Chapter 111: Please Stay Alive, Mr. Xu

It was as if she had grown up in a single moment.

The childish air about the girl suddenly diminished significantly; she was no longer innocent and romantic, but instead carried a slightly heavy sense of loneliness.

She was leaving.

Taking her only spear and bundle, she stepped onto the road back alone.

“…”

The moonlight tonight was very bright, and the stars twinkled, sketching a magnificent pattern in the sky as if a grand gaze was reflecting the girl's growth.

Wu Yingxue looked up at the night sky, her eyes glistening like water, and asked Mr. Xu one last question.

“Mister, just how many stars are there in the Milky Way in the sky?”

“Probably several thousand times ten thousand, or perhaps even more.”

So many?

The girl was clearly startled by this figure.

“If I had the time, I'd really like to count them one by one…” she said, sounding a bit silly. She smacked her lips and tightened her spear and bundle further to prevent them from falling.

With a light leap, her valiant figure jumped directly onto the rooftop.

Her cloth shoes made the roof tiles clatter.

Under Mr. Xu's gaze.

The young girl suddenly turned back and gave him a brilliant smile—a smile so bright and beautiful that the night sky seemed to light up, dispelling the previous heaviness.

Her eyes were as clear as crescent moons, and her voice was as clean as flowing water.

With her hands behind her back.

Standing on her tiptoes.

“Mr. Xu, please live well in this world that doesn't distinguish between good and bad.”

The girl's farewell was peculiar; after saying her piece, she directly performed her light-body technique and quickly vanished into the thick night.

That kind of farewell was a brilliance and liveliness Mr. Xu had never seen before.

Had the girl suddenly changed her personality?

No.

Mr. Xu felt that, more accurately described, the sixteen-year-old girl had finally shed her disguise and revealed her original self.

“The person is gone; it's time to return to the hot-blooded script of fighting heaven and earth.”

Mr. Xu stared at the night sky for a long time.

Suddenly, he let out a soft chuckle and turned back into the house.

Wu Yingxue's arrival was just an accident. He believed that after this, there would be little intersection between the two of them.

Mr. Xu prepared to return to his former life, gradually venturing deeper into the Hundred Thousand Mountains, relying on life-and-death battles and actual combat to continuously refine his martial Dao and Martial Skills.

Besides that.

The annual spring and winter Demon Tide of Qingniu Town was also a target he needed to treat seriously, as it was conducive to honing his killing techniques in group combat.

…

[Time passes. After her injuries healed, Wu Yingxue, who was temporarily staying at your home, left.]

[The young commandery princess carries a bizarre criminal charge on her back; she cares about it deeply and is determined to investigate the truth.]

[You watch her disappear into the night, silently offering a few blessings for her.]

[Your life returns to tranquility, back to the rhythm of practicing martial arts alone as you did before the girl appeared.]

[Practice, combat, practice again, combat again.]

[Your life is a straight line between two points. Although the process is painful and agonizing, your Persistence is effective. Your strength improves every day, which greatly increases your confidence and forms a positive cycle.]

Gathering strength, charging forward, throwing a punch—a powerful suppression and kill!

In the area near the Hundred Thousand Mountains.

Mr. Xu's figure flashed as his feet stomped hard on the ground, charging toward a tiger demon at an almost imperceptible speed.

His five fingers spread open, coming down from above.

*Bang!* His palm pressed the tiger demon's head down, slamming it into the ground and forming a crater, shaking up dust and sand and making leaves fall from a hundred trees.

“Roar!!!”

The tiger demon, having suffered a heavy blow, roared in anger and struggled to get up, but the figure suppressing it erupted with even more intense blood-Qi. Holding a blade that burst with the roar of thunder, he cleanly severed the tiger demon's head.

The battle ended.

Mr. Xu had won.

He stood in place, his eyes slightly closed, constantly reflecting on the previous battle.

“Whether it's fist techniques or saber techniques, under the dual effects of Persistence and Martial Arts Evolution, they have all undergone a transformation from their original martial arts.”

“‘Blood-Qi Long Fist’ has become ‘Blood-Qi Tyrant Fist’.”

“‘Five Thunder Saber’ has become ‘Nine Thunder Saber’.”

“But—”

Mr. Xu shook his head: “The level is too low. The martial Dao Cultivation Techniques I obtained from the real world have a starting point that is simply too low.”

“There aren't many martial Dao experts in the real world, and powerful Secret Manuals that can be found are even scarcer.”

“Even with the help of Martial Arts Evolution, the evolution of these Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills has extremely low cost-performance.”

“If I could find decent Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills, and then supplement them with the deduction and evolution effects of Martial Arts Evolution, that would be truly invincible.”

The question was…

Where could he find sufficiently excellent and Advanced Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills?

The only lead Mr. Xu could think of…

Was the already departed Wu Yingxue.

But he had already asked; the Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills the girl herself practiced were all special types restricted to the Imperial Bloodline, and they were all incomplete.

Imperial descendants like Wu Yingxue could only obtain the subsequent content of the techniques after achieving a Breakthrough to a new Realm.

This was one of Great Gan's security measures to prevent techniques from leaking out.

“Forget it, it's not a big deal.”

“Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills are just external methods; the blood-Qi and Physical Body are the core Dao.”

“Time will bring the answers I want. Even if I can't get Advanced Cultivation Techniques and Martial Skills, by relying on Persistence and Martial Arts Evolution, I can still obtain even further martial arts.”

“In the future, when my own Realm has risen, creating my own martial arts isn't impossible either.”

Mr. Xu shook the tiger blood off his palm and took a few steps back.

He grabbed the thick tail of the striped tiger demon with one hand.

He hauled it over his shoulder and, step by step, dragged the heavy tiger demon corpse back toward Qingniu Town, leaving a long, dark trail behind him.

Most demon flesh is inedible, but this tiger demon happened to fall within the edible category.

“Oh, Xi-geer is back!”

“What a good child he is. A-Niu, why aren't you going to help your Brother Xu?”

“Alright, Mother, I'm going right now!”

The autumn and winter seasons arrived.

The weather turned cold, and food became scarce.

Mr. Xu entered the Hundred Thousand Mountains, and while honing his Martial Skills, he would kill to obtain large amounts of demon flesh.

He didn't know how these demons grew, but every one of them was sturdy and massive; those as large as houses were everywhere.

Mr. Xu killed demons every day.

Every day, he obtained new demon flesh.

As a single person, he naturally couldn't eat it all, so Mr. Xu often distributed the demon meat to the people of Qingniu Town.

After all, when he first arrived in Qingniu Town in his first year, many people had helped him.

“The situation in Qingniu Town is getting worse year by year.”

“This year's winter Demon Tide hasn't even truly begun yet, but it's already reached the scale of last year's. If it continues like this, it's simply unimaginable.”

Mr. Xu sighed as he handed the tiger demon's corpse to A-Niu to butcher.

He looked toward the location of the Hundred Thousand Mountains. Even in the bleak and desolate autumn and winter, that terrifyingly deep blackness and the continuous, overlapping mountain ranges had not diminished in the slightest, bringing a horrifying and ghastly sense of pressure.

Pressing down on Great Gan.

Pressing down on countless Qingniu Towns.

Pressing down on every person living on the border.

A warning rose in Mr. Xu's heart; perhaps, before long, a massive storm would strike with great force.