Corruption before finally going down. Calling it able to turn rivers and overturn seas might be an overstatement — but when it had torn through the Golden Sun’s protective light with a casual grip, it hadn’t even changed expression.
And now that vast power was dormant inside a human frame.
The Jingang School’s method used qi to refine the body to its limit — the peak of what flesh and blood could become at the same cultivation level. But against something born with innate divine ability — inherent, not trained — even that felt like it had met its superior.
“Genuinely absurd.”
Shen Yi flexed his fingers, picked up the last demon core with the careful, slightly trembling attention of someone trying not to drop something precious, and placed it in his mouth.
Fully mastering this much strength would take days, not hours.
Lifespan began flowing into the Thunder-Wind Solar-Fusion Scripture again. The furnace was built. What remained was time.
【Year one — you consume the fish demon’s inner core. Cultivation advances.】
【Year four — the qi sea fills to near-overflow. The inner core’s demonic energy is spent. No talent comprehended, but under the influence of that demonic energy, your affinity with water increases.】
【Year six — jade dew overflows, beginning to permeate the meridians. Your meridians can now hold several times what they held before. You break through to mid-Jade Liquid Realm. Thunder-Wind Solar-Fusion Scripture: Minor Mastery.】
From this point, the text scrolling past made Shen Yi’s lips press together in a complicated way.
Compared to demon beast cores and heaven-and-earth treasures, the natural world was simply stingy to a degree that offended him. Whether herb, demon, or humanity — nominally the supreme beings of creation — the qi available from any of them was apparently identical.
【Year seventy-nine — you draw from heaven and earth without rest, hoping for more jade dew to steep your bones.】
【Year two hundred and three — your bones, steeped in jade dew over many years, grow increasingly translucent. Jade bones, formed by heaven — you step into late Jade Liquid Realm. Thunder-Wind Solar-Fusion Scripture: Major Mastery.】
【Year three hundred and twenty-six — jade dew spreads toward the organs. Your foundations deepen. Your entire body resembles a rare medicine — a sweet fragrance radiates from you.】
【Year five hundred and eighty-two — until even the blood carries glints of gold. Something ignites in your eyes, then fades quickly. You can finally suppress your qi signature entirely, cutting off a demon’s ability to sense you. You are no longer a precious medicine to be sought. You are a blade waiting inside a sheath.】
【Jade Liquid Realm — Perfection.】
【Remaining Personal Lifespan: 296 years】
【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 891 years】
Shen Yi closed his hand, closed his eyes.
He looked inward.
Inside the great prison woven from countless deep-crimson meridian threads, brilliant gold occupied every corner of his vision.
It was no longer contained. It moved freely throughout the entire body.
Jade bones. Luminous organs. Blood carrying golden light — like a roaring river, the sound of it constant and enormous.
Faced with an image this overwhelming—
He forgot, temporarily, how much that had cost him.
When he opened his eyes, the gold still held him, reluctant to release.
“Hah.“
He steadied his breathing and forced his thoughts back to earth.
After an advance this large, some degree of mental disturbance was inevitable.
All that demon-slaying. Coming to the Division.
Finally, the returns.
And the returns were difficult to find fault with.
This body was not what it had been.
Nearly three hundred years of personal lifespan. Something approaching demon territory.
He looked at the number with a slight tilt of his head.
Never mind a second life — this was enough for three.
Starting today, he could find a comfortable place and do nothing and still live long enough to grow genuinely tired of existing.
But having seen that inner image—
How could he settle for ordinary after that?
He wanted to push higher. He also wanted to die quietly of old age. Both at once — which meant the means of protecting himself were non-negotiable.
He looked at the panel’s list.
【Current Martial Arts】
Bone-Crushing Grapple — Major Mastery
Threshold · White Ape Dancing with the Python — Perfection
Jade Liquid · Heavenly Astral Blood-Corruption — Perfection
Jade Liquid · Meridian-Severing Dragon Capture — Perfection
Jade Liquid · Devouring Wolf Demon-Slayer — Perfection
Jade Liquid · Golden Sun Eight Treasures Mysterious Body, Volume One — Perfection
He went through them all.
The Shuiyun Township experience had given him a clearer sense of each technique’s strengths and weaknesses.
Erhei — the dark blade — was exceptional. Derived step by step through the panel, it cut through demon flesh with ease, replenished his strength as it worked, had a secondary healing effect. Against large-bodied demons it struggled somewhat.
The Meridian-Severing Dragon Capture could rapidly strip a target of their capacity to resist — but it required close-range physical engagement, which carried real risk.
The Heavenly Astral Blood-Corruption was solid, just expensive.
After running through them, his gaze settled on two: the Thunder-Wind Solar-Fusion Scripture, and the Golden Sun Eight Treasures Mysterious Body.
The first had a path toward Condensate Realm internal arts — probably.
He thought about his own insight, and felt less than certain.
The second came from Zhang Tuhu. At Perfection, it just barely pushed past the Jade Liquid threshold in terms of physical protection — extraordinary in the Threshold Realm, but the protective light it generated was no longer particularly useful at his current level.
He’d been reluctant to spend demon lifespan on it further.
But acquiring the Flood Dragon’s Power had made him reconsider.
If he was going to trade blows with demons at close range, there was simply no substitute for being difficult to damage.
(End of Chapter)