After an unknown period of time, Lu Yin woke up to the sound of dripping water as well as a strange buzzing noise that sounded like a cicada rubbing its wings together.
He slowly opened his eyes and saw a strange bug in front of him. He thought of eating it, but he ended up licking his parched lips that were as dry as sand. He needed to drink water. But at that moment, the insect flapped its wings and flew off.
Rays of deep red light blinded him, causing Lu Yin to instinctively close his eyes. When he reopened them, the emaciated elder had appeared before him yet again.
Lu Yin’s eyes changed when he saw the elder, and he tried to stand, but he couldn’t feel his entire body. Wait, no sensation… Could it be gone?! He strained to look down at his body, and to his relief, found that it was fortunately still intact.
A large chunk of roasted meat was thrown in front of Lu Yin. “Eat. You haven’t eaten anything in a month.”
Lu Yin stared at the meat in front of him and tried to suppress his saliva but found that he had none. He resisted the urge to take a bite and continued staring malevolently at the elder.
The elder laughed strangely. “Relax, it’s not white meat.”
Lu Yin squinted, his eyes flickering with indecision.
The elder shook his head and moved to the side. Behind him there was a giant, three meter long insect. It was missing several legs and traces of meat being cut out could be vaguely seen.
After Lu Yin ascertained that the roasted meat was not white meat, he immediately bit down. He swallowed the meat without chewing and quickly devoured the giant piece of meat, but an unbearable thirst soon followed.
The elder raised a finger, causing some of the trickling water droplets on the wall to slowly fly into Lu Yin’s mouth. This was a welcome shower after a long drought, and Lu Yin slowly drank the water for a long time. He then licked his lips and in a hoarse voice, asked, “Why did you save me?”
The elder sat down before Lu Yin. “It’s not for charity.”
“State your terms.”
A chilling smile crept into his skeletal face, “I need you to take some things to the Neoverse.”
“Neoverse?” Lu Yin was at a loss.
“You don’t need to know what that is for now. When you are able to reach the first Flowzone of the Innerverse, you will naturally know everything about the Neoverse.”
Lu Yin forced a smile onto his face. “Do you really think that I can enter the Innerverse? I can’t even get off of this planet.”
“There’s no rush. Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” the elder replied before he suddenly recalled something. “I nearly forgot—in order to ensure that you’ll uphold your end of the bargain, I’ve placed a dark seal on you. Only the person that I’m sending you to can remove it. No one else, not even Hunters, can help you. You can let them try if you don’t believe me, hehe.”
Lu Yin didn’t care about some dark seal. He had been on the verge of death and couldn’t be bothered about some trivial restriction.
“What is this place?”
“Driftcharge Planet. It’s a planet in its final moments, and one that’s about to be destroyed,” the elder replied. He then lifted a hand and began carving something into the stone wall with star energy. Lu Yin watched for a moment before a strange expression appeared on his face. The old man was carving words, and while he recognized the words being carved, he did not understand their meaning.
Half an hour passed before the elder finally stopped and let out a breath. He looked at the stone wall with a complex expression before turning to Lu Yin. “Memorize it.”
Lu Yin was dumbfounded. “What?”
“I’m making you memorize it,” the elder barked with an unkind tone.
Lu Yin was speechless. “You wrote for an entire half an hour, but you want me to memorize it all? How long do you think I’ll take?”
The elder stared at Lu Yin. “You can either memorize it, or you can go outside and become white meat.”
Lu Yin did not have a choice. “Alright, but don’t blame me if I take too long.”
“It wouldn’t be quick even if you wanted it to.” The old man sighed again, no longer in a mood to continue conversing. He soon left the burrow.
Lu Yin lay on the floor, motionless, and stared at the wall. “To be good at communicating, the Dao of Heaven refuses. To jump and lie in the heavens, the Dao of Heaven accepts. To jump and lie in the horizon, to condense gas, to swallow rivers…”
After Lu Yin had reached the Melder realm, all aspects of his body had been greatly upgraded, and memorizing a segment of words was not difficult for him at all. But this text was strangely difficult, and he even felt a sense of oppression while trying to memorize it. It almost felt as if something was staring at him in the dark. It wasn’t obvious, but his head grew dizzier as he read it over and over, and after twenty minutes he fainted.
The elder stepped into the cave and looked at the unconscious youth. “If it wasn’t dismantled for you to memorize, then you wouldn’t be able to remember even a single sentence.” He then gazed at the stone wall. “I really hope that this can truly be inherited.”
Lu Yin woke up with a splitting headache after spending half a day knocked out. What happened? What was that text? Did it actually give me a headache just from me memorizing it?
“Continue,” the elder commanded from where he was sitting nearby.
“May I ask what’s the point of memorizing this text?”
“You will have to go to the Neoverse and transcribe it to the person that I’m sending you to meet.”
“Alright.”
“It’ll also benefit you to memorize all this. Haven’t you felt the pressure increasing as you memorize more of it?”
Lu Yin’s brows furrowed even though his brows had been burned off. “What’s so good about the pressure?”
“Humans are composed of their body and their spirit. Some forces focus on the body, while others on the spirit. This pressure will polish your spirit so that you will have no weaknesses.”
Lu Yin was reminded of the Daynight clan and the unique characteristics of their battle techniques. For example, Ghostfire had been immune to every physical attack, but he had not been able to withstand the Daynight Punch. This was because the Daynight clan’s battle technique damaged both the body and the spirit, which was Ghostfire’s weakness.
“Alright, continue memorizing the text,” the elder ordered after giving Lu Yin a taste of knowledge.
Lu Yin breathed in deep, looked towards the stone wall, and continued reciting. He lasted for almost half an hour this time, which was a few minutes longer than the previous time. However, he had only memorized a small portion of the text on the wall so far.
Unknowingly, half a month passed with Lu Yin constantly reciting the words on the stone wall in his mind. From his initial limit of twenty minutes, he could now hold out for an hour. The elder had also indicated that if Lu Yin memorized the entire passage, no one weaker than a Hunter would be able to damage his spirit.
These words had been said to motivate Lu Yin, and Lu Yin had realized this, but he still accepted them as true. This was because he could already see the results. He could acutely sense that his spirit had become more durable, and the most obvious example was that he could now suppress his hunger.
By the end of the half month, he had memorized half of the Stonewall Scriptures. Although he had been reprimanded by the elder for being talentless, Lu Yin was satisfied with his progress. Even if there had been someone watching all this, they would not have been able to understand the pain that he had endured during this half month. He had only focused on memorizing the scriptures from the moment he woke up to the moment he passed out. These days had been very painful for him, but fortunately, his body had recovered quite a bit as well.
That warship’s light beam had nearly destroyed his body. No one knew why, but his body had recovered slightly by the time he had landed on this planet, and with each passing day, it continued recovering a little more. It had now reached the point where he could move his arm a bit.
“Your body’s strange. It’s very strong.” These were the first words that the elder said to Lu Yin for in half a month. Besides monitoring Lu Yin’s memorization, he also periodically left to do some unknown errand, but he was always more downcast upon his return.
Lu Yin glanced at him. “Strange?”
“Few could have survived an injury like yours. It doesn’t matter if they’re from the Outerverse, the Innerverse, or even the Cosmic Sea. An injury like that would have been a death sentence in a hundred out of a hundred cases. It’s a miracle that you survived.”
Lu Yin’s heart stirred, as he also felt that his body was strange. This oddness had only manifested after he broke through to become a Melder, and his body had continued becoming even more frightening, to the point where it was scarily powerful now. It had always been continuously strengthening itself, and even the Sandmaster had praised it in admiration. During Lu Yin’s first visit to the Dao of Purgatory, Frankfurt’s spear had not penetrated his body and only shattered his organs. In the ported battles, besides Explorers who could instantly obliterate him, no one else could harm his body. These changes were too great to be explained by his advancement into the Melder realm, but Lu Yin didn’t know what else could have happened during his breakthrough.
“You can see the oddness of my body?” Lu Yin was hopeful.
The elder shook his head. “Continue memorizing.”
Lu Yin begrudgingly looked back towards the stone wall.
The elder lowered his head, but kept his eyes trained on Lu Yin. This person’s body was actually even stranger than he had let on. This youth must have eaten some miraculous treasure, or else it was the innate gift of some strong clan. But to his knowledge, there was no clan whose innate gift could allow one to survive that serious of an injury.
The elder continued pondering things over before retracting his gaze and forcing a smile onto his face. He had no ability to snoop around, so it was fine as long as he maintained a glimmer of hope in his heart.
In the blink of an eye, another half month passed by. Now, Lu Yin had memorized all of the words on the stone wall. But he could only recite it section by section, and it was completely impossible for him to memorize it as a singular passage.
Lu Yin’s expression changed when he saw the elder leave. He slowly sat up, finally able to move around by himself. He wiped his body, causing a piece of skin to fall off. His body was shedding. It had recovered from his heavy injuries, and now, all of his dead skin was molting. He rubbed his still-bald head and felt the nearly imperceptible hair-roots poking out. He should be able to grow hair again soon.
Lu Yin lowered his hand, and his expression cooled. The attack on the pirate port was unforgettable, and it had been much crueler than the events that had taken palace during Earth’s trial. He had even almost been turned into white meat. Lu Yin looked out of the cave and walked out to stare at the sky.
Thick layers of dark red clouds piled together as lightning streaked through them, forming an apocalyptic image. Thick smoke spouted from the ground, and occasionally, there was an intense and audible rumbling that shook the very ground.
Lu Yin looked at the ground and followed the footprints to find the elder. He found the old man sitting in front of a small mound of earth, tearfully grieving, and constantly speaking. Lu Yin listened in for a while and discovered that the elder’s grandson was buried here.
The old man left the cave each day to hunt, but he also came to this place to grieve.
“Grandpa knows that it’s cold in there. Don’t worry. Grandpa will be with you soon and won’t let you be lonely.” After the elder said his final sentence, he slowly stood up.
Lu Yin immediately left.
When Lu Yin returned to the cave, the elder had not yet arrived as he was most likely hunting insects. Lu Yin tried his best to absorb some ambient star energy, but it was just too sparse. He unconsciously activated his Cosmic Art, causing nine stars to revolve around him.
The nine stars meant nine times the absorption speed. Even if the stray star energy was sparse, all of it would still be swept towards Lu Yin in a vortex, even though it felt pitifully inadequate.
The elder was dragging a giant bug’s carcass towards the cave when he sensed something unusual. He dropped the bug’s corpse and walked inside, where his gaze changed as soon as he saw Lu Yin. “This is… a Cosmic Art?”
Lu Yin, meanwhile, was unaware that his Cosmic Art had been discovered. He had wanted to recover his strength and was still blissfully absorbing star energy.
