Obtaining such a massive lump of Emperor's Flowing Dew paste was a gift from heaven, but sometimes a feast could choke a man to death.
He Lingchuan, of course, knew nothing of the mechanics behind it. He did not even have the luxury to wonder whether the God-Slaying Pill's violent frenzy was normal; all he could do in his frantic state was guide the true force along his meridians toward the Shanzhong acupoint.
Yet the torrent of true force was far too wild; his principal meridians could not endure it at all. He Lingchuan felt swollen all over, puffing up like a leather ball. If he could not divert the deluge immediately, the moment his meridians ruptured, his entire body would burst with a loud bang, splattering the cave walls.
What should he do?
The cleared meridians could not contain it, which meant... which meant...
He would just have to include the uncleared ones as well.
Either way, being crippled by the surge meant death, and failing to break through also meant death.
He Lingchuan was never one to sit and await his doom. Acting the moment the thought struck, he immediately diverted the bulk of the raging true force into his extraordinary meridians.
He had previously cleared only two of the extraordinary meridians; the rest were supposed to be opened slowly with painstaking patience. Now, there was no time for that. He directed the violent true force straight at the Ren and Du meridians.
These were the two most vital paths among the Eight Extraordinary Meridians, akin to the midnight-noon axis of the human body, the pathways through which Yang Fire and Yin Talisman rose and descended. The Ren meridian in particular was the shortest route for true force to travel from the lower dantian to the Shanzhong acupoint. Practicing the Ziwu Formula, these were the two channels He Lingchuan desired to open most, but they were also the most difficult, and he had intended to leave them for last.
Today, he would throw everything into the pot together.
Either they opened, or he died.
The agony of forcibly blasting through the blockages felt as though someone were driving steel nails through his meridians, riddling them with holes.
Under normal circumstances, he would have screamed in agony, but now he could not even make a sound and could only grit his teeth and endure.
If he failed to hold out, only death awaited.
The extraordinary meridians, normally plugged tight, were forced open bit by bit under the relentless pressure of the true force. This resistance only grew fiercer, yet the torrent's momentum actually accelerated—like a locomotive gathering speed after a sluggish, grinding start.
From Guanyuan, Qihai, and Shenque... all the way to Jiuwei, Zhongting, and Shanzhong!
Yet the true force did not stop. It surged past Shanzhong without entering, continuing upward to conquer other acupoints.
At the same time, the Du meridian was being forcibly widened as well.
To wait for these two rogue armies to converge, He Lingchuan had no choice but to steer the rest of the raging true force through several revolutions within his principal meridians.
Roughly a quarter of an hour later, the Ren and Du meridians were forcibly blasted open.
As his internal circulation fell into rhythm, He Lingchuan let out a long breath, feeling a splitting pain in the newly unblocked channels.
The ferocity of the true force had inevitably damaged the meridians themselves.
Fortunately, the restorative, protective nature of the Emperor's Flowing Dew began to manifest, swiftly repairing the damage just done.
He Lingchuan had no time to inspect his internal injuries, because the diverged torrents of true force finally converged once more, charging straight into the vital Shanzhong acupoint!
After so many detours, he had finally arrived at this step.
To expand a singularity into a second dantian required explosive power.
Without Emperor's Flowing Dew, He Lingchuan would not possess such force at his current stage. The conventional approach was to repeatedly purify and compress the true force within the lower dantian until it could be compressed no further, then use that incomparably refined power to strike the Shanzhong acupoint.
Even then, failure was possible; after all, every person's physical constitution was different, with no fixed formula or constant.
Yet today, he was borrowing the power of heaven and earth. His concern was not whether the burst would be spectacular enough, but whether the sheer potency of the dew would tear the Shanzhong acupoint apart.
Helian Chen had advised him to open the second dantian at the Shanzhong acupoint primarily because the point between the brows was too close to the brain—should cultivation deviation strike, he could end up an idiot. It was a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils.
However, the Shanzhong acupoint was one of the human body's famous fatal points. Suffering a strike there from an enemy brought dire consequences, let alone detonating a blast from within.
In an instant, the medicinal energy of the God-Slaying Pill surged into Shanzhong. Before it could even be properly compressed, it forcibly blasted open a sea of qi!
After the first blast, the God-Slaying Pill's power was hardly depleted, followed immediately by a second blast—and already a third was in motion.
This level of power was far beyond what a mortal body could bear; He Lingchuan spat up a mouthful of blood on the spot, feeling as though a gaping hole had been blown through his chest.
He immediately tried to guide the true force away from Shanzhong, but it was too late—the pill's power was gathering at breakneck speed, brewing a third blast.
*I'm finished,* He Lingchuan thought grimly.
Fusheng seemed to sense the danger and trembled faintly; as its master, He Lingchuan had no spare focus to pay it any mind.
*Does heaven truly intend to strike me down this time?*
***
From the outside, He Lingchuan still sat cross-legged on the ground, quiet as could be.
Save for the twitching muscles of his face and the veins throbbing violently on his neck.
In the tall grass outside the burrow, insects were in full chorus. Frogs and venomous snakes had come from afar, hoping to scavenge a buffet.
The tiger lay atop a boulder by the burrow entrance, sensing nothing amiss.
Beside it, the eyeball spiders had suspended two tightly wrapped grasshoppers by a single thread and were feasting heartily.
No creature knew that He Lingchuan was walking through fire, treading the razor's edge between life and death.
Nor did anyone notice that deep in the burrow, the large clump of moss had transformed from parched to damp. Having completely regained its vitality, it was dividing and spreading outward at an alarming rate.
It had no legs, but through replication and rapid growth, it advanced toward the entrance step by step.
Directly toward He Lingchuan's back.
By now, it could no longer be called a clump of moss. It had become a thick, living fungal carpet, sprouting spores like bamboo shoots after spring rain. At first, they were merely tiny specks, but within a few breaths they grew into mushrooms—some white, some red, and some mottled in both shades.
Once their caps unfurled, they began to quiver, scattering clouds of powder into the air with every tremor.
In just this short span, hundreds of spores sprouted across the fungal carpet, filling the stone burrow with exploding dust.
This toxic dust carried a potent hallucinogenic effect; any creature that inhaled it would quickly lapse into a coma or fall into madness.
Yet He Lingchuan kept his eyes shut, completely oblivious.
Immersed in internal breathing, he was not using his nose or mouth to breathe.
Instead, it was the mirror hanging at the cave entrance that sensed something wrong.
"Hey, there's something behind you! Hey!"
He Lingchuan had positioned the mirror facing the cave entrance to watch for outside threats, never imagining trouble would come from deep within the stone burrow!
Dammit all, it couldn't turn itself around to see what was happening behind!
The mirror shouted, but He Lingchuan gave no response.
This was bad.
If this newly acknowledged master kicked the bucket, it had no mirror slave and could never get out of this burrow on its own!
What to do, what to do?
While the mirror fretted in agony, the fungal carpet had already spread onto He Lingchuan.
Just then, another kind of creature appeared on the carpet:
White ladybugs.
They had not flown in from outside either; they burrowed out from inside the fungal carpet itself. It was impossible to tell whether they had always lived within it or had just hatched from dormant eggs.
The moment they emerged, they began gorging on the mushrooms, growing at a visible rate. In moments, they expanded from the size of sesame seeds to that of hazelnut kernels.
Only then could one see that each had an antenna-like appendage at its rear, connecting it to the fungal carpet.
By this time, the fungal carpet had "crawled" up to He Lingchuan, silently surrounding him.
As if counting down—three, two, one—the carpet suddenly flipped inward, wrapping around He Lingchuan with a crisp smack!
It was as though he had been bundled tightly in a blanket from head to toe, without so much as a single strand of hair left exposed.
Receiving their command simultaneously, the ladybugs on the fungal carpet swarmed over He Lingchuan, clustering in groups of three or four over several vital acupoints.
From their mouths, needle-long mouthparts extended, piercing straight through his clothing to strike the acupoints with precision.
Naturally, this included the Qihai and Shanzhong acupoints.
Immediately, the true force within He Lingchuan's body was siphoned out in an endless stream.
If an old resident of this forest had witnessed this scene, they would know that the man-eating fungus was hunting once again. This monster fed on living creatures, maintaining a symbiotic relationship with the ladybugs dwelling within its mat, which extracted nutrients from prey to feed back into the fungal body.
The order of consumption, of course, was true force first, followed by flesh and blood.
Back when He Lingchuan was concocting the God-Slaying Pill, the man-eating fungus had already awakened. It had lurked here for a long time, launching its ambush only when He Lingchuan was completely deep in meditation.
On the day following an Emperor's Flowing Dew eruption, there were plenty of scraps to scavenge.
And if it couldn't scavenge leftovers, fresh meat was just fine.
Gulp, gulp—the ladybugs began to suck, both they and the fungal carpet ecstatic:
The true force within this prey was overwhelmingly abundant!
It was like walking into an unassuming little eatery expecting nothing more than fried noodles, only to sit down and discover a full imperial banquet—and the kind where you weren't allowed to leave until you cleaned your plate.
Yes, no leaving until you finish!
Hundreds of ladybugs siphoned voraciously, channeling the true force through the tubes at their rears into the fungal carpet.
The latter slowly swelled, each hypha growing thicker, longer, and juicier. Batches of spores erupted across the fungal mat by the hundreds, swelling from tiny dots to full bloom before bursting, all within seconds.
The mirror shouted, "Hey, hey, what is going on here!"
It released an evil spirit to serve as its eyes, finally taking in the upheaval unfolding inside the cavern.
What kind of damned thing is this... No, wait, that's a man-eating fungus!
Crap, He Lingchuan was completely enveloped, his fate unknown.
Just as the mirror was about to alert the tiger to come to the rescue, the fungal carpet turned a deep crimson and rapidly expanded toward the cave mouth.
Clatter! The mirror was knocked to the ground, tumbling into a small corner where it happened to have a full view of everything in the cave.
Uh... it wasn't as if it had never seen a man-eating fungal carpet before, but how could this thing be so violently berserk?
In truth, the fungal carpet itself was not having an easy time either.
It had happily gorged on the buffet from He Lingchuan, and then—it was stuffed.
This was the very first time the fungal carpet had ever been sated before completely draining its prey. It ordered the ladybugs to release He Lingchuan, planning to resume feeding after digesting this newly acquired true force.
After all, the prey had been injected with the ladybugs' venom and wouldn't even be able to lift a finger.
Yet when the ladybugs tried to pack up and pull out, they discovered the most fatal problem:
Their mouth needles wouldn't retract!
The true force within He Lingchuan's body was exerting a reverse suction on their mouthparts, pinning the ladybugs in place and turning them directly into conduits for the outward-rushing true force, which poured relentlessly into the fungal carpet.
Now, nobody was allowed to leave the table!
Chapter 381