Time passed.
Several days flew by.
Hu Long's daily life was simple.
He went back and forth between home and the Tongbei Club, with no unnecessary socializing or entertainment.
Most people might have found this lifestyle dull after a while, but Hu Long quite liked it.
He had no worries about food or money.
He could also watch himself grow stronger every day. It was practically the life of his dreams.
Of course, it would have been even better if that thing hadn't kept pestering him from time to time.
Thanks to his perfected Comprehensive Combat Arts, Innate Divine Strength, and High-Efficiency Absorption and Metabolism, his progress was nothing short of astonishing.
While others were still struggling to get the movements of their post exercises right, he could already feel the Integrated Force within him growing more refined and flowing with ease.
There was also one small interlude.
Over the past few days, Sun Yi, whom he'd met once before, had come looking for him again.
He couldn't tell whether this woman was genuinely clueless or simply out of her mind.
The first time,
she'd demanded that Hu Long apologize and go to Hu Chengwen himself to explain things and mend relations between their families.
When he'd shown no reaction, he'd thrown her out.
The second time she came,
Hu Long had already told the property manager about the previous incident, so they didn't let her into the residential complex.
But she didn't give up. Instead, she waited for him at the entrance.
When he came back from the Tongbei Club, she happened to block his way.
The woman, Sun Yi, even put on the air of someone who'd suffered a terrible injustice.
Then she said something even more outrageous: "Fine, you win. I'll break up with him and give you a chance, but I'm keeping the baby, and you'll have to raise it."
Hu Long naturally refused.
A third time?
There wasn't one.
The moment she said those outrageous words, Hu Long felt his blood pressure shoot through the roof.
Her deranged, almost inhuman words were more than he could take.
He punched her right in the face.
He knocked out several of her teeth.
Hu Long had no habit of holding back just because someone was a woman.
Besides, she was clearly a fake person, utterly without shame or morals.
He used to think people like that only existed in novels and trashy plots, but reality was often more ironic.
And yet he'd run into one himself. Sometimes, you had to admit that real life could throw up people even more absurd than anything in fiction.
At least novels and bad dramas had some semblance of cause and effect. In real life, some people could lose it for no reason at all.
Some people seemed normal, but were actually only humanoid—human in appearance.
Most of the time, they behaved no differently from anyone else and did just fine at school.
But when certain situations arose, they did things that ordinary people couldn't understand.
That exposed the fact that their intellectual development was impaired.
Still,
Hu Long held back a little. He only left her face swollen, and the baby in her belly was unharmed.
After all, he wasn't a doctor. If she needed an abortion, she could go to a hospital for that professional procedure.
After getting hit, she finally stopped causing trouble.
She didn't come to pester Hu Long again.
The incident only strengthened Hu Long's conviction that sometimes, fists worked better than reason.
It was a small matter to him.
He soon put it out of his mind.
Inside the room,
Hu Long stood bare-chested, his eyes slightly closed and his feet set a little apart.
He held his arms around empty space, one hand clenched into a fist and the other held open, one above the other, forming a strange pose.
As he slowly breathed through his nose and mouth, his breath sank, and his lower abdomen rose and fell slightly with it.
At that moment, he was practicing the Mountain Standing Stake.
A closer look
would reveal that the muscles all over his body were trembling in a regular rhythm.
Suddenly,
Hu Long's eyes snapped open.
His stance shifted, changing from a stationary stake to one in motion.
His movements weren't particularly fast. They were more like the health exercises old men practiced in the park.
And yet,
Hu Long looked as though he'd just done strenuous exercise.
His skin flushed red, and sweat streamed down his body.
Wisps of white vapor even seeped from the pores all over him.
The next moment,
he stopped moving.
He raised his hand and punched.
Pop!
A sharp crack rang out.
"Standing like an ape with its arms hanging, force circles through the body."
"Power rises from the ground, starts at the waist and hips, travels through the back, and reaches the fingertips. So that's how it works."
A glimmer of understanding flashed in Hu Long's eyes.
His gaze fell on a line of text on the Panel.
[Mountain Standing Stake (Level Four)]
During this time,
practicing the stake exercises, along with Hu Qitian's explanations, had deepened his understanding of the path of a Secret Martial Artist.
Ordinary people, even the experts who practiced combat arts in the Tendon-Changing Realm,
only possessed Dead Force at its core.
This force came from rigid contractions in isolated muscle groups. It was stiff, sluggish, and exhausting.
To become a Secret Martial Artist,
one had to master Living Force.
Unlike Dead Force, Living Force was a coordinated, agile, adaptable force that could be controlled and adjusted throughout the body.
Integrated Force was the earliest stage of Living Force.
The Body Casting Realm was the process of mastering Integrated Force.
The Body Casting Realm was divided into three minor stages: Clumsy Force, Force-Through, and Unified Whole.
The Mountain Standing Stake had nine levels, with every three levels corresponding to one minor stage of the Body Casting Realm.
Clumsy Force.
Localized power: stiff and scattered. This was the dividing line between ordinary people and Secret Martial Artists in the Body Casting Realm.
At this stage, one began consciously strengthening and coordinating the arms and legs, but the power still came from a single source.
When exerting force, however, the whole body remained stiff, movements were wasteful, and much of the power dissipated as it traveled.
The saying "hands without a body, force that never reaches the tip" described this stage.
His earlier assessment of himself had been a little off.
In truth, he'd already had one foot in the Clumsy Force stage.
All he'd lacked was the ability to apply and control his force.
After several days of practice, combined with the changes wrought by Innate Divine Strength,
he had not only fully entered the Clumsy Force stage, but had already advanced to the second minor stage of the Body Casting Realm: Force-Through.
Force-Through, as the name suggested,
meant training the body through a variety of techniques, adapting it to different ways of exerting force so that power could be transmitted throughout the body in an instant. This allowed one to produce truly penetrating Integrated Force.
That was the force he'd just unleashed.
That meant he had succeeded.
If other people knew how fast he'd progressed, they'd be too shocked to speak.
According to Hu Qitian,
the Body Casting Realm was the starting stage for Secret Martial Artists, and it wasn't particularly difficult.
Generally, with the same amount of training time,
someone with Grade A Bone Aptitude could reach the first level of the Standing Post Technique in about a month and become a Secret Martial Artist in the Body Casting Realm.
Someone with Grade B Bone Aptitude would need a month and a half to two months.
Someone with Grade C would need at least three months.
That was the difference in Bone Aptitude.
But Hu Long had taken less than ten days.
And he hadn't merely entered the Body Casting Realm—he'd reached its second stage, Force-Through.
That far surpassed even ordinary Grade A Bone Aptitude.
"But with two physical talents and my perfected Comprehensive Combat Arts, on top of my peerless cultivation talent,
it's only natural I've made it this far."
Hu Long murmured to himself.
"At this rate, reaching the third stage, Unified Whole, and making my force perfectly fluid and unified is only a matter of time."