Everyone in the World Eats Mushrooms

On a snowy slope of Tea Mountain, the Cook, holding the female infant, looked back breathlessly. Old Man Jiang was incredibly persistent, still chasing them step by step.

He picked up stones and hurled them down!

As he threw them, he shouted, "Old man, you've lost your mind! The one in your arms is a monster!"

Old Man Jiang roared, "Nonsense! They are both my children. I found them both!"

The Cook retorted with an "I knew it" tone, "So you admit he's not your grandson? He's different from this female infant. Look at him, he doesn't look human at all! You clearly just picked up a monster!"

Hearing his words, Old Man Jiang looked down at the male infant. The child had his eyes open, sucking on his fingers, looking at him curiously.

If you say he's normal, he looks just like an infant, no bigger than two palms. There's no sign of a monstrous face or fangs.

But if you say he's not normal, then he's truly not normal in every way!

He's not afraid of the cold. Under the extreme cold, he could sleep soundly in the snow, even emitting warmth that made the old man feel cozy.

He's not afraid of heat either. He could crawl out of a boiling pot. Except for the initial desperate struggle when he was first thrown in, which caused his skin to turn red, he was completely unharmed afterward, leaving no marks, his skin still smooth and supple.

He also doesn't cry much! A child this small, who couldn't even open his eyes before, now has big, dark eyes that can stare at the sun and are unfazed by the wind.

All these strange phenomena could only be explained by him being a monster.

In comparison, the female infant in the Cook's arms was completely normal.

Her eyes were tightly shut, she trembled, and her cries were heartbreaking.

Old Man Jiang shouted, "Give me the child quickly! The female infant is freezing. Only the warmth from my grandson can save her!"

The Cook felt he was unreasonable. "Fool! I can't give A Xue to you! Don't you know? Monsters eat people! They disguise themselves as humans to trick you! And then they'll eat you until not even your bones are left!"

Old Man Jiang blurted out, "Didn't you eat them too?"

As soon as he said that, the Cook froze, as if struck by lightning, speechless.

He seemed unable to believe his ears, or perhaps his memory.

His eyes first showed confusion, then pain, and finally resignation.

Old Man Jiang said with a look of acceptance, "So what if they're monsters? If they want to eat me, this old man will let them! Let them eat me!"

If it were before winter, he would truly fear monsters, having heard many terrifying stories from the countryside.

However, after experiencing so much despair, he felt that monsters weren't that scary anymore.

Was there anything more desperate than watching his loved ones starve to death in his arms? Oppressive government is more terrifying than demons!

Now that Old Man Jiang's home was gone, his family was gone, and his heart was as dead as ashes. It was these two children who gave him the hope to live on.

Let alone such adorable children, even if they were truly green-faced, fanged, flesh-eating demons, the old man wouldn't bother running. He'd just let the monsters eat them and be reunited with his children and grandchildren in the underworld sooner.

Hearing the old man's death-defying words, the Cook looked down at the female infant.

She was already freezing, her cries growing weak. He quickly held her tighter.

Alas, it was freezing cold, and with only the two thin garments he wore, he couldn't keep the child warm at all.

The Cook mumbled, "Yeah, what's there to fear about monsters?"

"Can he really save A Xue?"

Old Man Jiang finally climbed to the pine tree. Seeing that the Cook wasn't stopping him, he took the female infant and held the two children together.

He then leaned against the tree, curling himself up.

"He can. Before, when I lay on the frozen lake, we all slept warmly when we huddled together!"

"You join us too!"

Seeing the female infant snuggled close to the male infant, as if burrowing into a warm embrace, the Cook finally felt at ease.

He took a deep look, stepped back to the other side of the tree, and curled himself up, saying, "I don't need to."

Old Man Jiang didn't say anything more. Thus, they each leaned against their respective sides of the tree, curling up their bodies, enduring the hunger and cold.

After a while, Old Man Jiang said, "Can you start a fire? I'm warm, but you'll freeze to death like this."

The Cook mumbled, "If I freeze to death, I'll freeze to death. So many people have frozen to death, I'm just one more."

Seeing his lifeless words, Old Man Jiang chuckled, "If you start a fire, we can..."

"..." The Cook was stunned, and stammered, "You want to eat too?"

"We have to live. I still want to raise them." Old Man Jiang spoke as if he were delirious.

The Cook gave a bitter smile, then said in a tone of despair that was almost a sob, "We can't raise them... they're not even weaned yet..."

Old Man Jiang's tone was firm, "We can live. We'll gather our strength, then go into the city and find a good family... We can live."

The Cook cried and laughed, "Go into the city? Heh heh heh. As if the nobles in the city would care about us. Donglai has refugees who've risen in rebellion, so Langya Commandery has also ordered all counties to close their city gates to prevent unrest... Don't you know the bodies outside the city are piled up like mountains?"

Only then did Old Man Jiang understand the simple reason for not being allowed into the city.

He was stunned for a moment, then stubbornly said, "There will be a way."

The Cook sighed, "But I don't want to eat anymore... swallow them... That's why they especially wanted to cook these two children."

"Why are you protecting this female infant? Do you know her? You call her A Xue?" Old Man Jiang asked the question that had been bothering him.

The Cook shook his head, "A Xue is my daughter... She was born when the heavy snow first started, so I named her Xue... After our house in the village collapsed, I took my wife and daughter to the county town. We were separated on the road. I've been searching for these past two days. I couldn't find them, and I was so weak from hunger I couldn't walk, so I ate."

Old Man Jiang suddenly understood. No wonder the Cook was so gentle with the female infant; he really had a daughter. Just as he was about to cook her, he remembered his own daughter was still missing, and his heart softened.

"Then you have even more reason to live. Haven't you found them yet?"

The Cook's tone was bitter, "When we got separated, they had already been sick and starving for three days. Now..."

Old Man Jiang suddenly remembered the bodies he had seen by the roadside earlier, a mother and daughter. He had even buried them.

Could it be that coincidental? Old Man Jiang asked casually, "Was she wearing an iron thumb ring?"

Unexpectedly, as soon as he said this, the Cook sprang up, scrambling frantically around the other side of the tree. He was ecstatic, "You've seen them?"

Seeing this, Old Man Jiang's heart leaped, and he couldn't help but swallow.

"My wife wore an iron thumb ring on her little finger, right? Right!" the Cook asked, while observing Old Man Jiang's expression. Gradually, the joy on his face also disappeared.

They looked at each other in silence. The Cook let out a bitter laugh, his hands and feet went weak, and he couldn't support himself, tumbling down the snowy slope.

They had climbed over two hundred feet up this slope. With this fall, the Cook rolled into a snowball and stopped motionlessly at the bottom.

Old Man Jiang quickly chased after him, wanting to pull him out, but in just a few moments, his hands became stiff with cold.

He thought of the strange infant in his arms and tried to use its warm current to melt the snow.

However, to his utter astonishment... when the infant's hand touched the snow, it remained dry!

"Huh?" Old Man Jiang was stunned.

It was then that he suddenly remembered that when he first saw the infant, he had been lying on the frozen lake, and it hadn't melted at all.

Even though he felt warm all over, no steam rose.

It was as if this warmth could only warm his body?

Old Man Jiang felt this bizarre phenomenon shake his understanding of the world, but he also accepted it. Monsters, perhaps, were just like this; he didn't understand.

He immediately cast this surprise aside and desperately dug through the snow to pull the Cook out.

However, he didn't know that a hundred feet away, someone was crouching on a treetop, looking afar.

"Embrace Yin, Carry Yang Technique?"

This person was Chen Hu, his face full of disbelief as he recognized the marvelous property of not melting in snow.

He had been observing for a long time and knew that the demon infant was constantly emitting heat, otherwise, the old man and the little girl would have frozen to death long ago.

However, this heat did not affect the outside world at all; the subtle and precise control behind it was truly skillful.

This was the first time he had seen such a phenomenon, but he had heard his master mention it: some cultivators could emit a ball of fire that only burned specific targets, with perfect control over all yang and heat energy. It wouldn't melt in snow, wouldn't liquefy in ice, water couldn't extinguish it, and earth couldn't put it out.

Even in a sea of fire with hundreds of people, it would only burn one person. If burned by such flames, unless there was a way to counter it, jumping into the Yellow River would be useless. It could even burn someone to death at the bottom of the sea.

This was a typical Embrace Yin, Carry Yang type of spell, where the caster determined where the yang and heat energy would be transmitted.

Most of those who mastered such spells were alchemists. To control the heat of their furnaces, they created various methods for using yin and yang energies.

In the same furnace, half boiling water and half snow was basic. Melting cinnabar in ice, or freezing mercury in lava, were considered advanced techniques.

When dozens of materials were refined in the same furnace, with cold and heat distributed at will, temperatures controlled to the extreme, with every inch, even every millimeter, of yin and yang ratio mastered – that was the pinnacle of skill.

Of course, whether basic or pinnacle, this was power completely beyond his reach as a mere Body Tempering Stage cultivator.

Let alone him, even the founding ancestor of the Heaven Swallowing Sect had never seen this technique, only hearing about it when discussing the Dao with others...

He never expected to see it today on an infant, no, a monster?

"What is his realm? Spiritual Sense Stage? Calamity Tribulation Stage? Or a great demon of the Dao Attainment Realm?"

Chen Hu was troubled. His master had only said that those who mastered this technique were 'profound cultivators,' but the word 'profound' was too vague. To what level of profundity? Chen Hu had no idea.

To him, cultivators of the Spiritual Sense Stage were already considered profound. So, was this demon infant truly of the Spiritual Sense Stage?

Thinking of this, Chen Hu took out a jade talisman. This was an 'Amulet of Evil Warding,' capable of negating one instance of harm from a Mystical Stage cultivator's spell.

He had four of them on him, all bestowed by his sect for his protection. After all, the Martial Sect was the public face of the Heaven Swallowing Sect, but secretly, they also helped people achieve the Dao through rare treasures, making them half immortal, belonging to the miscellaneous and unorthodox path within the ranks of cultivators.

Normally, when traveling, this item was of no use. He hadn't even used it last year when hunting down a dog demon, because that dog demon wasn't skilled in spells, preferring to enhance its fangs and teeth with magic power and fight with its physical body.

"Now, this demon infant is probably skilled in spells. I thought my jade talisman would finally be useful..."

"But if he's a Spiritual Sense Stage cultivator... then..."

Suddenly, Chen Hu looked at the refugee he was restraining and had a thought, "Eh? I've got it!"

He pulled the refugee further away, then exhaled True Qi, injecting it into the refugee's body. It violently impacted his extraordinary meridians and channels, finally converging and breaking through the three vital passes of the tail end, spine, and occiput, opening his Ren and Du Meridians.

"Roar!" In an instant, the refugee screamed, feeling unbearable pain.

Then, he spat out a mouthful of clotted blood, his eyes turned blood red, his muscles swelled, and veins bulged all over his body, his qi and blood surging like snakes writhing beneath his skin.

However, after the intense pain came waves of strength. He felt immensely powerful, capable of killing a bull with a single punch.

"Dong!" The refugee kicked a large rock, and the stone shattered.

"Ahhh! I am the Western! Chu! Hegemon King!"

At this moment, he felt as if the Hegemon King had been resurrected! Unable to control himself, he suddenly threw a punch at Chen Hu.

"Hmph? Hmph!" Chen Hu snorted coldly, letting the fist strike his chest.

In an instant, the refugee was struck by a powerful recoil force and sent flying backward, rolling several yards in the snow.

"A third-rate martial artist dares to compare himself to the Hegemon King? Who gave you the courage!" Chen Hu spat, his face filled with anger.

If he had just been hit by a punch, he wouldn't have cared. After all, suddenly possessing such powerful True Qi and having most of his physical potential awakened could easily muddle most people's minds.

But for the other party to dare compare themselves to the Hegemon King was simply laughable. His valor was unmatched throughout history! This was universally acknowledged from the imperial court to the martial arts world, and even to the immortal sects!

The current foremost martial artist in the mortal realm, Wang Siwen, called himself 'An immortal, eternal, and invincible,' but in reality, he was far inferior to the Hegemon King!

An immortal once said that throughout history, no one had surpassed Xiang Yu in martial arts attainments before the age of thirty!

What a terrifying fact this was. This was considering he committed suicide at the age of thirty-one. At that time, the only one who could kill him in the mortal world was himself.

It could be said that the Hegemon King was the guiding star for all martial artists. How could Chen Hu, who had infinite admiration for him, allow anyone to tarnish his name?

"Hmph, listen here, you dog. Go kill that Demon Infant, and I want you to retrieve a Jade Bone from its body."

"Don't think about useless things. The True Qi in your body is mine. I can take your dog life anytime."

Chen Hu's tone was cold, clearly intending to use the refugee as a vanguard to test the waters, while he himself would hide in the shadows and act according to his capabilities.

For martial artists with profound inner energy, there was a concept called Qi manipulation, which involved emitting external Qi to heal others.

Since it could heal, it could naturally kill, and even be developed for other miraculous uses.

At this moment, the refugee, subjected to his Qi manipulation to break through his meridians, had his Ren and Du Meridians forcibly opened, storing five years' worth of his True Qi, and his potential was stimulated, granting him nearly a thousand jin of strength.

This was already incredibly impressive; even a second-rate martial artist might not possess such strength, but Chen Hu didn't care, as it came at the cost of the refugee's life.

The claim of taking his dog life anytime was actually him talking nonsense. The refugee wouldn't live for more than fifteen minutes at most.

However, fifteen minutes was more than enough to test the Demon Infant's strength.

p.s: Apologies.