For three years, the morning breeze had carried the fragrance of locust blossoms through the mountain hollow. The foolish boy who had once squatted on the ground, drooling as he teased toads, now held his back as straight as the hardiest frost-hardened pine on a mountain peak.
Yun Che had healed his divine soul at the very beginning, helping him regain his senses. On the day he left, he had left behind the Netherfire Spear Art engraved on a piece of black jade, along with a black iron billet refined from a meteorite from beyond the heavens, weighing thirty-six thousand jin.
Holding that iron billet, Gu Yifan had spent a full hundred days grinding it beneath the old locust tree. He ground until blood dripped from his fingertips and Netherworld Fire seeped between his fingers, making the black iron hiss and give off bluish smoke. In the end, he forged it into that chilling black spear, its tip gleaming with a dark red, cold light.
No one knew what kind of life Gu Yifan had lived over those three years. By day, he followed Yun Che throughout the Myriad Tribulations Abyss, letting the fiercest hellfire temper the wound in his Dantian where his Immortal Bone had once been gouged out, over and over. Every inch of newly grown flesh sizzled in the flames.
He kept his teeth clenched throughout, never making a sound. As soon as the old scars fell away, bony growths ten, a hundred times harder than his original ordinary-grade Immortal Bone slowly grew beneath the new flesh. From one, then two, they eventually became nine full Nether Bones, translucent as black jade, climbing along his spine to his back, stretching the fabric of his clothes and revealing a faint, dark glow.
At night, he held his spear