Time flies by, day after day, time never comes back, and there is no second morning in a day.
Three months passed since Li Yan returned from the market.
Early that morning, Li Yan stood in the yard, staring in a daze at a huge ancient ape who was busy watering the spiritual field in the corner.
It is now the middle of winter again, and it is only three days away from the end of the year. However, here in the Wuliang Sect, there is basically no big difference between the four seasons.
Maybe this is how the seasons are here, or maybe it's the way of the immortal cultivators. There is no feeling of the coldest days of winter like in his hometown, and there is no heavy snow in winter. Li Yan can only see a hint of the change of seasons from the undulating mountains and the dark bamboo leaves.
In winter, bamboo leaves are broad and dark in color, almost completely black, giving people a heavy and solid feeling.
In spring, the thick bamboo leaves all over the mountains and fields lose their color and are replaced by tender green leaves that are small and pointed, carrying the freshness of rain.
When spring passes and summer arrives, the bamboo leaves slowly begin to become wider and thicker, and their color turns emerald green, as if they are lush and verdant.
There is often a kind of very brightly colored bird that stands among the bamboo branches, stretches out its thin pointed beak, and gently pecks the broad bamboo leaves, and streams of green juice will flow out.
But it doesn't mind the bitter taste at all. It keeps hopping on the bamboo branches, sucking the green juice with its sharp beak, and occasionally giving out cheerful chirps.
After the autumn wind blows, the entire Xiaozhu Peak is shrouded in a deep dark green ocean. Only the bamboo waves rise and fall layer by layer, and the black waves roll. No scenery inside the peak can be seen at all.
"It's the end of the year again, Dad, Mom, Third Brother, Fourth Sister..."
Li Yan had a lot of thoughts in his mind. The ancient ape beside the courtyard wall was holding up a large spoon of water. In the crystal streams, Li Yan seemed to see himself standing at the edge of the field. His father and third brother were driving the cart and pulling the cart respectively. When they reached the edge of the field, they wiped their sweat and smiled at him.
After a long while, the ancient ape finished watering and placed the bucket and ladle at the edge of the field. Then he quickly came to Li Yan, stood still, grinned at Li Yan, and then stood still.
Li Yan woke up from his trance, looked at the ancient ape in front of him, and joy slowly appeared in his eyes.
This ancient ape was exactly the puppet that Bai Rou had given to him. After Li Yan came back, he spent half a day practicing the art of controlling it, and then began to try to control it. As the number of times increased, he gradually became familiar with it, and it became quite smooth.
During this process, Li Yan did not find anything abnormal about the puppet, let alone any unexpected discoveries.
However, the puppet was restored and enlarged under the control of magic. After seeing its internal structure, Li Yan was shocked by the densely packed spirit stone slots, which were as many as eighty in number.
Li Yan filled the puppet with eighty low-level spirit stones in grief. After practicing controlling it for a while and becoming familiar with it, he took the puppet to a remote place in the back mountain.
As he pinched his fingers to perform a magic spell, the ancient ape puppet launched a full-force attack, targeting a stone wall a hundred feet ahead. The puppet simply raised its long arms, crossed its hands, quickly clenched them into fists, and held them high.
When his fists were raised above his head, a dazzling white light suddenly appeared on the fists. Li Yan's vision was immediately filled with the dazzling light, causing him to close his eyes involuntarily.
Just as he closed his eyes and opened them again, the ancient ape puppet clenched its fists and chopped down fiercely from the top of his head, as if to split the sky and earth in front of him.
As it chopped down with this force, the dazzling white light quickly broke away from its fist and slashed forward in a straight line.
The next moment, a scene that made Li Yan dumbfounded happened. Wherever the white light passed, no matter how thick the black bamboo was, it was turned into ashes. On the hard rock on the ground, a straight gully about four feet deep appeared.
A straight gully went forward, with mud and rocks flying everywhere. The white light hit the towering stone wall a hundred feet away. Perhaps because the speed was too fast, there was no sound when the white light hit the stone wall.
After a brief silence, Li Yan heard a deafening noise in his ears and eyes, and a ball of white light suddenly exploded, blinding people and illuminating the world.
Li Yan was so shocked that he was caught off guard. He felt dizzy, his ears were buzzing, and he didn't know where he was.
It took a long time for Li Yan to come back to his senses. When he looked at it carefully, he couldn't help but gasp.
A large hole about ten feet wide had appeared on the stone wall a hundred feet away, and dust and smoke were coming out of the hole. Li Yan held back his horror and hurried forward to check.
The big hole seemed to have no bottom, extending deep into the mountain. Li Yan finally used his spiritual sense to check it out and found that it was more than 1,700 feet long. This made Li Yan feel a chill in his heart.
What he didn't expect was that the attack in the early stage of foundation building would be so terrifying.
From this, it can be seen that the fighting between the foundation-building cultivators that Li Yan had seen in the secret realm before, either held back or had controlled their magic power to a subtle level, and rarely leaked out when attacking their opponents.
Li Yan once again felt the huge gap between himself and the foundation-building cultivator, and was grateful that he was lucky enough to kill a foundation-building cultivator. If it was a head-on battle, he estimated that he would not even have the slightest chance of escape.
After the deafening roar, thousands of birds in the forest flew away. Not long after, when Li Yan was staring blankly at the big hole, Wei Chituo turned into a ray of light and flew over quickly with anger on his face.
After figuring out the situation, Wei Chituo looked at the puppet with envy in his eyes. He circled around the ancient ape puppet several times, making admiring sounds from time to time. Finally, he left amidst the continuous praises.
After seeing this power, Li Yan was extremely happy. For him, this was a way to save his life.
But when he checked the ancient ape puppet again, he couldn't help feeling a little heartbroken. The light of the eighty spirit stones embedded in the puppet had dimmed by almost half after just one blow.
In other words, eighty low-level spirit stones would probably only be enough for two attacks at most.
Li Yan had no choice but to accept this consumption rate. After all, this was equivalent to a full-strength attack in the early stage of foundation building. Fortunately, Li Yan still had a small fortune, so he didn't have to worry about using spirit stones for the time being.
Li Yan also had a guess that even with such power, it might not be the full-strength attack of this puppet.
He only had low-level spirit stones in his hand. What if it was filled with eighty mid-grade spirit stones
If that were the case, he didn't know whether the formation inside the puppet could withstand the power of eighty medium-grade spirit stones. Just thinking about this made Li Yan's scalp tingle. He planned to find a chance to ask Bai Rou.
This is also because Li Yan is not at the foundation building stage yet, so he cannot know exactly how powerful a full-strength attack from a cultivator in the early stage of foundation building is. However, what makes Li Yan feel a little relieved is that as long as he does not use this kind of attack, such as just letting the puppet do some odd jobs, the consumption rate of the eighty spirit stones is almost negligible.
It can be seen from the scriptures how exquisite the formation engraved inside the puppet is.
Li Yan stood in front of the rock for a long time, and slowly an idea came to his mind. He had never known what level of combat power he had reached after consolidating the tenth level of Qi Condensation.
But he didn't want to go to his senior brothers and sisters to try out his skills, as that would expose his secret. Now that he had this ancient ape puppet, he could conduct a simple test.
Just like that, under the control of Li Yan's spiritual consciousness, the ancient ape puppet attacked him, constantly increasing the intensity of the attack little by little, and Li Yan did not dodge, but used his magic to fight back against it.
Finally, after consuming nearly three hundred spirit stones, Li Yan finally determined that he could withstand 70% of the puppet's attack power, and 80% would be a stretch.
If the puppet's attack power increased to 90%, Li Yan estimated that even if he could withstand it, he would be seriously injured.
As for the puppet's full-strength attack, Li Yan didn't dare to imagine it at all. No matter what, he didn't dare to try it.
This is because Li Yan has powerful magic power, which is about twice as much as that of the cultivators of the same level. This shows how big the gap is between the Foundation Establishment Stage and the Qi Condensation Stage.
This made Li Yan think of Wen Xinliang and the others. Killing the two women in the woods was just a matter of raising their hands.
In the courtyard, Li Yan looked at the puppet in front of him, which was more than half his height, and liked it more and more. With such a puppet by his side, his life would be much more secure. Bai Rou was really willing to give it up.
Moreover, as long as the formation in the puppet's body is functioning normally, it will still have extremely strong attack power even if it has broken arms and legs.
"Now, I should be able to easily withstand 80% of its attacks."
Li Yan thought to himself that he had been working tirelessly for the past three months, traveling back and forth between the secret realm and the secret chamber and the sect every day, practicing the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique.
When the mana in his body was exhausted, he would sit cross-legged and practice the Guishui Sutra to restore it with all his strength...
Li Yan also gradually discovered that these two techniques were surprisingly compatible. Every time he practiced physical training, it was an ultimate means of tempering his body and the operation of his magical powers.
The magic power cultivated from the Guishui Sutra is extremely pure and powerful. Each time, it can satisfy Li Yan's practice of the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique for at least three cycles, which makes the progress of practicing the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique very rapid.
After the body was refined by Guishui Sutra, the empty spiritual power tank ran even more frantically. Every time Li Yan's spiritual power tank was emptied, Guishui Sutra would absorb and exhale the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, like a whale sucking water, quickly sucking away the spiritual energy around it.
Fortunately, the spiritual energy in the secret room seemed endless, so Li Yan was not worried at all.
And the magic power after practicing again will be more condensed than before, making Li Yan feel that the magic power is getting heavier, as if a small tree has roots.
What Li Yan didn't know was that when Gong Chenying and Zhao Min were practicing in the first level of the Qiongqi Purgatory, they could only practice once a day and had to meditate to recover until the next day before they could continue practicing.
It is simply impossible for him to be so crazy. If the two girls knew about it, they would definitely think that Li Yan was talking nonsense.
After three months of hard practice, the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique had reached the peak of the early first level, and was about to break through to the middle first level.
Even if Li Yan just clenched his fist now, the air in his fist would be squeezed, making a muffled explosion sound.
Li Yan tried to attack from the back mountain. He easily swept his leg across the tough black bamboos as thick as his arm and broke two or three of them easily. You have to know that this was a real sweep, not a break.
Before, when Li Yan was at the seventh level of Qi Condensation, he used the Wind Blade Technique to chop at a black bamboo as thick as his arm, but he could only break one bamboo at most. That is, after the location attacked by the Wind Blade Technique cracked, it formed strips of bamboo, but it was not completely cut off.
It was no longer able to support the weight of the entire black bamboo, and fell to the side.
However, with Li Yan's current cultivation level of the tenth level of Qi Condensation, he should be able to break two of them after using the Wind Blade Technique.
With the improvement of Qiongqi Purgatory Technique, Li Yan's appetite is increasing day by day. Almost every day, he needs to take three to four fasting pills.
Otherwise, that kind of hunger would make Li Yan feel like he could swallow an elephant. Before he practiced the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique, a fasting pill could allow Li Yan to go without food for seven or eight days in a row.
Although the fasting pills were effective, they tasted like chewing wax. However, Li Yan did not want to go to the servants in the front to ask for food. He estimated that the amount of food he consumed in one meal would be as much as the daily intake of all the people there combined, and that would scare the servants to death.
This also made Li Yan wonder whether the two girls were in the same situation when they practiced the Qiongqi Purgatory Technique before. What he didn't know was that the two girls could only complete one cycle of the technique in a day, which was already the limit.
Unlike him, he can complete three cycles in one breath, which is three times as much as them. Such consumption is beyond their imagination.
The results of such efforts are astonishing. Li Yan can now easily lift a three thousand jin boulder with a wave of his arms, and can also easily lift a thousand jin boulder with a hook of his toes.
The strength of an ordinary cultivator at the tenth level of Qi Condensation Stage is only between seven hundred and one thousand kilograms.
He clenched his fists, and the invisible spiritual energy in the courtyard began to become restless.
"My current cultivation has reached the late tenth level of Qi Condensation. It should not be a problem for me to take on 80% of the attacks from this puppet. Even if it is 90% of the attacks, I think I can take it on without getting seriously injured.
But that would require the use of the Qiongqi Purgatory Body. Perhaps when he reaches the Great Perfection of the Qi Condensation Stage, after all the magic power in his body is condensed, coupled with the Qiongqi Purgatory Body, he would be able to barely withstand the full force of this ancient ape puppet.
But after taking a blow like that, I would be completely exhausted, at my weakest, and no longer able to fight. It’s better not to let this happen.”