Na Yi blinked.
"There is more?" she asked.
Ren nodded.
"The amplification art helps you swing what you already have harder," he said. "But your original foundations were…" His gaze swept over them, not cruel, not soft—just honest. "…thrown together in a hurry, under bad conditions, with too many compromises. If you want to walk into a smelting trial that kills seasoned warriors like it's nothing…"
His eyes cooled, a thin shard of steel sliding into that lazy brown.
"…you need something deeper."
Na Yi's throat worked.
"You intend to… change our foundations?" she asked.
"If you're willing," Ren said. "I can give you a body cultivation art that doesn't care how 'talented' you are. It'll tear you down a little first. You'll have to start from the beginning. But with what you have now, and with the resources I can steal from your enemies…"
He gestured with his chin at the massive swamp beast lying half-submerged nearby, its corpse still steaming where he'd broken its spine with one casual punch.
"…you'll catch up fast," he finished. "And what you build will be solid. No cracks."
Na Shui swallowed.
"Start… from the beginning?" she whispered. "As in… Strength Training?"
Her whole body shivered. She had clawed her way up to Viscera Training with blood and fear, with too many nights spent shaking in the dark. The thought of throwing all that away and standing again at the very first step of Body Transformation…
Beside her, Na Yi closed her eyes.
Images rose unbidden.
Fire Worm warriors trampling sacred totems beneath bloody boots. Chi Guda's sword rising and falling, falling, falling. The temple burning. Her tribe's wails. The Sorcerer's silhouette in the old paintings—one hand raised, blessing a kneeling witch while twelve suns burned behind him.
"Ren," she said quietly.
He looked at her, expression open, giving her the space to choose.
"If we do this," Na Yi said, "if we accept your art and restart, and still fail in the Sorcerer Pagoda… then we will die without even the small strength we have now."
"That's true," he said bluntly. "If you walk this road and trip, it's still a cliff. But if you don't do this, your chance of dying in there is even higher."
His gaze turned distant, seeing something far beyond the swamp.
"I've seen the structure of those trials," he went on. "They're not meant for people with half-rotten, patched-together foundations. The seven levels—Hell, Hungry Ghosts, Beasts, Witch Slaves, Mortals, Celestial Envoys, the Sorcerer's own world—they're built to break you down and rebuild you."
He looked back at them.
"If your body and true essence are already unstable, they won't rebuild you," he said softly. "They'll just shatter you and sweep the pieces away."
Na Yi's hands clenched into fists so tight her nails bit into her palms.
Na Shui watched them both, eyes wide and wet.
"Elder Sister…" she whispered, voice shaking.
Na Yi's lashes trembled.
Then she drew in a deep breath, held it for a heartbeat, and opened her eyes again.
They were clear.
"The Na Tribe is already gone," she said, voice low but steady. "All that remains is Master's key… and the two of us."
She met Ren's gaze head-on.
"If we cling to this small safety and hide in the swamp, then we have already failed," she said. "If we die trying to reach Master's trial with better foundations… then at least we will have walked forward."
Na Shui's shoulders shook.
"I… I don't want to lose Sister," she choked.
Na Yi turned her head, the hardness in her eyes softening as she looked at the only family she had left.
"Then walk with me," she said. "We will not lose."
Na Shui stared at her for a long heartbeat.
Then she nodded once, hard enough that her braid bounced.
"O-okay," she whispered. "If Sister walks… I walk."
Ren watched them, something warm and heavy settling behind his eyes. Southern Wilderness mist curled around the three of them, gold-tinged in the strange swamp "afternoon," like an old world holding its breath.
"Good answer," he said quietly.
He stepped closer, boots squelching in the wet earth.
"Sit," he told them. He didn't bark the order; he just laid it down like a stone on the path. "This will be uncomfortable. But I won't let it hurt you more than necessary."
...
The process of rebuilding a cultivation foundation wasn't as simple as "wipe" and "rewrite."
If it were, the Southern Wilderness would already be full of geniuses.
Na Yi and Na Shui sat cross-legged on a patch of half-dry ground between twisted roots, backs straight by habit. Their tribe's witch training had drilled that posture into them no matter how tired they were. The fetid swamp air pressed close; poisonous mist drifted like pale ghosts between the trees.
Ren knelt behind them.
He placed a hand between each of their shoulder blades, fingers spreading to cover key acupoints. His palms were warm and steady.
His Dao essence flowed in thin, precise streams—neither domineering nor weak, but the kind of calm force that could bend a river just by changing its bed. In his consciousness, a modified version of Chaotic Virtues Combat Meridians floated like a living diagram: meridians, bones, and nodes drawn as intersecting lines of light, a script of flesh and Dao.
"First, we relax," he murmured. "Let go of the idea that your current realm is who you are."
Na Shui's breath hitched.
Her "realm" had been the only thing standing between her and being eaten more than once.
Na Yi's jaw clenched, then slowly eased. Her eyes slid half-shut.
"Now," Ren said. "Gather all your true essence in your dantian. Don't circulate it. Don't push it. Just… hold it."
They obeyed.
Inside Na Yi's slender body, threads of true essence that had once wandered through scarred meridians drew inward like retreating tides. Na Shui's essence followed, hoarded in her core with the desperation of someone clutching the last food in winter.
Ren's Immortal Soul Bone flickered within his spine, cold light crossing its surface like lines of an equation. Vectors. Stress points. Margins of safety.
He sent tiny nudges of Dao essence into key acupoints along their backs, fingers shifting by a hair to press exactly where they needed.
Hidden "drain" channels opened—paths their bodies had never used before, carved into existence by his Dao and anchored to their own meridians. Channels that would let their accumulated essence bleed out without ripping everything else apart.
At the same time, he wrapped a thin veil of Dao around their souls: Calm, Steady, Still. A gentle weight that kept panic from shaking their spiritual seas the moment they felt themselves grow weak.
"Exhale," he said.
They exhaled.
True essence began to flow.
Not up along familiar meridians, not out toward limbs and sorcery runes. It sank. Down through the new paths he'd opened, leaking into the swamp's earth like hot water through cracked stone.
Their bodies shuddered.
Na Shui whimpered despite herself. The warmth that had always sat in her core—the proof that she was "someone," not prey—was being scooped out in front of her eyes.
Na Yi's fingers dug into her own knees, knuckles blanching.
Emptiness crept in.
Ren's hands stayed steady.
"You're not losing anything worth keeping," he said quietly. "Your comprehension, your experiences, your will—those remain. We're just changing the container."
The last dregs of true essence drained away.
Na Yi and Na Shui trembled like newborn foals, suddenly aware of how heavy the world truly was when nothing pushed back from inside.
Ren let that emptiness sit.
One heartbeat.
Two.
Three.
Then he moved.
The modified Chaotic Virtues pattern unfolded between his palms—a luminous lattice that only he could see, written in lines of Dao. It was body, it was law, it was memory: meridians that echoed the Nine Worlds and Eight Desolates, bones that hummed with the idea of the body as vessel and Dao as treasury.
He pressed that pattern into their backs.
Not as an external force that overrode them, but as a blueprint their bodies could choose to grow toward. A possibility sinking into bones and blood.
Within Na Yi, something old stirred.
Her witch bloodline, a faint echo left by the Sorcerer's teachings in her ancestors, recognized a familiar flavor wrapped in something utterly foreign. It rose from her marrow like a sigh, brushing against the pattern with tentative acceptance.
Within Na Shui, that same bloodline didn't hesitate.
Her soul clutched at the new structure like someone drowning grabbing a rope. Primitive sorcery instincts that had once been forced to crawl through rituals and broken chants suddenly saw a clear road ahead and leapt.
Ren guided their first breath.
"Inhale," he said. "Draw in heaven and earth energy the way you did when you practiced sorcery. But instead of sending it to your spiritual sea, let it sink into your muscles. Imagine it soaking into your bones. Let it follow the pattern I've given you."
They obeyed.
The swamp's qi was muddy, poisoned, full of rot and venom. Under normal circumstances, trying to cultivate here would be like drinking from a latrine.
But Ren Ming was not normal circumstances.
The Ancient Ming Bloodline coiled inside his cells stirred like a great beast lifting its head. It tasted the nearby qi, devoured the worst impurities, and spat the rest back out as something cleaner. Around the sisters, the air shifted—just a little—like a stagnant pond being stirred.
The first tendrils of energy entered their bodies.
This time, it didn't rush blindly to the dantian. It sank into sinew and marrow, guided by the new meridian map pressed into their backs. Pain followed—a deep, honest ache, as if every old scar in their muscles had been reopened.
Na Shui bit down on a cry, shoulders shaking.
Na Yi's breath trembled once, then steadied. Sweat slid down her temples.
Ren's palms pressed more firmly against their backs—a silent promise.
I'm here. Keep going.
Minutes stretched.
An hour.
The swamp's light shifted as Strange "afternoon" slipped toward stranger "evening," mist turning from gold to bruised purple. Ren's Dao essence continued to adjust tiny flows, redistributing strain before it could become injury.
By the time he finally withdrew his hands, their robes clung to their backs with sweat.
Na Yi's hair stuck to her neck in dark strands.
Na Shui fell forward, catching herself on shaky arms.
"…Is this… all?" she panted.
Ren chuckled.
"For now," he said. "Congratulations. You've gone from 'crippled witches on the run' to 'martial artists with better foundations than ninety-nine percent of the Southern Wilderness.'"
Na Shui wanted to snap that it didn't feel like congratulations. Her limbs felt hollow and heavy at the same time.
Then she noticed it.
Her breath, though ragged, sank deeper than before. Each inhale spread warmth along clear lines to her fingertips. Her muscles, though exhausted, felt aligned, as if every fiber finally understood where it was supposed to be.
Na Yi closed her eyes and turned her senses inward.
Her body, once a patchwork of half-healed injuries and desperate, uneven tempering, now felt like a single piece—an unsharpened blade fresh from the forge. The sorcery runes etched into her blood and bones no longer fought against her physical training; they settled along the new meridians like inscriptions on a sword.
"…It is different," she admitted softly. "Cleaner."
"Exactly," Ren said. "From here on, every step you take lands on solid ground. And I don't plan to let you crawl."
Na Shui groaned.
"You mean…" she began.
He smiled, teeth flashing in the dim.
"We go hunting," he said.
...
The first hunt came at dawn-that-wasn't-dawn.
The Southern Wilderness had no true sunrise. The mist simply changed color. What had been black slowly turned gray, then a sickly green, then that faint gold that passed for morning.
They moved through it like shadows.
Ren walked ahead, hands loosely tucked into his sleeves, steps unhurried. Behind him, Na Yi and Na Shui followed in the pattern he'd drilled into them the previous night—one slightly left, one slightly right, so their fields of vision overlapped.
Their new bodies were still raw. Every motion pulled at freshly tempered fibers. But their balance was better; the ground felt closer.
"There," Ren said softly.
He didn't point.
His Ashura Intent—killing will tempered through worlds and wars—unfurled just a touch, tasting the air for hostility. It brushed against something in the swamp ahead: a coiled malice, low and cold.
A swamp crocodile, ten feet long, lay half-buried in the mud, only its eyes above the surface. Its qi was thin, but its body was a weapon from snout to tail.
Na Shui's first instinct was to let Ren handle it.
He didn't move.
"That's your food," he said mildly. "I'm just here so it doesn't eat you instead."
Na Shui's mouth went dry.
Na Yi stepped forward first, fingers flexing. Her true essence was still faint, but her body art's first layer already gave her more strength than she'd ever had at the same "realm" before.
The crocodile lunged.
Mud exploded. A maw full of teeth snapped toward her leg, jaws strong enough to crush bone.
Na Yi's new meridians flared.
Her muscles remembered the pattern Ren had pressed into them. Strength Training wasn't just brute force—it was the memory of perfect force.
She shifted her weight the way he'd shown her, half-step to the side, heel digging down. Her body turned along a line that made the incoming bite feel slow.
Her fist slammed into the side of the beast's jaw.
Something cracked.
The crocodile's head snapped sideways, body twisting with the blow. It landed half-out of the mud, flailing. Na Shui's knife flashed almost on instinct, driving into the beast's exposed neck, guided by Ren's earlier anatomy lesson.
"Joints, tendons, behind the skull," he had said, tapping a diagram in the dirt. "You don't have brute power yet. So you break what matters."
Blood steamed in the cool air.
The beast thrashed once, twice, then lay still.
Na Shui stared down at her trembling hands.
"I… we…"
"You killed a beast together," Ren said. "Good. Remember how that felt. That's your new baseline."
To them, it had been frantic, terrifying.
To him, it had been a slow, harmless warm-up.
...
"Fire Worms," Ren said later that day, wiping someone's blood from his knuckles onto the dead man's tunic, "are very generous people."
Na Shui stared at him.
Generous was not the word she would ever use for a cannibal tribe that slaughtered and devoured others for pleasure.
Ren flipped open the pouch he'd taken off the corpse.
Inside were coarse spirit stones, still humming faintly with heaven and earth energy. A few body tempering pills made from beast marrow. Bone artifacts carved with cruel, twisting symbols that reeked of blood sacrifices.
"See?" he continued. "They collect resources from everyone they eat. And now, those resources are going to feed you instead. That's generosity."
Na Yi snorted before she could stop herself.
"That is called robbery," she said dryly. "Not generosity."
"Semantics," Ren said. "They stole it first. I'm just correcting distribution."
He tossed a pill to each of them.
"Swallow," he said. "Then run the first layer of the body art. Focus on bones this time."
They obeyed.
The pill melted in their mouths, a heavy warmth sinking quickly into their limbs. Under their old cultivation, the medicinal power would have scattered, wasted. Now, with Chaotic Virtues' modified circuits running in their flesh, it flowed along clear paths, sinking into marrow.
Where previously they would have lost half, now nearly every drop went into tempering bone and tendon.
Their bodies answered.
Sinews tightened. Joints compacted. The faint trembling from their earlier exhaustion steadied into a deeper, more grounded fatigue.
Ren watched with half-lidded eyes, Immortal Soul Bone tracking the flow of medicinal power inside them. When it threatened to bunch up around a joint or organ, he nudged it with a thread of Dao, smoothing out potential blockages before they could form.
"Don't force it," he murmured. "Don't chase after the pill. Let it come to you and sink with your breath."
Over the next three days, this pattern repeated.
They walked.
They hunted beasts.
They ambushed Fire Worm scouting parties.
Ren's cloak of neutral chaos made hiding trivial. One moment, a team of three or four Fire Worm warriors would be trudging through the swamp, laughing crudely about their next meal. The next, Ren would be there—stepping casually out of a patch of mist as if he'd always been standing in it.
For minor warriors, he rarely bothered with his spear.
A casual punch, guided by his immense physique and Ashura Intent, was enough to shatter ribs and stop hearts. Bodies hit the mud with wet thuds, air leaving them in ugly gurgles.
But whenever he judged an opponent "appropriate," he stepped back and raised an eyebrow at the sisters.
"Go on," he'd say. "Your food."
The first time, Na Shui froze.
The Fire Worm warrior in front of her was laughing, teeth filed to points. His eyes crawled over her as if seeing a piece of meat that had stood up and talked.
The memory of being bound and jeered at by men like this clamped around her chest. Her newly strengthened muscles shook.
Ren didn't touch her.
He didn't tell her it was okay to be scared. He didn't tell her to calm down.
He just spoke, voice quiet but firm.
"Shui," he said. "If you cannot point your blade at them, their blades will always be pointed at you."
Na Yi's hand brushed her sister's arm once in silent support, then she moved first.
Her body art's Strength Training layer pulsed. Heretical God Force's ring turned slowly in her spiritual sea, amplifying not just her strength but her perception of every tiny shift in the enemy's posture.
Her fist broke the Fire Worm's spear in one strike and his neck in the next.
Blood splashed across the swamp grass.
Na Shui squeezed her eyes shut for half a heartbeat.
When she opened them again, the world hadn't ended.
Her hatred stirred—hot, poisonous. Under the old system, it would have eaten her from the inside. Now, Heretical God Force caught it, spun it, tempered it into something tighter and cleaner.
She moved.
Her knife flashed, not wild but precise. A cut across the throat. A kick to the knee that shattered bone. Each movement recorded itself in her bones as a tiny Dao Fruit of force and angle, the way Ren had reshaped their art to do.
By the fifth skirmish, she didn't hesitate anymore.
Her face was pale afterwards, but her eyes were clear.
Ren saw the change and, somewhere inside, approved.
Good.
Na Yi changed, too.
Her movements had always been precise—witch training had drilled discipline into her body. But now every strike carried a new weight. When she stepped, the ground seemed to accept it. When she swung, the air dragged along her fist.
Her bones remembered each perfect motion and added it to the next.
At night, under the ghostly glow of swamp fungi clinging to tree roots, he had them sit.
"Heretical God Force," he said. "First layer only. Slowly. Let it spin, then let it fade."
Glowless rings turned in their spiritual seas, the art's "governor" adjusting stress into spirals that tempered as they boosted. Chaotic Virtues guided the residual force into marrow.
Their progress was frightening.
On the second night, they pushed deeper into Strength Training than most tribal warriors managed in a month.
On the fourth, they touched Flesh Training—their skin taking on a subtle luster, a toughness that made minor cuts from thorn and vine simply… not happen.
By the end of a week, after ambushing a Fire Worm raiding team carrying high-quality bone tempering pills and a small stash of blood lingzhi, Na Yi and Na Shui sat cross-legged on a raised root, sweat streaming down their faces as bone-tempering energy hammered through their skeletons.
Ren stood nearby with arms folded, Ashura Intent whispering around him like the scent of steel. Beasts lurking in the dark felt that intent and slunk away instead of approaching. Even the swamp's insects seemed to hesitate at the edge of its influence.
Inside the sisters' bodies, tiny cracks echoed.
Bone that had once been brittle from malnutrition and rushed cultivation broke down under the medicinal force and was reforged denser, cleaner. Old fractures were erased, replaced by solid structure.
Na Shui clenched her teeth so hard her jaw creaked.
Na Yi's breath came out in sharp, controlled hisses.
Then, almost in unison, they exhaled.
The energy completed its circuit.
Within their bodies, the process of Bone Forging closed a crucial loop. Their marrow, in their senses, shone faintly—clean, strong, like red-gold metal just cooled.
They opened their eyes.
"Viscera Training…" Na Yi murmured, feeling her organs thrumming with new vitality. Her heart pumped a fraction harder. Her lungs seemed to pull more of the world in with every breath. "Already…"
Na Shui laughed weakly.
"I feel like… if I spit, I could knock down a small tree," she said, half-joking.
Ren chuckled.
"Let's not test that," he said. "Bad for your dignity."
He stepped closer, gaze sweeping over them like a craftsman inspecting new blades.
Their outward auras were still modest—early to mid Body Transformation, nothing flashy. But the quality of that cultivation…
Their bodies were like newly forged weapons, tempered evenly from core to skin. When they circulated true essence, it moved with a compressed density that would make most Southern Wilderness Bone Forging warriors cough blood from shame.
He tilted his head.
"How do you feel?" he asked.
Na Yi rolled her shoulders.
"…Like the world is… clearer," she said slowly. "My body responds the instant I think to move. My sorcery runes… connect more easily to heaven and earth. It is as if… a mist was lifted from my senses."
She lifted her hand, flexing her fingers. Senjutsu of witch-blood and the martial circulation of Chaotic Virtues flowed together instead of clashing.
Na Shui bounced once on the root, testing her weight.
"And my sister is cool," she blurted, then flushed. "I-I mean, we both are, but—"
Ren laughed, the sound low and easy.
"Both of you are," he agreed.
His voice softened.
"And more importantly—you're far more ready to step into your Master's pagoda."
Na Yi's fingers tightened unconsciously.
In her mind, she saw the Sorcerer Pagoda again—the seventy-two towers, the one with their tribe's key, the seven levels of life-and-death tempering. Before, the thought had been equal parts hope and despair.
Now, for the first time, hope outweighed the rest.
"…Thank you," she said simply.
Na Shui nodded so hard her braid smacked her back.
"Thank you," she echoed. Her eyes shone with something that wasn't just gratitude. It was the fragile, stubborn belief that maybe, just maybe, the world wasn't done with them yet.
Ren shrugged a little, like it was nothing special.
"Don't thank me yet," he said. "We still have a cannibal general to kill and a guardian beast to negotiate with. Save your gratitude for after our heads are still attached."
Na Shui made a strangled noise.
Na Yi's lips curved.
"Ren," she said after a moment, "this art you've given us… this path you walk… It is far beyond what the Southern Wilderness deserves."
He smirked.
"I don't really care what the Southern Wilderness 'deserves,'" he said. "I care about what you two deserve. And what my Dao wants to see in this world."
Na Shui blinked.
"What does your Dao want?" she asked, genuinely curious.
He looked up.
The swamp canopy blocked the sky, but his eyes went farther than these twisted branches. Somewhere in his inner Heaven, stars of different worlds shifted—Martial World dimming a little, DxD's star burning brighter, other dim lights waiting.
"Roads," he said quietly. "Clean ones. Not paths hoarded by the strong and dangled in front of the weak like bait. Not legacies rotting under cannibals. Roads anyone with the guts can walk, as far as they're willing to bleed."
Na Yi stared at him.
For a moment, under his relaxed, foreign speech, she heard something old and vast—like the Sorcerer's voice crossing a thousand years, layered over that of another monster who laughed at heaven.
"…Then we will walk," she said.
He smiled.
"That's all I ask."
...
Inside the Magic Cube, Mo Eversnow watched.
She had no true "eyes" here—only soul perception, drifting like cold starlight through the gray ocean of memories and legacies crushed into the artifact. But Ren's presence was a constant disturbance in that ocean, a moving singularity that bent everything around it.
She felt the flicker of his Dao retreat from the sisters' spiritual seas, withdrawing the last guiding thread and leaving them standing on their own feet.
It should have been impossible.
Modifying chaotic-level arts like Heretical God Force and Chaotic Virtues Combat Meridians in a matter of hours; pressing them into the bodies of two ordinary Southern Wilderness girls; draining their foundations clean without killing them; guiding them from crippled, traumatized survivors back to solid Viscera Training in a week…
And not just "back."
Their foundations now were superior to most so-called prodigies she'd seen in her life.
Even many Divine Realm powerhouses would have left hidden sequelae doing something like this—tiny cracks in meridians, hairline fractures in Dao Hearts that only showed themselves decades later.
Yet his Immortal Soul Bone turned complexity into simplicity. Every adjustment that should have taken months of deduction, he performed as easily as breathing. His Dao Heart didn't waver once—not when he tore their power away, not when he gave them the choice, not when he set them on a road that might kill them faster.
He spread "roads" the way other people scattered seeds.
Mo Eversnow pressed slender fingers to her lips, a habit from when she still had a physical body. Her expression, if she'd had one, would have been unreadable.
"Spreading roads, hm…" she murmured to herself.
For someone like her—born with terrifying talent, nurtured in the Divine Realm, then frozen in a prison of ice and time—the idea of a man who could take commoners and give them the chance to touch a higher sky…
Her heart, long accustomed to watching geniuses rise and fall like sparks, beat once with a strange, unfamiliar rhythm.
Interest.
A flicker of hope.
Maybe even… envy.
"Na Yi, Na Shui…" she whispered. "You really did meet a monster."
Her gaze—if one could call it that—followed Ren's soul imprint as he walked ahead of the sisters through the swamp, his back relaxed, his steps unhurried, his Dao wrapped around them like an unseen canopy.
Somewhere deep inside the Magic Cube's gray ocean, ancient Divine Realm legacies stirred uneasily.
Mo Eversnow's eyes—imagined, remembered—softened.
"A monster who builds roads for others," she thought. "What kind of world will you drag into being, Ren Ming?"
For the first time in a long, long while, the future of the lower realms felt… interesting.