She thought back to how he'd been completely out of it earlier—so caught up in his thoughts he didn't even hear her say goodbye. She couldn't help but smile. That same junior everyone called "the most remarkable talent since the Third Patriarch,… was actually a lot more interesting than his senior brother.
Curious, she bent down and took a longer look.
Just one glance—and she couldn't look away.
These… weren't random doodles. They were visual representations of the Crimson Shroud Sword Art's key insights, transcribed into patterns that mirrored restrictive formations.
Qi Bi wasn't clueless about restrictive formations herself. What she saw made her heart stir.
She bit her lip unconsciously, focusing harder. "He's already nailed down the core concepts of the defensive stances… but this part is different. Maybe his cultivation level isn't quite there yet? Still…"
A sudden thought struck her. She let her sword art flow—not even drawing her blade, just circulating inner energy through its usual meridians. As her True Breath (refined Qi)
reached the critical bottleneck, she shifted the flow slightly, following the snow-pattern's logic…
And just like that—smooth as silk—she passed through.
No, not just smooth—
That tiny shift in flow created a strange pull, like her qi was being gently guided. Before she realized it, her body was moving on instinct, following the path sketched out by that boy…
With every shift unlike the ones before, the pull of True Breath deepened. Until finally—at that stubborn bottleneck she hadn't been able to break through for months—everything suddenly clicked. It was like boiling soup melting snow—smooth, natural, effortless. In a single breath, she charged through that barrier, and with momentum still going strong, she smashed through three or four more breakthroughs before it finally wore off.
At the same time, Qi Bi was completely stunned. "That's...?" She instinctively formed a sword gesture with her fingers and slashed through the air. Instantly, sword qi shot into the skies from the mountaintop, streaks of glowing light flashing like waves. Layers upon layers of multicolored sword light crisscrossed endlessly in the sky.
No, it wasn't quite the legendary "Ten Thousand Layers of Radiant Sword Qi," nor did it rival her master's elusive "Thousandfold Illusory Sword Intent"—but this kind of display could only mean one thing: she had fully mastered the sword technique!
"He actually did it?"
She stood there blankly for a long moment, then suddenly dropped to one knee, eyes locked on the following moves. But soon, her expression dimmed with disappointment.
The formations that followed, while intricate, were messy and disorganized. There was no coherent flow to them. Especially the offensive sequences—they were all over the place, like a tangled ball of string.
Qi Bi's cheeks flushed. She was clever—sharp as they come—and realized instantly that it was her earlier mistake that had thrown off the kid's thought process, leaving him stuck and fumbling through the latter part.
And that only proved something more profound. The boy's cultivation wasn't leagues above hers—but his ability to grasp the core ideas, to intuit and deduce the inner workings of the technique… that was what allowed him to pull off such a brilliant display.
For him, it was probably just a sudden spark of insight.
But for her, it had shaved who knows how many detours off her journey, saving her a ton of precious time.
She slowly got back to her feet, eyes drifting toward the misty mountain trail below. There, barely visible through the drifting fog, was the silhouette of a young boy making his way down, step by step.
"The most remarkable talent since the Third Patriarch…" Qi Bi brushed a lock of hair from her face and smiled faintly. "Maybe… that title isn't just empty words."
---
Li Xun, meanwhile, had no clue what kind of praise Qi Bi had just showered on him. And honestly, even if he did, he probably wouldn't have cared.
Not because he was some sage above it all, but simply because… he didn't have the bandwidth to care right now.
He was in agony—utterly spent. Every last drop of energy had been wrung from him.
For over a month now, while refining the NetherYin Qi, he had felt how the foreign, powerful yin-fire had fused tightly with the Blood Nightmare lurking in his heart meridian.
The two forces were now locked together, spiraling around each other like a yin-yang symbol, maintaining a delicate balance. Layer after layer, different types of true breath coiled around them, distinct in nature yet now acting as one.
Whenever the Blood Nightmare stirred, the yin-fire would react too. The balance made sure that for every ounce of power the Blood Nightmare pushed, the yin-flame matched it—not to destroy, but to counterbalance. The Blood Nightmare wanted to drain him dry. The yin-flame? It was trying to flood him with energy.
It had taken Li Xun a while to grasp this.
Both forces could kill him—no doubt. But their roles were fundamentally different.
The Blood Nightmare was like a parasite, feeding off his life force. The daily bouts of heart-wrenching pain were literally the thing sucking out his marrow and blood for nourishment.
But weirdly enough, this wasn't entirely a raw deal for Li Xun.
The Blood Nightmare, being pure filth and corruption, needed to refine itself by purging filth as well. So as it fed, it also drew out the gunk from his body—the accumulated impurities buried deep inside. In a twisted way, it was actually cleansing him.
As for the yin-fire—that was the mad genius of Ghost Master. He had designed it to be a pressure cooker. Its role was to push Li Xun into refining his energy harder, to stimulate growth. With both internal and external forces pressing him, progress was bound to speed up.
And where did these two monsters meet? His heart meridian.
The yin-fire, infused with all of Ghost Master's life-long cultivation, should've been way more powerful than the Blood Nightmare. Normally, it would've devoured the Blood Nightmare instantly, which would've triggered the trap Blood Wanderer had buried within—blowing up Li Xun's heart meridian on the spot.
But fate threw in a twist.
The flame had been delayed. It didn't enter his body until seven years later.
In those seven years, the Blood Nightmare had marinated in Li Xun's blood, adapting to him, becoming more than just an intruder. At this point, it was practically part of him—another organ.
The flame, recognizing this kinship, didn't destroy it. Instead, the two opposites found a way to coexist. One drew, the other poured. One took, the other gave. They balanced each other out—and that's why the pain had eased recently.
Had things stayed this way, the road ahead might've been simple, if not exactly smooth.
The outcome would still have its twists, sure—but at least it would remain within the bounds of expectation.
Just as Li Xun reached the "Moonrise Over the Sea" stage of his Qi Transformation and transitioned into the Lingxi Art, he finally understood what Qing Yin, Qing Xu, and Lin Ge meant by "grinding it out like water wears down stone."
This technique might very well be the most labor-intensive foundational method in the entire Tongxuan Realm—one of the hardest to even get started with.
Especially when contrasted with his own experience: he had read top-tier cultivation texts like the Netherworld Record, and had personally trained in the advanced and sinister NetherYin Qi. Compared to those, the Lingxi Art required dozens—hundreds—of times more effort just to establish a foundation!
Leaving aside questions of tier or profundity, just the methods used to nourish true breath were worlds apart.
NetherYin Qi boiled things down to three stages: "Rough," "Concentrate," and "Transform."
But the Lingxi Art? It was broken into dozens of steps, beginning with the most basic "Perception"—and each step was exquisitely refined.
Each stage had hundreds, even thousands, of accompanying methods. Nearly every meridian, every organ, had its own precise protocols.
If one were to follow it step by step without deviation, they might not see any results for ten or even twenty years. When Lin Ge said seventy years, he wasn't being dramatic.
Li Xun had never been the patient type. In fact, he'd looked down on such rigid systems, scorned the old masters who would design something so stiff.
But out of caution, he gave it a fair look—using his greatest strength: deduction.
He spent seven days and seven nights modeling the method, starting from the simplest to the most complex. When he was done, his entire body was soaked in cold sweat.
He no longer dared to cut corners, not even a little.
This was a massive and exquisitely precise system. Every step of the technique was interwoven with later, even subtler changes.
Even if you just memorized the manual and followed it like a machine, mindlessly and without innovation, it would take seventy to eighty years at minimum.
But for someone like Li Xun, who wanted to probe every hidden detail, who couldn't help but dig into every last nuance?
Spending a hundred, maybe two hundred years—wouldn't be unreasonable.
Based on his analysis, the process began with the first stirrings of true breath. After progressing through several stages, the goal was to compress both the breath and the nascent golden core into something smaller than a needle's eye—a single "spirit seed."
From then on, all true breath generated would originate from that seed—its quality far exceeding that of NetherYin Qi by orders of magnitude.
Of course, in terms of quantity, it wouldn't come close.
You could imagine what that meant—the amount of compression required, the demands on precision and control. It was terrifying.
Even after seven years of focused cultivation, without distraction, Li Xun's true breath still lacked the necessary density. Worse, it was still interlaced with chaotic elements: the Blood Nightmare and the Yin Fire—both impossible to control.
Trying to refine this mess into something so pure?
It would be a nightmare.
At first, Li Xun didn't fully grasp the difficulty. After completing the first stage, "A Bright Moon Rises Over the Sea," he used his embryonic golden core as a control hub, circulating true breath through his entire body and driving the technique from that center.
It was a tedious, repetitive, mind-numbing task.
Tens of thousands of energy channels, tens of thousands of types of internal flow—like trying to manipulate a vast tangle of strings using a single finger.
Imagine trying to make a lifeless puppet dance like a living being.
Apart from methods to refine control and purify the breath, the rest was just endless trial and error.
It took Li Xun twenty full days before he began to glimpse how to do it. And that—was when disaster struck.
His breath and golden core had just begun to unify, forming a complete, delicately balanced system under his control. It was intricate, precise—but also fragile.
Any disruption could cause it to collapse entirely.
And that's exactly what happened.
The Blood Nightmare and the Yin Fire broke out of the heart meridian—like saboteurs crashing into a delicate machine.
Before, their daily torment had been a matter of sheer willpower. He endured it.
But now, the Nightmare's relentless suction and the Yin Fire's surge of life-force were variables the newborn system couldn't withstand.
In that instant, Li Xun's twenty days of painstaking cultivation were obliterated.
And if that were the end of it—just wasted effort—he could've swallowed it.
But this wasn't just "lost work." The collapse of the system triggered a catastrophic chain reaction.
The moment it shattered, the previously harmonized true breath surged outward like a breached dam—engulfing every corner of his body.
If not for his pain-forged endurance—and the Yin Fire's timely flood of vitality—Li Xun would've died on the spot. Torn meridians. Shattered heart.
That… was true cultivation deviation. A full-blown Qi deviation.
In the end, it was the Blood Nightmare that saved him.
After seven years inside him, it had toughened his body to the extreme. Under the impact of the rampaging true breath, that resilience kept him alive.
And while he lay unconscious for a full day and night, his body—astonishingly—recovered on its own, at least seventy to eighty percent.
Li Xun was shaken. Genuinely shaken.
He'd seriously considered quitting. Thought about how to walk away. Maybe even how to return the copied Lingxi Art to the Blood Wanderer and beg to be let off the hook.
But that's when he realized something terrifying:
Without even noticing it, he'd grown… addicted.
Not just to progress.
But to the process itself—the joy of breakthrough, even the pain—it had all burrowed into his bones.
He stopped for half a day. Just half a day.
And already, his mind couldn't stop turning over the next problems to solve.
Just one more hour of thinking—and he couldn't help but start experimenting again.
To put it bluntly:
He was hooked.
And the craving wasn't just mental—it was physical. Deep in his marrow, it itched.
And there was no way he could quit.