The transformation continued for a full day, and at the end, the remainder of the golden energy rushed into the voids within his bones. There, it joined the tiny universe that was taking shape. Metal was birthed deep within the earth of the various planets, and within the meteors floating around space. Golden life forms were born. And with the appearance of gold, wood began to diminish. Agglomerated runic creatures composed of anywhere between one and five elements began to interact with the world around them.
Cha Ming wondered for a moment if they were sentient. He reached out to the void and discovered that no—such a thing wasn’t possible for him. Creating sentient life was the realm of the gods. What he’d made, however, was a pale precursor. The void network in his bones contained an imitation universe. It flowed, thrived, raged, resisted, and refined itself, but it was missing a key element: emotion. Sentient beings felt emotion.
Five elements aside, Cha Ming noticed a pool of energy building up in the center of his makeshift universe. White runes of creation and destruction chased each other in a circle at the center, never making contact but always fighting. And in the center of these, where there were spatial distortions aplenty, a single spot of gray appeared.
Who would have thought that by refining his bones, he could produce Grandmist energy as well? After all, this wasn’t the transient, misty qi he generated to use Origin Strike. This was stable Grandmist energy, the type he’d used to feed his Clear Sky Brush on Jade Moon Planet. Try as he might, he’d never been able to find any in the mortal world. It was the reason why his Grandmist seals on alchemical pills were one of a kind.
Three days passed by as his transformation continued. When the final change in his void network was completed, Cha Ming’s bones began to crackle. His blood, which had been completely replaced during his transformation, now contained a faint ethereal wisp of something familiar: divinity. It wasn’t a full drop of divine blood. If it were, he would already be a blood-awakening cultivator. But he knew that, with the slightest effort on his part, he could condense one.
“So powerful,” Cha Ming muttered. He flexed his muscles and discovered that the air around him was different somehow. His relationship with it had changed. From the air, even within his Clear Sky Brush, he felt respect.
“By reaching half-step blood awakening, you’ve obtained a trace of divinity,” Sun Wukong said, waking up and stretching out his arms. He yawned deeply. “A single step more, and you’ll become a demigod. Qi cultivators become transcendents, and each transcendent has a domain. Domains represent control, and qi cultivators will gain control over the elements in their surroundings.
“Demigods, on the other hand, gain the respect of their surroundings. Everything around them will fear damaging them and desecrating their bodies. The universe itself will dampen the damage dealt to demigods and protect them, as their presence is holy. They are personifications of the elements themselves.
“As a half-step blood-awakening cultivator, cultivating the Seventy-Two Transformations Technique, you now possess a third of the strength of a full blood-awakening cultivator—333,000 jin!”
“No more threes?” Cha Ming asked.
“No more threes,” Sun Wukong said. “Three threes are the peak of perfection in the mortal realms—pushing past that limit will require you to transcend mortal limitations.”
Cha Ming nodded. He looked over his body again and became aware of a third ability granted by the Seventy-Two Transformations Technique. The first twelve transformations had improved his talent and allowed him to change his appearance. The next twelve had given him control over his weight, culminating in giving him control over his shape.
These last twelve allowed him to increase his size as he wished through stored vitality. His regeneration had increased drastically. Now, he could regenerate his body from his vitality stores if even a single drop of blood remained. Furthermore, he could now transform to any size as large as a demon of his level, even in human form. He could shrink his size down to an inch in length. Hiding would be much easier from now on.
“With this,” Cha Ming said, “there are very few people I now fear on this plane.”
“Even transcendents would have trouble dealing with you,” Sun Wukong said in approval. “They might be able to generate the same power as you, but the plane loathes their presence and will fight against them. Anyone who wishes to kill you would need to pay a ghastly price to do so.”
Cha Ming nodded. He retracted his power until he reached late marrow refining. He lamented in losing the feeling of being special in the eyes of the world. A portal opened beside him, which he stepped through into the stone room filled with protective formations.
Now that he was powerful enough to achieve his goals without a hitch, he had less than a month to tie up any loose ends in his plan. In addition to incriminating the Wang family, he had important duties to attend to. Finishing the Breaker, or something like it, was at the top of his priority list. The crown prince was counting on him, after all.
Weeks passed by in a blur, and Cha Ming, along with the rest of the research and development group, worked with inhuman speed. Ceaseless trial-and-error runework, as well as various attempts at smelting and combining many ores, took place in a very short amount of time.
Fortunately for everyone, they had Shao Qiang. The normally quiet man wasn’t very useful aside from performing calculations, his field of expertise. But as a seer, he made use of his talent to predict relative chances of success or failure. With each prototype piece, their team was able to predict its
