The punch connected with a dull, heavy thud, sending visceral shockwaves through the lion's massive frame. It let out a pained, guttural howl, retreating several steps while its crystalline silver mane quivered with the force of the impact.
But as Feng Luotian landed and assessed the result, his excitement dimmed. The beast was hurt, but the damage was far less significant than he had hoped; its sheer resilience was a testament to the biological superiority of a Six Fangs monster. Its skin felt less like flesh and more like flexible armor.
Luotian sighed inwardly, his thoughts shifting to cold calculation. A Six Fangs monster's hide is ridiculously dense. As I feared, my foundation is solid, but I lack a dedicated body-strengthening skill or a high-output offensive skill. Without them, I'm just a ghost—I can dodge forever, but I can't deliver the killing blow to an opponent with a higher cultivation level. I need to secure those techniques immediately. But for now, I'll use this beast to grind my soul and reflexes.
With renewed resolve, he charged. This time, he abandoned the offensive entirely, shifting his focus to the razor's edge of evasion. Whenever the lion swung its [Poison Blade] tail at a lethal angle, Luotian activated Pinnacle Flash Lightning for a micro-second burst. Crackling golden sparks traced his blurred silhouette as he danced through the toxin-filled wake of the tail.
By combining Momentum Eyes with brief lightning bursts, he trained his reflexes and Theríon circulation together. The attacks left little room for error, but he remained calm and focused.
When his Theríon reserves finally dipped toward depletion, Luotian flickered out of existence, vanishing into the foliage.
Unable to sense Luotian's cultivation, the silver lion prowled the riverbank in frustration. It huffed and looked around for the elusive commoner. Luotian remained on a sturdy branch only meters above, resting while the beast searched below.
The lion's stamina was fading fast. As a mindless beast, it had fought with unrestrained, wasteful ferocity, pouring every ounce of its marrow into its strikes. Once it was certain the intruder had fled, the silver lion finally succumbed to its exhaustion, collapsing onto the mossy ground to rest.
But Feng Luotian had only one month before the entrance exam. Reaching into his bag, he retrieved a Theríon Recovery Pill and swallowed it.
The pill tasted of bitter herbs and old memories. Sun Wuji had gifted these to him years ago on his birthday. Back then, Luotian couldn't tell if his brother was teasing the "Cripple" of the family or if he had a sincere, desperate hope that his brother would one day wake up. Regardless of the intent, the gift was a godsend now. The medicinal energy surged through his meridians, aggressively accelerating his recovery rate for the next round of his dance.
Within half an hour, his Theríon reserves were fully replenished, the medicinal warmth of the pill finally settling into his core. He checked his stats, the blue interface of CRONOS flickering before his eyes.
///// Level: Four Fangs (67%)
///// [Pinnacle Flash Lightning] Level 1 (31/100)
"Only a 1% energy increase after exhausting my entire reserve? This is tougher than I expected," Feng Luotian muttered, clicking his tongue. Progress felt painfully slow to someone who had once stood at the peak. Then he glanced at the resting beast and smiled. "But hey, we've got a long road ahead of us, don't we, Little Silver?"
Without giving the lion a single heartbeat to recover fully, Feng Luotian leapt from the tree. He plummeted through the canopy, landing with the weight of a falling mountain squarely on the monster's head—a brutal signal for the start of another relentless training session.
The lion roared in a mix of fury and genuine trauma, but its protests were meaningless. It had been reduced to little more than a living dodge-training machine, forced into a desperate dance under Feng Luotian's calculated maneuvers.
Half a day later, the sun began to dip low, casting long, bruised shadows across the thicket. The Blade Tail Silver Lion finally collapsed, its massive frame hitting the dirt with a hollow thud as it fell unconscious from sheer, systemic exhaustion. If any other Fang Fighter had been present to witness the scene, they might have felt a genuine pang of sympathy for the poor beast; it had been used as a whetstone until its very spirit was blunted.
Feng Luotian chuckled lightly, shaking his head as he wiped a stray bead of sweat from his brow. Stretching his arms until his spine popped in a satisfying rhythm, he turned away from the fallen predator and made his way back to his camp, ready to rest for the night and let his own weary muscles refine the day's gains.
* * *
Waking the next morning, Feng Luotian ventured on a brief hunt, targeting several Four Fangs monsters to restock his supplies. With two fresh kills slung over his shoulders, their cooling blood staining the forest floor, he returned to the site of the previous day's relentless exercise.
But when he arrived at the riverbank, the Blade Tail Silver Lion was nowhere to be found, and the original corpse he had used as bait had been stripped to nothing but bone.
A faint, knowing smile crossed Feng Luotian's lips as he casually dropped the new Four Fangs carcasses onto the mossy earth. This time, he didn't bother with the tactical concealment of the high branches. Instead, he stood openly in the center of the clearing, his posture relaxed yet deliberate—a silent, arrogant invitation for the forest to reclaim its losses.
Not long after, the familiar silver frame emerged from the thicket, its fur glinting like polished steel in the morning light. But the beast had learned a lesson in survival; it wasn't alone. Prowling beside it was a second lion, slightly smaller but radiating a visible, shimmering heat. Its fur was the color of fresh arterial spray, glowing with a faint, internal fire.
///// Six Fangs Blade Tail Crimson Lion
///// [Burning Blade]: Imbues its tail with flames strong enough to instantly incinerate those three levels higher and burn those one realm above, causing damage over time.
Feng Luotian chuckled, clearly amused. "Oh? I didn't expect you to raise the difficulty of my training on your own, Little Silver. Bringing a friend to the party?"
His smile widened into a confident, sharp-edged grin as he extended his hand, curling his fingers in a classic beckoning motion. "Come on, then. Show me if two of you are enough to touch my shadow."
The taunt was all the beasts needed to ignite their territorial fury.
With deafening, synchronized roars that sent the Emerald Squirrels fleeing in terror, they charged. The air grew heavy and suffocating as the heat from the Burning Blade clashed with the toxic, acrid scent of the Poison Blade.
The dual onslaught was relentless, a chaotic storm of fire and venom that forced Feng Luotian to push his neural pathways to their absolute threshold. Though the intensity was far beyond anything he had faced the day before, his movements remained disturbingly sharp. The synergy of Momentum Eyes and Pinnacle Flash Lightning allowed him to weave through the intersecting arcs of their tails, though the high-speed calculations drained his Theríon at a staggering pace.
The chaotic scene—two massive lions lunging in a desperate pincer movement while a lone young man flickered between them like a ghost—repeated itself again and again. Each near-miss sharpened his instinct, his reactions growing faster and his control over his internal energy tightening with every exchange.
By the next day, still more lions had emerged from the thicket. Luotian watched their growing numbers in astonishment. What had begun as a duel with one beast had become a roaring pack, with scarcely a gap between their attacks.
Feng Luotian twisted his torso, the air pressure from a silver lion's tail-swipe whistling past his ear like a falling blade. The weapon missed him by a hair's breadth, only to be immediately replaced by the Burning Blade of a crimson lion. It lashed toward him in a wide, searing arc that turned the oxygen into a suffocating haze. Feng Luotian ducked low, the hungry flames scorching the air just millimeters above his scalp.
He pivoted and ducked through the flurry of claws and bladed tails, keeping just beyond their reach. But even his concentration began to fray under the constant attacks.
As he sidestepped a pincer strike, his heel caught on a hidden, moss-slicked root. It was the smallest of errors, but in this high-tier gauntlet, it was a death sentence. Bang!
The silver lion's massive, leaden paw crashed into his chest. The impact was absolute, sending him hurtling backward like a ragdoll caught in a gale. His body slammed into a thick ancient oak with a resounding, bone-deep crack, the bark splintering into a thousand shards upon collision.
Feng Luotian gritted his teeth, his vision flickering as the world tilted. A sharp, metallic tang filled his mouth, and a thin trail of blood trickled from his lip as he slumped against the tree. For a heartbeat, the pack paused, their golden and amber eyes locking onto him with the terrifying clarity of apex predators sensing a cracked shield.
Panting, Luotian wiped the blood from his chin. His gaze sharpened despite the pain. He pushed away from the splintered trunk and straightened, ready to face the pack again.
"Not bad," he muttered, his voice a low rasp that somehow carried over the growls. A faint, defiant grin curled at the edges of his lips. He scanned the ring of muscle and fur closing in around him. The silver lion let out a guttural rumble, and the crimson one answered with a roar that shook the very leaves of the canopy.
The pack surged forward once more. Despite the throbbing ache in his ribs and the heavy weight in his limbs, Luotian threw himself back into the fire. His movements were no longer just precise; they were desperate and jagged, forged by the sudden necessity of survival.
Through the blur of gold, silver, and red, he sidestepped a synchronized pincer strike, his lips twitching with bemused irony. "Are you lions… or hyenas?" he murmured, the joke lost to the wind as he prepared to turn his own pain into the ultimate fuel for his refinement.
* * *
Three weeks passed in the blink of an eye, the days melting into a relentless cycle of sweat, blood, and progress.
Feng Luotian had long ago exhausted the supply of Theríon Recovery Pills gifted by his brother. To sustain his pace, he turned to the land itself, foraging for medicinal herbs with similar properties along the winding trails and the outskirts of his camp. Among his most vital discoveries were the Moon Lotuses drifting atop the indigo river. Ten seeds from a single lotus offered the same potency as a professional pill. With thousands of lotuses blanketing the water like a fallen galaxy, each harboring dozens of seeds, Luotian found the fuel he needed to maintain his grueling, sun-up to sun-down regimen.
About a week earlier, he had finally accumulated enough energy to advance to Five Fangs.
This morning, as the first rays of light pierced the canopy, he felt the tangible transformation in his marrow. As he stretched, he noted the subtle shifts: his skin had bronzed into a deep tan, and his once-slender frame had hardened into a map of sharply defined, functional muscle. His physique no longer suggested a scholar; it exuded the confidence of a seasoned warrior.
///// Five Fangs (21%)
///// [Last Dance Curse] Level 5: Temporarily increase the user's level by 1 for 9 minutes. However, the user must collect 10 souls within this time. Failure to do so results in a decrease of 2 levels.
///// [Momentum Eyes] Level 5: Allows the user to perceive the momentum and trajectory of objects within a 40-meter radius.
///// [Pinnacle Flash Lightning] Level 2 (88/100): Wrap the user's body in lightning. Speed +300%. Lightning Resistance +4%. Attack +20%.
After a sparse, functional breakfast, he stood with a calm and focused expression, mentally preparing for another day of pushing his limits. But as he reached for his gear, the morning silence was shattered.
"Aah!!"
A sharp, piercing scream cut through the mist—a girl's voice, raw and saturated with terror.
Feng Luotian froze, then turned toward the cry. His muscles tensed. Without a word, he sprinted through the trees to find its source.