*Click

The sound seemed deafening in the early morning silence. Nothing made a sound except the young, innocent looking boy, Bao Gang. The click represented that the two soul seas had finished nourishment. With this click came in increase in clarity for the young cultivator. The world seemed to be clearer and more colorful, and he could think much faster than before. When before he could use his spiritual sense to observe billions of organisms, he could now watch twice as many, which could be attributed to his doubling of soul seas.

As he began to exercise his newly improved soul sense, he saw a ring of bloody animal corpses strewn around a mile in diameter. Furthermore, multiple demonic beasts were looking at him greedily, like a miser at gold, or a child at candy. Pure, undisguised greed. Demonic beasts are the beast equivalent of cultivators. They can absorb spiritual energy through eating, and also unconsciously. The only problem with their cultivation is their low intelligence and low spiritual energy attunement. However, heaven gives opportunity to even the most unlucky, and as such, the beasts were gifted a strong body. They could be considered dual cultivators, with body cultivation and essence cultivation. The essence cultivation is the same cultivation route which most humans take, simply because it has advantages over the other two types, soul and body. Soul cultivation has a lack of cultivation techniques, especially high level ones, and body cultivation requires heavenly resources. For beasts, this is mitigated slightly because they can eat other cultivators to gain their spiritual energy.

Demonic beasts usually guard a treasure which they find in order to protect it until maturity when they will eat it. The demonic beasts had thought Bao Gang to be a treasure and rushed over to be the first to eat it. Treasures can absorb spiritual energy to cultivate or to advance to maturity more rapidly. While strong cultivators can also absorb seemingly infinite amounts of spiritual energy at a rapid pace, they would emit a strong pressure which would warn demonic beasts. The lack of pressure combined with large spiritual energy absorption portrayed him as a treasure. The beast carcasses were clearly the weaker beasts who showed up first, who tried to eat Bao Gang, because they knew they would not be able to guard a treasure until maturity, so they settled for the best option available, eating an unmatured treasure. This action got them killed by the stronger beasts, who, after all being drawn to him were mutually afraid of having the treasure stolen from under their nose, and decided to all back away to a distance of half a mile.

Of course, on a planet with weak spiritual energy, like the one he was brought to for body tempering cultivation, these “strong beasts” would be those at the 4th level of body tempering, hardened bones.

Seeing that the beasts were still wary of each other, Bao Gang concentrated on absorbing spiritual energy once again. This time, to temper his body for protection. During his cultivation, had he been slightly unlucky, he would have been eaten by demonic beasts, and so he vowed to become stronger so he would not be looked at as an object for the purpose of furthering cultivation. Once again, the spiritual energy of the planet began to enter his body. He pushed the energy into his flesh and felt agony, his flesh was being ripped apart and healed forcefully. The reconstruction strengthening and imbuing it with spiritual energy in the process.

With normal cultivators on this planet, they would take upwards of a year to complete the first level of body tempering, tempered flesh, but these ordinary cultivators would only be absorbing the spiritual energy of 25 cubic meters of space. With even this amount of spiritual energy, many of them needed to apply a paste to reduce pain whilst cultivating. Bao Gang was absorbing the energy of the entire planet. The only reason he was able to do so while still keeping his sanity is due to his soul strength. The advantage of having two soul seas and having been nourished for trillions of years was now shown. His ridiculously strong soul allowed him to forcibly ignore the pain from his body, allowing him to cultivate at a pace which could only be described as heavenly.

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In reality, what took other cultivators a year, took him slightly upwards of 10 breaths.

Click* entry flesh tempering

Pop* middle flesh tempering

CRACK* peak of flesh tempering!

His flesh had toughened becoming harder to penetrate, at the end of the ten breaths, reaching the peak of the flesh tempering realm. He believed, if he pressed a knife to his flesh and attempted to cut it, it would leave no mark unless he stabbed at this flesh with all his strength.

Even though 10 breaths sounds like a short time compared to a year, he would have finished the stage even faster had he had a less cultivation suited body. His body which was free from impurities and nourished since time immemorial, was perfectly suited to cultivate, to have the potential to reach the highest peak. This body would require many times more resources than others, but would set a foundation stronger than any other cultivator. His flesh had been reconstructed more than 1000 times more than a normal cultivator, and compared to geniuses, over 100 times more.

Geniuses would naturally be able to reconstruct their flesh more than others. If the less talented tried to keep reconstructing their flesh, they would reach a limit at which they could no longer temper their flesh and imbue it with more spiritual energy. As the body is the root of the self, this would later lead to problems such as bottlenecks and outlived potential.

While he was forced to reconstruct his flesh more than others, it also led to stronger flesh than an ordinary cultivator. Compared to these ordinary cultivators, his flesh would resist penetration 10 times more.

Taking the tooth of a nearby demonic beast, he stabbed it his arm. Contrary to his expectation, there was no splurt of blood. After removing the tooth from his arm, he saw a 3 millimeter deep wound, out of which, a trickle of blood flowed.

He sat down once again to cultivate, pulling spiritual energy into his body once again, this time using it to reconstruct his muscles. 20 agony filled breaths passed while he felt his muscles swell up, reconstructing and getting slightly bigger after each reconstruction, then his muscles swiftly condensed, returning to their original size, but many times denser than at the start of cultivation.

He stood up--well more accurately, jumped up, launching himself 4 meters into the air. He was shocked at the results of his cultivation. Obviously, he would need to get used to his newly strengthened muscles. He had just tried to stand up, but ended up being shot up 12 feet in the air!

As the body tempering stage became closer to completion, it would become harder to complete, each stage taking much longer than the stage before, but for Bao Gang, this was simply a difference of 10 breaths(30 seconds)!

When he landed on the ground, he had newfound confidence that he would be able to escape from the nearby demonic beasts. Having flesh 10 times tougher and muscles 10 times stronger than an ordinary cultivator, he would at the very least be able to escape, albeit with some difficulty and some injuries.

He turned his attention to the other two objects, the second jade slip, which he placed between his brows, and the pet which Wei Yun had given him. Or more correctly, a big red lizard. As he looked at the lizard, the lizard looked at him. When Wei Yun had first given him the lizard, it had been about 5 cm long, but now was about 10 cm long. As a demonic beast, it had clearly made use of the spiritual energy which he had attracted to cultivate, growing to be twice as long.

Realizing that his new pet had used him for its cultivation, he picked up the lizard, made a half serious/half smiling face,

“Don’t you take advantage of me.”

CHOMP*

The lizard bit him.  Perhaps out of annoyance for having been ignored for 24 hours, perhaps to send the message that Bao Gang is not the master, but that it is the other way around

The flesh which could block a kitchen knife was cut like tofu!