Pan Long had never dreamed that tempering his body with the Earthly Baleful Force through Body Tempering would hurt this much.
He had prepared himself for pain. The art's description said he would have to endure the pain of Body Tempering, and Grandmaster Taishang had stressed that this was a painful practice.
But he had never imagined it would hurt like this!
People described agony as "ten thousand arrows piercing the heart" or "being stabbed with needles and seared by fire." Those were exaggerations. The pain he endured now was real.
Body Tempering with the Earthly Baleful Force meant using True Qi to carry it through every part of him, letting it eat into his flesh, bones, and organs. Nothing could be spared—unless he wanted to leave some parts untempered. Those would become his weak points. Even after mastering the art, a blow to one of them would temporarily strip him of his power and leave him a mortal too weak to truss a chicken.
Pan Long would never leave himself such a weakness. He gritted his teeth and spared not one place, inside or out.
The human body was small. The human body was vast.
For a martial artist like him, his skin, muscles, and even bones were sturdy. His hands in particular had been tempered repeatedly through his family's martial arts. Even without True Qi, an ordinary strong man wielding a sharp blade could not cut through their flesh.
The Earthly Baleful Force did little damage to his hands. Parts he had trained in the same way suffered little too, well within what he could bear.
But far more of him had never been trained!
His organs, for instance.
His nerves and bone marrow.
His brain.
Almost no one trained those parts specifically. Pan Long suspected that even