Su Yueli did not make a sound.
She clenched her teeth hard, biting her lips open until a faintly dark-red streak of blood ran down from the corner of her mouth.
At that moment, the Ultimate Dao Astral Force within her began to circulate with a thunderous roar. Her Martial Dao will clamped down on the violent medicinal power and began driving it deep into her bone marrow.
She was fully aware that the Martial Dao allowed not the slightest retreat. To reforge Flawless Golden Bones, she had to shatter every inch of her skeleton, knead it to pulp, then nourish it anew with the Ten-Thousand-Year Blood Marrow.
That single sitting lasted thirty years.
The stone door remained tightly shut. Below the ten-thousand-foot cliff, the wind wailed coldly.
In the first year, a frail blade of wild grass sprouted from a crack in the cliff face. It withered in the autumn wind and became earth.
By the fifth year, the accumulated black iron dust on the stone beam outside the chamber had reached a finger's thickness.
An injured goshawk had once built its nest on that stone beam and hatched two chicks. Later, the chicks spread their wings and flew away, leaving only an empty nest of grass, which was blown into the ten-thousand-foot abyss by mountain winds during a torrential storm one year.
By the tenth year, the air in the valley had grown ever drier, until even the last trace of moisture had vanished completely.
Within the desolate Spiritless Death Valley, no one knew that deep within the rock wall halfway up the cliff, a living person still sat in meditation.
Outside Spiritless Death Valley, thirty years of mortal life had already brought autumn chill time and again.
At the foot of the mountain, Blackstone City still stood,