The bitter winds of the Far North seemed to grow even more shrill the moment Lei Meng departed.
On the Eagle-Beak Ice Shelf, the seated figure remained like a rock unchanged since time immemorial.
Although the surrounding rogue cultivators had dispersed, no longer daring to regard the ruthless man named Iron Mask with such greedy, brazen eyes, they had not gone far. Keeping a respectful distance, they cast complicated glances his way through gaps in the wind and snow.
The battle just now had featured neither the dazzling spectacle of spell arts filling the sky nor the sharp brilliance of flying swords crisscrossing through the air. Yet the shock of fists striking flesh, of a pure physical body clashing head-on with a humanoid beast like Lei Meng, struck deeper than any exchange of spells.
The once-jagged tip of Eagle Beak had actually been trampled several feet lower. Dense cracks spread across the ice like a spiderweb, silently telling of the violence that had taken place.
For Chu Bai, however, seated at the center of the storm, the clamor outside had long since been shut out. At this very moment, an upheaval unknown to anyone else was taking place within his body.
To Chu Bai, the half-day struggle with Lei Meng had not merely been a contest of pride to establish his might. It had also been a once-in-a-thousand-years chance to temper himself at the forge.
Lei Meng's thousands of heavy punches, powerful enough to split mountains and shatter stone, had been like forging hammers cast from deep-sea black iron, tirelessly pounding Chu Bai's flesh.
Every blow brought a savage tremor, hammering the immense medicinal power that the Geng Metal Body-Forging Art had accumulated beneath his skin over the years, along with the divine path origin lurking in his blood, deep