What I Reckon

Ordinary Soul Masters usually did only one thing after consuming top-tier resources like the Soul Ascension Pill or Profound Water Pill.

They closed their eyes.

Then they gritted their teeth and powered through.

They only tried their best to refine the medicinal power, following conventional meditation methods and quietly waiting for their Soul Power to increase.

As for the process?

Why did their Martial Souls grow stronger? How exactly did the medicinal power work within their bodies?

Nobody knew, and nobody cared to think about it.

To most Soul Masters in this world, consuming resources was like eating plain rice. As long as it filled their stomachs after going down, that was enough.

Who had the time to study how rice was broken down by stomach acid?

But Huo Yuhao insisted on studying it.

Sitting cross-legged on his bed, Huo Yuhao tossed a water-blue new-version Profound Water Pill into his mouth.

He did not think of himself as some peerless freak blessed with heaven-shaking insight.

But he was a genuine college student.

A model student who had been thoroughly beaten down by endless problem sets and experimental data.

He knew all too well what research was about.

It was nothing more than recording, analyzing, summarizing patterns, and then putting them to use.

As long as his brain was up to the task and he had enough samples, he could take apart even a pig and figure it out.

First Soul Skill, Mind-Clearing.

A slightly cool sensation instantly swept through his entire brain.

Huo Yuhao's gaze became exceptionally clear, and his whole body seemed to have activated a precision supercomputer.

He clearly sensed the Profound Water Pill rapidly dissolving in his stomach.

The gentle medicinal power turned into countless warm currents that began spreading through his complex meridians.

What was the flow rate when it passed through a certain meridian?

How many millimeters did it expand when it struck a certain acupoint?

This data, minute to a horrifying degree, was meticulously imprinted deep into his memory.

For some reason, he actually found this brain-cell-burning work rather interesting.

The Profound Water Pill improved by the great cauldron was absurdly effective.

As long as the user was below level sixty, consuming three in succession would definitely raise their Innate Soul Power by two levels.

Unfortunately, it had one unsolvable limitation.

Starting from the fourth pill, it had no miraculous effects whatsoever beyond restoring a bit of stamina.

In the courtyard.

Ye Guyi sat cross-legged in the open space, her entire body firmly enveloped in a dazzling holy golden radiance.

She had just completely refined the medicinal power of her third Profound Water Pill.

At that moment, she felt as though some ancient shackles within her body had been violently torn apart.

The forced increase in her Innate Soul Power directly triggered a drastic qualitative transformation in her Holy Angel Martial Soul.

The golden light began to riot.

The two illusory wings that had been gently flapping behind her suddenly erupted with intense pressure.

Then, the golden light tore apart.

The two wings abruptly spread outward, forcibly giving rise to another two.

A four-winged form.

She was now only one step away from the Six-Winged Angel recorded in the Douluo legends of ten thousand years ago.

Ye Guyi suddenly opened her eyes, her warm golden pupils filled with shock.

She lowered her head to look at her hands, feeling the pure power within her body surge several times over.

With this nearly tangible sense of oppression, even if she faced that Evil Soul Master who had slaughtered her sect again, she would dare to draw her sword and charge straight at him.

The atmosphere became incomparably murderous.

Ye Guyi's gaze gradually sharpened as her intense obsession with revenge churned madly within her chest.

"Uh."

Huo Yuhao crushed a sunflower seed between his teeth and asked indistinctly, "Can you fly now?"

The peerless killing intent around Ye Guyi instantly stalled.

"I'll fly your head."

She rolled her eyes at him irritably.

The lone-wolf aura of someone burdened with a blood-deep vendetta, which she had painstakingly built up, was utterly ruined by a single sentence from him.

Ju Zi sat on a reclining chair beneath a tree, holding a glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice.

She watched the scene with a smile, her gaze lazy and content.

Compared to the lifeless imperial court of her previous life, where scheming was everywhere, she preferred this sort of chaotic everyday life.

Huo Yuhao brushed the sunflower seed shells from his hands and casually popped another Profound Water Pill into his mouth.

"Crunch, crunch."

The crisp chewing sounds were especially grating in the quiet little courtyard.

Ye Guyi's eye twitched hard.

"You're eating another one?"

"Yeah. It's not like I've got anything better to do."

"You've been eating them for a month already!"

Ye Guyi felt her blood pressure skyrocketing.

That was a Profound Water Pill.

In the outside world, any single one could spark a head-smashing scramble among high-ranking sects.

Yet this guy clearly could no longer benefit from them, but he still chewed one every day like clockwork as a snack.

He was practically a purebred wastrel.

"Ju Zi, aren't you going to stop him?"

Unable to bear it any longer, Ye Guyi tried to find reinforcements.

Ju Zi took a sip of fruit juice, her expression unchanged.

"Let him eat."

"That's a Profound Water Pill!"

"It only costs three hundred Gold Soul Coins per batch. Is that expensive?"

Ju Zi tilted her head, her face full of matter-of-fact certainty.

Ye Guyi instantly shut down.

She felt like a miserable beggar who had never seen the world.

Ju Zi secretly laughed to herself. As long as Huo Yuhao obediently stayed by her side, forget treating Profound Water Pills like candy.

Even if he threw every last one into the water just to hear the splashes, she would not blink an eye.

In truth, Ye Guyi had misunderstood Huo Yuhao.

He was not truly wasting resources and giving up on himself.

Over the past half month, he had swallowed one useless pill every day entirely for the sake of his mad grand plan of deduction.

Every circulation of medicinal power within his body, every microscopic cleansing of his meridians—

he frantically recorded it all using his First Soul Skill.

If he could not remember the pattern after one try, he would take ten.

If ten tries were not enough to pin down the acupoints, he would smash out precise data with thirty pills.

As long as he had enough living experimental samples, he could completely crack the operating code of the human body, this intricate machine.

Time passed quickly.

Half a year later.

Life in the little courtyard remained as calm as water, but Huo Yuhao's experiments had already made a qualitative leap.

Which meridian allowed Soul Power to flow the fastest?

Which hidden acupoint produced the strongest explosive force when blocked?

Countless trials and errors, countless rounds of deduction and summary.

During that time, he had even thrown his meridians into disorder several times by recklessly guiding his Soul Power, writhing on the ground in agony.

But none of that mattered.

With the Red Jade Pill's powerful ability to repair his vitality and blood, along with the Blue Jade Pill's nourishing effects, he had forcibly mapped out every one of those erroneous routes.

Beneath the shade of a tree.

Huo Yuhao sat quietly in meditation with his eyes closed.

By then, he had already constructed an incomparably perfect three-dimensional diagram of meridian circulation in his mind.

With a thought, he moved.

The Soul Power within his body instantly abandoned its slow, crude instinctive path and directly entered an entirely new high-frequency meridian network.

There were no blockages.

No sluggishness whatsoever.

Like it had been fitted with a turbocharger, his Soul Power began racing along the personal route he had spent half a year deducing.

Its speed became more and more terrifying.

He no longer even needed to deliberately maintain a meditative posture. Once the circulation was established, his Soul Power automatically completed its major circulation throughout his body.

It circulated while he ate, while he slept, and even while he daydreamed, constantly solidifying his cultivation.

Even more terrifyingly, Huo Yuhao could clearly sense it.

This unique pattern of cleansing was also subtly tempering his bones and muscle tissue.

The sun was nearly setting.

Huo Yuhao opened his eyes and slowly exhaled a breath of stale air that had been building up for a long time.

An unprecedented sense of comfort shot straight up his spine and into his head.

After half a year, the result of combining the exploratory spirit of modern science with a supernatural power system had finally been forcibly pieced together by him.

He stood up, stretched lazily, and could not stop the corners of his mouth from rising.

In his heart, he gave this outrageous new creation its final name.

Heavenly Origin Art.

"Hey, what are you grinning at like an idiot?"

Ye Guyi had just walked over with a short sword in hand. Seeing his expression, her brows immediately furrowed.

Huo Yuhao turned toward her, his face bright with a smile.

"Nothing."

He casually waved a hand. "I just suddenly feel like I might be kind of awesome now."

"Did all those pills fry your brain?"

Ye Guyi looked at Huo Yuhao with concern and pity.

Her expression practically had the words "tragic news from the pill-popping world" written all over it.