In the side room, Li Su immediately began cultivating as soon as she recovered.
With battle approaching, becoming stronger as quickly as possible was the only way to stay alive.
In fact, after Li Su finished eating, Xuanci had also obediently returned to his own room and begun cultivating.
Inhale. Exhale!
The Indestructible Diamond Divine Art's first and second stages circulated with the rhythm of Li Su's steady breathing.
It was no longer difficult for her to circulate the second stage. In fact, she could now alternate between the first and second stages.
From the first stage through the fifth, the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art was practiced through Circulation Realm and breathing.
Its difficulty lay in more than just how hard it was to cultivate.
The stages also had to be alternated, which was undoubtedly even harder.
Starting from the second stage, each completed stage of the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art had to flow seamlessly with the one before it. With each breath, Circulation Realm would arise on its own, and her force would flow without end, keeping her body absolutely indestructible. This wasn't a simple matter of alternating. Both stages had to remain active with every breath, generating two kinds of force within her body that then overlapped, making her defenses even stronger.
Under normal circumstances, Li Su shouldn't have been able to attempt this yet.
She would have needed to reach perfection in the second stage and let her body fully adapt to its breathing method before trying.
Though she hated to admit it, actual combat was the best way to learn how to use a martial art.
In the eyes of Wang Jiantong and the others, Li Su's fight with Li Hui might have been a stunning display of the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art—and of Li Su mastering it.
But that wasn't how Li Su saw it.
It had been a real, extremely perilous battle in which she could have died.
In that instant, every nerve in Li Su's body had been stretched to its limit.
The 175% boost to her comprehension granted by the world had erupted for the first time in full.
Not yielding an inch, not wasting a second, without a moment to catch her breath, she had fought for a full five minutes—three hundred seconds. In Li Su's eyes, the battle played back like a film, frame by frame.
Every slash had been aimed at her vitals. Every slash felt like the final blow.
The pressure Li Hui had put her under was so immense that her blood had nearly boiled, while her mind had tightened to a height it had never reached before.
Driven by an overwhelming will to survive, Li Su had banished almost every stray thought from her mind, leaving only a battle instinct as natural as breathing. The Arhat Fist, Cotton Palm, and even the Vajra Palm and Dragon-Capturing Skill—martial arts she had only seen before—had all come together, and she had unleashed them in that moment.
The fight had been so intense that Li Su hadn't even had the focus to watch her life flash before her eyes.
Every bit of her thinking had gone toward dealing with Li Hui's blade.
Li Su had to admit she'd been incredibly lucky.
Li Hui's strength had been just right. The pressure he put on her had pushed her barely past the limit.
Put simply, if Li Hui had been any stronger, she would have died because she couldn't have held out. If he'd been any weaker, she would also have died, because the pressure wouldn't have been enough to make her give everything and enter that near-death state.
Under that frenzied pressure at the very edge of her limits, with her thoughts reduced almost entirely to instinct, Li Hui had finally managed to force a sliver of true qi through. Even when it struck her internal organs, it had done no more than damage a few capillaries. Yet that was enough to violently provoke Li Su's instincts. In an instant, she brought out the alternating breathing of the two stages—and succeeded.
As a result, Li Su had made tremendous breakthroughs in both her inner power and her martial arts after surviving.
In fact, compared to gaining a year's worth of inner power, the experience she'd gained under that pressure had been the greatest reward of the battle. She didn't like it one bit and had no desire for more. If she could help it, she would never go through anything like that again.
She could think that all she wanted, but the benefits were still real.
Especially given Li Su's current situation. What was happening shouldn't have been possible.
Yet at that moment, her state was essentially equivalent to having mastered the first two stages of the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art and learned to alternate between them.
What did that mean?
It meant the pot was hot, the oil was ready, and all she needed was something to throw in and stir-fry!
On its own, this wouldn't make Li Su improve very quickly. No matter how well prepared you were, a pot without ingredients was useless.
But as it happened, when she left Shaolin Temple, she had taken a Great Restoration Pill.
A single Great Restoration Pill could add ten years of inner power, and most of its medicinal potency had lain dormant in her cells.
What did that mean?
It meant she had a pot—and the ingredients, too.
In an instant, the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art—which was already very difficult to cultivate, especially from the second stage onward, when it demanded not just talent but an immense amount of true qi—seemed to have been strapped to a rocket. Whoosh! It shot forward.
As she constantly alternated between the two stages, Li Su could clearly feel her progress in the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art accelerating.
Her external force was growing stronger, and her internal force was rapidly increasing as well.
As the two forces surged back and forth, the Great Restoration Pill's potency, absorbed into her cells, was taken up at a speed she had never experienced before and converted into even more true qi.
In just a few breaths, she was making almost as much progress as she had previously made in an entire day of cultivation.
How astonishing. How terrifying.
But none of that mattered.
What mattered was that Li Su was rapidly narrowing the gap between herself and a true second-rate expert.
It wasn't a gap in martial arts or experience, but in the sheer amount of inner power—a gap that simply couldn't be overcome without slowly accumulating it over time. Little by little, she was closing in on ten years of inner power.
In the real world, inner power was measured in sixty-year cycles.
Those who had entered World Fragments seven times might even possess several cycles—hundreds of years—of inner power.
But that didn't mean ten years of inner power was insignificant.
Inside a World Fragment, ten, twenty, and thirty years of inner power represented distances that couldn't be crossed.
For a second-rate expert, Circulation Realm was the standard, while ten years of inner power was the threshold for entry.
Not everyone with ten years of inner power was a peak second-rate expert, but almost every peak second-rate expert had more than ten years of it.
Murong Bo, Wang Jiantong, Wang Xianglong, and the other young geniuses like Ming Yulong were all at that threshold.
Li Su had practiced martial arts for more than four years, and she cultivated the high-quality Arhat True Qi. As she continued practicing the Indestructible Diamond Divine Art, it was further transformed into the top-quality Indestructible Diamond True Qi.
Once she reached ten years of inner power, she would undergo an immense transformation and might even gain the ability to fight a first-rate expert.
Someone might say, That's too fast—damn, far too fast. It's only been a few years!
No, it wasn't fast.
For one thing, Li Su had been born into a prestigious orthodox sect. The three arts—the Arhat Fist, Arhat Divine Art, and Indestructible Diamond Divine Art—formed a step-by-step progression, each link building on the one before. On top of that, she had her terrifying talent bonus from the world.
It was like Xiao Feng finding the Northern Dark Divine Skill: aside from her inner power, the foundation Li Su had built from the very beginning had been aimed at becoming a first-rate expert.
Meanwhile, as Li Su continued to cultivate and improve, the others who had also experienced the battle five days ago hadn't been idle either.
Lying on the ground, helplessly waiting for judgment to come—even for only a short while—had been a feeling that stayed etched in their memories.
After entering Weizhou, Wang Jiantong and Xu Jing had both thrown themselves into cultivation.
After Xuankong woke, Xuancheng and the others had also plunged into tense training. They worked on their martial arts, of course, but they also fought plenty of sparring matches.
Even during the time Li Su had spent sitting and eating, the sound of fists and feet had never stopped in the small courtyard behind the inn. If not for their special status and the fact that they'd given advance notice, the authorities would have shown up long ago.
The commotion was simply too great. Wang Jiantong and Xu Jing in particular, with their two swords, made it feel as if dozens of people were fighting at once.
As for Ming Yulong, who had made a date with Li Su, she hadn't trained or fought. From the day she arrived in Weizhou, she had sat on the inn's roof every day, gazing into the distance without a word.
Except for the one time she came down when Li Su woke up, she hadn't left the rooftop again. She just sat there alone, quietly watching the sky.
The martial artists were tense, but the people of Weizhou were even more so.
As time trickled by, it was as if the whole city had been frozen. Every passing second felt heavy, laden with an indescribable oppression.
At last, four days later—
Wuu—!
A horn sounded, one unlike any heard in the Central Plains. Then came the thunder of pounding footsteps!
They seemed to trample the very heavens and earth. Outside Weizhou, a vast black mass of people stretched as far as the eye could see, arriving with overwhelming force!
As if sensing something, a gale suddenly howled across the land. The heavy clouds overhead began to sink, and the whole earth grew so oppressive it was hard to breathe.
The Western Xia Army.
The enemy was at the gates!!!