Wood qi attained, a hunting mission

Another month slipped silently by.

Spirit Pavilion, Withered-and-Flourishing Blessed Land.

Time here seemed to have been cleaved in two by an invisible blade.

On the left lay eternal, exuberant life, vines like dragons and ancient trees towering into the heavens; on the right lay endless, oppressive silence, bones exposed in the wilderness and yellow sand filling the sky.

Only the young man seated cross-legged on the boundary between life and death remained utterly still, like a divine pillar anchoring the sea.

But that stillness was merely an illusion.

Had anyone approached at that moment, they would have discovered, to their horror, that strange changes were taking place across Chu Bai's body.

The left half of his face was rosy as jade, his skin so delicate a breath might break it; the right half was visibly shriveling and turning ashen, as though he had aged decades in an instant.

Withering and flourishing revolved; life and death alternated.

This was the ordeal that came with absorbing [Withered-and-Flourishing Azure Qi]. Every strand of spiritual qi entering his body destroyed and remade his flesh.

An ordinary Qi Refining cultivator would have suffered a mental collapse and cultivation deviation long ago under such inhuman torment.

But not Chu Bai.

At that moment, his perfected "Origin Return Formula" revealed its incomparably domineering nature.

As the final stream of gray-green qi entered his nostrils, a strange ripple suddenly rose around Chu Bai.

An inward look would have revealed an astonishing sight:

Within his dantian qi sea, beside the once sharply divided metal and water qi, there now stood another force of extraordinary resilience.

Vibrant green light faintly shone on the left, while a deathly gray haze swirled on the right. The two converged and intertwined within him, finally forming a gray-green vortex of spell power, endlessly renewing