Martial Skill: Savage Bull Diagram

The clamor of the bonfire feast had long since faded away, and the tribe had returned to the silence of the night.

Inside the stone house, Lin Yi sat cross-legged on the stone bed covered in beast hide. He closed his eyes and sank deep into his mind.

The complete Savage Bull Divine-Pattern Diagram floated silently at the center of his consciousness. Dark cyan lines intertwined and coiled around one another, every node and every arc displayed in the finest detail.

The life-or-death pursuit during the day had pushed his comprehension across some invisible threshold.

Now, as he looked upon the diagram again, the markings that had once been mere engraved patterns were being peeled back layer by layer, revealing the clear logical structure beneath. The paths through which a Savage Bull's blood and qi flowed when activating its Divine Ability, the timing and rhythm of the Divine Markings' flashes, where power gathered and where it erupted—all of it lay before him like disassembled mechanical parts.

His progress in comprehending it was even faster than he had expected.

The greater half that had remained vague before now surged forth like hidden currents beneath ice, absorbed and digested by his mind piece by piece.

Those tangled, crisscrossing turns he had been unable to understand now seemed no more than inevitable routes dictated by the Savage Bull's particular physical structure.

Those nodes that had once seemed abrupt corresponded to several crucial Aperture Points within a Savage Bull's body.

By midnight, the final obscure point had been completely understood.

Lin Yi opened his eyes and exhaled a breath of turbid air into the darkness. He had now completely understood the entire Divine-Pattern Diagram.

But understanding it was one thing; turning it into something humans could use was another.

He closed his eyes again and began the second stage: deduction and modification.

His first few attempts were simple and crude. Following the principles of the Divine Markings, he simulated similar patterns across the surface of his body with blood and qi.

Blood-red lines climbed over his arms and chest, and at first glance, they truly bore a few traces of the Savage Bull Divine Markings.

But Lin Yi quickly discovered that those patterns were all show and no substance. After the blood and qi flowed through them, there was no amplifying effect at all. They were like tattoos on his skin, utterly useless.

After some simple thought, he found that the problem lay in the foundation.

The physical structures of Savage Bulls and humans were completely different. They had their own unique distributions of Aperture Points, paths of blood and qi circulation, and arrangements of bones and muscles.

The reason those Divine Markings worked on the Savage Bull King was that every single node in the patterns precisely corresponded to a key point within its body.

For humans to copy them would be like stuffing a tiger's skeleton into a cat's body. Nothing would line up.

He needed to redesign everything from scratch.

He would use human acupoints to replace the Savage Bull's Aperture Points, replan the Divine Markings' routes according to the meridians of the human body, and adjust every arc and every node to proportions and dimensions suitable for humans.

This was an incomparably meticulous task.

When Lin Yi first tried adjusting the position of a certain node, the instant his blood and qi flowed into the new route, a tearing agony suddenly surged through his body. It was as though something had tied a dead knot in his meridians, then violently yanked it tight.

He let out a muffled groan. It took quite a while for his chaotic blood and qi to settle.

That was the backlash caused by improperly using an Aperture Point. Fortunately, it was not severe and had not damaged his foundation.

The second attempt, the third attempt, the tenth attempt.

Every deviation in adjustment brought pain of varying degrees. Some were needle-like stings; others were dull aches that swelled deep into his bones.

But Lin Yi gritted his teeth and endured it, precisely recording the location and severity of every pain as it came, then reasoning backward to determine exactly which link had gone wrong.

His comprehension continued to advance steadily throughout the process. With every failure, he found the crux of the problem faster than before.

He began breaking the Savage Bull Divine Markings into separate segments.

He took the force-generating logic of the pattern around the shoulder blade and transformed it into something suited to the rotation of a human shoulder joint.

He took the transmission path of the pattern along the spine and refitted it to the meridians running along both sides of the human spine. He took the explosive nodes from the pattern around the four hooves, compressed them, and grafted them onto human palms and soles.

Dismantling, reshaping, joining, polishing.

Countless deductions collapsed. Countless reorganizations of the patterns failed. Countless sensations of torn meridians washed over him again and again like tides.

Yet with every failure, he came one step closer to the right answer. Those pattern fragments that had once clashed so completely were gradually worn smooth, their sharp edges ground away until they fit snugly against human flesh and blood.

He did not know how much time passed.

The instant Lin Yi completely smoothed out the final blood and qi circuit, linking the entire pattern end to end into a closed loop, the blood and qi within him seemed to be drawn by some unseen force.

It surged into that brand-new pattern with a roar, rushing along the path he had redesigned. There was not the slightest obstruction, nor the faintest backlash.

Dark red patterns silently emerged across the surface of his skin.

They were thirty percent similar to the dark cyan Divine Markings on the Savage Bull King, yet their lines were finer and more orderly, their bends softer and rounder, carrying clear traces of human meridians.

Their color was a rich blood red, faintly suffused with a weak golden glow, like molten red iron flowing across his skin.

At the same time, Lin Yi felt the blood and qi throughout his body surge wildly under the patterns' pull, power pouring forth from every limb and bone.

He instinctively activated his blood and qi. It seeped out of his body, and around him, the vague silhouette of a Savage Bull appeared—thick, heavy, and filled with oppressive force.

He clenched his fist.

His knuckles cracked like popping beans, and the air in his palm gave a faint, compressed squeak as he squeezed it.

That power weighed heavily within him, as though an extra skeleton had been braced beneath his flesh and blood.

He tried throwing a punch into the empty air. The fist wind stirred the dry grass at the edge of the stone bed, directly sweeping several blades away.

Lin Yi lowered his head to look at the blood-red, gold-tinged patterns on his skin, and the corner of his mouth rose.

"This power... is so strong."

He took a deep breath and slowly calmed his blood and qi.

The glow of the patterns gradually dimmed, but did not vanish completely. Instead, they lay dormant beneath his skin, faint and shallow, like a fuse that could be reignited at any moment.

Light from outside shone through the cracks of the stone house. It was bright daylight already.

Lin Yi froze for a moment. It had been deep in the night when he entered meditation. In the blink of an eye, it was already the afternoon of the next day?

The exhaustion from continuously performing high-intensity deductions belatedly washed over him, but even stronger was the exhilaration and thrill of accomplishing something momentous.

Just as he stood up and prepared to push open the door for a breath of fresh air, he heard a hushed yet unmistakably anxious conversation outside.

"...He really stayed in there all night and most of the day?"

"Brother Lin must be doing something huge! I came to call him for breakfast this morning, and I saw his whole body glowing. It was terrifying!"

"Are you sure he was glowing and not suffering from qi deviation?"

"Uncle Village Chief, what does suffering from qi deviation mean..."

"Enough, enough, you two. Keep your voices down. Don't disturb him."

Listening to the three voices outside—the Village Chief's steady tone, Biao's voice that remained booming even when lowered, and Xiao Hu's irrepressible excitement—Lin Yi could not help but laugh.

He pulled open the wooden door of the stone house.

Sunlight poured in at an angle, making him squint. The three people outside had been crowding around the doorway and craning their necks. Startled by the sudden opening of the door, all three leaned back in unison.

Lin Yi looked at them, flashed a brilliant grin, and reached out to pat the blood-red patterns on his body as they slowly faded.

"Village Chief, it worked."