Casting a Hand Net

Qing Prefecture, an unnamed mountain north of Little Canal Town.

Zhou Ming sat cross-legged inside a cave, stuffing his mouth with roasted meat.

Shell Bear meat really was fragrant.

A hundred times better than beef!

Zhou Ming sighed inwardly.

With each bite of Shell Bear meat entering his stomach, a warm current spread through his body, coursing through his limbs and bones.

His bones, flesh, and skin were wrapped in that warm current, filled with an indescribable comfort.

When he swallowed the final bite of Shell Bear meat,

Zhou Ming immediately circulated his cultivation technique, beginning to refine its energy and transform it into his own Blood Qi.

Two months ago, he had brought back eight cultivation techniques, all of which he had cultivated to perfection. Only his skull remained unrefined into Jade Bone.

Going out to find other cultivation techniques was definitely out of the question.

Whether he could find any was another matter. Once he went out, he might expose his trail again.

Eighth-Rank Cultivation Techniques focused on condensing one's Blood Qi and tempering one's bones.

The condensed Blood Qi was used to forge one's own skeleton.

Without a corresponding cultivation route, Zhou Ming could only find a way himself.

As the saying went, fools were not frightening; what was frightening was when a fool had a sudden flash of inspiration.

But clever people were not necessarily any better.

If there was no cultivation route, then forget the cultivation technique. He would directly use Blood Qi to grind it down.

A man had to dare to think and dare to act.

That one attempt nearly sent him riding a crane westward.

After condensing his Blood Qi, he had merely separated out a single strand and slowly ground it against his skull.

His whole body had immediately collapsed into convulsions, foam spilling from his mouth as his eyes rolled back.

When he woke again, he did not even know how much time had passed.

The first thing he did upon waking was look at the panel.

[Rank: Eighth-Rank Martial Artist—Jade Skin, Pseudo-Jade Bone (205.1/206)]

It had actually gained 0.1 progress.

It did not hurt. He had simply lost consciousness, as though he had been anesthetized.

He did not see death. All he saw was the door to a new world opening before him.

If one strand was too domineering, then he would use one thread. If even a thread would not do, then he would turn it into a grain of sand.

After trial upon trial, he shed tears of regret.

He had suffered for nothing before. Clearly, he could have done it painlessly.

After converting the energy brought by the Shell Bear meat into Blood Qi, Zhou Ming controlled grains of Blood Qi the size of sand particles and rammed them against his skull.

Those sand-grain-sized clumps of Blood Qi were like meteors streaking across the horizon. The instant they touched his skull, they vanished without a trace.

[Rank: Eighth-Rank Martial Artist—Jade Skin, Pseudo-Jade Bone (205.91/206)]

[Rank: Eighth-Rank Martial Artist—Jade Skin, Pseudo-Jade Bone (205.92/206)]

...

[Rank: Eighth-Rank Martial Artist—Jade Skin, Pseudo-Jade Bone (205.99/206)]

[Rank: Eighth-Rank Martial Artist—Jade Skin, Jade Bone]

As the panel changed, Zhou Ming's entire body shuddered.

Jade Bone was finally complete!

Zhou Ming suddenly discovered that where he had once only been able to sense his flesh through Blood Qi, he could now directly observe within himself.

As long as he wished it, an image would appear in his mind.

"That's insane!"

Damn!

I knew it!

Ninth Grade practitioners could already achieve Blood Qi Manifestation.

How could Eighth Rank possibly have no abilities at all?

Through his inner sight, Zhou Ming discovered gray threads covering every part of his body.

Even his Jade Bone was covered in a small amount. It was not entirely jade-white.

"Turbid Qi!"

Zhou Ming's first instinct was that this was the Turbid Qi recorded on the jade slip.

To remove Turbid Qi, one needed to use Heavenly Essence.

What was Heavenly Essence? Yang and lightning were supreme; the moon, morning dew, and heavenly water came next.

Disperse Blood Qi, capture its spirit, merge it into the body to dissolve impurity.

The instant he saw the Turbid Qi, he recalled the final three sentences on the jade slip.

These past days, he had also figured out what Heavenly Essence meant.

Put plainly, it was the essence of heaven and earth.

But he had never grasped the final sentence.

Zhou Ming turned to look at the tally marks carved all over the stone wall, his brows tightly furrowed.

There were thirty-six tally marks across the wall in total.

There had also been times when he had become engrossed in cultivation or forgotten to carve one.

If one tally represented a month,

then seven months had already passed.

Spring had gone, and autumn had come.

He knew there was not much time left until the Martial Examination.

But he absolutely could not go wearing this face.

He was only at the Eighth-Rank Peak. Going would be no different from delivering himself to death.

So he had to cultivate the Immaculate Body, at the very least gaining the ability to alter his appearance.

Even that round-faced, bearded man could do it. There was no reason he could not.

Zhou Ming followed the passage forward, carrying firewood in his left arm and holding a burning stick of wood in his right hand.

Half an hour later, upon seeing the light coming from ahead, Zhou Ming tossed the firewood aside.

Walking out of the cave and feeling the fierce wind blowing toward him, Zhou Ming tore off a strip of cloth from his clothes and tied up his long hair.

He sat cross-legged at the cave entrance.

He understood Heavenly Essence as the essence of heaven and earth.

Yang, he thought, should mean the sun, but capturing the sun itself was naturally impossible.

Then it could only mean sunlight.

And the moon...

Zhou Ming raised his head toward the sky and murmured, "Naturally, it is the waning moon hanging high in the sky right now."

Disperse Blood Qi, capture its spirit, merge it into the body to dissolve impurity.

Zhou Ming slowly closed his eyes.

Then the aura around his body spread out, Blood Qi surged, and a crimson blood cloth two meters long and three meters wide appeared above his head.

Looking closely, that crimson blood cloth was formed from countless particles of Blood Qi arranged together. This was not Blood Qi Manifestation.

As all the Blood Qi in his body flowed outward, weakness flooded Zhou Ming.

He forcibly resisted the urge to retrieve his Blood Qi.

Drawing all the Blood Qi out of his body was the method Zhou Ming had thought of.

Disperse!

If manifestation would not work, then he would extract it.

A quarter of an hour later, Zhou Ming's face had gone pale, and just as his body was about to topple,

he felt his released Blood Qi sink slightly. A bead the size of a green marble fell into it.

Zhou Ming hurriedly controlled his Blood Qi to wrap around it.

He slowly manipulated his Blood Qi to unravel.

Yet although he could sense it through his Blood Qi, he could not see it.

Feeling a message of longing coming from his body,

he did not think further.

He instantly drew the Blood Qi back into his body.

As the Blood Qi returned to him, Zhou Ming observed within himself.

That green bead rolled all around his body. Each time it pressed over a strand of Turbid Qi, the Turbid Qi vanished, while the bead shrank by a ring, until it dispersed completely.

If those strands of Turbid Qi had not truly disappeared, Zhou Ming would have doubted whether this thing was really a spirit at all.

Because his body had not changed in the slightest.

Yet the panel gave him the answer.

[Divine Ability: Immaculate Body—Not Initiated (1/100)]

Looking at the panel, Zhou Ming showed no joy. Instead, his brows drew tightly together.

Was this cultivation? What he had just done was clearly waiting by a tree stump for rabbits, a blind cat stumbling upon a dead mouse.

A few seconds later, and he would have missed that spirit.

The method was wrong.

Zhou Ming felt that by extracting all his condensed Blood Qi from his body like this, in barely over a quarter of an hour, one-tenth of his total Blood Qi had already dissipated.

Dispersing it definitely did not mean dispersing it like this. Who could withstand such a method?

If he kept doing this, he felt that even a Second-Rank Celestial would tumble down to the mortal world and become an ordinary man.

Since he had seen this thing once,

Zhou Ming thought of fishermen catching fish. He only needed to cast a net. Everyone could not see the fish—if they could do it, so could he.

He felt that his earlier attempt to use manifestation for capture had not used the wrong method.

It was the manifested object that had been wrong.

Damn!

The direction of using a dip net was right.

But how large a range could that damn thing cover?

A hand-thrown net!

His aura stirred, and his Blood Qi manifested.

Zhou Ming began constructing a hand-thrown net.

A moment later, Zhou Ming stood atop the giant boulder blocking the cave entrance and cast his net into the air.

A gigantic net formed from manifested Blood Qi descended from the sky.

Damn!

There they are!

In an instant, Zhou Ming sensed seven beads inside the net.

Retracting the net, Zhou Ming tried touching one of the Moon Spirits with his hand.

The instant his fingertip touched it, the entire Moon Spirit vanished, as though it had never existed.

He had no time to mourn.

He released his Blood Qi and slowly wrapped it around the remaining six beads.

After merging five into his body, Zhou Ming took out a jade bottle, placed the remaining Moon Spirit inside, retrieved his Blood Qi, and sealed the stopper.

He wanted to see whether this thing could be stored.

After carefully tucking the jade bottle against his body, he began his great fishing endeavor once more.