Two days later, Xiaomeng's cave abode opened wide, and a heroic-looking man stepped out. He could not exactly be called handsome, but he radiated masculine vigor and was roughly the same type as Feng Jun.
The moment he stepped outside, a woman drifted over to him. It was Xiaomeng. "Huh? How did you end up looking like this?"
"I didn't do anything to it." The man was Qu Jianlei. When forming a Core Embrace, cultivators could use the baptism of Tribulation Lightning to make slight adjustments to their appearance. He spread his hands with a grin. "This was what I looked like when I first met you."
Xiaomeng rolled her eyes at him. "Can you stop talking so shamelessly?"
Qu Jianlei laughed heartily. "Only a True Adept would dare be shameless. Back when I was at Peak Emergence from Dust, how could I have dared talk like that?"
Xiao Meng snorted irritably, but then felt that something was off. She looked at him again and finally spotted it. "Why are you taller?"
When she had first met him, she had been taller than him. Later, as he got older, he had become a little shorter. Yet now they were actually the same height, and he even seemed faintly taller.
"Of course I am." Qu Jianlei answered smugly. Having successfully formed his Core Embrace in a single stroke—and with a high-grade core at that—he naturally had to puff himself up a little. "The first time I tried to form my Core Embrace, I already decided that I had to get taller, at least taller than you. How could a dignified man be shorter than a woman?"
As he spoke, he could not help sighing. "Who would have thought it would take more than two hundred years to fulfill that dream?"
Increasing