Half a day later.
Luo Yun stood before a dilapidated village, looking at the crooked wooden sign by the entrance.
The four characters "Shrek Academy" were scrawled unevenly, as if someone had painted them with an ink-dipped fire poker.
The posts beneath the sign were nearly rotten through. They creaked whenever the wind blew, as if they might collapse at any moment.
Behind the sign was a dirt road, pitted and uneven, with puddles left over from last night's rain.
Low adobe houses lined both sides of the road. Their walls were peeling, exposing the yellow earth and straw underneath.
A few children ran along the road in the distance, carrying bamboo baskets filled with stones. They ran until they were panting, their faces slick with sweat.
Luo Yun looked the children over.
They seemed to be around twelve, with Soul Power somewhere between level twenty and thirty, nearing the Soul Elder rank.
Watching them run with stones on their backs reminded him of when he was six.
Back then, though, he had run through blizzards in the Far North, bare-chested and carrying stones heavier than himself, through snow that reached above his knees.
These children, by contrast, were running along an ordinary dirt road. There was no bitter cold, no blizzard, no pressure that made it hard to breathe.
Luo Yun shook his head.
It wasn't that this method was useless, but running alone, without medicinal baths, had little effect.
True physical strength didn't come from running. It came from soaking in a tub of medicine afterward, as the medicinal potency seeped into the spaces between your bones and strengthened your body bit by bit.
Run without soaking, and you could run yourself to death without ever becoming strong.
The children ran past Luo Yun, each of them eyeing