Wildly Devouring Raw Flesh, the Blind Girl Crushed Solid Rock in Her Dreams

Daylight had fully broken over the outskirts of Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

The morning mountain wind could not disperse the miasma in the woods, but it made Lu Chen's body temperature, his upper body bare, burn ever hotter.

The black metallic patterns that had emerged across his chest when he resisted the immortal sect's flying swords had now completely stabilized. Those markings lay deeply embedded beneath his iron-gray skin, carrying an innate and overbearing savagery.

He had expended too much qi and blood.

Last night, he had first pulled up a thirty-thousand-jin Dao Stele with his bare hands, then crushed an entire squad of cultivators to death one after another. The Ultimate Dao Furnace had squeezed the last scraps of reserves from his stomach clean.

Acid churned madly in his stomach.

Lu Chen turned sideways and squeezed through the narrow crack at the cave entrance.

He needed to find some high-grade blood food to replenish his depleted qi and blood.

Lu Chen had only walked a few hundred steps.

The bushes ahead were violently smashed apart.

A massive beast covered from head to toe in heavy stone scale armor came tumbling and scrambling out from deep within the forest.

It was a genuine second-rank demon beast: a Rock-Cracking Bear.

This beast should have dwelled in the middle region of Immortal-Breaking Mountain. Yet now, it looked like it was fleeing blindly in panic.

Some utterly terrifying great demon had clearly awakened in the deepest reaches of Immortal-Breaking Mountain. The oppressive aura that seeped out from dozens of li away had frightened this Rock-Cracking Bear out of its mind, driving it straight into the spirit-energy-scarce outskirts.

The Rock-Cracking Bear's enormous body came to an abrupt halt.

Its thick limbs plowed four deep trenches through the muddy ground.

Its beast eyes, bloodshot and crimson, locked fiercely onto Lu Chen standing directly in its path.

A second-rank demon beast.

Out in the open, even an entire team of Qi Refinement cultivators would never dare confront one head-on. They would have to keep their distance, form a Four Symbols defensive formation, then throw out a heap of high-grade talismans to slowly grind down the beast's health.

Lu Chen did not play by those rules.

The Rock-Cracking Bear pushed off with its hind legs. Its huge body whipped up a foul wind as it roared and lunged at him.

Lu Chen did not move from where he stood. Instead, he raised a rough, broad hand to grip his chin and twisted his sore neck twice from side to side.

His joints cracked sharply.

The next instant.

The bluestone beneath his feet exploded.

Lu Chen strode forward. Rather than retreat, he charged headlong toward the berserk giant bear.

The distance of several zhang vanished in an instant.

The Rock-Cracking Bear rose onto its hind legs, its enormous shadow swallowing Lu Chen whole.

Its bear paw, clad in stone scale armor and capable of smashing apart a boulder that took two or three men to embrace with a single blow, came crashing down at Lu Chen's crown with a shrieking gale.

The Ultimate Dao qi and blood within Lu Chen's body roiled madly at that moment.

The speed at which his heart pumped blood surged to its limit.

The muscles of his right arm bulged in an instant, his great tendons drawn taut.

He had no intention of yielding.

Lu Chen's right fist tore upward through the air, blasting out a dull boom.

His fist slammed squarely into the center of the descending bear paw.

Great sound was silent.

Then came a thunderous CRACK.

The sound was so loud that a great swath of leaves shook loose from the surrounding trees.

The second-rank demon beast's palm bones, hard enough to rival a mid-grade magic artifact and its greatest source of pride, shattered into powder before Lu Chen's utterly unreasonable Ultimate Dao brute force.

The force of the shattering bones drove upward through the bear's paw.

Several stark-white broken bone spikes changed direction, piercing backward through its immensely thick hide and scale armor, jutting bloodily into the open air.

"ROAR—"

The Rock-Cracking Bear let out an incomparably miserable howl. Its massive body lost balance and staggered helplessly backward.

Lu Chen did not give it the slightest chance to catch its breath.

He stomped down hard with his right foot, and his entire body followed it like a shadow.

Both hands climbed directly onto the Rock-Cracking Bear's broad shoulders.

His two thick arms became an iron vise, locking tightly around the giant bear's neck, as thick as a water jar.

The Rock-Cracking Bear struggled desperately, its remaining paw flailing wildly.

The eight muscles across Lu Chen's waist and abdomen contracted at once, his great tendons suddenly exerting force.

With both hands gripping the bear's head, he drove with his waist and arms, brutally wrenching it hard to the side.

An exceptionally crisp sound of bones slipping out of place rang out.

The Rock-Cracking Bear's thick cervical vertebrae were twisted apart on the spot by that monstrous rotating force.

Its enormous beast body crashed down, making the earth quake violently.

Fight over.

Lu Chen did not so much as glance at the stone scale armor beside him, which could be exchanged for spirit stones.

He simply crouched halfway down.

He plunged both hands into the Rock-Cracking Bear's chest cavity and tore out a huge, steaming chunk of the bear's heart meat.

There was no pot or stove here, and he had no need to make a fire.

He opened his mouth wide.

Lu Chen bit down on the bloody raw meat. He barely chewed before swallowing it straight into his belly.

This was how the Ultimate Dao ate—wild and primitive.

The raw demon beast meat fell into his stomach.

The Ultimate Dao Furnace within his body was completely ignited at that moment, turning madly.

The immense amount of mixed demon qi and violent spiritual power contained in the raw flesh was treated as refuse within Lu Chen's incomparably powerful stomach.

Scalding qi and blood brutally forced that waste out of his body.

Large amounts of foul-smelling hot sweat seeped from Lu Chen's iron-gray skin and dispersed into the air with the breeze.

The remaining purest essence of flesh and blood was forcibly stripped free by that domineering power and pressed, without losing a single trace, deep into the marrow throughout his body.

With the replenishment of second-rank high-grade blood food.

That violent essence surged back and forth through his extraordinary meridians and eight channels.

A layer of dark-red metallic sheen slowly emerged over the iron-gray skin on Lu Chen's body.

The sheen seeped out through his pores, making even those black patterns grow deeper and darker.

An exceedingly fine grinding sound came from within his marrow.

Its density surged once more.

He had relied on nothing but eating meat, without the slightest pretense of sitting in meditation to cultivate qi.

The strength of Lu Chen's flesh directly smashed through its barrier and stepped into the twelfth great stage of Iron Cloth Shirt.

Lu Chen rose to his feet.

He did not deliberately exert any force.

Merely to adjust to his newfound strength, he casually and lightly stamped his foot.

Crack.

The hard stone layer beneath him, which even flying swords usually struggled to cleave, was stamped by that careless step into a vast web of shocking cracks.

The sheer weight and crushing pressure of his physical body had reached a level that even cultivators would find inconceivable.

Now, even if a low-grade magic artifact fell onto his foot, it would likely be crushed blunt by that invisible pressure.

At the same time.

Several li away, deep inside the cave that was mostly blocked by the thirty-thousand-jin City-Guarding Stele.

A-Nan remained wrapped tightly in that thick Netherwind Wolf hide.

The little blind girl had fallen into the deepest sleep.

After enduring the agony of her jade bones being remade, her strength had been drained to the absolute limit.

Her little mouth hung slightly open, and an indistinct murmur slipped from her throat.

Along with that hazy sleep-talk.

A-Nan turned over.

Her pale, slender little hand, without even a trace of callus, slipped out from beneath the wolf hide.

Then, entirely unconsciously, it landed on the flat, dry boulder beneath her.

It was merely an ordinary motion of turning over.

Puff.

An exceptionally muffled sound echoed through the quiet cave.

The boulder's surface had no room to resist at all. That little hand pressed a deep palm print straight into it.

Stone dust trickled down.

Around the handprint sunk deep into the rock, there was nothing at all—no trace of a cultivator's true essence fluctuations.

There was only a pure, unreasonable, tyrannical crushing force.

This was the terrifying monstrous strength that accompanied the first emergence of jade bones.

But the price was equally obvious.

After that press, A-Nan's pale little hand swiftly flushed with a burning red hue.

It was the natural reaction of a mortal's meridians still being unable to fully adapt to such domineering power.

A sense of exhaustion struck her instantly.

The little girl did not even have the strength to lift her eyelids, and she sank once more into the deepest sleep.

After some time.

A sound came from the crack outside the cave.

Lu Chen squeezed in sideways, carrying an entire torn-off Rock-Cracking Bear hind leg over his shoulder.

He had deliberately saved this blood food to feed A-Nan after she woke.

He set the bear meat on the ground.

His gaze immediately caught the change on the flat boulder.

Looking at the extremely deep palm print, with stone dust still scattered around its edges, Lu Chen's expression did not change in the slightest, but the string of protectiveness in his heart drew even tighter.

He softened his steps and did not disturb the still-sleeping A-Nan.

Turning around.

Lu Chen walked to the cave entrance and picked up the remaining half of the century-old Black-Iron Chain that A-Nan had snapped yesterday.

Clatter.

Without a word, he wrapped the half-section of thick, heavy chain around his left arm, coil after coil, binding it there with crushing menace.

His right arm remained free, ready to swing his fist and kill at any moment; his left arm was wrapped in iron, meant to withstand any immortal sect magic artifact foolish enough to come at him.

This was entirely the instinct of guarding food.

The chain's clasp had just been fastened.

Something strange suddenly stirred in the forest outside.

A great flock of startled birds that had been perched in the distant treetops seemed to sense some exceedingly dangerous disturbance. They flapped their wings in groups, shrieking as they flew into the sky.

Immediately afterward.

The ground beneath his feet began to tremble faintly.

An exceptionally heavy, strongly rhythmic vibration of steel pierced through the dense miasma forest and traveled along the ground all the way to the cave entrance.

That kind of commotion was definitely not scattered cultivators flying on swords.

Lu Chen abruptly turned his head.

Through the narrow gap above the Dao Stele, his gaze stared straight toward the distant woods.

The dense gray miasma was forcibly torn apart at that moment by an incredibly savage force of impact.

At the edge of his vision.

A full thirty cavalrymen, clad head to toe in black-iron heavy armor, rode massive Ironclad Rhinos in an impenetrable charging formation.

This heavily armored force completely ignored the rugged terrain around Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

Like a black torrent of steel, they flattened every thick tree in their path. Even those demon plants covered in poisonous thorns were mercilessly trampled to pieces.

That killing torrent bore the terrifying pressure of crushing through mountains and forests as it advanced straight toward the cave.

The veins on Lu Chen's hand, pressed against the black stone Dao Stele, bulged one after another.