Breakthrough in Fist Technique

"Off you go." Chen Mo pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with snow toward the dried-up creek bed ahead.

He had been in the Guard Camp for three months now, and by rights, it was time to assign him to a squad.

But the New Year was just around the corner, and with no fighting in Xingyuan Prefecture, many of the guards were locals.

General Sun had granted leave to most of his men, letting them return home to reunite with their families.

So everything was delayed, even the end-of-month evaluations were canceled.

Unless something earth-shattering came up, nothing else would be dealt with until after the holiday.

Now, only a little over thirty guards who had no home to go to, or whose families weren't in Xingyuan Prefecture, remained in camp, along with a handful of auxiliary soldiers doing odd jobs.

Many tasks usually handled by the auxiliaries now fell to the guards themselves.

Take shoveling snow, for instance—if they left it to the auxiliaries, it wouldn't be clean even after half a month.

Still, one good thing about the approaching New Year was that the camp's food standards had clearly improved.

One day they'd butcher a pig, the next a sheep. The day before, General Sun's family had a cow die from a fall, and he sent over two hundred catties of beef to the guards staying behind.

As for all sorts of pastries, fruits, dried nuts, various wines, and even tobacco leaves for New Year's goods, General Sun had plenty delivered as well.

Chen Mo didn't smoke or drink, so he traded those items with other guards for pastries and dried fruits.

Now his room was packed with snacks. Every day after meals, he'd grab a handful and eat.

This helped him accumulate blood and qi faster. Even if it was only a tiny increase each time, it added up to a considerable amount over days and weeks.

Training had also come to a complete halt. Aside from a few necessary chores each day, the rest of the time was entirely their own.

That suited Chen Mo just fine. The food standards had clearly risen, and barring any surprises, they'd stay that way until after the fifteenth of the first month.

If that held, he should be able to undergo his next Mortal Transformation after the fifteenth. Even if it was a bit late, it wouldn't be by more than a few days.

Before then, he might even manage to break through to the second layer of the Greedy Wolf Seven Kill Fist, which would give his strength a decent boost.

Pushing the wheelbarrow back into camp, Chen Mo picked up his shovel and started clearing snow again.

The snow that had fallen two days ago was thick, reaching up to a man's shins. He had to get it cleared now, or it would be even harder later.

The little creek where they dumped the snow wasn't far from camp. It had long since dried up, so they could safely pile all the snow inside.

Even the guards who hadn't trained in martial arts still had two or three hundred catties of strength—they were all sturdy men.

So they worked fast, carting load after load of snow out of camp in a flurry.

The dry creek bed was piled high. With that much snow packed together, it might not even all melt by spring.

"Brothers, the kitchen's making dumplings for lunch today. We'll make do with that for midday, and have a proper feast tonight," a cook called out cheerfully.

Today was New Year's Eve. Tomorrow would be the New Year.

Even in an ordinary household, they'd try to prepare a decent spread for the holiday.

The cooks in the Guard Camp weren't the most skilled, but today they were pulling out all the stops to prepare as many dishes as possible.

"Sounds good!" Chen Mo was the first to agree. He dropped his shovel and headed straight for the kitchen.

In Xingyuan Prefecture, the custom was to eat dumplings on New Year's Eve—but at noon, not at night.

There were two fillings: beef and radish, and pork and chives.

In the military, everything was practical and rough, so the dumplings were big, each one the size of two or three copper coins.

Chen Mo grabbed four large plates first, each holding seventeen or eighteen dumplings. He ate two plates while letting the other two cool.

He also took a few cloves of garlic and poured a bowl of aged vinegar.

By the time the other guards trickled in, Chen Mo had already polished off two plates.

The cook in charge of boiling the dumplings kept bringing out more plates.

Even the auxiliaries working in the Guard Camp had a good gig. If the guards lived well, the auxiliaries fared better than ordinary soldiers outside.

Especially the cooks helping in the kitchen—they ate whatever the guards ate, living more comfortably than small landlords out in the world.

Chen Mo downed five plates of dumplings first, then loosened his belt and ate two more. He sat for a bit to let the food settle.

Then he picked up two more plates to take back as an afternoon snack.

Everyone was used to this by now. There were plenty of big eaters in camp, but someone who could pack it away like Chen Mo was truly one of a kind.

At first, people might have been surprised, but after seeing it enough, they got used to it.

Still, before they knew that Chen Mo had quietly killed seventeen or eighteen people, everyone thought he was just simple and honest.

After finding that out, most people saw him as a man of few words and ruthless action.

Fleeing all the way from Qing Province to Ding Province's Xingyuan Prefecture, surviving by begging, and killing seventeen or eighteen people along the way—no matter how you looked at it, that wasn't an easy feat.

Even some veterans wouldn't dare claim they could pull it off.

Since Chen Mo had managed it, it proved he wasn't as simple and honest as he seemed on the surface. At the very least, he wasn't someone to mess with.

After putting the dumplings in his room, he went back to shoveling snow in the afternoon. He worked for about another hour or so before the snow was mostly cleared.

Once the shoveling was done, Chen Mo returned to his quarters and ate the two plates of dumplings, which were still a little warm.

The remaining personal guards all lived in the same row of barracks now. Inside, several stoves were lit, making it as warm as spring compared to the outside world.

Each stove used a fine iron pipe to vent directly outside, so there was no worry of charcoal poisoning.

The New Year's Eve feast was better than ever—there was far too much to finish, and the leftovers would last for days, plenty of them.

The next day, the first day of the new year, General Sun rode back from the city. He handed out red envelopes to each of the personal guards who hadn't been able to go home for the holiday, chatted for a while, and then left.

In the days that followed, Chen Mo's life didn't change much. Aside from eating better, he kept up his daily cultivation and training without pause.

The main reason was that he had nothing else to do. He didn't drink or gamble with the other guards, and with the whole day empty, the only way to pass the time was to train.

More than ten days slipped by. One day, while Chen Mo was cultivating, he clearly felt a tremor run through his flesh.

This was a sign that the Greedy Wolf Seven Kill Fist was about to break through. As a very simple external hard martial art, its breakthrough required no special opportunity or fate.

As long as one trained hard and steadily, the breakthrough would come naturally when the time was right.

Chen Mo's legs were rooted deep into the ground like an old tree. In his perception, what had originally been a single mass of blood energy was now gradually splitting into two.

From now on, every time he trained, the effect would be twice what it had been before.

Not only that, Chen Mo could clearly sense that after the second blood energy mass had fully formed, his own blood energy was more invigorated.

Every subsequent training session would yield twice the results of the previous one.

This martial art did not grant any immediate boost upon breakthrough—all improvements came from daily practice.

Breaking through was merely a means of shattering a bottleneck. Once a martial artist reached a limit and continued training, blood energy would begin to accumulate, gradually condensing into a new mass within the body.

Only when that blood energy mass fully formed had the martial artist truly broken through the next barrier, allowing them to gain progress from continued cultivation.

After carefully sensing the surging blood energy within him following the breakthrough, Chen Mo focused his mind on the Mortal Transformation Pearl.

The once transparent and colorless pearl was now nearly completely crimson. The next Mortal Transformation should come within just a few days.