Stone Men

Biodata

Power Progression

Stone Men gain physical power through accumulated mass rather than conventional cultivation alone. Individual bodies, the Supreme Will, and Yu Jiemo’s cultivated realm therefore have distinct measures of strength 147 156 186.

Appearance & Biology

• Stone humanoids: Ordinary Stone Men stand approximately ten meters tall. Even the largest remain around that height rather than growing with their strength 129 241.
• Increasing density: Their volume stays essentially unchanged while their mass rises, producing bodies far heavier and harder than their appearance suggests 129 164.
• Mineral diet: They consume soil, stone, and ore without excreting waste. What they eat is converted into their own mass 129 156.
• Sleep and digestion: Their frequent sleeping is part of the conversion process; eating continuously is limited by how quickly they can assimilate material 156.
• Endurance: Yu Jiemo carries an ant carcass and a tiger for an entire day and night without tiring 134.
• Reproduction: A parent assembles a stone-shaped body and transfers some of its own mass into it. One early example uses a tenth of the parent’s mass; later reproductive cycles are described as splitting an individual from eighty tons back to forty 129 156.
• Offspring quality: Meteoric iron and other minerals can strengthen newborn bodies, though ordinary Stone Men generally use whatever material is nearby 129.

Documented Population

Abilities & Skills

Mass-Based Strength and Durability

Their development is described as “proving the Dao through strength”: accumulating enough physical substance to overcome techniques through force 185.

• Even the weakest bodies are dozens of times harder than ordinary steel 212.
• A Stone Man survives Dark Tiga’s automatic defense throwing it over a thousand meters without losing a chip 129.
• Wolong and Wenhe, despite their enormous mosquito bodies, initially cannot lift an ordinary Stone Man; Wenhe’s improvised weapon breaks against its head 146.
• Durability is not uniform. Ordinary bodies are later described as having Second Stage–comparable defenses, while stronger individuals reach Third Stage defenses 183.
• Isolated Stone Men remain vulnerable to sufficiently powerful opponents or massed attacks. During the extermination war, charging demon armies crush ordinary individuals without stopping 186 189.

Consumption and Fusion

Stone Men can consolidate their race’s strength by eating one another rather than waiting for ordinary mineral digestion.

• Consumed Stone Man material becomes the eater’s mass immediately, with no digestion period 171.
• Yu Jiemo doubles his mass by consuming a similarly sized Stone Man in two hours 171.
• Fallen bodies remain useful nourishment. The Demon Race consequently removes corpses rather than allowing surviving Stone Men to reclaim them 164.
• Fusion allows the civilization to concentrate its resources into a few powerful bodies while retaining the ability to reproduce afterward 184.
• Su Mo identifies a potential route from consuming matter to consuming rules, ultimately reaching the Sixth Stage. This is a projected path, not an achieved racial advancement in the documented battles 196.

Collective Consciousness

The Supreme Will coordinates the race through a shared mental network. Ordinary individuals retain only enough independent psychic activity to eat, sleep, and reproduce 129 146.

• Reports and computing resources are centralized; the Supreme Will decides which problems warrant a response 129.
• Psychic attacks against an individual can encounter the far greater consciousness behind it 146.
• Stone Men scattered across the world function as observers, making large Demon Race movements difficult to conceal 193.
• Yu Jiemo is initially excluded because his soul is neither native to the race nor an individual split from the Supreme Will 196.
• Shattered bodies lose the mental link’s protection, allowing enemies to check their remains with soul attacks 164.
• Their protection is not absolute: Big Pineapple’s soul fragments penetrate a Stone Man’s body and enter the collective consciousness’s soul space 213.

Gravity and Flight

Increasing mass initially makes Stone Men slower and harder to move. Su Mo identifies antigravity as a possible solution to this limitation 194.

• Yu Jiemo’s fused body uses repulsion to rise into the air at a mass of one million tons 195.
• The force supporting that flight is distributed across thousands of li, collapsing the ground and crushing nearby life 195.
• At the Fifth Stage transformation, the Rock Sovereign drags distant Stone Men and surrounding matter into himself 242.
• During the black dragon’s assault, he devours a cosmic storm, spatial fragments, and the force of its roar before they can destroy the world behind him 247.

Mineral Knowledge and Fragment Assimilation

The collective maintains practical records and can incorporate powers obtained from exceptional materials.

• Its archive contains maps, ore descriptions, and reports on Transcendent abilities 166.
• Black iron ore provides five times the mass gain of an equal volume of soil. Yu Jiemo applies metallurgical knowledge to make alloys that improve feeding efficiency 166.
• Yu Jiemo proposes forging powerful beings’ fragments into equipment; the Supreme Will agrees to suppress the fragments’ consciousnesses before forging 176.
• The Supreme Will later absorbs Liu Dajun’s fragments and develops a protective barrier that strengthens as it is repeatedly broken and rebuilt 211.
• Fragment consumption carries risks: when a test subject swallows Liu Dajun’s fragment, its mental link is severed and Liu Dajun takes control of the body 208.

Society & Behavior

The early civilization prioritizes survival and reproduction above individual intelligence, emotion, or comfort. Its members usually remain in their own feeding territories, eating and sleeping rather than seeking conflict. Animals initially treat them as moving rocks rather than predators 129 134 135.

This apparent harmlessness conceals an ecological threat. They permanently remove soil and minerals from circulation, expand their population, and accidentally kill animals by moving, rolling over, or leaving enormous feeding pits. Other species can lose their habitat without the Stone Men deliberately attacking them 132 136 147.

The Supreme Will is more calculating than its passive bodies suggest. Its strength grows with the race’s quantity and quality. Although opponents initially assume that killing individuals will weaken it, Su Mo later discovers that deaths do not reduce the quality it has already accumulated 184 196.

Their civilization can switch between dispersed collective development and a hierarchy centered on exceptionally strong individuals. The Twelve Ancestral Witches provide surviving centers of strength from which the race could reproduce even if its ordinary population were destroyed 184.

History

Early Expansion

Su Mo initially becomes frustrated that the Stone Men do little except eat and sleep, despite being the intended protagonists of their world. Observation reveals that their quiet lifestyle can eventually produce neutron-star-mass individuals and black holes through fusion. To force them into action, he introduces four ancient evil gods and eighty fragment domains that compete for their food supply 128 129.

Yu Jiemo enters the world in a Stone Man body but cannot access its collective will. Meanwhile, the Ant Queen recognizes their reproductive and physical advantages, and Wolong and Wenhe’s failed attacks demonstrate that the emerging Demon Race cannot yet defeat them directly 132 146 147.

Tribulation Qi and the Twelve Ancestral Witches

Xu Shilun’s released Tribulation Qi gives the normally emotionless Stone Men faint emotions and causes them to attack nearby animals. They are less affected than other beings, but no longer remain entirely passive 156.

After Yu Jiemo’s apparent death, his scattered thoughts are absorbed within the collective consciousness, where twelve new consciousnesses form. With the Supreme Will’s assistance, he subsequently regains strength by consuming other Stone Men 164 171.

The twelve empowered bodies alarm Wolong and Wenhe, who recognize that the Stone Men are concentrating their population into stronger combatants. Big Pineapple, the Ant Queen, the Demon Race, and the Dark Tigas unite in a worldwide extermination campaign 177 184.

War and Seizure of Power

The Supreme Will has long avoided fusion because it fears the fatal consequences of reaching the Fourth Stage. Under the threat of extinction, it finally permits concentrated development 186.

Wolong privately decides that complete extermination might make him disposable. He considers preserving a controllable fused opponent while destroying the remaining population. Yu Jiemo instead reunites his clones into a million-ton body, and the Supreme Will continues gathering Stone Men beyond the enemy’s attention 193 195 211.

The Supreme Will seeks the Demon Emperor’s throne and resolves to preserve both peoples while building enough power to surpass a god. After the Demon Emperors flee, Stone Men suppress the Demon Race, imprisoning most captives rather than killing them indiscriminately 216 220.

Rule, Resource Crisis, and Black-Hole Transformation

As ruler, the Rock Sovereign relocates the Demon Race north and promises to restrain Stone Men expansion. Their multiplying population nevertheless continues consuming the world’s matter 234.

Preserving both peoples requires either an alternative food source or matter brought in from outside. A planetary fragment proves inadequate, feeding the Stone Men for less than a week. By this point, their population has reached 2.5 billion while the world has shrunk to less than a fifth of its original size 237 240.

The Rock Sovereign resolves to reach the Fifth Stage and begins drawing matter and Stone Men into a single black-hole body. He later protects the surviving world from the World-Destroying Evil Dragon, then burns the Stone Men within himself to empower a retaliatory strike. The exchange leaves both combatants’ immediate fates uncertain 240 242 247 249.

Later Appearance

• Stone Men later witness Li Pengfei demonstrate rock consumption through his reversed [The Sky Is Falling] rune. They question his suggestion that he might eat his own people to gain strength 342.

Relationships

• Supreme Will / Rock Sovereign — Central consciousness and eventual ruler. Treats ordinary bodies as replaceable stores of mass while pursuing the race’s survival and his own advancement 196 211 234.
• Yu Jiemo — Transmigrator in a Stone Man body, initially excluded from the network. Helps develop fusion-based combat and metallurgical feeding methods; the Supreme Will also attempts to strip away his soul and make him a puppet 156 166 202.
• Su Mo — Creator and observer. Pressures their development through resource competition and prevents their premature destruction because their consumption forces the Demon Race to grow 129 194.
• Demon Race — Initially indifferent neighbors, then existential enemies. Later becomes a subject population under the Rock Sovereign, who protects its survivors despite the continuing conflict over resources 159 234 247.
• Wolong and Wenhe — Principal organizers of resistance. Investigate Stone Men physiology, publicize their ecological threat, and coordinate the extermination campaign 146 159 164 184.
• Ant Queen — Early rival alarmed by their reproductive advantage; joins the extermination alliance and later cooperates with the Rock Sovereign against Wolong 147 184 221.
• Liu Dajun — His fragments become experimental material and a source of protective power, though one fragment temporarily takes over a Stone Man host 208 211.
• Rock-digesting mosquitoes — A rare biological countermeasure. Unlike the demons conducting the experiments, these mosquitoes can digest Stone Man remains and produce waste that restores depleted land 164.
• Spider Heavenly Emperor — Powerful enemy whose poison corrodes the Stone Heavenly Emperor’s body and soul, demonstrating a threat that physical hardness alone cannot prevent 225 230.