Su Yueli did not make a sound.
She clenched her teeth so hard that her lips were bitten raw, and a trickle of dark red blood dripped from the corner of her mouth.
Her Ji Dao Astral Qi surged violently at that moment. Her martial intent locked onto the wild medicinal power, forcing it deep into her bone marrow.
She was perfectly clear-headed. In martial arts cultivation, there was no room for retreat. To reshape the flawless golden bones, she had to shatter every inch of her skeleton, crush them to pieces, and then temper them anew with the Ten-Thousand-Year Blood Marrow.
This single sitting lasted for thirty years.
The stone door remained tightly shut. Beneath the ten-thousand-fathom cliff, the wind howled with a bleak chill.
In the first year, a fragile wild weed sprouted from a crevice in the cliff wall, only to wither in the autumn wind and turn to dust.
By the fifth year, the dark iron dust accumulated on the stone beam outside the chamber had grown a finger thick.
An injured goshawk once nested on the stone beam, hatching two chicks. Later, the fledglings spread their wings and flew away, leaving behind an empty nest that was eventually swept into the bottomless abyss by the mountain wind during a heavy rainstorm.
In the tenth year, the air in the valley grew increasingly dry, until even the slightest trace of moisture vanished.
In this desolate Spiritless Dead Valley, no one knew that a living person sat cross-legged deep within the rock face halfway down the cliff.
Outside the Spiritless Dead Valley, thirty years had passed in the mortal realm, bringing with them many autumn chills.
At the foot of the mountain, Blackstone City still stood, but the mortals within had already lived out their entire lives.
Thirty years ago, in a remote, grease-stained restaurant, there was a young waiter responsible for serving food and wiping tables.
Back then, he had blushed as he served a steaming plate of sliced mutton to a mysterious girl wearing a green and white dress and a white carved mask.
At the time, he felt she possessed an ethereal aura, looking nothing like an ordinary mortal.
In the fifteenth year, during a winter of blocked roads and biting winds, the young waiter failed to survive a severe cold and passed away on his dilapidated earthen bed.
On the day of his funeral, his son, dressed in mourning burlap, took over his role as a waiter in the restaurant.
By the thirtieth year, the waiter of old had returned to dust, and even the wooden marker on his grave in the public cemetery had weathered away.
Now, the one wiping tables in the restaurant was a quick-witted teenage boy. He was the grandson of that young waiter.
“Customer, our restaurant's spicy hotpot recipe was passed down from my great-great-grandfather. It's guaranteed to be authentic!” the boy shouted to the diners at the table, deftly snapping the rag in his hand.
The wooden table where Su Yueli had once sat had rotted and become infested with insects due to years of moisture. A few years ago, the shopkeeper had chopped it into firewood and burned it in the stove.
The red paint on the restaurant's doors had peeled and been repainted, and the willow tree in front had withered and died three times.
In the kaleidoscope of the mortal world, decades were nothing more than a few strokes in a ledger. The births, aging, illnesses, and deaths of mortals were as faint as a gust of wind, leaving no trace once they blew past.
Inside the stone chamber, Su Yueli was covered in a thick layer of dust.
The hem of her green and white dress had almost merged with the black ash on the floor, and cobwebs clung to her hair. She looked like a clay figurine that had been buried in the earth for years.
Yet beneath this shroud of dust, her skin glowed with a warm, gentle luster.
Instead of becoming shriveled from years without food or water, she had grown increasingly translucent.
Her appearance showed not the slightest sign of aging. In the absolute silence, her mind remained as tranquil as a still pool. Her facial features, refined by years of martial arts tempering, carried an ethereal quality.
She paid no heed to the changes in the outside world. In her spiritual realm, there was only her skeleton, which was constantly being shattered and rebuilt.
“Still not enough.”
Su Yueli’s martial intent echoed calmly within her sea of consciousness.
This was an incredibly tedious and agonizing struggle.
The Ninth Realm demonic leech core before her, after thirty years of continuous refinement, had shrunk to the size of a fingernail. Its deep red color had almost entirely faded, leaving behind only a nearly transparent shell.
Yet all the vital blood qi within the core had been thoroughly drained by her, completely absorbed into her limbs and bones.
The golden bones within her body were undergoing a qualitative transformation.
Every day, Su Yueli would mobilize the incredibly fierce Ji Dao Astral Qi within her, guiding it along her meridians to actively fracture her bones with countless tiny cracks.
Crack.
The sound of fracturing bones echoed repeatedly in the stone chamber.
Afterward, the gold-red medicinal power fused with the Ten-Thousand-Year Blood Marrow would flow like molten iron, wildly seeping into, filling, and packing those fractures tight.
Over thirty years, she repeated this process thousands of times.
This was a truly self-destructive method of tempering. Even if ordinary cultivators practiced external body-tempering techniques, they would never dare to treat their own bones with such cruelty. A single slip could result in shattered bones and permanent crippling.
But relying on her powerful self-healing ability as an early stage Heaven-Shaking Realm expert and the steady stream of vital essence fed back by her Martial Soul, Su Yueli grit her teeth and endured this bone-tempering process for thirty long years.
Now, the density of her bones had reached an almost unfathomable level.
The marrow, originally red and white, had now turned entirely dark gold.
These bones were not only as hard as immortal sect dharma treasures, but they were also unreasonably heavy.
If she were to stand up and take a step right now, her sheer physical weight alone would stamp a deep crater into the hard, black-gold stone floor of the chamber.
This was the flawless golden bones.
Within the stone chamber, the air that had remained stagnant for thirty years suddenly rippled.
Whoosh.
Su Yueli’s dust-laden chest rose and fell in an extremely slow, yet incredibly heavy breath.
With this single inhalation, the already scarce air in the chamber rushed through her nose and mouth, instantly bursting in her lungs.
In the next instant.
Thump!
An incredibly dull, colossal boom suddenly exploded within the absolutely silent, sealed stone chamber.
The sound was extremely deep, sounding not like the friction of flesh, but rather like a military war hammer violently striking a ten-thousand-pound drum.
That was her heart.
Her heart, which had been silent for thirty years, began to beat once more.
With this first heartbeat, the blood in Su Yueli’s body, which had been stagnant and nearly congealed, surged wildly through the blood vessels of her golden bones like a sleeping river of dark gold.
Her blood was no longer red and white, but had transformed into an extremely viscous, heavy dark gold.
As the dark-gold blood surged through her body, a low rumble of thunder echoed from the depths of her bones with every cycle.
Thump! Thump! Thump!
Her heart beat faster and faster, sending dull, bell-like reverberations echoing throughout the stone chamber.
The incredibly powerful, purely physical sound waves bounced back and forth between the enclosed stone walls, creating rustling friction. In that instant, the entire stone chamber began to hum and vibrate in resonance.
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