A week later, Cha Ming sat by a fire under the guise of a soldier. Sun Wukong sat beside him, invisible to anyone else.
You’ve got humans down to a science, Sun Wukong said. You’ve imitated thousands of Southern and Northern cultivators alike. You can imitate devilish auras and transformations, the baleful aura of blood masters, and the pure aura of inquisitors of the Church of Justice. The only people who are beyond you are those from the Spirit Temple.
They’re just too difficult, Cha Ming said, poking at their fire with his spear. There’s something intangible and ethereal to them I can’t quite put my finger on.
How can I complain about your progress when I couldn’t hide my tail for aeons? Sun Wukong mused. Now let’s try something fun. Let’s try demons.
Demons? Cha Ming asked, startled. Is that even possible?
Why wouldn’t it be? Sun Wukong asked, a puzzled expression on his otherwise impish face. You can change your face and your height, and even your aura. You can see demonic energy currents. The Seventy-Two Transformations Technique, when cultivated to its fullest, will allow you to imitate anything in nature.
But the internals, the bones, the size, Cha Ming protested.
Just try it! Sun Wukong said.
Cha Ming looked around for a demon, and the first one he spotted was a spirit wolf. It was only twenty feet long, not much bigger than he was. He scanned it with his transcendent soul and began to transform. Pain was the first thing he felt as his bones began creaking and shifting, realigning to fit the image in his mind. Hair grew out of his entire body, and his nose and mouth elongated. His eyes changed, and his teeth grew sharp. Before long, his balance was off. He fell forward, catching himself on two newly grown paws.
Then, he grew. His skeleton was like a blacksmith’s puzzle, manipulating it freely until it couldn’t move anymore, then somehow finding a way to break apart. His tendons shifted, and his muscles grew. Even his digestive tract grew. Long strands of sinew linked everything together, his vitality knowing just what to do to complete the image in his mind.
As the changes in Cha Ming’s body finalized, he became aware of new sensations. His eyes were sharper, and his ears could pick up sounds from a mile away. He also felt a deep hunger for things that revolted the human Cha Ming. He quickly suppressed these feelings and reminded himself that he didn’t need to sate them. His mind was still human, after all. Or was it?
It took a full minute to fully transform, after which time Cha Ming mirrored the wolf’s behavior and changed his posture and thinking pattern. He was an honorable beast of the forest, a follower in his pack. He kept his head slightly low in a gesture of submission. As for the urge to rejoin his pack, Cha Ming suppressed it.
Good, good, Sun Wukong said. Very good for a first transformation. Now you just need to learn how to do that about a hundred times faster.
A hundred times? Isn’t that a bit exaggerated? Cha Ming said. He blinked, however, and realized that he’d already transformed back into a human. It had only taken a fraction of a second. His fur had vanished, and his personality had reverted to normal in the blink of an eye. His qi pathways, which had contorted into their demonic equivalent, were back to normal, connected to his Dantian in its independent space. The entire process seemed law defying, but upon closer inspection, wasn’t everything he did? Didn’t he get his body half destroyed and grow it back again? Couldn’t he lose his head and have it grow back? What was a body to him now that he’d reached the peak of marrow refining? He didn’t need to eat, drink, or even breathe anymore.
Sun Wukong grinned. Try it again.
Cha Ming did so. The transformation only took twenty seconds this time. After a few dozen more attempts, the transformation took less than one second. According to the Monkey King, it would only get faster.
Just like your beast friends can grow and shrink in an instant, so can you, given enough practice. Your first few beast forms will take time to get used to, but soon they’ll become second nature. We’ll spend the next two weeks practicing on this mountain before leaving.
Cha Ming nodded. The ability to transform into whatever demon he liked would be useful, if only to cut down on travel time. Let’s get started, he said, picking the next form he wanted to try out. It was a fifty-foot-long badger with bloodred eyes.
Baby steps, he told himself as long claws sprouted out from his hands. The accompanying rage almost overwhelmed him.
Chapter 5: Pai Xiao
Three thousand miles away, an eagle soared across the blue skies of the Ji Kingdom. The eagle was a large demon, a fledgling lord-level demon beast that was a long way from home. Wind ruffled its feathers as it circled down to the forest below, likely looking for a smaller demon to catch and devour. It was hungry, for it had flown for many days to get here.
Using its keen eyes, the eagle scanned its potential victims. It ignored anything larger than a few dozen feet long, as it would take too much time to consume before local predators forced it away.
That’s the one, the eagle thought. It spotted a spirit elk measuring twenty feet long and fifteen feet tall. It was a male with smaller horns than most, meaning that it wasn’t very important to the nearby spirit elk. Its fate was to wander about the woods and attract predators, sparing the other more important elk from an untimely fate.
The eagle pulled back its wings and lowered itself toward
