"By the way, big sister."
Qin Mu leaned closer, his big eyes fixed on Hu Liena.
"Didn't you ask me yesterday whether any outsiders had come to our village?"
"I remembered that Pharmacist Grandpa caught a strange old man by the river yesterday. He seemed to have come from outside the Great Ruins too."
"That old man also had nine shiny rings beneath his feet, though their colors were really ugly. Do you want to come with me to the pharmacy and take a look at him?"
Hearing Qin Mu's words, Hu Liena's heart suddenly clenched.
A strange old man in the pharmacy? Nine rings?
Wasn't that Poison Douluo, Dugu Bo, who had been missing for an entire day and night?!
"H-how is he now?" Hu Liena asked, desperately suppressing the panic in her heart.
"Won't we know if we go look?"
Qin Mu stood up, patted the dirt off his trouser legs, grabbed Hu Liena's hand, and ran toward the thatched hut behind the village that gave off a strong medicinal smell, leaving her no room to refuse.
Hu Liena did not dare resist and could only follow behind Qin Mu with gritted teeth.
They passed through a narrow dirt alley.
Before they even neared the pharmacy,
a bizarre odor so pungent that one whiff made them dizzy drifted over on the wind.
The smell carried the bitterness of herbs, along with the fishy stench emitted by all kinds of poisonous insects.
"Pharmacist Grandpa!"
When Qin Mu reached the pharmacy door, he lifted the somewhat tattered curtain and poked half his body inside as he called out.
Standing behind Qin Mu, Hu Liena finally saw the scene inside the pharmacy by the light from outside.
After just one glance,
her stomach churned violently, and she covered her mouth, nearly vomiting on the spot.
Outside the Sky Screen, audiences throughout the Douluo Continent collectively sucked in a cold breath the instant they saw the scene.
In the center of that dim pharmacy,
stood a bronze cauldron as tall as half a person.
There was no firewood burning beneath it.
Instead, yellow, purple, and black glowing rings were arranged underneath it, hissing as they released eerie green poisonous flames.
Those rings being used to fuel the fire were unmistakably Dugu Bo's Soul Rings!
Inside the cauldron boiled a pot of thick black medicinal soup, bubbling away.
And Dugu Bo, the mighty ninety-second-level Titled Douluo and guest elder of the Heaven Dou Empire,
had been stripped down to nothing but a pair of underpants.
Several thick, dark-red centipedes had tightly wrapped around his limbs, suspending him from the rafters with most of his body immersed in that boiling black medicinal soup.
Dugu Bo's old face, once gloomy and arrogant, had now been smoked black.
His eyes were closed, and white foam dribbled from his mouth as he weakly gasped for air.
At the edge of the cauldron crouched more than a dozen plump, colorful poisonous toads.
With their mouths open, they were blissfully absorbing the Jade Phosphorus Snake Emperor Poison emanating from Dugu Bo's body.
"Oh, Mu'er is here."
Beside the cauldron,
the Pharmacist wearing an Evil Ghost Mask held a large iron ladle.
As he leisurely stirred the black soup in the cauldron, he turned his head.
The deep eyes beneath his mask passed over Qin Mu and landed directly on Hu Liena, whose face had gone deathly pale.
Under the gaze of those deep eyes, Hu Liena's legs went weak. She uncontrollably took a step back, her back bumping into the doorframe.
The thatched hut was dimly lit.
Beneath the half-human-tall bronze cauldron, the yellow, purple, and black rings pulsed rhythmically, producing eerie green flames that cast the Evil Ghost Mask on the Pharmacist's face into shifting light and shadow.
"Pharmacist Grandpa, this soup is so black."
Qin Mu was not afraid in the slightest. He walked to the cauldron, stood on tiptoe, and peered inside.
A pungent herbal smell mixed with a fishy stench hit him in the face. It made Qin Mu cough twice before he hurriedly pinched his nose shut.
The Pharmacist stopped stirring with his iron ladle, and a low chuckle came from beneath his mask.
"This soup isn't for you to drink."
The Pharmacist turned around and pointed his ladle at Dugu Bo, who hung from the rafters.
"This outsider's poison techniques are crude. They do not even qualify as beginner-level."
"Still, his body has accumulated quite a lot of miscellaneous toxins. Combined with those glowing rings beneath his feet, they contain a very peculiar energy circulation."
"I'm simmering him over a low fire to force the toxins out of his body bit by bit. With a few potent medicines added in, it is just right for tempering the new gu insects I have been raising."
Having said that, the Pharmacist turned again and looked at Hu Liena, who stood frozen at the doorway.
"Mu'er, is this little girl an outsider too?"
The Pharmacist's gaze swept over Hu Liena twice, his tone somewhat casual.
"She looks like excellent medicine bait. Delicate skin, tender flesh, and fairly abundant vitality."
"If you have no other business with her, leave her here. I happen to be short on someone to test medicine on."
The moment she heard the words "test medicine," every hair on Hu Liena's body stood on end.
She had personally watched a Titled Douluo have his Soul Rings stripped away and used as firewood before being thrown into a pot to boil. If she ended up the same way, it would be ten thousand times more terrifying than being swallowed by darkness.
"No..."
Hu Liena shook her head repeatedly. Her beautiful eyes were filled with terror and pleading as she stared straight at Qin Mu.
Qin Mu quickly spread his arms and stood in front of Hu Liena as though shielding a chick.
"Pharmacist Grandpa, big sister is a good person. Yesterday at the village entrance, she even told me to run."
"Grandma said big sister is staying in the village to help with work. You can't use her to test medicine."
After hearing this, the Pharmacist shook his head in boredom and casually tossed the iron ladle into the cauldron.
"Fine. Since Old Lady Si said so, let her go."
The Pharmacist walked over to a basin of water and washed his hands, muttering casually as he did so.
"But this outsider's cultivation path is truly hard to understand."
"They forcibly seal the souls and power of all kinds of wild beasts into these glowing rings, then put them on themselves."
"This method relies entirely on external power and completely locks away one's own potential."
The Pharmacist picked up a rag and wiped his hands, then turned to look in a direction somewhere overhead, as if speaking to himself.
"One's own body is the greatest treasure in the world."
"Rather than developing one's own Spirit Fetus and Divine Treasury, they pursue these inferior external energies. It is like throwing away a watermelon to pick up sesame seeds—utterly foolish."
The Pharmacist's casual remarks might have been nothing more than an offhand complaint in Crippled Old Village.
But when they reached the Douluo Continent outside the Sky Screen, they were no less than a magnitude-twelve earthquake.
In Spirit City, within the Elder Hall.
The Grand Consecrator Qian Daoliu suddenly opened his eyes, his long golden hair stirring despite the absence of wind.
His weathered face was filled with shock and confusion that he could not conceal.
"Relying on external power, locking away potential, utterly foolish..."
Qian Daoliu muttered to himself, repeatedly chewing over those words.
For countless years, the ironclad rule of the Douluo Continent had been that Soul Masters cultivated by hunting Soul Beasts, absorbing Soul Rings, and obtaining soul skills.
In their eyes, this system was the most perfect law of heaven and earth.
Yet now, this mysterious Pharmacist from a higher-dimensional world had mercilessly dismissed that entire system as worthless!
It was not just Qian Daoliu.
Within the Seven Treasure Glazed Tile Sect in the Heaven Dou Imperial City, Ning Fengzhi, Sword Douluo, and the others also looked at one another, unable to speak for a long while.
"Sect Master, this..." Sword Douluo opened his mouth, but did not know how to express the turmoil in his heart.
Ning Fengzhi took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down.
"Senior's words may be harsh, but upon careful thought, they contain the truth of the Great Dao in its simplest form."
A sharp glint flickered in Ning Fengzhi's eyes as the image of Qin Mu shattering a barren mountain with one punch replayed in his mind.
"That cowherd had no Martial Soul and no Soul Rings. He merely tempered his body and opened his so-called Spirit Fetus, yet he possessed such terrifying power."
"This proves that cultivation methods relying on oneself truly stand far above our system of absorbing Soul Rings!"
On the training ground of Shrek Academy,
Yu Xiaogang had fallen into a nearly frenzied state of enlightenment.
The pen in his hand scratched wildly across the paper, even tearing through the pages.
"Wrong! It was all wrong!"
Yu Xiaogang's eyes were bloodshot as he clawed at his hair with a slightly deranged expression.
"Our Douluo Continent's cultivation path of tens of thousands of years was misguided from the very beginning!"
"Instead of developing the treasures of our bodies, we seize the power of Soul Beasts. That is why even if we cultivate to level ninety-nine, we only live for a few hundred years!"
The surrounding students were stunned by the Master's wild roar.
Tang San stood to the side, his heart also churning like a raging sea.
The Mysterious Heaven Skill he cultivated was, to some extent, also a method of tapping into one's own potential. It shared the same underlying principle as Crippled Old Village's philosophy.
At that thought, Tang San's heart burned with excitement.
If I can obtain the true method of opening the Divine Treasury in this world and combine it with the Tang Sect's ultimate arts, I, Tang San, will surely become the ruler of all worlds!
Within the Sky Screen,
seeing that the Pharmacist had stopped paying attention to Hu Liena, Qin Mu tugged at the corner of her clothes and quickly slipped out of the pharmacy with her.
Walking along the village path, Hu Liena gulped down fresh air, feeling as though she had just passed through Ghost Gate Pass.
"Little brother, thank you."
Hu Liena crouched down and gratefully helped Qin Mu straighten his somewhat wrinkled collar.
"It's okay, big sister. Pharmacist Grandpa is actually a pretty good person. He just has a strange temper."
Qin Mu grinned, revealing a mouthful of white teeth.
"Come on, I'll take you to watch Mute Grandpa forge iron."
Qin Mu took Hu Liena's hand and ran toward the blacksmith shop at the front of the village.
Inside the blacksmith shop, the furnace blazed fiercely.
Bare-chested, Mute swung a large iron hammer in his hand, repeatedly striking a red-hot lump of iron on the anvil.
Clang! Clang!
The crisp sound of hammering echoed through the village.
Standing outside the shop, Hu Liena had initially only watched with curiosity.
But after watching for a while, the expression on her face gradually changed.
She realized that although Mute's hammering movements seemed simple and brutal, they carried an extraordinarily mysterious rhythm.
Every time the hammer fell, Mute's chest swelled high. Then, as the hammer rose, a visible stream of white air sprayed from his nose and mouth.
With every breath, even the air around the blacksmith shop seemed to twist along with him.
Standing several meters away, Hu Liena felt a scorching heat wave crash into her face.
Yet within that heat wave, she sensed a trace of extraordinarily pure energy.
This energy was completely different from the Soul Power of the Douluo Continent. It was heavier, more violent, and purer.
"Th-this is drawing in and expelling the primordial energy of heaven and earth?"
Hu Liena's heart jolted as a thought flashed through her mind.
Although she had lost her Soul Power, as the Holy Maiden of Spirit Hall, her comprehension was exceptionally high.
Watching Mute's breathing rhythm, Hu Liena subconsciously closed her eyes and began trying to adjust her breathing to imitate his cadence.
Inhale, exhale...
At first, Hu Liena found it extremely difficult. Her chest felt unbearably tight, as if her lungs were about to burst.
But she gritted her teeth and forced herself to persist.
After trying dozens of times in a row, she finally found a hint of the right method.
With one deep, prolonged breath, Hu Liena felt the pure energy around her slowly flow into her body through her nose and mouth.
The energy traveled through her meridians. Her formerly dried-up meridians were like land parched by drought, greedily absorbing this strange power as if welcoming sweet rain.
"Buzz..."
Hu Liena's body trembled slightly.
She could clearly feel that the Soul Power in her body, originally stuck at the level-fifty bottleneck, had actually begun to loosen ever so slowly after absorbing that external primordial energy!
Not only that, her Soul Power was undergoing a qualitative transformation, becoming more condensed and more domineering than before.
"An opportunity! This is a tremendous opportunity!"
Hu Liena suddenly opened her eyes, her face filled with wild joy.
She had never imagined that merely watching Mute forge iron from the side and imitating his breathing method would allow her to break through her cultivation bottleneck and even transform her Soul Power.
The energy contained in the air of the Great Ruins was simply a supreme tonic!
Outside the Sky Screen at that moment,
all the powerful figures of the Douluo Continent erupted after seeing Hu Liena close her eyes, imitate the breathing, and then undergo a change in aura.
"Quick! Watch that Mute's breathing movements carefully!"
In Spirit City, Bibi Dong stood up and loudly ordered the elders and knights below the hall.
"Breathe according to his rhythm! Quickly!"
For a time, everyone inside and outside Spirit Hall—tens of thousands of people—fell silent and began following Mute in the Sky Screen, laboriously practicing deep breathing.
And it was not just Spirit Hall.
The Heaven Dou Empire, the Star Luo Empire, the major sects...
Across the entire Douluo Continent, an absurd yet incomparably spectacular sight appeared that morning.
Countless Soul Masters, regardless of age or gender, stopped what they were doing and, facing the Sky Screen in midair, uniformly began inhaling and exhaling.
Some held their breath for too long, their faces turning the color of liver; others exerted themselves too fiercely and collapsed onto the ground coughing.
On Shrek Academy's training field.
Ma Hongjun panted heavily, clutching his stomach as he complained.
"Ah, no, no more! Why does my stomach hurt so much? Did I get a stitch?"
Tang San was also drenched in sweat. He tried using the Mysterious Heaven Skill in conjunction with this breathing method, only to discover that the two seemed to conflict and could not be merged at all.
"This breathing technique is only suitable for absorbing the special vital energy of that higher-dimensional world."
Tang San stopped, shaking his head regretfully.
"Our Douluo Continent's air contains only ordinary Soul Power, not that pure, dense energy. Even if we master the movements, we won't be able to absorb anything."
Hearing Tang San's words, the surrounding students all stopped, their faces filled with disappointment.
Yu Xiaogang also sighed and crossed out the breathing diagram he had recorded in his notebook.
"It seems that if we want to undergo a true transformation, we'll still have to enter those Great Ruins ourselves."
Everyone turned their eyes back to the Sky Screen, the longing in their gazes growing even stronger.
If casually copying even a tiny bit of the technique brought such immense benefits, then receiving personal guidance from those old monsters would surely let them ascend to the heavens in broad daylight, wouldn't it?
Within the Sky Screen.
Qin Mu had no idea that Hu Liena beside him had just undergone a small enlightenment.
After watching Mute finish forging a piece of iron, he took Hu Liena by the hand and continued wandering aimlessly through the village.
The two arrived at an open space behind the village, where Blind Man sat atop a large rock, leaning on a bamboo cane and basking in the sun.
"Grandpa Blind Man, what are you doing?"
Before you continue