At this point, Bao Gang had four goals.

1: Having higher cultivation. Before advancing in cultivation, he wanted to increase the strength of the mysterious force in his blood. Thus, this would have to be postponed until then.

2: Having better battle ability. This could be battle skills and also battle experience. He had already learned that cultivation alone would not protect him.

3: Advancing in his agility technique. Similar to cultivation, the mysterious force in his blood which increased his spiritual energy attunement would have to be increased first.

4: Strengthening the mysterious force in his blood.

Obviously, he decided to strengthen the mysterious force present in his blood.

Not only would this be hitting three birds with one stone, but would also allow him to get battle experience. So in reality doing this would be hitting four birds with one stone!

The fastest way to gather the spiritual energy needed to strengthen this force without absorbing the spiritual energy of the entire planet would be to hunt demonic beasts while cultivating.

A demonic beast with a high cultivation would contain all the spiritual energy they had absorbed throughout their entire life. Even absorbing the spiritual energy of thousands of miles would not be fast enough, but combined with the spiritual energy of beasts which had lived for years, might be enough to make up for the deficits.

The problem is that drawing in spiritual energy would attract attention. Although he was already over 8000 miles away from the Immortal Mountain sect, the decrease in spiritual energy around him would give him away to others, just as easily as it had to Hao Lin.

For this reason, he could not take spiritual energy from a large area. However, this would only be the case if cultivators could detect the decrease in density of spiritual energy.

Bao Gang began to draw spiritual energy from the ground. He reached with his soul sense deep into the earth, seeing 1000 meters down, 2000 meters down. Sensing no cultivators underneath the earth, he began to draw in the spiritual energy from the inside of the planet.

A flood of heat inundated him; his body grew feverish. The spiritual energy in the air, while leaning towards fire laws, was fairly balanced, but deep inside the earth, magma floated around, and fire laws made up the vast majority of the spiritual energy.

When he had first started cultivating on this planet, he needed to renourish his split soul seas, and so he just tried to absorb as much spiritual energy as possible, but did not consider whether or not he could absorb it from inside the earth.

He had truly lost an untapped gold mine!

At this point, he was absorbing more spiritual energy than when he first arrived, and no one could even notice!

The spiritual energy produced by the inside of the planet was at least 4 times as plentiful as the spiritual energy produced above the ground.

He could not use his soul sense to view the entire inside of the planet however. On Earth, he could do so, only because his soul tendrils did not have to withstand the punishment of laws. On this planet, the opposite was true. The deeper his spiritual sense went, the more fire laws they had to withstand, and eventually could not. He retracted his tendrils of soul sense, not wanting to lose parts of his soul sea, but continued absorption of spiritual energy.

He noticed that the deeper into the earth, the denser the spiritual energy.

Wanting to experiment, he walked to a nearby active volcano. Surely enough, the concentration of spiritual energy increased, however the density of fire laws increased faster. Around there, he could not even cast his spell to create water, because the spell needed water laws, which were simply not dense enough due to the high density of fire laws.

This is why the spiritual energy of the Immortal Mountain sect increased as the height of the mountain increased. Spiritual energy was emitted from the inside of the volcano, but the difference between this mountain and the one at the sect is that this one did not have a mixture of spiritual energy. For lower level disciples, they would not be able to stand the concentration of fire laws, and their body would be forced to constantly fight against it, lowering their lifespan, additionally only allowing them to cultivate with fire laws, instead of spiritual energy.

“There must have been something different about the Immortal Mountain sect which allowed them to have spiritual energy instead of fire laws,” he thought.

Likely to be a treasure, he began to excited for his eventual return to the sect. Even if there hadn’t been anything of value there, he would still need to retrieve Xiao Gou Shi who was being held in the beast hall.

Leaving the volcano, he once again began to hunt demonic beasts.

Like this, two months passed.

During this time, Bao Gang had been hunting and cultivating constantly, except for 8 hours a day when he would sleep.

In the first few days, he realized that sleeping in a tree would not be safe, as he would sometimes be attacked by demonic beasts during the night.

Luckily, he always allowed tendrils of his soul sense to permeate the surrounding air, and this would warn him when a demonic beast touched one of the tendrils. He had learnt the method to do so in one of the books in the library.

Over these two months, the mysterious strength in his blood became more and more prevalent. Compared to when he entered the sect, the strength after the two months was incomparable. It would be at least millions of times stronger. For this reason, his insanely high spiritual energy attunement had continuously increased, although he had no idea what to do with it. He had successfully conjured the wings of the hummingbird 6 weeks ago, accomplishing one of his goals, but could not use it to absorb any more spiritual energy, as he would give away his position by absorbing spiritual energy from the air.

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Keep in mind that he had been absorbing at least 80% of all spiritual energy on the planet.

While he had originally thought this when he first arrived, he in fact, had only been absorbing 20% of it. At least 80% of it was being produced under the surface of the planet, which is exactly what he was absorbing. Now, when he got a light cut, it would heal instantly, and an injury like a broken bone would heal within a minute.

2 days ago, he had fought to the death with an improved brain stage leopard(8th stage of body tempering). While the leopard could react much faster than Bao Gang could with his eyes, the true advantage of the realm is the ability to use spiritual sense in order to react faster. Bao Gang could do this too.

The leopard’s advantage had been completely negated.

In reality, not every stage of the body tempering realm would be a goal in and of itself. Golden marrow and improved senses are good examples of this. They are truly just preparatory stages for the ones which come afterwards. After invigorated blood, bodily strength all bodily components would experience an increase in power, and after upgraded brain, the soul sense would become usable, as well as the nourishment of the soul using the body, but the stage prior to each of these power-ups would give little to no combat benefit to the cultivator.

In terms of bodily strength, the leopard was completely outclassed by Bao Gang, who had undergone many more reconstructions, and with its only advantage nullified, it was quickly defeated, but in a last ditch attempt to bring down its attacker with it, it had pounced towards Bao Gang, not putting any effort into defense.

The leopard had thought it had succeeded, Bao Gang’s wounds this time were even worse than during the incident with the tiger. His internal organs had been crushed, and his lungs and heart had tears, because the leopard had broken his ribs.

But before the leopard died, it saw skin grow on Bao Gang’s chest, which covered the wounds, and Bao Gang’s concave chest soon began to inflate again.

The leopard died with reluctance in its eyes, its apparent success only made worse by the realization of its failure.

Two minutes after being seriously injured, the wounds had completely healed.

“Wow! If I ever get injured in battle, it will be neutralized without giving the opponent an advantage, as long as I don’t break any bones, which would temporarily lower my combat capability, I’m glad I tested it.”

Now, if the healing factor had grown as fast as the mysterious strength in his blood, it would not have even taken two minutes to heal, however the healing factor had not done so. While it had not yet reached its true healing abilities yet, it was getting harder and harder to increase the healing abilities.

Now, two days later, Bao Gang felt as if something was special about this day. He took a break from hunting and just sat on the edge of the volcano, cultivating while observing the swirls and bubbles of the lava. He had spread out his spiritual sense, so that if any demonic beast approached, he would have warning.

As he continued cultivating, he felt more and more comfortable, but also more and more alert, as if he was getting closer and closer to perfection, and he slipped into a trance.

This is not just a normal trance, but one where he had reached a state of inner peace. He was not sacrificing alertness for this peace however, he could still sense some demonic beasts crawling around in the jungle, even a demonic hawk which was headed in his direction from behind, but still over a mile away. He disregarded it as a threat to his safety, only being in the strengthening muscle realm and also being far away from him.

His mind kept getting clearer and clearer, his thoughts faster and faster, his spiritual energy attunement rising more sharply than it had at any time in the previous two months.

He felt as if he was becoming close to godliness.

Suddenly, the blood in his body rushed out, forming a crimson ball in front of him. He felt a strange attraction to the blood, or more precisely, something in the blood. His body dried up and became similar in looks to a mummy, and he could no longer move his body. But he didn’t care, he retracted the soul tendrils around him, concentrating on the ball of blood, infusing all of his spiritual energy into the ball.

As he did so, the ball condensed, becoming smaller and smaller, but he began to see specks of gold in the blood. Not very large, but at some places, his blood had specks of gold. This is what attracted him and he concentrated on these specks, infusing his own blood into them, feeding them, and the specks grew larger, concentrating to one point.

That point where they all condensed became a golden droplet.

The golden droplet embedded itself between his brows, flying into his soul sea, along with the cauldron of creation and destruction, and his blood starting floating towards him again. He also began floating towards the blood.

Well, not floating, more accurately began moving towards the blood.

Surprised, he re extended his soul tendrils to see around him.

The strengthening muscle stage demonic hawk had grabbed him in its claws.

Unluckily for the hawk, it had not gone through many muscular reconstructions and could not hold, or even penetrate the flesh of Bao Gang, and was forced to let go.

Unluckily for Bao Gang, the hawk had grabbed him from behind while he was sitting in front of a volcano, and this push was just enough to hit him off the edge. He could not fly as his blood had not yet returned to his inert, mummified body, and all he could do is watch in horror as he fell.

When he had fallen down about 20 meters(this takes like 2 seconds of falling), some of his blood had returned to his body and he began to conjure wings from spiritual qi, but he had done too little, too late.

There was now no true spiritual energy around his body, only fire laws. While this would not hurt him due to the laws being low level and his cultivation being enough to ignore it, this prevented him from casting spells.

Remember that body tempering realm cultivators do not have qi, they are forced to use spiritual energy to cast spells. Similar to casting the water spell earlier where there was not enough water laws in the spiritual energy to cast it, at this point, there was not enough wind laws in the spiritual energy, and all he could do was continue falling.

20 more meters and he hit the surface of the lava with a splash.

This entire time, the golden droplet of blood had not been doing nothing. It had been absorbing fire laws, and its speed only became quicker after Bao Gang fell in the lava.

As he sunk deep down into the lava, unable to do anything other than slowly burn, he had the consolation of knowing that after he condensed the golden droplet, he had automatically advanced to the stage of improved senses. He had actually already completed the stage, which involved the tempering of his senses, as he could already used his spiritual sense, and for this reason he advanced to the stage of upgraded brain, passing this too for the same reason.

Likewise, he had already been gifted with a body free from impurities from his trillions of years of nourishment.

After condensing the drop of golden blood, he had advanced from the peak of invigorated blood realm to the peak of pure body!