A Painful Harvest

As long as the green hills remained, there would be no shortage of firewood. As long as he stayed alive, there would be plenty more treasures to find. But if greed cost him his life, all the treasures in the world would be useless!

So Little Leopard chose to leave without hesitation.

However, although he wanted to leave, the flame seemed to have no such intention.

Very little time passed between Little Leopard noticing the strange flame, deciding to leave, and beginning to retreat-no more than a single thought. Yet in that fleeting instant, the strange flame reacted. With a whoosh, it floated toward him, swift and urgent. Little Leopard tried to dodge, but he was neither as fast nor as nimble as it was. He wanted to use the Three Realms Minor Shift, but that last sword strike had consumed most of his internal energy and physical strength. He simply did not have enough internal energy left to activate the Three Realms Minor Shift. After he dodged twice, the strange flame caught up with him.

"Aaargh-"

Naturally, nothing good came of being caught.

The instant the flame touched his skin, Little Leopard felt a scorching current surge into his body. Strangely enough, once that current entered him, it did not burn as he had imagined it would. Instead, it merged with his internal energy.

The moment his nine-dragon divine fire inner qi came into contact with the black flame, the flame broke apart, like a drop of water merging into the ocean. As for which was the drop and which was the ocean, that remained unclear.

But Little Leopard suffered for it.

The black flame entered his body, becoming a hot current that merged into his nine-dragon divine fire inner qi.

It sounded like a good thing, a fortuitous encounter, as though he had gained a hundred years of cultivation out of thin air. At the very least, the power of his Nine-Dragon Divine Fire Art would increase tremendously.

But what was the reality?

Little Leopard was already going mad.

Utterly mad.

Just imagine being forced to take an enormous pot of freshly boiling water into your mouth, then being forced to swallow it, all while having to remain conscious.

What would that feel like?

In truth, Little Leopard was suffering far more than someone being force-fed boiling water.

Every meridian through which his internal energy flowed felt as though it were being scorched by a raging fire. With his body's current strength, he could not possibly withstand such an overwhelmingly powerful force. Yet he could not draw that force back into his dantian either. Even setting aside whether it would explode his dantian once it arrived, his internal energy was already causing this much agony while sitting still. If he moved it, wouldn't that finish him off?

In fact, the moment the black flame entered his body, Little Leopard felt his mind begin to blur. His consciousness began drifting away from his body, sinking into darkness.

Put simply, he was about to pass out from the pain.

In truth, he was passing out from the agony for an instant, only to be jolted awake by that same agony. Unconscious, then awake, then unconscious, then awake-it was like a tug-of-war, repeating endlessly. His mind was utterly dazed, yet he still retained one final thread of reason. His sense of time stretched without limit. Even a single second seemed as long as an entire lifetime.

I'll really die if this keeps up!

His last thread of reason told him that if this continued, that monstrous flame would roast him into a suckling pig. Damn it, if I die, I die! I can't worry about all that now!

Little Leopard gritted his teeth and prepared to endure the pain while drawing the internal energy scattered through his meridians back into his dantian. To ensure that nothing went wrong in the process, he also activated his strange eyes.

"Eh?! Aaaaaaargh-"

After his eyes began glowing red, Little Leopard felt a slight disturbance in the heat inside him, followed by a string of strange cries.

After activating his strange eyes, before he could use them to examine the state of his body,

he felt his internal energy begin to move. As though attracted by something, it began flowing slowly along his meridians toward his eyes.

Once again, the agony of searing heat ravaging his meridians struck him. He still could not withstand it and once again fell onto the razor's edge between consciousness and oblivion.

This time, however, he could clearly perceive the route his internal energy took. It traveled along a path it had never followed before, flowing toward his eyes and gathering within them.

With all the internal energy in his body gathered in his eyes, his meridians no longer suffered that scorching heat and unbearable pain. Little Leopard's mind gradually cleared, but his eyes swelled unbearably, as though something were about to burst out of them.

What he could not see was that his eyes had turned completely translucent gold-red. The ring of black markings around his pupils had also become clearly visible, and the air around his eyes shimmered under the intense heat.

He could see none of this. Nor did anything worth looking forward to happen afterward. The internal energy in his body was like a surging tide that crested and fell, while his eyes were like a sturdy dam. After several failed assaults, the internal energy returned to his meridians along its original route, once again giving Little Leopard a taste of that legendary sensation of hovering between death and ecstasy.

The difference was that this time, after returning to his meridians, the internal energy did not stop. It continued flowing slowly back, finally gathering in his dantian.

Only after all his internal energy had returned to his dantian did Little Leopard begin to make some sense of what had happened.

Originally, his dantian had contained a small vortex formed by the Nine-Dragon Divine Fire Art. Now, at the center of that vortex, there was a tiny black flame. Unlike the black flame he had seen earlier, this one was only the size of a grain of rice. It flickered in and out of sight at the center of his dantian, impossible to notice without careful scrutiny.

His internal energy had changed as well. After merging with the black flame, his formerly gold-red nine-dragon divine fire inner qi had undergone some subtle changes. Its bright gold-red color had dimmed slightly, with the faintest trace of black light showing through, though it was impossible to discern without looking closely. Most importantly, after his internal energy merged with the black flame, Little Leopard felt that its power must have increased considerably.

Of course, this realization lasted only an instant, for the pain inside his body soon tortured him into unconsciousness again.

What he did not know was that the creature had not been guarding the Rootless Grass specifically. It had merely stumbled upon those few stalks. Since the Rootless Grass was quite beneficial to it, it had stayed there for a few days, only to happen to encounter Little Leopard.

This monster was an exotic species left over from the primordial wilderness, a notoriously vicious creature called the Dragon-Eating Loach. In primordial times, it had fed exclusively on dragons and was their natural bane. It was not large-even the biggest grew only about half a meter long-but its scales were extraordinarily hard, impervious to blades and spears, water and fire. The several rows of teeth in its mouth were incomparably sharp, capable of easily tearing through a dragon's scales so it could burrow into the dragon's belly and feed on its flesh and blood. It also laid its eggs inside the dragon, drawing upon the boundless vitality and nutrients of the dragon's body to hatch its young.

But dragons had vanished long ago, over the course of those tens of thousands of years, and the Dragon-Eating Loaches had done the same. Formidable though they were, their requirements for survival were extremely stringent. Only within a dragon's belly did their eggs have a very high chance of hatching and surviving. If they incubated inside any other creature, that creature would be drained dry before they even hatched, and fewer than one in ten would survive. Thus, after the dragons disappeared, the Dragon-Eating Loaches vanished from the world along with them.

Who knew where this one had come from, only to be encountered by Little Leopard? Little Leopard had certainly been fortunate. Although these ancient vicious creatures were formidable, the one he encountered was a descendant of Dragon-Eating Loaches that had survived by sheer luck. Since dragons no longer appeared in the world, it was a malnourished creature that could barely grow to maturity. It could not wield even a tenth of its full abilities, and its intelligence was extremely low, which was why Little Leopard had managed to kill it so easily.

As for the blackfire flame, it was an innate divine ability of the Dragon-Eating Loach and one of the world's rare marvels-a kind of mystic flame that could only be nurtured and exist within a Dragon-Eating Loach's body. Its power was boundless, but likewise, owing to malnutrition, it could not unleash even one hundredth of that power. In fact, the mystic flame inside this Dragon-Eating Loach was merely a tiny spark. Even after putting forth all its strength, it could only spit out a weak burst of flame, exhausting its essence and dying in the process. In truth, if it had not spat out that flame, it might well have still been chasing Little Leopard around.

One wrong move, and the whole game was lost. That was precisely what had happened.