“What is this place ?”

Awakening suddenly then standing up on the grass of an unknown meadow, the twelve year-old Samael Venus frowned heavily as he recalled that... He has not a single clue about how did he end up in this place.

“What the hell... I should have been in the mountains. Where did Grandpa Ohan go ?“

Feeling... weird to say the least, Samael started examinating his body. Being crazily handsome, with a white and smooth skin, his oddly crimson eyes, androgyn facial lines and his snow white long hairs attached in a horse tail he curiously rather closed his eyes to examin his internal body and what he saw left him fairly dumbstruck.

His body was... too perfect. Not about his beauty, but he was just impossibly too healthy. It was like his body was just made yesterdaw, without a single stain of dirt, impurity. Anybody who eat, drink, absorb outside mana energy to cultivate or simply breath will progressively absorb outer world impurities as he simply live.

It is a normal processus of nature anybody goes through, and it isn't truly a bad thing as the body clean itself on an just as normal way but the thing is that even if it clean itself it isn't at all perfect, as any dirt inhaled from hair or toxins ingested from medecin pills or beast flesh left invisible, microscopic stains which are extremely hard to get rid of on a regular basis and are mostly left as they are until you take a medecine bath and even then stains can't be exactly completely erased.

So it was a good thing having his body cleansed to this degree, even if he doesn't know how such a thing has been made possible. Maybe Grandpa Ohan is pranking him and knocked him out, putted him in an heaven-defying bath then left him amidst of nowhere for training... Yeah, that sounds possible.

Continuing his internal investigation he noticed with joy that unknowingly that he also broke through ! 8th heavenstage of the Body Transcending Realm !

“Sure thing... This should have been the ultimate bath in existence.”

According to what his Grandpa taught him, cultivation is separed in three major tiers : The Mortal realms, from the Body Transcending Realm till the Stellar Phenomenon Realm, the Celestial realms from the Ascended Samsara Realm till the Stellar Evolution Realm, then even above, the God realms. It may be infinitely far from him right now, so much that he can't even imagine how powerful one must be at those levels but as his Grandpa said, having knowledge never hurt a bird.

The Body Transcending Realm is the first realm one has to go through on the cultivation path. As a mortal and uncultivated body is utterly weak and won't be able to support the power a Celestial later have, it needs to be improved first through the Body Transcending Realm.

In this realm one must choose at least three up to nine out of the fourteen cultivable parts of the human body. Each body part will be equal to a heavenstage in the Body Transcending Realm, which will be developped according to the Body Art practiced by the cultivator. Bodies will then be rated as by tiers, according to the number of parts improved : A 3rd Body Tier will be a body with three parts evolved. Samael, as a 8th heavenstage Body Transcending Realm practitioner has currently a 8th Tier Body.

His Grandpa also taught him about the Body Arts, being one of the most important things regarding cultivation. If you look at the cultivation path like and endless road you are stepping in, the Body Art will be like a marked map showing you where to go at every moment and telling you what to do here and there.

They are divided in five major tiers : the Mortal Body Arts, Immortal Body Arts, Earthen Body Arts, Heavenly Body Arts and Divine Body Arts.

Mortal Body Arts are so rubbish that according to his grand father he will likely never come by with them. They are the lowest type of Body Arts and have an hard time to even raise someone to the Connecting Universe Realm, maybe Stellar Phenomenon at most. They are mostly practiced by the lower realm practitioners, playing a huge role in why they hardly ever ascend to the Outer World as one has to be in the Ascended Samsara Realm to freely left his realm. There are other reasons though.

Immortal Body Arts are a bit better, as they can succesfully raise someone to above the Exalted Samsara Realm, and Earthen and Heavenly Body are where Body Arts begin to be decent, even though his grandfather wouldn't accept him practicing something any lower than a Divine Body Art, the creme of the top.

As a Body Art need to be practiced from the very start of cultivation, Samael naturally practice one. The thing is that he doesn't even know what he is practicing ! His Grandpa taught him that the vast majority of the Body Arts are chosen by the family, the master or the practitioner himself and are learnt via the scroll on which it is recorded on.

But some peoples, who have a great ancestry are also sometime given Body Arts by their blood, or to be exact, their bloodline. This is usually happening at the Bloodline Awakening Realm and isn't actually convenient, as one would have to restart cultivating from the very beginning if his practiced Body Art isn't compatible with his bloodly obtained Art but at least it helps the family retrieve it for later generation and is usually a rare event worth celebration if this Body Art hadn't been retrieved by someone else before.

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Sometimes however the bloodline may be a bit awakened just enough right before the Bloodline Awakening Realm to transmit the first two grades of the said Body Art to help the practitioner start practice it from the very start. His Granpa though that it is most likely what happened to him.

But there's a sure thing Samael know of, having read a few Divine and Heavenly Arts by his grand father, it is that the Body Art he is practicing is surely a Divine one without a doubt. Heavenly Arts most of the time require a 8th or 9th Body Tier at the Body Transcending Realm whilst Divine Arts do always require a 9th Body Tier, but there's also a fair gap in the quality of this improvement. The Body Art he is practicing not only require 9 stages at the Body Transcending Realm, but also involve a quality only Divine Body Arts can compare to, and even above some of them.

Samael already improved his bones, muscles, skin, blood, veins, stomach, lungs and only has his eyes and brain to improve left which are also the hardest parts. At the Body Transcending Realm one would have to be extremely meticulous and careful at carving the complex mana patterns on his body, and the higher the tier of his Body Art is, the more complex are difficult it will be. It's been three years since Samael started practicing cultivation, from nine years old to twelve years but he is only at the 8th heavenstage of the Body Transcending Realm. If an ordinary clansman from an Earthen or Heavenly clan from an upper realm would would look at him, he would say that this is fairly slow as at this age most of the well nurtured practitioners would be at the early to mid stages of the Energy Merging Realm but it would be the case practicing a good Earthen or normal grade Heavenly Body Art. Nowhere near the application required to build a Divine Body Art foundation so he doesn't care much about it.

Finally exiting his meditating state, Samael started pondering at what is he going to do now. As he looked around him he could only see a vast meadow of grass behind him, and a small forest followed by a range of mountain ahead of him. Those mountains void of snow doesn't really look alike those he used to go when he lived with his grand father and the so thin concentration of mana in the atmosphere led him to think that he is not even in the same realm they used to be. This should be an ordinary realm at most, maybe even a lower realm.

“Is that a sort of trial...?”

Samael started sighing, a bit depressed. Whilst is it true that the massive mana concentration from an upper or a galaxy realm weren't at all necessary in the Body Transcending Realm, it remains something enjoyable. Being in this sort of place makes him feel like not having enough air to breath, a quite hateful feeling.

“I'm so hungry...”

Curiously he also noticed that saying that he has an entirely pure body wasn't an exageration at all. He was so pure that even his stomach was devoid of the single gram of food, making him feel like eating an entire cow.

“Let's head to the forest first. We may find a beast to hunt on the way.”

As he entered the forest, walking on a fairly slow pace he took his time observing and studying his environment he noticed a few additional things. The forest was a bit noisy compared to the Galaxy Realm in which he used to be, which means that there's a lot more ordinary creatures and rank 1 beasts. That confirms the fact that again he is in a way lower realm that the one he used to be, and the forest is a lot less dangerous.

“At least grandpa isn't heartless enough to drop me in a place a lot beyond my current level...”

This is also why he dared enter the forest like that. It was common thing in Galaxy Realms to see rank 14 or even 15 on low grade forests, which would be equal to death sentence for him. At least rank 1 beast were equal to him, a Body Transcending Realm practitioner, and he wouldn't be afraid of rank 2 beast if he had a fine weapon. Unfortunately, he didn't even have one.

“God damn it... I don't even have shoes for fuck sake !”

He only has a just as white shirt and a bit skinny pant, neither good for protection nor descretion.

“At least skin was one of the organs I've upgraded, otherwise I wouldn't be able walk as carelessly as I do.”

He suddenly stopped thinking of his lack of clothes when he heard the sound of a cracking woodbranch. He raised his head towards to direction where he head the noise to see a boar eating a brown champignon, unaware of his presence.

“Good. A low-grade rank 1 beast, this will be easy.”

Low-grade beasts of a rank means that they are equal to the early stage of the equal realm of a cultivator. A rank 1 low-grade beast is basicly no stronger than a 3rd heavenstage Body Transcending Realm practitioner, an easy target for a 8th heavenstage cultivator like him.

Approaching the bear slowly and steathily, Samael suddenly took support on the ground, and ran full speed on it very quickly breaking through the dozen of meters seperating them in the blink of an eye and just as the bear noticed something and started turning his head an extremely heavy punch striked the left side of his head in a discusting sound of bones breaking.

The boar was so badly hurt that Samael didn't even have to do anything else. He just calmly massaged his hand, staring sternly at the staggering boar who didn't take long to fall heavily on the bubbly ground of the forest, dead.

Although he was happy finaly have something to eat, Samael knew he had to make fire first to roast the meat. Having lived near the mountains for a long time he took a branch of pine wood with its thorns, and went to a nearby bush which he shook a bit. A few bug of different size, shape, and colors fell on the ground and one amongst them made Samael smile widely.

“The Calamity Coxinel... Haha it's good she's there as well ! Come here baby !”

He picked up the small, circular Calamity Coxinel which looked almost just like a regular coxinel aside that... it was hot like a grain of sand under the summer sunlight.

The Calamity Coxinel isn't anything special as it was not even a rank 1 beast, but it has a use as a fire elemental ordinary bug. The few milimeter long fire breath it produce is enough to make fire on pines thorns. Useful if you aren't a fire element cultivator. It was named the Calamity Coxinel because one cannot even count on a twelve digit number the amount of time this small bug led hectars of forest goes to ashes.

An hour later Samael began eating the roasted boar meat he cut off from the leg using the boar horn, extremely excited. His joyful face made him so cute that no woman wouldn't want to hugg him as their most beloved little brother. He was so hungry that every mouthful of meat he ate felt like the best dish under heaven whilst there weren't even salt nor spice. He didn't care though, feeling the thin quantity of mana energy the beast slowly stored in his flesh as he grew up.

The way humans and humanoids cultivate and the beasts do is a lot different. Basically humanoids use Body Arts to carve their powers as they absorb the atmosphere mana energy inside their bodies into their dantian, a spiritual organ located between the lungs which store and refine the outside energy to cultivate the realm. Beast stores half of their energy into their Crystal Core, which is quite the same as the human body dantian for beasts, and half into their flesh which is extremely nutritive for cultivators as in such a low realm, a single mouthful of flesh is equal to over an hour of cultivation in terms of energy.

But Samael didn't go straight refining it at the moment as he has to properly eat and find a place to rest before anything else and just directly stored it in the place he usually store unrefined mana when he noticed that something was wrong... Something definitely immensely wrong.