On the second day since Young Miss Huang Biren had gone to the party, she was expected to return to the Huang mansion, but she didn't. People thought she might have decided to stay at the palace for one more day, so no alarms went off. The only one who thought differently was the white wolf, who knew the young miss didn't change her plans so casually. To make things even more difficult, the patriarch had also left the capital and wasn't expected to return for at least a week.
The wolf was worried about the human, but it tried to push this worry down as much as possible so it could begin its new cultivation. Unlike the catastrophic disasters that had nearly extinguished its life force before, this maiden attempt spared the wolf from death's icy threshold.It harnessed the raw power of the surroundings, allowing the qi to flood its being with seamless, unrivaled fluidity.threshold. It then began to circulate the qi through its meridians before directing it into its source core, located near its belly button. Finally, it directed the purified qi into its bones.
When the qi entered its source core, the wolf felt as though it had transcended. Its entire essence was violently reforged, shattering its natural limits and propelling its power to a higher state of existence. Its perception became razor-sharp, granting the beast a godlike clarity that pierced through the veil of the physical world. Its bones grew harder, and the wolf felt as though they had become unbreakable. This was all due to a single circulation of the technique, and yet the increase in cultivation was far beyond what the wolf had expected. Throughout the night, the wolf cultivated as though there was no tomorrow. Even the most marginal breakthrough sparked a fire of hope, making the impossible feel inevitable.
When the sun finally came out, the white wolf opened its eyes. In them, one could see excitement mixed with the flames of vengeance. The wolf had created its technique with inspiration from human cultivation, so some similarities couldn't be avoided. The wolf had entered the Bone-Forging Realm, the first realm of human cultivation. The wolf was no longer on the cultivation path of beasts. It hated humans, but it had to admit that their cultivation path seemed better, at least the levels it had seen so far. This wasn't to say the white wolf had found no issues with the human path.
Human cultivation relies on siphoning the diluted essence of origin qi from the vast, untapped reservoirs of the world. Origin qi is nothing more than a microscopic fragment of the boundless, chaotic ocean that is true world qi. Humans cultivate using origin qi not because it's the most powerful, but because it's one of the easiest to control and doesn't harm the human body. Demonic beasts, on the other hand, absorb world qi without choosing any of its components; they simply use the world qi itself to cultivate. The white wolf speculated that a demonic beast in a certain cultivation realm is far more powerful compared to a human in the equivalent realm. With this speculation, the white wolf created a technique that could use world qi for cultivation while still following the human principles of cultivation, which seemed to be more thought-out and organized for maximum growth in power.
The white wolf didn't know what the consequences of this untested technique would have on its body and mind, but it didn't care. It was still too focused on vengeance to analyze things carefully. Had it paused to reflect, it would have unearthed the grim truth that it was treading a forbidden graveyard of failed pioneers who dared to merge the Beast and Humans' cultivation paths.
While early Bone-Forging seemed like a modest step, the fact that it conquered this milestone in a single night was nothing short of a miraculous anomaly. In the days that followed, the wolf cultivated day and night, taking only short breaks to check if the young miss had returned. As the second day vanished with no sign of Huang Biren, the wolf ascended to mid-Bone-Forging, its skeleton hardening into impenetrable fortress steel. The only thing the wolf worried about was the young miss, and this worry for a human female made it feel as though it was betraying its heart of vengeance. It tried to mask its concern with cold pragmatism, labeling the girl a simple necessity for survival, but the undercurrent of unease continued to gnaw at its soul.