Inside the boundless internal cosmos of Lin Xiao’s dantian, the laws of the mortal world ceased to function.
There was no up, no down, and no horizon. There was only a vast, calm expanse of indigo mist, swirling in slow, nested spirals around a central gravity anchor. Into this calm void, the eight-hundred-and-fifty-ton star-bronze cooking pot dropped like a falling asteroid, trailing three million gallons of dark, rotting marrow and the screeching fury of ten thousand ancient curses.
The ancient object crossed into the dantian’s inner chamber. Then, the curses reacted with feral desperation.
Carved across three hundred years by demonic grandmasters who bathed in the blood of flayed mortals, the demonic runes were living pathogens of pure malice. Sensing that their physical vessel had been swallowed, the blood-stone carvings peeled themselves from the star-bronze hull. Tens of thousands of writhing, centipede-like crimson brands surged into the indigo mist. It hissed with foul rotting intent.
Among them were the most dreaded arts of the Blood Sea Sect: the Blood-Leech Rot Curse, designed to drink the marrow from living bones. The Bone-Grinding Soul Siphon, which spun victim souls like millstones. And the Corpse-Grease Pestilence, capable of withering an entire city’s water supply into septic sludge. They sought soft mortal organs to rot, spirit veins to rupture, and a spiritual soul to infect with eternal madness.
They found none of those things.
They found only the infinite, non-Newtonian thickness of Primordial Chaos.
“Host alert,” the Dao Spirit’s voice rang through the mental chamber, cool and composed as a master scholar organizing her bookshelf. “Ten thousand Tier-Four rotting binding curses have deployed hostile intrusion protocols. Curses are attempting to establish leech-like feedback loops with your central spiritual sea.”
“Let them try,” Lin Xiao chuckled internally, floating at the center of his own internal universe. “In my old life, preparing certain wild delicacies always needed patience. You couldn’t just throw raw fugu or unwashed bitter melon into a wok and expect a good meal. You had to bleed the toxins, blanch the bitterness with salt. Then he let the clean fire do its work. A little chili oil always tries to sting the tongue at first. But once you stir it into the broth, it just adds character. Let’s start the slow simmer.”
At his command, the indigo mist didn’t push the curses away. It embraced them.
The Primordial Chaos was the state of existence before the creation of the heavens, before light parted from darkness, before virtue separated from vice. To this primal, sovereign origin, a demonic blood-curse was not an immortal taboo. It was merely organized energy that had forgotten its original nature.
The writhing crimson centipedes struck the azure mist. Then, their virulent poisons met an unbending wall of ancient dissolving. The jagged, bar-baric runes didn’t explode. Their jagged edges simply began to melt. Like sugar sculptures plunged into boiling springwater, the hundreds of years of hatred, the rotting vectors, and the twisted demonic seals dissolved.
The dark red taint was stripped away atom by atom. That left behind only the naked, uncorrupted spiritual life-force that the Blood Sea Sect had stolen from thousands of living beings over three hundred years.
“Curse neutralization completed with zero leftover toxicity,” the Dao Spirit announced, her voice with the soft chime of internal potion-made fine-tuning. “Refining yield confirmed: four million, eight hundred thousand units of pure, unaligned ancient spiritual energy added to internal reserves. Plus, the Eight-Hundred-and-Fifty-Ton Star-Bronze hull has been cleanly separated from its rotting binders. Metal essence is now stored in steadied cubic metal bars within your backup spatial vault.”
The sensation within Lin Xiao’s core was nothing short of extraordinary.
It didn’t feel like a violent rupture or the chaotic qi inflation that human fighters dreaded when absorbing foreign treasures. Instead, the four point eight million units of refined essence washed through his jelly-like body like an ocean of rich, golden ginseng broth simmered over gentle peachwood coals.
Every single droplet of his semi-clear sapphire mass absorbed the nourishment, humming with boundless life-force. His cellular stretch swelled, his internal thickness doubled. The non-Newtonian impact-hardening threshold climbed to an entirely new realm of physical invulnerability.
Meanwhile, outside in the physical sky, Elder Han Gu’s world was tearing apart at the seams.
When a fighter bonds with a high-grade lifebound ancient object like the Nine-Ghost Blood Soul Cauldron, their sea of mind is inextricably woven into the ancient object’s core runes. For eighty years, Han Gu had fed his own marrow into the cooking pot to maintain total dominance over its ten thousand curses.
The moment Lin Xiao’s ancient dantian dissolved the last demonic seal, the backlash struck.
CRACK!
The sound came from within Han Gu’s chest. The spiritual cords connecting his Nascent Soul to the cooking pot snapped at the same time. It whipped back into his dantian with the force of shattered steel cables.
“GAHHHHHH!”
Han Gu arched his back wildly atop his blood platform. His skeletal throat opened in a shriek of pure agony. The pale parchment of his face turned a sickening, bruised violet as his mouth vomited a torrent of clotted black blood. The blood hissed as it struck his cloud, burning through the crimson vapor like acid.
“My seals... My lifebound brand...” Han Gu choked, clutching his hollow chest with both claw-like hands. His dragon-bone staff slipped from his numb fingers, tumbling three hundred feet through the clear air to shatter on the rocks below. “Erased! Not suppressed... Not broken... Fully unmade! What’s that monster?!”
With the severing of the cooking pot’s life-link, seventy years of stolen life-force bled from Han Gu’s body in seconds. His sparse black hair turned brittle and white, falling away in ragged tufts on the wind. The wrinkled skin across his cheeks collapsed against his cheekbones. The dark Nascent Soul flame burning in his dantian shrank to the size of a flickering candle, threatening to put out fully.
Four miles away, atop the watchtower of the Hundred Treasures Trade Depot, Patriarch Lu Feng and forty hardened merchant guards dropped their weapons. They stared in speechless awe.
“The blood mist is fully gone,” Lu Feng whispered. He watched the shimmering azure rings of light spreading across the mountain peaks. “He swallowed the curses of a thousand massacres and turned them into clean morning sunlight. That’s not training... That’s the Dao of Genesis itself.”
High above the safe hall, Lin Xiao hovered in the clean mountain breeze, glowing with blinding radiance.
To the thousands of beastfolk and mortal defenders watching from behind the stone fortifications, the scene was holy beyond understanding. The blue slime was no longer merely a friendly village mascot or a squishy protector.
Surrounded by a halo of nine nested rings of shimmering rainbow light, Lin Xiao looked like a tiny sun suspended beneath the heavens. The four point eight million units of pure qi within him were so dense, so harmoniously balanced between yin and yang, that radiant beams of golden-azure essence leaked from his semi-clear pores. It cast dancing patterns of liquid light across the entire valley.
Down on the walls, Tie Shan leaned against the stone low roof wall. He wiped soot from his eyes with the back of his hairy wrist.
“Look at him,” Tie Shan whispered, his booming voice silenced by sheer respect. “He didn’t just smash the demon pot. He ate the poison, burned the curses, and gave the sky back to the sun.”
Beside him, Su Ling’er’s three snowy fox tails fanned out in an arch of pure crimson-tipped light. She clasped her hands together over her chest. She felt the deep ring of Lin Xiao’s breakthrough through their sacred True Name bond. Her training, which had hovered at the peak of the three-tailed realm, surged with easy grace, washing through her spirit veins like warm honey.
“Master’s dantian has reached the limit,” Su Ling’er said, her voice trembling with deep joy. “He’s no longer at Foundation Establishment. The core is coming.”
Xiao Hei stood atop the castle wall gate, throwing his head back toward the golden light. The sky wolf king let out a long, amazing howl of triumph that echoed across forty miles of mountains, joined within seconds by the baying of seventy shadow wolves and the joyous roar of Xiao Long coiling through the upper clouds.
In the sky, Lin Xiao gave a little wiggle, fully clueless to the awe-struck worship unfolding beneath him.
“Mmmm,” Lin Xiao murmured to himself, floating comfortably in the warm sunshine. “That was definitely the best hotpot I’ve had in three hundred years. But good grief, I’m so full. It feels like I ate eight bowls of sticky rice cakes and washed them down with ten flagons of thick plum wine. My middle is practically buzzing.”
“The fullness isn’t stomach stall, Host,” the Dao Spirit corrected him gently. “It’s the pre-breakthrough star-core. Your ancient reserves have surpassed the volume limit of a liquid dantian by four hundred and eighty percent. The internal pressure is initiating spontaneous gravity collapse.”
Lin Xiao felt his balance point tighten.
The four point eight million units of pure essence, swirling like an oceanic galaxy within his core, began to pull inward toward a single, infinitesimally small map point.
The time had come to form the Golden Core.