Meng Zhao held a three-foot short staff, sweeping and chopping, poking and tripping, tangling and stirring his way onward. His moves were sometimes domineering and forceful, sometimes strange and exquisitely subtle. Along the way, he encountered no fewer than a dozen encirclements centered on white bones, as well as attacks from ferocious beasts shaped like lizards.
Yet he dealt with them all effortlessly. At the same time, continuously absorbing Ferocious Beast Inner Cores gradually transformed his bones, turning them a deep platinum-white, sharp and keen. Though his build showed no obvious change, his weight had increased severalfold. This was a side effect of his bone density reaching an extreme level.
After fighting for roughly half a quarter of an hour, Meng Zhao finally discovered another unusual object besides the white bones and short staff.
It was a war chariot half-buried in the earth, made of bronze and wrapped in densely intertwined bone vines. A War Sword was embedded in its shaft, likewise broken. At the edges of the broken blade, black liquid appeared from nothingness and flowed down without cease.
Meng Zhao immediately stepped forward and swept away all the bone vines with his short staff. After a series of crisp cracking sounds, the war chariot hidden beneath the dust finally reappeared in the world.
The bronze itself was remarkable enough, but only when the chariot saw daylight again did Meng Zhao realize that it had likely been forged from Dragon Blood Bronze, a material extinct in the present age, mixed with meteoric iron. Its surface was covered in dim golden treasure-light, while ghostly blue radiance seeped from its cracks, as though liquid metal flowed within.
Embedded in the axle were irregular gemstones of unknown origin. Meng Zhao counted them carefully and found seventy-two, corresponding to the number of Earthly