In the Wilds,
never entrust your hope of survival to another yao.
The three Great Yao were locked in a struggle. For now, they were exercising restraint, fighting without openly breaking with one another. But if the situation continued to escalate, it could very well bring the heavens crashing down and the earth splitting apart.
The mercy of those above and the elusive promise of good fortune were always the most hollow lies.
Still employing various transformations and disguises, and aided by the Concealment Rune, Su Changsheng returned home with a heavy heart.
He shut the door and slipped into the underground tunnel.
After sorting through his gains from this outing, he began cultivating. With danger lurking on every side of the Yao Stronghold, he was unwilling to waste a single moment he could spend growing stronger.
Three unwavering hours of breathing practice, followed by crafting runes, studying demon arts and techniques, and so on.
Outside, the sky gradually darkened. Thick clouds blanketed the night, and the north wind howled. Only a faint, intermittent red glow pierced the clouds and spilled across the earth.
With his eyes closed, Su Changsheng circulated part of his demon power in a specific pattern while diverting another portion to draw stones of varying sizes onto designated parts of his yao body.
The process sounded simple, but as the saying went, great skill could look deceptively clumsy. It was actually extremely difficult. The problem was not the complexity of the process; rather, with his attention divided between two tasks, the slightest stray thought would ruin the entire attempt.
The Stone-Forging Art demanded absolute focus, seriousness, and care from its practitioner.
Fortunately, Su Changsheng was a patient yao, with a stubborn streak in his bones that would not let him stop until he reached his goal!
Though the Stone-Forging Art was exceedingly difficult, his foundation in the Stone-Shattering Art gradually helped him find his way.
Both the Stone-Shattering Art and the Stone-Forging Art had evolved from the Stone Demon's innate talent. They shared similarities in the circulation of demon power and the mobilization of blood qi, and even complemented and reinforced one another in use.
Once he grasped some of their common principles and found the right approach, Su Changsheng's studies grew increasingly smooth. The art began to feel natural in his hands.
He was steadily finding his stride.
Three days later.
Clatter, clatter, clatter.
As stones peeled away from his yao body, fell to the ground, and crumbled into powder, his eyes snapped open. A breath of white vapor roared from his mouth.
"It worked!"
He had reached the beginner stage of the Stone-Forging Art!
Su Changsheng abruptly rose, his enormous snake tail slicing through the air with a shrill crack.
He threw a barehanded punch, and the Stone-Shattering Art erupted in response. Before his eyes, great masses of air compressed into dense ripples, surging like ocean waves and slamming into the rock wall with force that could topple mountains and overturn seas.
Boom!
A large section of rock exploded, breaking into thumb-sized chunks. The hole left in the rock wall was more than five meters deep!
Yet its diameter had been constrained to roughly half a meter.
"The Stone-Shattering Art is easier to control now. I can just barely concentrate it into a narrow line, multiplying its power!"
"My physical strength has increased, and my defenses have improved considerably too. After I use the Stone-Shattering Art, that faint sense of disharmony caused by its backlash has also diminished significantly."
"The Stone-Shattering Art and Stone-Forging Art really do fit together and strengthen each other. This was the right step. All that painstaking study wasn't wasted."
Su Changsheng's spirits soared.
The benefits from successfully learning the Stone-Forging Art were even better than he had imagined.
With little effort, he could now leap seven or eight meters into the air and easily lift boulders weighing several tonnes. His strength had previously been nothing remarkable, but this improvement had all but doubled it.
The increase in his defenses, in particular, was a tremendous surprise.
"My yao body has become much more resistant to the Stone-Shattering Art's backlash. What used to require a cooldown of about two and a half minutes now only takes roughly two minutes."
"This improvement in defense already rivals what I gained from my last shedding, and this is only the first training session."
As Su Changsheng silently calculated, he could not help drawing a deep breath.
After all, the Stone-Forging Art was a demon technique that continuously tempered the yao body. Its benefits were not merely a one-time gain. As long as his yao body still had potential to be forged, repeated practice would improve it little by little.
Until there was no room left for further progress.
"Judging by the current situation, the beginner-stage Stone-Forging Art should let me keep tempering myself for more than a month. After that, ordinary stones probably won't do much for my yao body."
"When that happens, I'll either have to raise the Stone-Forging Art's level so it can extract the deeper essence within ordinary stones, or find other resources to replace them. According to the art's instructions, ores rich in metal would be best... Different combinations of metal ores produce different forging effects."
"Metal ores... Ah, there's no hurry. I'll leave things as they are for now."
Su Changsheng sighed inwardly.
It was easy to foresee that the Stone-Forging Art would become a voracious consumer of resources.
Yet the Black Mountain Demon Stockade already lacked metal ores of all kinds. The few deposits it possessed were controlled by Great Yao, and such ores rarely circulated outside their hands.
For now, he could only set aside the idea of tempering his yao body with metal ores.
Then he smeared some Toad Oil over himself, found more stones to cover the appropriate spots, and resumed cultivating.
The Toad Oil's effects were extraordinary, leaving him thoroughly invigorated. Combined with the Stone-Forging Art, it even made every scale on his body itch faintly. Every cell in his yao body opened a tiny, hungry mouth, greedily sucking in the Toad Oil and the stones' essence.
The effects of tempering his yao body slowly improved at a rate visible to the naked eye.
The two were simply a perfect match!
However, with Su Changsheng's meager demon power, the blood qi of a level three half-demon, and his current proficiency in the Stone-Forging Art, he could not yet cover his entire body. He could only select important areas and temper them bit by bit.
Once his level rose, his control improved, and he had sufficient demon power and blood qi, perhaps he could find a way to envelop his whole body in the Stone-Forging Art. The results would surely be even better.
The days passed one after another.
Hidden in the underground tunnel, Su Changsheng continued cultivating diligently. Tempering his yao body had become almost an obsession.
Still, he did not neglect the Breathing Technique or rune crafting, making progress in both. Little by little, he advanced toward becoming a fourth-level half-demon.
Though his progress was slow, the day would eventually come when he reached the finish line.
His schedule was packed every day, sometimes with more than he could manage. He wished he could divide his attention between two tasks and make one body do the work of three.
Knowing full well that he could improve simply by cultivating, yet having no time to do it, was an agonizing feeling.
Even so, between cultivation sessions, he did not forget to go out to gather news and buy more blood food.
Besides the Yao Market, his main source of information was the Bird Yao next door.
According to his neighbor, quite a few yao residents from the Left Stronghold had recently arrived at the Black Mountain Demon Stockade in successive groups. Most had been settled in the Half-Demon Grounds and the Lesser Yao Grounds.
This made the two already overpopulated areas even more crowded.
Disorder was inevitable.
Some original residents formed gangs to resist the newcomers. Some newcomers seized homes from the original residents, even accidentally killing yao in the process. Others went so far as to ambush the Lesser Yao who managed these areas.
All manner of incidents played out every day.
An endless torrent of trouble!
The age of chaos had yet to arrive, but the lives of the yao at the bottom had already obligingly collapsed first.
Unable to control their own fate-what a sorrowful thing!
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