About thirty years ago, James entered the realm of Huajin for the second time, purging the vampiric taint from his body and gaining perfect control over his strength. Judging by the system of martial arts cultivation he practiced, the next step was the so-called Bao Dan stage. But now that he had reached this point, James was in no hurry.
He focused on building and managing the Howlett Family's industrial empire. More than a decade ahead of its time, he developed and put the gasoline internal combustion engine into use. Driven by this technology, the family rose to become the world's leading industrial power. And in an era before antitrust laws even existed, it soon had the entire Western industrial establishment gasping for air.
James had long since selected and won over several European and American financial tycoons, tying them to his chariot. He had no intention of relying on his family alone to swallow the entire capitalist world, and he was entirely unafraid of underhanded tactics.
At the same time, he devoted himself to studying the histories and cultures of many ancient peoples. He traveled far and wide, spending years studying at colleges across Europe. He reexamined his own cultivation, searching for a training method better suited to Mutants or other supernatural races.
Over the years, he had deliberately used the Howlett Family's influence and his travels to gather humans with unusual mutations. Most had congenital or acquired physical deformities. A very few showed signs resembling those of Mutants, but their abilities were exceedingly weak, such as an unusually nimble tongue or mildly corrosive bodily fluids.
It was only after meeting Azazel that he found the perfect subject for his teaching experiments in his adopted son. The results had been quite promising.
Comparing his own Mutant abilities with Azazel's, James discovered that Mutants could follow two distinct paths in developing their powers and their physical selves. For Mutants like Wolverine or Sabretooth, whose powers were inherently suited to hand-to-hand combat, martial arts training could improve their control over their abilities while greatly enhancing their destructive power.
But for Azazel and others whose Mutant abilities were strange and wondrous, the source of their strength lay in their powers themselves, not in their bodies' physical capacity for destruction. Mutants of this type did not necessarily need to practice martial arts to gain better control of their abilities. Instead, they needed to train their control over their own bodies, consciousness, and minds.
So James had cultivated his body to a certain level, then looked back from that lofty vantage point to see through to the essence of things. He had developed a new cultivation method focused on mastering oneself.
Combining martial arts, meditation, breathing techniques, yoga chakras, and other methods for training the body and mind, he divided it into three stages, much like the progression from Mingjin to Huajin. But unlike those methods, it trained the body without cultivating strength. Its purpose was to begin with control over one's own body, then move on to control of the mind, consciousness, and emotions, improving one's understanding and mastery of one's Mutant abilities.
Azazel's progress over the years had almost exactly matched James's expectations for the method.
At the first stage, a Mutant's powers would no longer easily run out of control. At the second, they could wield their strength with ease and use their powers proficiently. At the third, they should be able to develop and perfectly use the full extent of their current abilities, perhaps even surpassing their existing limits to some degree.
Azazel had reached the second stage. He now had precise, mature control over his teleportation: its frequency, range, accuracy, and even the mass he could carry with him. He was no longer like he'd been when he first started practicing as a child, able only to guess roughly where he'd end up.
He had yet to reach the third stage, so James had no truly objective, precise example to study. His years of traveling and studying in Europe had given him some degree of an academic mindset.
In James's overall framework for cultivating Mutant abilities, all three stages belonged only to the first level. To explore the next level, he would need to complete the final step he was undertaking today.
According to Daoist views of the world and life, martial arts cultivation at this point was called Bao Dan. A golden pill swallowed into one's belly, and one's fate was in one's own hands, not Heaven's. In reality, this stage involved bringing the body's cultivation to the point where one had perfect control over its energy and blood, then compressing and concentrating all the so-called Jing Qi, blood energy, and vital essence into a single point. That point would then stimulate the body to improve further, like a second growth spurt—a complete transformation.
The problem was, where was this so-called point?
It varied from person to person and from one cultivation method to another. It could even vary according to the time and place. So James had no idea where it was. He had never reached this realm in his previous life, and neither his teacher nor any of his fellow disciples had ever produced a master at this level.
So all he could do was experiment, drawing on his martial arts knowledge and understanding of the human body.
For anyone else, this would be nothing more than a suicidal gamble, staking their body on a one-in-ten-thousand chance of survival. For James, though, it was extraordinarily easy. It had also given him a vast wealth of experience in the internal damage caused by bodily cultivation.
Whenever his energy and blood gathered in the wrong place, his organs would quickly fail and die. The consequences varied widely. But his healing ability would restore him to perfect health in an instant.
For years, James had made these experiments part of his daily routine. He would sit cross-legged, channel his strength, and concentrate it—then spit blood, have his intestines and stomach rupture, and, a moment later, try another point without a scratch.
He had tested nearly every acupuncture point, energy-channel junction, organ, bone, blood vessel, and other part of the body. Each time he failed, he recorded the body's reaction to that location and the benefits that might come from stimulating it carefully and correctly.
One day, this knowledge and research would become a treasure trove for the study and advancement of the human body.
Of course, after so many years of experiments, he had succeeded. But when James first found the correct point of concentration, he had reconsidered and stopped rather than continuing his cultivation.
"Who says the human body can form only one 'golden pill'?"
With this question in mind, James decided to continue experimenting. He planned to practice on every part of his body and see whether a person could have a second, third, or even more Bao Dan points.
That was why it had taken him more than ten years to finally decide, today, to enter this entirely new realm.
Azazel stared unblinkingly at his old man. After he lay motionless as if dead for a while, the muscles and bones in his body began to twitch rhythmically. Starting at his cervical vertebrae and continuing down to his tailbone, nine egg-sized points, scarlet and faintly pulsing, appeared at intervals along James's spine.
His body shook more and more violently. Bones cracked beneath his skin, which began to split and peel away as new skin rapidly grew in its place. Now and then, blood clots and cloudy fluid spilled from his mouth. His teeth fell out, then grew back. The whole scene looked as if he were being stripped of flesh and bone layer by layer, only to grow back again. It was absolutely horrifying.
His rapid-healing Mutant ability completed the process of transformation—which should have taken more than a hundred days—in a very short time.
James began to shrink. Even seated, his frame had been enormous and excessively broad, but now it gradually drew in, accompanied by a teeth-grinding series of cracks from his bones.
A little while later, all the changes—the withered bones, the fresh flesh, the bloody, violent transformation—came to an end.
James stood up. His skin was as smooth as jade, seemingly without pores. His hair, beard, and body hair had all fallen out again. Examined closely, each new strand of hair was four or five times thicker than a normal one. His body hair had vanished, along with his skin's pores.
His face was imposing and finely sculpted, with an almost eerie beauty. His frame had become exceptionally broad and sturdy, yet his muscles no longer bulged. His flesh had the texture of some entirely new kind of tissue. Its lines differed somewhat from those of ordinary human musculature, yet it was filled with an uncanny sense of power.
James glanced at the various bits of bodily tissue and filth that had fallen around him. Then he looked at Azazel, who seemed mentally shattered and utterly hopeless, and said cheerfully,
"Hey, sonny, doesn't Dad look handsome?"
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