What the Hell Are You?

"This is all wrong!"

"What the hell is going on?!"

On the same night, atop the same solitary peak, in another quiet chamber, Lü Shenliang muttered to herself.

She had clawed her beautiful hair into a messy heap of straw.

Even without knowing the cause, anyone who saw her like this would immediately understand that she had something important she simply could not figure out, no clues at all, and was frantic with anxiety.

But more likely, they would have been scared away at first sight.

Before her floated a Golden Core!

The aura of this Golden Core was exactly the same as hers. With every breath she took, it seemed to breathe with her, drawing in the spiritual energy between Heaven and Earth alongside her.

A Golden Core cultivator's Golden Core could not leave the body until at least the Fifth Level of Golden Core.

Most cultivators in the Lesser Jade Continent knew that she had failed in Core Formation at the Foundation Establishment stage and formed a crippled Golden Core.

In the Cultivation World, a crippled Golden Core meant a maimed Golden Core. The difference between a crippled Golden Core and a Golden Core was like the difference between a fragment of a magic treasure and a complete magic treasure.

How could the power of a fragment of a magic treasure compare to that of a complete one?

Under normal circumstances, the detached Golden Core of a Fifth Level of Golden Core cultivator who had reached the average standard was roughly the size of an adult's fist.

The reason it was called a Golden Core was because it was entirely like pure gold, brilliant with golden radiance, its pure golden light continuously weaving together profound laws of Vital Energy.

A Golden Core was something a cultivator seized from the creation of Heaven and Earth by defying the heavens. It was the Dao embryo seed that would one day transform into a Nascent Soul. Aside from profound, it could often only be described as solemn in manifestation, wondrous beyond measure.

Yet her Golden Core could be described as savage and bizarre.

Her Golden Core was as large as a child's head. Even before forming a Nascent Soul at the Ninth Level of Golden Core, most Golden Core cultivators' Golden Cores might not be as enormous as hers.

Her Golden Core bore mottled gold, but it was not a seamless whole. At a glance, it looked entirely like countless shattered golden fragments had been congealed and pasted together by Vital Energy of other colors.

More aptly put, her Golden Core looked as though it had shattered over and over again, each shattering leaving countless terrifying wounds. Those wounds had slowly healed and scabbed over, leaving dreadful scars behind, only for those scars to split apart again in the next collapse, scab over again, and scar again.

Put simply, it was like someone's face being slashed countless times—slashed again after the wounds had healed and scarred, then scarred again.

After ten or twenty such times, the scars layered upon scars, while the uninjured flesh instead became scattered tiny specks embedded amid those savage, horrifying scars. Her Golden Core was now covered in scars. Every scar bore who knew how many further scars formed by cracks, and each scar was filled with an unstable aura, utterly unlike the harmonious, stable aura of an ordinary Golden Core. It was as if the auras within those countless scars would collide and tear at one another, ready at any moment to burst open with fresh wounds.

The Core Qi of the Golden Core itself gave off an incomparably chaotic sensation. Yet the utterly chaotic Core Qi flowed around the Golden Core, mottled streams of Core Qi colliding, dispersing, and gathering again, gradually forming a unique and profound Core Qi manifestation around it.

The Core radiance around it ultimately formed nine points of light in different colors. Like nine stars, these nine differently colored lights revolved around the Golden Core along fixed paths.

This strange phenomenon was not unfamiliar to Lü Shenliang. Those nine star-like lights of Core Qi had existed long ago. But the crucial point was that, amid those nine star-like lights, a wisp of gray Vital Energy had suddenly appeared for no reason at all.

Judging purely by appearance, that hazy wisp of gray Vital Energy was like a nebula winding among the Golden Core and those nine stars.

Lü Shenliang was nearly driven mad by this inexplicably appearing wisp of gray Vital Energy.

Given the degree of chaos within her Golden Core, it would have been perfectly normal for some new Golden Core manifestation to appear out of nowhere. But no matter what kind of Golden Core manifestation it was, it would still have an origin-level connection to her Golden Core. It would still be part of her Golden Core.

The key was that although this wisp of gray Vital Energy had appeared amid her Golden Core's Core Qi and had clearly fused into her Golden Core, she somehow could not touch it. It was as though it existed there, yet had nothing to do with her.

If the contents of her previous conversation with Wang Li had not surfaced so clearly in her mind, and if she had not instinctively felt that this gray Vital Energy was connected to the mutation in Wang Li's cultivation method and the gray Dao Hall incarnated within him, she might have been unable to resist self-detonating her Golden Core just to see whether it would make this gray Vital Energy disappear.

Gray!

It was all this same gray. There had to be an inevitable connection!

"Wang Li!"

She truly could not endure it anymore and let out a piercing shriek.

"What happened?"

The instant Wang Li's figure flashed out of the stone dwelling where he cultivated, he saw Lü Shenliang with hair as messy as a chicken nest.

Then he saw her reddened eyes and the fierce expression on her face. His face immediately fell again. "Senior Sister, I refuse to accept this!"

"Refusing to accept it is useless. Do you think my mind is having problems right now?"

Lü Shenliang's chest heaved violently as she gritted her teeth. "What the hell are you?"

Wang Li stood there blankly. He instinctively felt that Lü Shenliang really did not seem to have chaotic divine consciousness at the moment, but he had no idea why his senior sister was in such a mood.

"What the hell am I?"

He did not dare leave his senior sister's question unanswered, afraid of provoking her again. With a miserable expression, he said, "At most, maybe I'm a lecherous ghost? Or a greedy ghost?"

"To hell with your big-headed ghost!"

Lü Shenliang said viciously, "I mean that gray Dao Palace of yours."

"Senior Sister, let me tell you, my gray Dao Palace became amazing today." The moment Lü Shenliang took the initiative to ask about the gray Dao Palace, Wang Li immediately became animated. "I listened to you and really went in to try it out. As a result, five things like streaks of fire appeared inside. Those five streaks of fire were like magic treasures. The moment I activated them with my True Essence, they became like five great doors, and inside each one were those gray-robed cultivators I told you about."

"Is that so?" Lü Shenliang's face became expressionless. "Explain it more clearly."

Wang Li became even more animated. He carefully recounted everything that had happened before and after he tested the five streaks of fire. Still unable to suppress his pride and delight, he continued, "Senior Sister, think about it. The cultivators in the first few streaks of fire are at the Second Level of Qi Refining through the Fifth Level of Qi Refining. Those opponents are too weak for me. But the final streak of fire is densely packed with all sorts of cultivators at the Sixth Level of Qi Refining. These Sixth Level of Qi Refining cultivators can help me stabilize my cultivation, and when I fight them, besides familiarizing myself with all kinds of combat methods and techniques, I might even learn quite a few of their methods."

"Is that so?"

Lü Shenliang smiled without warmth. "Why do you think those cultivators from before are useless? Since you can awaken one of them, did you not try to see whether you could awaken several at once?"

Wang Li froze.

Only after a breath did he come back to himself, once again impressed by his senior sister's train of thought. "Senior Sister, you're amazing. It really does seem like I should try that."

"So I say you're especially stupid, yet you still refuse to admit it." Lü Shenliang sneered. "Ever since the first gray-robed cultivator appeared, this gray Dao Palace within you has clearly been using these tribulations to give you stronger combat and survival abilities in cruel killing formations. So every tribulation target it chooses for you, even if they are not the cream of the crop among cultivators at each level, must certainly be somewhat special. But a truly cruel killing formation naturally would not consist purely of one-on-one duels like this. So once your cultivation reaches a certain point, its natural evolution will require you to possess the ability to fight many with few and survive amid incomparably chaotic, brutal killing formations. Right now, you think a cultivator at the Second Level of Qi Refining is beneath notice. But what if dozens faced you alone? What if hundreds surrounded you and killed you together?"