Chapter 55: This Young Master Discovers

Chen Haoran noticed the monster too late, it was too close, and though beneath him in cultivation he wasn’t so far beyond it that he could stop it from striking.

So he didn’t.

When the crocodile-sized salamander breached the water and opened its maw to swallow Phelps whole Chen Haoran placed himself in front of the monster and let it clamp down on his arm. Phelps rolled into a floating backflip and shrieked from the air. The salamander flailed and tried to drag Chen Haoran into the water. He flexed his qi and swung his arm down, crushing the salamander’s head into a gooey mess between his forearm and the earth.

“So this is what lives in the water.” He shook off salamander brain goop and washed his arm in the pool. Phelps dropped back down and squealed at the corpse. “Real scary Phelps.”

Chen Haoran ripped the rest of the vines out of the ground then split open the salamander with his scimitar and pulled out a rough, cyan core. “I don’t suppose you eat these too,” he said, waving the core in front of the sloth.

He was only half serious but Phelps took it as permission and snapped the core out of his hand. Chen Haoran had a brief moment of wide-eyed shock. “Fuck, don’t eat that.” He rushed over and tried to wrench Phelps’s mouth open but the gluttonous sloth swallowed the core whole. “Damnit Phelps, spit that out.”

Phelps shuddered and his body expanded, Chen Haoran braced himself for the inevitable shattered glass feeling of a broken connection. Phelps burped and deflated. He stared. Phelps happily squealed. He stretched out his sense, Phelps’s qi had grown.

He sighed and rubbed his fist on Phelps’s head. “Greedy little shit, you damn near gave me a heart attack.”

Phelps’s gluttony aside it was good to know that he could feed him cores, he hadn’t thought the things were edible like that. Not that he would try to eat them himself. Monsters hunted each other, it made sense that they could process cores as well. It was a shame that he didn’t intend to give the core to Phelps, he missed out on getting a reward.

He brought over the monk flower vine and showed it to Phelps who, perhaps finally being full or just plain disinterested, merely sniffed it and turned away. Chen Haoran stowed away the vine in his storage bag to try again later and looked at the dead salamander. He had been expecting to find an aquatic monster since he entered the cavern but it wasn’t as strong as he assumed. He looked out across the lake, the waters were still. He took the corpse in hand and tossed it into the water. He watched it float for a few minutes, channeling qi to his senses to catch any movement. There was none to be had however and so he packed up Phelps onto his back and turned to leave. He would have to hunt elsewhere for more salamanders it seemed.

There was movement on the water. A giant salamander leapt out of the water like a breaching whale and snapped up the crocodile-sized corpse in one bite. Chen Haoran watched the titan slam back down into the lake and felt the water it kicked up mist his face.

He turned around and left. He would have to hunt elsewhere.

As he had both feared and expected the steam returned quickly and he was forced to slow his pace to a veritable crawl lest he tripped into a boiling pool or a hidden monster. Much like the landscape, the monsters grew grander in both size and cultivation the further he traveled into the cavern. Hulking sloths shambled across the roof and floated with dense pressure. The crickets grew more vicious their spiny forelimbs became razor-sharp blades that, combined with their higher cultivation, forced Chen Haoran to fight them cautiously compared to how casually he treated them before. The salamanders were even more ridiculous.

Received Hundred-Fold: 100-year-old Qi Realm Giant Salamander Core

He killed another salamander much like the one that tried to eat Phelps only to discover that they were basically juveniles. He had been expecting any water-based monsters in the Spa Cavern to be particularly strong given the environment but it was an ugly surprise nonetheless. The salamanders were just as vicious as the crickets, leaping out of their pools to bite at anything passing nearby. Their sneakiness combined with the steam meant more often than not Chen Haoran was scrambling to avoid a sudden ambush. A task that he failed more often than he succeeded. Without the Stygian Lotus Flower’s enhancement, he would have been injured numerous times when he failed to react quickly enough. It was to the point that he was forced to detour around several large pools to avoid another titan salamander.

He was lucky enough to avoid meeting any Liquid Meridian Realm monsters so far. It was not a luck he expected to last. The caverns were too rich in energy and resources to not have a few higher realms wandering around. If things kept getting stronger the deeper he went then it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to meet one. He hoped it would be a sloth. Anything else and he would be facing a fatal threat to his life.

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It wasn’t like there were no benefits to all this danger, however. Chen Haoran found more monk flower vines growing along the edges of the pools. Phelps had no taste for the vines unfortunately but he devoured the flowers without issue along with monster cores. Chen Haoran made sure that he was eating plenty of moss as well. A task made easier by the fact that even the moss improved as they traveled, becoming brighter and thicker than before.

The ambient qi of the cavern as a whole seemed to increase in fact. The air was thick with it, the pools boiled with vitality, and the steam of course was the best of both worlds. Chen Haoran’s cultivation speed had taken off like a rocket compared to before and it became quicker the farther he traveled.

Environment, spirit pools, refined qi, supplements, everything had finally aligned to bring him to the Eighth-Layer faster than he could have ever imagined. For all the danger this place had been constant blessing after blessing for him. Forget the Eighth-Layer, he had already set his gaze on the Ninth.

If only the other side of his practice was so smooth.

In the shadow of another giant column, Chen Haoran practiced the Canyon Carving Sword while Phelps curiously watched on. He cycled his qi in the long-familiar pattern and flowed into a few basic sword movements. As he swung his scimitar the steam around him ebbed and flowed as it avoided the blade. As it was cut by the blade rather. The steam split just before it touched the scimitar’s edge and flowed over and under it. Chen Haoran counted thirty seconds before his steam-cutting dance came to an end and he lost control of his qi.

Thirty seconds of Harmonization. It was a definite improvement from when he started but Chen Haoran couldn’t find it within himself to be satisfied. Lan Fen and Song Yuelin wielded Harmonization as if it was another part of their bodies. No, not as if. It really was just another part of their bodies, the natural expression of a technique they were deeply in tune with. There was something he was missing, something about Harmonization that diligent practice alone wouldn’t solve. Something that Lan Fen and Song Yuelin didn’t, or perhaps couldn’t, say.

Chen Haoran sighed and sat against the column, idly counting the cracks in the ringing overhang of stone above him. This column was much like the last one he had camped under, just a bit taller and with brighter moss. It said something about how crazy the rest of the Spa Cavern was that this strange geology was the least noteworthy.

He pressed his back flat against the mossy rock and crossed his legs in a meditative pose and closed his eyes. Phelps’s squeals broke through his nascent concentration. He opened one eye and glared at the sloth. Phelps innocently stared back. Chen Haoran snorted and closed his eyes and again Phelps squealed before he could fully concentrate.

“Alright already.” He stood up and cut a square outline in the moss behind him. “I’ve seen bodybuilders eat less than you.” He pinched a corner of the square and ran his scimitar underneath it, channeling qi to the blade he brought it up under the moss while pulling on the corner. He had to jimmy his impromptu razor around the center of the blanket of moss he was carving out as it kept getting stuck. Soon enough though he had peeled enough off that he could rip off the rest in one piece. Underneath the moss was the smooth rock of the column and he quickly found what his sword got stuck on, a long jutting line of rock that curved and twisted like a pattern.

He frowned.

Exactly like a pattern.

Chen Haoran chopped and ripped more moss off the column, a sinking feeling growing in his stomach as he exposed more curving lines and etchings of leaves and fruit carved into the rock. There were limits to how strange geology could be, even in a place as crazy as this. He ran out from under the too-uniform overhang of stone and leapt atop it. He ripped off more moss and exposed a deep groove that he was sure ran all the way up to the top. He cycled qi to his legs and ran a loop around the column, stabbing and ripping and finding more grooves evenly spaced around it.

This wasn’t natural.

These columns weren’t formed, they were built.

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