Hengsha

Min Hengsha stood between Min Baxian and Zhuang Wei, his towering body hunched over. His teeth chattered, his long hair whipped wildly about, the scar on his face twitched faintly, and sweat poured down like rain.

Empowerment by pouring cultivation into someone might seem wonderful, but how could ordinary people understand the suffering it entailed?

It was like forcing someone who had already eaten their fill to swallow another thirty meat buns. The bloating made one want to die, yet Min Hengsha endured that pain in full.

Back when Xiang Yang left Nanxiang, Min Ling and the others had already decided to devote all their efforts to nurturing Min Hengsha. The Lineage's stored martial arts foundations and cultivation resources were all opened to him, yet even that seemed insufficient.

Thus, Min Ling took Min Hengsha out of Nanxiang and into a temple on Guangyuan Mountain, where an old acquaintance lived. They sought the aid of the reclusive master, Master Ling Kong, who tempered Min Hengsha's body with a hundred herbs and a hundred poisons.

It took a hundred days, also known as the Hundred-Day Foundation Establishment, to forge him a body of steel sinews and iron bones, expanding his meridians and dantian. Such an opportunity was one in ten thousand, no less extraordinary than Xiang Yang swallowing the Bone-Marrow Cleansing Pill—perhaps even greater.

Yet the pain of that process was no less than being cast into the eighteen levels of hell. His body had to endure a hundred days of agony—soreness, numbness, itching, and pain—and he could not even touch his skin. Otherwise, if a wound appeared, the hundred herbs would not have time to neutralize the hundred poisons, and the toxins would kill him on the spot.

The torment of the flesh fed back into the mind, becoming endless