In Da Qing 292, the Qing Kingdom admitted defeat and compensated Wu Kingdom with silver and land. Only then did Wu Kingdom call it off.
You felt the Qing Kingdom was truly a clown.
In Da Qing 293, you began cultivating "Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony." This step had no division into ten or twenty percent progress—or rather, it had something like progress, but you had no way of sensing exactly how much. It mainly involved coordinating the exertion of your meridians, bones, and the like. Once you completed this step, even without using any Force Qi, a casual wave of your hand could wield several thousand jin of strength, shoving aside a giant elephant or collapsing a stone wall with one slap.
In Da Qing 295, you practiced chopping and slashing every day, and your saber techniques became increasingly miraculous.
In Da Qing 299, you could already make your muscles and bones tremble in unison, erupting with crisp ringing sounds. But you knew you were still far from done; your ability to coordinate your muscles and bones was nowhere near perfection.
Some Martial Masters had relatively poor Foundations. Even at the end of Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony, their sound was no more than exploding firecrackers. Others, however, could achieve "Tiger Leopard Thunder Sound." With your Talent Aptitude, you figured you ought to manage at least Tiger Leopard Thunder Sound.
The final step for a Martial Master was condensing Martial Will, but this could be carried out simultaneously with Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony. In theory, the two steps proceeded side by side, but in practice, condensing Martial Will took far longer than completing Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony!
A standard Grandmaster seed became a Martial Master at thirty, began Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony at thirty-three to thirty-five, and generally reached the most coordinated state around fifty. Then, they would not be able to condense Martial Will until sixty. Some even dragged it out until their seventies or eighties, or were unable to become Grandmasters for their entire lives.
Yet there were also many with unwavering wills, extraordinary gifts, or comprehension that pierced the heavens, who could condense Martial Will in their thirties or forties, taking a step ahead of Muscles and Bones Ringing in Harmony.
In Year 302 of Daqing, your muscles and bones grew ever more coordinated. Though they were bodily structures within you, you could flexibly make them shift within a certain range as easily as moving your fingers.
In Year 303 of Daqing, you looked up at the sky and saw nothing.
You hesitated over what choice to make this time. If you remembered correctly, that Alien Demon seemed to have first appeared in the Qing Kingdom and slaughtered a city, but later it was surrounded and killed by Grandmasters in Wu Kingdom.
After the Alien Demon succeeded in turning the tables and killing them, its Demon Country was established beginning in Wu Kingdom as well.
After hesitating for a moment, you decided to head west, cross that boundless desert, and travel to the legendary grasslands on the other side.
Yet before setting out, you still left behind a message for the Martial Masters of your generation whom you knew, the First-Rate juniors, and the Grandmaster seniors.
You said that you had dreamed of an Alien Demon from beyond the heavens descending upon the world, massacring all three kingdoms. Even Supreme Grandmasters would not be able to withstand a single exchange against it. The dream had been too real, etching terror into your soul. You had no choice but to believe it.
They thought martial arts practice had turned you stupid. One Grandmaster senior even advised you that, if nothing else worked, you should find yourself a wife and enjoy the pleasures of human relations instead of fantasizing about Alien Demons from beyond the heavens.
You merely tossed out one sentence: "In my dream, an Alien Demon's blood can be used to forge divine weapons beyond imagination." Then you left without looking back.
Though you knew leaving that sentence behind was probably useless, you still had to wait for Bei Chenguang, the child of the era, to be born, because the conditions were not right.
First, too few people possessed demon blood in the beginning. Those who did were personally transformed by the Alien Demon, and their combat strength rivaled that of Grandmasters. You could neither defeat them nor gather their blood, so it was impossible to forge divine weapons capable of threatening the Alien Demon.
...By the time it began mass-producing Demonized Soldiers, the three kingdoms had already collapsed.
Then there was this... even if the existing Grandmasters donned matching divine weapons, they still would not be the Alien Demon's opponents.
Bei Chenguang had become a Grandmaster at twenty. His Foundation Amplification had to be ten times, or perhaps even nine times, that of an ordinary person. Do not be fooled by the fact that he had only just become a Grandmaster in that simulation—he might already have been able to hang up several veteran Grandmasters and beat them senseless.
And even with that level of strength, he and the Alien Demon fought all the way to the East Sea without a victor being decided.
If it had been you at the beginning, you might have considered changing all this and actively establishing a resistance organization within the Demon Country... but after that incident eight or nine years ago, you realized that Martial Masters were still too weak.
Hold steady and do not get reckless! This was a future that had not yet happened. What you needed to do now was not change regrets within the "future," but accumulate strength and end everything in a more distant past!
In truth, in the lands of these three kingdoms, as long as you were cautious enough, it was not too difficult to live safely all the way through. But humans were emotional, not rational.
You feared that you would be unable to stand watching the Alien Demon ravage the world, then take action again and again, exposing yourself... so it was better to run farther away from the very start. Out of sight, out of mind.
In less than a month, you reached the edge of the Western Border. Vegetation was sparse here, and most of the land was barren soil. The farther west you went, the more yellow sand carpeted the ground.
You entered the desert.
You carried more than a hundred jin of water and meat on your back. This weight was not even a warm-up for you. The supplies were enough to sustain more than twenty days of travel, letting you race several thousand li westward—a distance enough to cross more than an entire kingdom.
You ran onward all the way. Fortunately, this Great Desert was not an absolute dead zone. You often encountered cacti, as well as sand rats that emerged at night, greatly easing the pressure on your food and water supplies.
You felt that as long as you remained steady and allocated your resources carefully, leaving this Great Desert would not be difficult. Ordinary people had to consider countless factors such as poisoning from wild food, illness, Water Earth incompatibility, being buried alive in sand pits, and more, but such issues were greatly reduced for martial artists.
But the eastern sea was another matter. In the desert, at least your feet stood firmly upon the ground. Upon the boundless ocean, martial artists, whose body density was somewhat greater than that of ordinary people, had to keep swimming without pause or use Force Qi to hold themselves up in order to avoid sinking beneath the sea.
On the fifteenth day after entering the Great Desert, you cursed inwardly at how absurdly huge this desert truly was. You had already traveled nearly three or four thousand li, yet all around you was still a sky filled with yellow sand.
At dusk, you even saw enormous hazy masses of earth-yellow in the distance, stretching from heaven to earth and dyeing that entire swath of sky sandy yellow. It was a sandstorm, the most terrifying natural disaster in the desert!
Before such an extreme natural disaster, even Grandmasters could not survive. You spread your legs and fled madly in the opposite direction. Though you still carried dozens of jin of food and water, your speed had already soared to high-speed rail levels, exceeding 250 kilometers per hour. If the yellow sand beneath your feet had not been unsuitable for exerting force, you could have run even faster.
In barely a dozen minutes, you left the sandstorm behind. You sneered. Nothing much... Yet after slowing down for only an hour, yellow mist rose once more along the distant horizon. After cursing, you continued running.
"Is this fun? Bullying an old Martial Master pushing fifty?!"
Before you continue