"The boundary between practicing martial arts and cultivating the Dao was not as distinct as we imagined."
"I even had a conjecture that I could not yet verify: every talisman cultivator in the mountains was born with the physique and bones of a Golden Body Realm martial man."
"To learn boxing, you first had to understand yourself. Zhao Shu Xia, we would begin with the simplest thing—breathing. It was like standing high above and looking down, an Immortal using Palm Views Mountains and Rivers."
Chen Ping'an neither taught Zhao Shu Xia any boxing moves or stance frames, nor did he rush to feed him punches. Instead, he first left seven diagrams of the human body's acupoints inside the Bamboo Building. They corresponded respectively to the different scenes within Chen Ping'an's Human Body Small World, from the third to the ninth realm of his martial arts. The portraits had deliberately erased flesh, blood, bones, and sinews, leaving only acupoints and meridians. They were as tall as a person, with more than a thousand qi palaces and acupoints—far exceeding the understanding of ordinary Dao Cultivators. As for the acupuncture wooden figures used by directors in common apothecaries, they were naturally even less comparable. On the seven diagrams, different acupoints glittered like scattered stars, their lights flickering in many colors and illuminating the entire Bamboo Building until it shone brilliantly, like resplendent star maps hanging in the void beyond the heavens.
With every breath taken by the "Chen Ping'an" in the seven diagrams, countless phenomena emerged within those seven worlds of stars: galaxies seeming to pour down from above, white rainbows stretching across the sky, stars pulling and rotating around one another.
Each portrait resembled a dazzling, multicolored astrological formation. The lower "Chen Ping'an's" realm, the quicker his breathing and the shorter the