Twenty days had passed since his spar with Fain.
After returning to the War God Sect, Fain had spent three days unconscious before waking, then entered deep seclusion. He seemed to have gained quite a lot from that battle. Whether he could successfully break through remained unknown.
Today was the eighty-first day since he had perfected the Heavenly Pillar Method. Loa did not make his breakthrough at home. Instead, he returned to the same mountaintop as before, sat cross-legged, and sank his awareness into his body.
The morning mist had yet to disperse. Thick as milk, it wrapped the entire mountaintop tightly. Dew had soaked his robes, leaving them clinging to his body, but he felt no cold. In fact, he could feel nothing at all-not from numbness, but because his perception was undergoing one final implosion.
Since the previous night, the changes within his body had been like floodwaters bursting through a dam.
His blood was the first to move.
Loa "heard" the first drop of blood change. Pumped from his left ventricle, it traveled through the aorta toward the vertebral arteries. As it flowed past the seventh cervical vertebra, it collided with the silver-blue energy spilling from the jade-like bone-in that instant, that drop of blood was no longer blood.
It became light!
The drop burst inside his blood vessel, becoming a cloud of silver-blue light that seeped inward along the arterial wall, penetrating his marrow, his nerves, and the ends of every capillary. Then came the second drop, the third, the hundredth-like falling dominoes, all his blood underwent a qualitative transformation within three seconds.
His blood no longer flowed. It surged. Like a river of stars set ablaze, it roared through his blood vessels, burning, restructuring, and regenerating everything in its path. He could feel every red