This time, Xiao Hua used the Fire Marrow Blazing Crystal differently from before. Although he employed the "Prairie Fire Cultivation Method" to draw the remaining flames into his meridians for tempering, the flames upon his bones and those scorching his flesh did not immediately vanish. Instead, they slowly tempered him!
From the moment Xiao Hua fused the Fire Marrow Blazing Crystal into his arm and ignited his entire body, deep beneath the East Ridge Medicine Garden, at an extremely great depth, there was a fist-sized lump of lava. Around that fist were frigid yin rocks. Within it lay several layers: the outermost was liquid magma; further in, it had hardened like Foundation Establishment, forming crystal; further inward, it was empty, empty as air. Yet within that emptiness appeared a thread of pitch-black collapse—a collapse born of heat so extreme it seemed ready to burn space itself away!
As flames curled around Xiao Hua's entire body, that pitch-black collapse at the crystal's innermost core actually inched toward him... Xiao Hua sat atop the high ridge like this, flames winding around him, forging his bones and nurturing virtual points, for ninety-nine days. When the hundredth day arrived, the rising morning sun in the east cast its first ray upon Xiao Hua. The strange flames suddenly drew in and entered his body. The crimson color upon his bones had already spread over sixty percent of them, though the red remained mottled and impure. Then a flash of light passed over his bones, and they returned to their ash-gray color, without the slightest anomaly.
Likewise, the one hundred and thirty-two million virtual points that had been nurtured now separated from the black dots and piled together, forming another humanoid framework. This figure was far taller and more robust than Xiao Hua, truly resembling a