Roasting a Lion's Head

This was Fu Yuan's busiest day since entering the World Road. First, he cleaned up the battlefield and broke the restrictions on a great pile of ordinary storage bags. As expected, he found nothing that pleasantly surprised him.

Only when he opened the Thousand Winds Demon General's storage bag did he find a sheet of black-and-blue beast hide. Ancient and sinister, it bore both pictures and text. The beast-shaped characters seemed to date from the ancient imperial era and were exceedingly intricate.

It described a method for refining living puppets, divided into five categories. Fu Yuan was very familiar with the first four: ice, fire, earth, and poison puppets. The last had the most text, and was evidently the strongest and most difficult kind to refine.

"This is interesting." A smile curled across Fu Yuan's handsome face, brimming with enthusiasm. "If I used this method to refine ferocious beasts, the results would surely be extraordinary."

He set the beast hide aside and continued examining the storage bags of the Nine-Headed Lion and the others.

Unlike humans, the vast majority of ferocious beasts and divine beasts disliked relying on external means. The sight of Madam Snake's storage bag sent a chill through Fu Yuan: it contained all manner of frozen bodies and internal organs.

The Seven-Footed Black-Feathered Eagle's storage bag, on the other hand, gave Fu Yuan a pleasant surprise. A golden feather had been carefully placed in the very center, and the vast vitality it radiated showed how extraordinary it was.

"A phoenix feather!" Fu Yuan examined it lightly. It was no ordinary feather, but something quite extraordinary. Most likely, the Black-Feathered Eagle had prepared it for its own transformation, only for Fu Yuan to reap the benefit.

Of all living creatures in the world, the phoenix race cultivated the fastest in the Nirvana Realm.

Phoenixes underwent Nirvana and were reborn in fire, growing stronger with every death. They were an extraordinary race, holding a dominant position within the Divine Phoenix lineage.

Zhu Yan's storage bag contained quite a few vermilion fruits, spiritual medicines that strengthened Qi and blood and tempered the flesh. They were exceptionally valuable, but they could not catch Fu Yuan's eye. His body and blood Qi had reached a terrifying level. He was confident that, since the age of myth, no second person like him could be found in the world-truly without equal through the ages.

"A Buddhist scripture!" An ancestor of the Nine-Headed Lion's lineage had once been a Dharma Protector King of the Western Heaven, a supreme sacred land, and had held an extremely high position in Buddhism.

Merely holding it in his hands made him feel calm and clear-minded. His Double Pupils opened and closed, and the words seemed to leap from the scripture, suffused with Buddhist light. A giant Buddha seemed to appear in Fu Yuan's mind.

He stood there, and heaven and earth became small, while the sun, moon, and stars dimmed.

"Quite extraordinary. Most likely, it was left behind by an ancient Buddha." Fu Yuan sighed in admiration, though he also felt some regret. The Buddhist scripture was far too incomplete: only seven pages remained, and too much had been lost.

After cleaning up the battlefield, Fu Yuan got busy plucking feathers, skinning the snake, and chopping off lion heads. It was quite an undertaking.

Dressed in peerless white robes, Fu Feng watched him work calmly from the side. It was a rather amusing sight.

The one flaw was that the python meat was too rank. Even after Fu Yuan covered it in seasoning, it was still hard to eat, so he had no choice but to remove the snake's gallbladder and save it for making wine.

"I was still too impulsive. I should have left Zhu Yan's corpse intact." He felt regret again. He had long ago heard his elder brother say that the brains of this kind of ferocious beast were a delicacy, exceptionally fresh and delicious.

"I need to pay more attention next time," Fu Yuan reminded himself solemnly. In his elder brother's words, aside from cultivation, there were only three things in the world one must never let down.

Beautiful women, fine wine, and good food-only those three.

Removing the Black-Feathered Eagle's feathers and the Nine-Headed Lion's fur was a major undertaking. Fu Yuan grew quite impatient and took a simple, brutal approach, stripping off their skins.

"It seems we're missing a cook in the group!" Fu Yuan was thoroughly convinced and resolved to recruit one to prepare all kinds of delicacies for him.

Fu Yuan took a ten-meter-wide cauldron and a dazzling array of pots, bowls, ladles, basins, and seasonings out of his storage ring.

Had any other cultivator been there, they would probably have been too shocked to speak.

Good heavens, what respectable cultivator brought such things along when going out? Was he afraid he had too much storage space?

But if they learned that Fu Yuan's storage space was a full hundred meters high and ten thousand meters long, and that he had even thoughtfully prepared several cauldrons, the largest hundreds of meters across, there was no telling how shocked they would be.

Fu Yuan had prepared those for large specimens like True Dragons and White Tigers.

The fragrance of plainly stewed Black-Feathered Eagle and fire-roasted lion meat, seasoned with the spices Fu Yuan had specially brought from outside, traveled far more than ten miles. It was enough to make little Fu Feng beside him cry from craving.

It was Fu Feng's first time in the outside world, and everything was new and wondrous. He accepted the lion meat Fu Yuan handed him and took a small bite. He was instantly hooked.

This is so delicious! How can anything in the world taste this good?

"Now that we have good food, how could we go without wine?" The youth sat cross-legged in the air, wolfing down a three-meter-long, golden-brown lion leg. It sizzled, and grease covered the corners of his mouth. There was not the slightest trace of an Emperor's son's noble refinement about him.

Fu Feng took the black wine flask and copied Fu Yuan, gulping down a large mouthful. It was intensely fiery.

Humans are so strange. How can they like something like this? Fu Feng thought. Yet he did not put it down, sipping it little by little. Paired with the Nine-Headed Lion's meat, it had a distinctive flavor of its own.

"Ready!" Fu Yuan lifted the lid, and fragrance instantly billowed out. With a pained heart, he tore off a hind leg and a large slab of meat for Fu Feng. Then, as Fu Feng stared dumbfounded, he picked up the cauldron and tipped its contents into his mouth, devouring everything like a wind sweeping away clouds.

It was a very strange sight: the youth held the enormous cauldron, gulping and swallowing, spitting out a black bone from time to time.

Compared with Fu Yuan's ravenous eating, Fu Feng was elegance itself, the very image of a noble young master.

"I'm so full!" They had eaten for a full hour before finishing most of it. The Nine-Headed Lion was more than ten meters long, and even Fu Yuan, who called himself a big eater, gave up after several burps. He froze the rest and put it in his storage bag.

"I've eaten and drunk my fill. It's time to make my name resound throughout the World Road!" Fu Yuan wiped the grease from the corners of his mouth and set off again, bound for the Heaven-Ascending Tower.

This had not merely been a meal for pleasure. The blood Qi and cultivation of the Nine-Headed Lion and the Seven-Footed Black-Feathered Eagle were contained within the food, making it a nourishing meal that counted as a short bout of cultivation.

His cultivation at the third level of Nirvana had become much more consolidated, nearly breaking through the middle stage and entering the late stage. It was comparable to half a month of arduous cultivation.

It was not that Fu Yuan cultivated too slowly. His original self had been a Holy Son, and with a fivefold boost to his cultivation, few of his peers could cultivate faster than him.

But his cultivation foundation was too complete, unprecedented in all of history. As a result, every minor realm required several times, or even ten times, as much accumulation as others needed.

The Emperor Realm, the Hengjie Star Domain.

The Great Luo Dynasty, silent for hundreds of thousands of years, revealed its edge, declaring war on several surrounding powers at once. Battles between Divine Fire Realm experts took place at every moment, and even mighty Venerable Realm experts clashed from time to time.

The conflict drew the attention of nearly half the Emperor Realm. The Great Luo's foundations alone were astonishing: it was among the strongest powers beneath the imperial clans and imperial dynasties, one of the very greatest dynasties. Moreover, the Indestructible Forbidden Zone stood behind it.

"Luo Jue, in this age of great contention, does your Great Luo truly mean to do this?"

"Will you provoke the wrath of all and be the bird that sticks its head out?"

The current Holy Lord of Fengling Sacred Land stepped forward, his Qi and blood shaking the starry river and his body crushing the void. A Venerable of the present age had come forward to call them out.

"The times really have changed. Our clan's servants of old have actually grown so bold!" Grand Elder Luo Jue stepped forward. The stars made way, and divine radiance streamed down. His timeworn, aged face bore boundless majesty.