A massive five-meter monster dove at me from the sky, merrily crackling with lightning bolts as thick as ropes, while I just stood there smiling like an idiot.
"I'm going to miss you, old friend."
An obvious lie. I wasn't going to miss this bastard bird for shit. A Thunder Hawk. An Earth Profound beast. I had absolutely no way to kill it. Just as it had absolutely no way to kill me.
It was simply a problem of physiology. It fought either from the sky or by diving at its victim after first bombarding them with ranged attacks. On the ground, I was quicker.
This creature was the one that opened my eyes to a sad truth: this was a pompous world of pompous cultivators. The best way to become stronger here was to power through pain and suffering.
My strategy with broken cores simply turned out to be less effective than I'd hoped.
One day, I accidentally ran into this bird, and one blast from it knocked me down. I barely managed to dodge its claws, then hide beneath some boulders it couldn't break.
And when I summoned my pagoda and started healing while simultaneously building lightning resistance and increasing my affinity, I realized that things moved about five times faster this way.
Was it because the element entered through a wound, or because this bird's lightning was somehow special?
From then on, I met with the bird every day, trained my dodging a little, then took a wound and healed from it afterward.
Before that, I'd spent a couple of months hunting Spirit Profound lightning-element creatures in the Wasteland of Death. They weren't hard to kill, and afterward I absorbed their cores.
But as it turned out, that wasn't the best strategy. Getting wounded was faster. And I had deadlines. I was already behind schedule. That was why, on this day, I was saying goodbye to the bird I'd been playing with for so long.
I had increased my lightning affinity about twentyfold. After breaking through, I thought I could raise that number further and do it continuously, but the speed wouldn't be the same anymore. Not even close.
Like I said, killing this bird was beyond me. Wrong weapon, wrong strength, wrong level. My katana had broken precisely after I struck this idiot in the head. The katana turned to powder, and the bird didn't even scratch itself.
Fortunately, there was a blacksmith in the closest city who managed to make a copy, only at the Nascent Profound level. This katana was already much tougher. Though I doubted it would last me long either.
Either way, I had achieved my goals and then some. All those wounds hadn't been for nothing. I broke through to the third level of the Great Way of the Buddha.
As I recall, in canon one Trash spent years unable to reach this level and went through countless sufferings to advance along this path, while I was practically flying through the levels.
My theory: internal pressure. My profound energy cultivation was too low. There was no pressure or resistance from my own energy system, so the inheritance of the Rage God was free to do whatever it wanted with my body. What a shame I couldn't postpone breaking through forever. The Elementary Realm simply had too many advantages.
Of course, there were downsides too. How could there not be? In terms of capacity, my profound veins were probably already no worse than the legendary veins of the Evil God. I hoped that wasn't just wishful thinking. But that brought major drawbacks too. Now I needed to gather enormous amounts of energy to crawl through the levels. In other words, the price of breakthroughs had gone up. Which meant slower cultivation.
Fortunately, I had plenty of ideas for speeding things up. So I wasn't afraid. And the advantages would show themselves at higher realms.
So, after simply flicking the bird on the beak, I dodged its claws and jumped back. Then, not forgetting to shout that we'd see each other again, I turned and ran. The Falling Star movement technique still had all the same flaws. I still had to toughen up my face so it could survive that many falls.
When I read that cultivators had "thick faces," I imagined something completely different. I thought it was some idiom for shamelessness. But apparently... Or was that just me?
At least my movement speed was growing by leaps and bounds. Travel barely took any time. I'd have to remember to race that thief from the Divine Phoenix Empire someday. There was a character like that.
My path led to the coldest region of that empire, if not the entire continent, because I needed to reach the Frozen Cloud Palace.
Of course, I had doubts they'd let me in. But I had arguments prepared that would be damn hard to brush aside. I was one hundred percent ready. I hadn't been making plans for just one year, after all, and I knew exactly how I could put pressure on the cold beauties.
Eight days later, I braked with my face just short of the gates in the wall of the Frozen Cloud Palace. This journey would've taken several months before. That's what it means to achieve great mastery in a technique. The Great Way of the Buddha helped a lot too. Even without the movement technique, I was insanely fast.
"Leave, outsider, or you will be killed. This is no place for men."
The ladies on guard beside the gates didn't bother with ceremony.
"Senior Sister, I will. But I need to deliver a message and receive an answer. Can you help me? It's for the great mistress of your palace, Feng Qianhui."
"Speak."
Unexpected. What happened to all the arrogant speeches about how trash like me wasn't even worthy of knowing their great mistress's name, and all the other crap? Or had the stereotype kicked in where I was so handsome that all the icy girls melted at the sight of me and started behaving decently?
I really was handsome, to be fair. Divine blood, however little of it there was. No matter how much I cursed the chicken, my genetics were good. Add the fact that the Rage God's inheritance had purified me, add my rebirth in Phoenix flames during the trials, and you got the stereotypical jade skin, silky hair, and shining eyes.
"Please tell the great mistress of the palace that Feng Lun of the Heavenly Mystery Realm has come to discuss the millennium calamity with her."
That was it. The keywords had been dropped, and they happened to be panicking about exactly that. No, only the very highest levels of leadership were panicking. The juniors knew nothing. No panic among the population. Sensible behavior, if you ask me.
And so, exactly twenty minutes later, I was invited into a place where no man had set foot in many years.
Until one Trash got here and started groping all the local beauties. Once again I'm convinced the world isn't so simple. You can find light even in pitch darkness.
What I mean is that here, Yun Che was a champ. Flirting with and picking up beauties? Yes! Outright harassment and rape? Absolutely not. In this case, the Trash behaved like a champ. Judge me for being born a heterosexual man. There are two kinds of us: perverts and those who are good at hiding it.
Two Hollywood++-tier MILFs came to meet me.
Their technique was simply unholy, whichever way you looked at it. You could tell where a lady's natural beauty ended and where profound energy had gone to work. Facial lines too symmetrical, eyes too perfect, lips too full, waist too narrow, hips too wide, too... There were a lot of those "toos," as if they'd all been made from a template.
No surprise there. Every medical reference book I'd read said the same thing, though I already knew it anyway: yin governed femininity, yang governed masculinity. Going deep into the theory I'd developed would be tedious. The important part was that these ladies strengthened their yin and therefore became more feminine.
Men didn't work like that, by the way. Not at all. Given my monstrous affinity for fire, I should've looked like a square-jawed Neanderthal with a huge body. But that wasn't how it worked.
Local evolution in general behaved incredibly strangely, and at this point there was no point even trying to understand it or measure everything by the standards of sanity.
Back to the MILFs studying me closely. The older one—and one of them was clearly older, because her hair was completely gray—looked at me kindly, with hidden anxiety. The younger one looked at me like I was a cockroach.
"Greetings, Seniors."
A polite form of address and a bow. I'm not some great face-slapping badass. Politeness takes cities.
"Junior, I was told you are from the Heavenly Mystery Realm. Is that true?"
"Junior Feng Lun greets the great mistress and the palace mistress. Apparently, I possess an inheritance from that realm, since I can see many things, but I have never actually been there, Senior. So it is both true and false."
"So you dared deceive us." Of course. The president of the Blue Wind Empire's Association of Feminists and Man-Haters couldn't restrain herself from attacking me—for now, only with words.
Then she started pressing down on me with profound energy.
"Yu Xian, stop."
The older MILF spoke quietly, even gently, but the younger one didn't dare argue and immediately stopped pressuring me. Not that her pressure had any effect on me. Yes, it was cold, unpleasant, and could generally hurt me. But I was only happy about that. Even while inactive, my technique still forced my body to adapt. Just at different speeds.
"So, young man. You said you came to speak about the millennium calamity. Do you know what it will be?"
"Yes, Senior. More precisely, it would simply be called a calamity, and Senior Mu Bingyun would simply have left instructions on how to avoid it, if the calamity were only a single event. But there are several such events. I know of three major dangers that will threaten your sect in the near future."
The name of their sect's founder immediately made them take me seriously. Few people knew that name, so I managed to increase their trust in me a little more.
"Junior, can you tell us about these calamities? We will reward you generously."
"Of course, Senior. That's why I'm here. Shall we discuss the price?"
"You...!" The head of the radical feminist party lost control again when some lousy walking sperm bank dared demand something from her.
"Senior," I ignored the idiot, "of course I could help you for free without asking for anything in return. But let's be honest. You turned into an evil sect a long time ago. If Senior Mu Bingyun ever visits this place again, she will most likely simply destroy the sect. Senior created this place so women could find refuge and peace here. Now? It is a place of pride and evil. You deceive young and talented girls into joining, ruining their talent and their lives while knowing perfectly well what harm they will suffer from cultivating the Frozen Cloud Art."
The two MILFs had been staring at me wide-eyed the entire time. Though after a couple of seconds the older one fell into deep thought, while the younger was trying to turn into a Kryptonian and burn me with her eyes.
"You claim the founder of our sect is still alive?"
"Exactly. She simply wanted to sever her ties with this place so her enemies couldn't reach you. That's why she hasn't visited all this time."
"How are we supposed to know you're not spouting nonsense?"
Guess who said that.
"It's very simple. I know of three calamities. One can be checked right now. Indirectly, of course, because it hasn't happened yet. If I turn out to be right, I'll name my price. Accept it, and I'll tell you about the other two calamities. For appropriate prices as well."
"Why don't we simply torture you until you tell us everything you know?"
"Because even a stupid bitch like you should've connected my surname with the Phoenix mark on my forehead."
I quickly closed the distance until I was standing as uncomfortably close to her as possible and looked straight into her eyes from above.
"Come on. Dare to even look at me funny, bitch!"
Even this idiot could put two and two together. The Divine Phoenix Empire was the strongest power on the continent after the Sacred Grounds.
She might have been in the Emperor Profound Realm, but my bluff was divine-grade.