After entering the training room for the second time, Jiang Liu didn't hesitate at all. He immediately crouched with his arms over his head as spiritual energy surged through his body, forming a faint, watery sheen over his skin.
One hammer!
It slammed into his arm, and Jiang Liu's face twitched.
Another hammer.
It smashed into his thigh, and Jiang Liu couldn't help groaning.
The third hammer.
Jiang Liu cursed the game developers.
The fourth hammer, the fifth hammer, the sixth hammer.
Jiang Liu gritted his teeth and endured more than a dozen blows, but still had to leave the training room.
It really did hurt like his heart was being pierced!
He'd thought the training speed boost from the paid training room was meant to save time, letting him master a technique faster.
Now that he thought about it, heh.
The paid training room wasn't for saving time. It was for getting hit fewer times and suffering a little less.
With a 50% increase to training speed, he only needed to take seven hundred and fifty blows instead of a thousand to master the Thousand Hammer Golden Body. What a deal!
Five Spirit Stones an hour. This wasn't the value of his time; it was compensation for emotional distress.
And he was the one paying!
Jiang Liu took more than ten minutes to recover before he finally dispelled the shadow of pain that had seeped into every inch of him. His face pale and his body trembling, he entered the training room again.
The third time, he endured thirty blows.
The fourth time, he endured sixty.
The fifth time, he endured a hundred.
Sixth time, seventh time, eighth time...
By the end, Jiang Liu had gone completely numb. His mind was blank, as if every nerve in his body had gone dead.
Enter the training room, get beaten, leave, enter again, get beaten again—an endless cycle.
It was exactly like fighting and training in the story stages. It all came down to willpower.
Fortunately, the Lingyun Sect Senior Disciple had already tempered his willpower to an extraordinary degree, and he somehow managed to endure the Thousand Hammer Golden Body training.
[ Ding! Thousand Hammer Golden Body training complete. ]
"It's over?"
Jiang Liu's face was expressionless. Even when he heard the notification in his mind, he showed no reaction, still mechanically trying to enter the training room.
After failing to get in twice, a glimmer of light slowly returned to his dull, lifeless eyes. His eyes gradually grew moist.
"I miss my mom..."
Jiang Liu murmured to himself. He remembered being held in his mother's arms when he was little, then recalled his parents' funeral when he was a teenager.
A thought arose, then was suppressed.
"Phew. That was rough."
Jiang Liu let out a long breath and looked at his skill list. The Thousand Hammer Golden Body icon was now glowing brightly.
[Thousand Hammer Golden Body]: Temper the body with a thousand blows to forge flesh as tough as gold. Greatly increases physical durability, grants immunity to damage below Qi Cultivation Layer 5, and reduces damage from Qi Refining Layer 6 through Qi Refining Layer 9.
Immunity to damage below Qi Cultivation Layer 5!
With this passive body-tempering technique, he truly wouldn't have to fear being shot at from the shadows anymore!
Could a handgun bullet pierce his Thousand Hammer Golden Body?
There was only one way to find out.
"Not bad, not bad. All that suffering wasn't for nothing."
After seeing the effects of the Thousand Hammer Golden Body, Jiang Liu couldn't help smiling. It was as if he'd completely forgotten all the pain he'd endured.
Pain didn't matter. The reward was what counted.
As long as the return was proportional to what he put in, he could accept any amount of pain.
The Thousand Hammer Golden Body was satisfactory enough. It should be his strongest skill now, an even greater improvement than Heart Piercing Drop.
"What time is it?"
Jiang Liu glanced at the parkour event countdown. The second round would start in a little over two hours.
In other words, he'd spent an entire day getting hammered in the training room.
Mastering a body-tempering technique in a single day—what could he say? It was the Cultivation Era, after all. It had simplified every part of the cultivation process.
In a real cultivation world, his body would have been smashed to pieces after just a few blows while training the Thousand Hammer Golden Body. It would take months to master.
With only a little over two hours until the second round, Jiang Liu couldn't be bothered to leave the Cultivation Era. He casually claimed his daily Spirit Stones and tossed them into the Foundation Establishment Furnace, then plunged straight into story stage 1-10.
He spent a couple of hours messing around with the Lingyun Sect Senior Disciple, killing him a few times. Before the event began, Jiang Liu bought a high-grade movement speed buff and waited for a few minutes. Then an electronic voice rang in his mind.
[The second round of the King of Parkour has begun. Enter?]
[Yes]
After entering the event Illusion Realm, a completely new scene appeared before his eyes.
Jiang Liu opened his eyes. The first thing he saw was a towering, treacherous mountain with a steep, sixty-degree slope.
No need to guess. That mountain was the course.
"Where are my wings? My huge-ass wings?"
Jiang Liu had only been looking at the mountain for a few seconds when he heard a familiar voice beside him. He turned and saw Li Dongze frantically pawing at his back, but no matter how much he searched, he couldn't find his wings.
Where were his wings?
Jiang Liu froze, then felt around his own back. He couldn't find any wings either.
[Flight is prohibited during this round.]
Huh?
They'd banned his wings?
It was a pay-to-win game, and they were trying to balance it?
Could they at least show some respect to players like them, the God-Tier Players?
"See? I told you."
Jiang Liu patted Li Dongze on the shoulder. "The first round was just to weed out the pretenders. Of course the second round was going to be harder."
"Fine, they made it harder. But why'd they have to ban my wings?!"
Li Dongze looked like he was about to cry. "I spent all day practicing flying, and now they just ban it? Are they messing with me or what?!"
"I'm reporting them! I'm taking this to the Oversight Bureau!"
Uh...
Jiang Liu felt a little guilty. He was the one who'd egged Li Dongze on to practice flying. Li Dongze had listened and really spent the whole day training.
Then they'd banned flight.
"Forget it. There's no point arguing with the game developers."
Jiang Liu consoled him. "A flight ban makes sense, though. It's a parkour event, and the course is a mountain. If we could fly, we'd just fly straight to the top. What would even be the point of a race? You know?"
"I mean, sure..."
Li Dongze grumbled, still very unhappy.
A couple words of comfort should be enough. What else did he want, Jiang Liu to quit too?
Jiang Liu rolled his eyes and left him alone. A glance around revealed Su Weiyang a few meters away. That bright, blazing glow around her made her impossible to miss; no one dared approach within several meters of her.
She noticed him too. They nodded in greeting, but they weren't close to begin with, and they were competing against each other now, so neither said much more.
Jiang Liu looked around again. Of all the students from Third Middle School, only the three of them had made it to the second round. Making the top three out of ten schools was pretty good.
A rugged mountain thousands of meters tall stood before them. The players in this race were gathered at its foot, gazing up at the peak with burning eyes and excited expressions.
The final round of the King of Parkour, rewards of magical artifacts of every rank, and cultivation gains multiplied many times over!
Everything awaited them at the summit!
[The second round of the King of Parkour is in the preparation phase. All players, please get ready.]
[Duration: 30 minutes.]
[Countdown... End!]
The transparent screen hanging overhead slowly faded away. The instant the countdown ended, ten thousand players began climbing the mountain!
Before you continue