HUMMMMM—WHOOSH!
The instant three thousand Dad Points and the remaining half-vial of [Thousand-Year Earth-Heart Milk] fused with [One Hundred Jars of Aged Hundred-Flower Honey] inside the Upgrade Box, a warm. Glowing cocoon of rose-pink and golden light enveloped six-year-old Su Nuannuan right in Gu Changsheng’s arms!
Across the underground cavern, Captain Gu Tie, eight-year-old Gu Nian, and the forty frightened orphan children peering through the wooden bars of their cages all stared in wide-eyed wonder.
Seconds ago, the air around the back cage had smelled like sour vinegar and rotting venom that made everyone’s eyes sting.
Now, as that soft rose-pink light soaked into little Su Nuannuan’s skin and meridians. The corrosive dark-purple mist swirling around her tiny shoulders didn’t explode or scatter—it folded inward like spun sugar and melted straight into the golden warmth of the Thousand-Year Earth-Heart Milk!
Inside the six-year-old girl’s fragile body, the rampaging [Innate Ten-Thousand-Poison Empress Body]—which in the original tragic novel had rotted her own vocal cords, blinded her left eye. Forced her to live on venomous insects until she went mad—underwent a complete, 100% flaw-free rebirth!
The Thousand-Year Earth-Heart Milk washed away every trace of frostbite, malnutrition, and corrosive backlash in her bone marrow. The hundred jars of aged Hundred-Flower Honey wove a permanent, natural spiritual lock around her poison core!
In front of Gu Changsheng’s smiling eyes, the terrifying dark-purple veins throbbing across Nuannuan’s hollow cheeks faded away like ink washed off white porcelain.
Within five breaths, her pale, sunken cheeks plumped up with healthy, rosy baby fat and two tiny dimples; her dry, cracked lips turned pink and soft. And even the red poison-blisters on Gu Changsheng’s bare wrists vanished completely as the newly transformed mist brushed over his skin!
And the smell—.
The sour, lethal poison miasma was gone without a trace.
In its place, radiating gently from six-year-old Su Nuannuan’s hair and fingertips, was a warm, mouth-watering fragrance of sweet wildflower honey, toasted caramel. Fresh milk-candy that filled the entire dark cavern like a sunny spring bakery!
[ DING! CHILD #2 INNATE PHYSIQUE UPGRADE COMPLETE! ]
* Child #2 : Su Nuannuan (Age 6 | Adopted Daughter #1)
* Old Physique : [Uncontrolled Ten-Thousand-Poison Body (Curse)]
* New Physique : [Rank 2 Perfection: Sweet Honey-Candy & Healing.
Aroma Empress Body (100% Controllable!)]
* Dual-Mode Passive & Active Effects :.
1. Passive “Sweet Sister Mode” (Default): Radiates a constant.
warm caramel & hundred-flower honey aroma! Any family member.
or ally patted by Nuannuan’s small hands receives instant.
poison-purging, fatigue relief, and +20% meridian recovery!
2. Active “Bad-Guy Sneeze Mode” (Defense): Only when Nuannuan.
sneezes at an enemy does her breath turn into [Weapon-Melting.
Black-Licorice Gas], which dissolves steel weapons and armor.
into sticky black taffy in 2 seconds without hurting skin!
Sitting in the crook of Gu Changsheng’s left arm wrapped in the warm fox-fur cloak, six-year-old Su Nuannuan blinked her big, dark eyes in astonishment.
For as long as she could remember, her chest and tummy had always hurt like she had swallowed burning coals, and her fingers had always been cold and purple.
Now, her tummy felt warm and full like she had just drunk a whole bowl of sweet honey milk!
Timidly, holding her breath, Nuannuan lifted her tiny right hand out from under the fox-fur cloak and looked at her five short little fingers.
They weren’t purple anymore—they were warm, pink, and smelled just like the five-copper honey-candy sticks she used to stare at outside the village candy-peddler’s stall!
“U-Uncle...” Nuannuan whispered, her big eyes shining like wet black grapes as she tentatively touched the back of Gu Changsheng’s bare wrist where the red blisters had been seconds ago. “Your hand isn’t rotten!
And Nuannuan’s hands...
Nuannuan’s hands smell like honey candy!”
She sniffed her own tiny fingers twice, and then looked up at Gu Changsheng with a gap-toothed, trembling smile that broke through six years of darkness like the first flower of spring:.
“Nuannuan isn’t a poison bug anymore! When I touch Uncle, Uncle doesn’t get hurt!”
“I told you, Nuannuan was never a poison bug,” Gu Changsheng said softly, wiping a smudge of coal dust off her rosy cheek with his thumb. “From today on, you’re Dad’s sweet little honey-drop, and you can hold Dad’s hand or hug your Big Brother whenever you want.”
Hearing that, six-year-old Su Nuannuan threw both tiny arms around Gu Changsheng’s neck and buried her face against his warm collar. Inhaling the comforting scent of his coat as her Darkening Meter plunged another fifteen percent in a single breath—dropping from 55% straight down to 40%!
At that exact instant, a massive wave of pure. Flaw-free spiritual backflow from stabilizing an Empress-tier innate physique surged out of the system link and washed through every bone and meridian in Gu Changsheng’s body!
HUMMMMM—CLANG!
Unlike ordinary martial artists who had to grind for ten years to temper their skeletons from mortal bone into Iron-Bone. The system’s golden feedback combined with the lingering essence of the Thousand-Year Earth-Heart Milk refined all two hundred and six bones in Gu Changsheng’s twenty-eight-year-old body at once!
Inside his chest and limbs, his skeleton turned the color of burnished dark gold, his twelve main meridians widened to twice their previous diameter. His base physical strength soared from twelve hundred pounds straight past two thousand five hundred pounds!
Gu Changsheng had broken cleanly through the first major realm wall—advancing from Rank 1 Peak Martial into Rank 2 Early Martial (Iron-Bone Stage)!
[ DING! HOST MAJOR REALM BREAKTHROUGH — RANK 2 IRON-BONE! ]
* Host Realm : Rank 1 Peak -> Rank 2 Early Martial!
* Base Strength : 2,500 lbs (5,000+ lbs with [Father’s Authority]!)
* Nuannuan Stats : Warmth/Happiness: 62 -> 78/100!
Darkening Meter : 55% -> 40% (-15% DROP!)
* Daily DP Income: +7,000 DP/day -> +8,500 DP/day!
Right beside Gu Changsheng’s boots, eight-year-old Gu Nian looked up at the tiny girl in the fox-fur cloak. Pulled a warm, paper-wrapped [Rank 1 Perfection: Jade-Dew Healing Fruit Gummy] out of his yellow smock pocket. Held it up toward his new little sister with a serious nod.
“Hi, Nuannuan. I’m Gu Nian, and I’m eight years old,” Gu Nian said earnestly, puffing out his chest slightly so she could see the two glowing [Little Red Flower Stickers] on his pocket. “Dad says I’m your Big Brother now.
Here—eat this golden bear gummy. It tastes like orange honey, and nobody is ever going to lock you in a cage again.”
Nuannuan peeked out from Gu Changsheng’s shoulder, took the little golden bear gummy with two tiny fingers, and popped it into her mouth.
As the sweet honey-orange flavor melted on her tongue—the first piece of candy she had ever eaten in her six years of life—her big eyes curved into happy crescents and she whispered shyly:.
“Thank you, Big Brother...”
Exhausted from days of starvation and overwhelmed by the cozy warmth of the Earth-Heart Milk and the fox-fur cloak, the six-year-old girl’s eyelids drooped heavy. Within ten seconds she fell fast asleep with her thumb tucked against her cheek and her head resting safely on Gu Changsheng’s shoulder.
Even in her sleep, her small fingers stayed curled around a fold of Gu Changsheng’s collar, and every slow breath she took sent a gentle ripple of warm caramel-and-honey fragrance across the cavern.
Where that soothing honey aroma drifted past eight-year-old Gu Nian and Captain Gu Tie, both of them felt the minor fatigue from their twenty-minute winter sprint down the mountain road vanish completely!
More amazing still, when the warm caramel-scented breeze wafted through the open wooden cages along both sides of the cavern, the forty cold. Frightened orphan children—several of whom were coughing from cave dampness or nursing scraped knees from the slave catchers’ ropes—stopped shivering at once.
“Wait... my knee stopped stinging!” the ten-year-old boy in the front cage whispered, touching his scraped shin in amazement.
“And my little brother’s cough stopped as soon as he smelled that sweet honey wind!”
“That little sister in the fur cloak isn’t a poison monster at all!” a seven-year-old girl in the second cage whispered back, her eyes shining with relief. “She’s a little candy fairy!
Just smelling her makes my tummy feel warm!”
Hearing the forty children whisper little candy fairy instead of poison monster, eight-year-old Gu Nian grinned proudly in his yellow bunny slippers and gave a small, solemn nod to the kids in the cages.
“That’s my new little sister Su Nuannuan,” Gu Nian told the children seriously as he helped Captain Gu Tie pull open the wooden cage doors. “Everyone line up quietly in two rows and hold hands so nobody gets lost in the tunnel. At our house in Frost-Pine Town, the floors are warm like summer, and Auntie Qin and Grandpa Fu have a whole kitchen full of hot pork buns and sweet ginger soup waiting for you!”
Across the cavern, Captain Gu Tie had already used his Rank 2 Iron-Bone hands to snap the padlocks off all twelve wooden cages. Freeing the forty kidnapped orphan children and tying the dozen masked buyers and four guards into a single long rope chain.
“Listen up, you human-trafficking scum!” Captain Gu Tie growled in a low voice, giving the rope chain a sharp tug that made the dozen masked buyers stumble into a neat line. “You’re marching right behind us to the Frost-Pine Town Magistrate’s yamen to confess.
You bought these kids—and then you’re putting on pink chore aprons to dig herb fields for our Peace Pharmacy for the next twenty years!
Make a single peep in the tunnel, and I’ll let the Patriarch introduce your backsides to his belt!”
The dozen masked buyers—who had just watched Gu Changsheng fold a ten-foot iron rod in half with a kitchen wok. Rip an iron cage door off its hinges barehanded—nodded frantically behind their gags, terrified of making a sound.
Just as Captain Gu Tie led the forty freed children toward the rear ventilation ramp that climbed out to the back hillside, however—.
Clack... scrape... thump!
From the top of the main entrance ladder shaft thirty yards away came the sound of boots climbing hurriedly down the wooden rungs, accompanied by the unmistakable. Lingering stench of hundred-day fermented skunk-cabbage and a greedy voice muttering in the dark:.
“Curse that Gu Changsheng and those three useless Shadow-Rat assassins! Good thing I still kept twenty silver taels hidden in my boot sole and brought this clay centipede jar! Once I buy that six-year-old poison brat from the Slave Boss tonight and boil her blood into Ten-Venom Marrow Pills, I’ll slaughter every man, woman, and dog in the Gu Clan!”
It was Lin Fan—arriving right on schedule with a two-foot-tall sealed clay jar full of venomous centipedes tucked under his arm!
Captain Gu Tie’s eyes flashed with fury as he reached for his iron spear: “Patriarch, it’s that rat Lin Fan! Let me go up the ladder and skewer him!”
“Wait a second, Gu Tie,” Gu Changsheng whispered with a cold, dangerous grin. Glancing from the sleeping little girl on his shoulder to the unconscious scarred Slave Boss lying on the floor and the empty iron cage behind him. “Skewering him in the dark is way too merciful for a guy who brought a jar of centipedes for my six-year-old daughter.
Help me stuff the Slave Boss into that cage under a black blanket—and let Dad leave a special gift inside his jar.”
Captain Gu Tie’s eyes lit up with a fierce, silent chuckle as he looked from the unconscious Slave Boss to the cramped iron cage in the corner.
“Stuff the two-hundred-pound Slave Boss into the little cage so Lin Fan thinks the girl is still inside?” Captain Gu Tie whispered, rubbing his iron-hard hands together eagerly. “Patriarch, you really never let that Second Branch rat take a single breath without stepping into a ditch!
Leave the heavy lifting to me—I’ll fold this scarred bastard into that cage like a winter quilt in ten seconds!”
Beside them, eight-year-old Gu Nian patted the leather pouch of marbles at his waist and whispered earnestly:.
“Dad, make sure the bugs you put in the cage bite him right on the nose! He wanted to put my little sister in a bug jar, so he should get stung two hundred times!”
“At least two hundred times,” Gu Changsheng promised softly, adjusting the sleeping Nuannuan’s warm fox-fur cloak so her ears wouldn’t hear a sound of the commotion to come.