By early afternoon, the campsite along the Clear Stream River was a model of rustic elegance. The shaded bamboo arbor kept the glaring sun at bay, the raised water chute filled the stone pool with musical trickles of springwater. Old Ba lay comfortably atop the smooth quartz path, nibbling thoughtfully on a bowl of blanched rivercress tossed in wild citrus-vine dressing.
“Master Lin,” Old Ba remarked, smacking his ancient beak with relish, “this old shell has grazed upon river moss, lotus roots, and water lilies for four hundred years, yet I’ve never tasted a weed so crisp, so delightfully sour, and with such a fragrant lingering aftertaste. It clears the heat from my lungs like an autumn frost.”
Floating peacefully in the basin, Lin Xiao bobbed with modest pride. “The secret is the acid reduction, Old Ba. Wild greens are wonderful. But without an acidic dressing to cut through the plant tannins, they taste like lawn clippings. A little citrus vine-sap and a pinch of crushed rock salt make all the difference.”
Inside Lin Xiao’s clear blue belly, Xiao Long the golden carp was lazily napping against the slime’s warm core, fully clueless to worldly cares.
Lin Xiao was just about to brew a fresh pot of ninety-two-degree Cloud-Mist tea. Just then, a heavy, rhythmic thudding began to vibrate through the riverbed gravel.
THUD. THUD. THUD. THUD.
Small pebbles bounced on the quartz stone floor. The reeds along the northern bank swayed wildly, snapping like dry matchsticks. A deep, deep-throated snort, thick with foul breath and aggressive fury, echoed from the hardwood treeline.
Old Ba’s neck snapped back into his shell with a heard thwump. Only his leathery snout and two wide, panicked eyes remained visible.
“Master Lin! Take cover!” Old Ba hissed in a wild, muffled whisper. “It’s the Scourge of the Upper Ridge—the Iron-Tusk Razor Boar! A Tier-1 Peak demon beast! It has gored two dozen human hunters and flattened entire bamboo groves!”
Crashing through the dense underbrush, the beast burst into the clearing.
It was a total mountain of muscle and malice. Easily weighing eight hundred pounds, the boar stood six feet tall at the shoulder, its hide covered in dense, wire-like black bristles caked with dried mud and tree sap. Protruding from its broad, scarred snout were a pair of huge, three-foot-long curved tusks. The tusks were not ordinary ivory. They were metal, glistening with dark iron veins that reflected the sunlight in evil violet gleams.
The boar’s tiny, bloodshot red eyes locked onto the clearing.
It had smelled the fragrant aroma of roasted sweet yams and the zesty citrus notes of the vine dressing from two miles away. In the brutal hierarchy of the Grand Desolate Forest, when the Iron-Tusk Boar smelled food, it took it. Anything standing between the boar and its meal was ground into red paste beneath its cloven hooves.
And right now, resting directly beside the food, was an absurdly plump, semi-clear blue ball of jelly.
SNORT! GRRRRR!
Steam jetted from the boar’s nostrils. Lowering its armored skull, it dug its massive hind hooves into the river gravel, kicking up plumes of dirt as it launched into an earth-shaking charge.
Forty miles per hour. Eight hundred pounds of furious moving mass, packed entirely onto the needle-sharp tips of two metal tusks.
The air pressure preceding the charge was so intense that it flattened the river reeds and sent waves splashing across Lin Xiao’s stone basin.
“Master Lin, dodge!” Old Ba cried from within his shell. “Even a Foundation-stage iron shield can’t take that impact head-on!”
Lin Xiao didn’t dodge. In fact, he didn’t even leave the basin.
Eight hundred pounds of wild boar, Lin Xiao observed with cold and exact calm. His panoramic senses tracked the beast’s flight path down to the tiny fraction of an inch. Look at that shoulder definition. Look at that marbling across the flank. That is prime, free-range, grain-and-nut-fed mountain pork. Ribs, pork belly, tenderloin, bone marrow... And it’s delivering itself directly to my kitchen.
Lin Xiao rolled out of the basin and planted his mass squarely on the quartz path.
He didn’t raise a weapon. He simply allowed his fluid body to settle, activating his non-Newtonian dilatant properties to their fullest limit.
“impact-hardening fluid dynamics: Engaged,” the Omniscient Dao Spirit chimed in his mind. “Thickness multiplier scaling faster and faster with strain rate. Ready for moving absorption.”
BOOOOOM!
The Iron-Tusk Boar struck Lin Xiao with the bone-shaking force of a runaway freight locomotive.
The metal tusks hit the dead center of Lin Xiao’s azure membrane.
Old Ba winced, burying his head fully into his shell, expecting the blue slime to burst like a water balloon under a falling anvil.
Instead, the sound that echoed across the river was not a wet pop, but a deep, ringing THWONGGG. The sound of a heavy-duty rubber bumper halting a high-speed steel battering ram.
At the exact heartbeat of impact, the extreme sideways tearing force caused the colloidal specks within Lin Xiao’s fluid matrix to instantly lock into a rigid, diamond-hard six-sided lattice. The massive striking force of the eight-hundred-pound charging beast was not absorbed by soft tissue. It was in a heartbeat scattered horizontally through Lin Xiao’s water’s skin and faded away harmlessly into the shock-absorbing quartz stone floor beneath him.
To the Iron-Tusk Boar, it felt as though it had charged at full sprint into a mountain made of solid sky iron-hard metal.
CRACK!
The boar’s left tusk snapped cleanly in half, spinning through the air before splashing into the river.
The beast’s eyes crossed in dazed, bone-shaking agony. Its front legs buckled, its snout plowing three feet of quartz gravel as its driving force was halted dead in its tracks. The boar gave a pitiful, wheezing squeal, its entire skull shaking with ringing blast waves.
“My turn,” Lin Xiao said cheerfully.
Before the dazed beast could even try to stand, Lin Xiao acted.
Contracting his core, he leaped into the air. In mid-flight, Lin Xiao opened his Primordial Chaos Void Maw wide—not merely opening a mouth, but expanding his outer membrane into a huge, semi-clear azure dome ten feet in width.
GLOOP!
Lin Xiao dropped from the sky like a giant blue parachute. He wrapped the eight-hundred-pound boar entirely within his mass.
The boar thrashed wildly, kicking its heavy hooves and snapping its leftover tusk. But inside Lin Xiao’s stretchy jelly body, there was no solid surface to kick. Every violent movement was met with fluid pushback that swallowed the striking force like quicksand. Within four seconds, the boar’s flailing ceased as it slid smoothly past the space-folding event horizon into Lin Xiao’s internal Primordial Chaos Dantian.
Inside the void, the beast was humanely and painlessly transitioned into raw elemental qi.
The dense bone-iron of the boar’s skeleton and tusks was stripped of organic matter and melted into pure metal marrow. The ferocious beast-qi was purified into clean origin energy. And the prime living meat was flash-chilled and organized neatly into Lin Xiao’s internal frozen stillness pantry.
A ringing bronze chime rang through Lin Xiao’s mind:
A thunderous golden cascade of qi surged through Lin Xiao’s core!
The refined bone-iron marrow integrated into his fluid matrix, causing tiny golden six-sided patterns to shimmer across his semi-clear azure surface. His width settled comfortably back to a plump honeydew melon. But his internal thickness had increased tenfold.
Lin Xiao let out a small, contented puff of clear steam.
Peak Qi Gathering achieved, Lin Xiao thought, checking his internal inventory with total delight. And look at this bounty! Three hundred and twenty pounds of marbled pork belly, thick-cut ribs, tenderloin, and marrow bones, chilled to four degrees in void frozen stillness. No butcher fees, no freezer burn, and fully sterile.
Beside the weeping willow, Old Ba slowly, tentatively poked his head out of his shell.
The clearing was fully quiet. The terrifying eight-hundred-pound razor boar had vanished. There was no blood, no torn flesh, and no shattered bones. There was only the little blue slime. He sat peacefully on the quartz path, gently wobbling in the afternoon breeze.
Old Ba stared at the spot where the boar had been standing, then looked at Lin Xiao.
“The... The razor boar?” Old Ba rasped, his voice trembling so wildly his beak clicked. “Where is the beast? Did master banish it into the underground deep pit?”
Lin Xiao gave an innocent, cheerful wiggle. “I put it in cold storage. It had wonderful marbling. Tonight, we’re having braised pork ribs and sweet yams.”
Old Ba’s jaw went slack once more.
He ate it, Old Ba realized, his ancient soul trembling with existential awe. He didn’t just kill a Tier-1 Peak demon beast. He absorbed it whole like a drop of water falling into an ocean! An eight-hundred-pound monster, erased from the world in five breaths. The master’s only thought is... Braised ribs!
The old tortoise pressed his snout deeply into the quartz stone floor, shaking with deep respect. The human sects fear the forest beasts, and the forest beasts fear the human sects. But this blue sovereign... He treats the entire realm as his private pantry. To follow him is to witness the Great Dao itself eating dinner!
In the stone basin, Xiao Long poked its golden head above the water, chirping happily and spraying a gentle arc of droplets over Lin Xiao’s head.
Lin Xiao smiled, extending an azure tendril to pat the little fish’s golden snout.
Now, Lin Xiao thought. He looked at the neatly stacked firewood by the bank, all we need is a proper cooking vessel. A stone slab is fine for grilling, but if we want real red-braised pork belly, we need a heavy iron wok.
If the heavens heard his culinary desires. Then, a faint, rhythmic sound drifted down from the rocky western ravines—a distant, metal clangor. It was followed by a heavy, wheezing groan.