"When experts fought, life and death hung on an instant. The slightest difference was more than enough to rewrite a certain death!"
"That was the difference between life and death!"
Starting that night, Grandma Shi began teaching all sorts of Life-Preserving Arts and the crucial tricks to staying alive: how to survive when an opponent had higher cultivation and kept you suppressed from beginning to end, and how to create a chance to wrest life from the jaws of death.
If an opponent's cultivation surpassed yours by so much that they could simply crush you, how should you preserve your life then? How could you create that slender chance to escape alive?
If an opponent's strength had reached a level that left you as powerless as a mountain bearing down on your head, what methods could you use to prolong your life, even by a single second?
"Don't underestimate one second or two. Sometimes, failing to hold on for that one second means death; but if you hold on, it means a turning point, it means help arriving and your life continuing."
"At any time, even when you know you're powerless and can only wait for death, you must hold firm to one conviction, one shred of hope: I will live! I can live!"
"With the same injuries, if you have that conviction, you can live! Without it, even the slightest pessimism means death!"
"Only if you refuse to give up first can there be hope, can there be a chance!"
"Make sure you remember that!"
"..."
Much of what Grandma Shi taught that night was unheard of to everyone, including Zuo Xiaoduo and Li Chenglong. It involved not only martial arts techniques, nor merely cultivation and mental states, but also intent and things that sounded profoundly mysterious when spoken