Chapter Eighty-Six: The Coiled Dragon

Inside Nether Street, Zhou Bai’s seclusion still continued. He chose once more to advance his Shell-Shedding Art, and from the second layer to the third it cost him thirty-two points.

For his present stock of points, that was hardly enough to make a difference.

With his life-bound shell shed, the demonic qi within his body no longer resisted him. Little by little, Zhou Bai absorbed it and brought it under his control.

After the breakthrough, the life-bound shell’s rate of absorption quickened again. The demonic qi streamed in like threads, slowly pouring into his dantian, where it finally gathered around the salted fish.

The salted fish changed only faintly, but it did show signs of life, at least enough to seem as though it had died only recently.

Zhou Bai waited a moment, and the body of the salted fish twitched slightly beneath its skin, arousing the curiosity of the ghost tree.

It kept staring at this new companion. The dantian was now its own little territory; even the talismanic characters formed by the Curse-Killing Divine Power circled endlessly around the ghost tree.

Soon Zhou Bai discovered that the most obvious change in the salted fish was not a journey from death to life, but that the dragon qi radiating from it had begun to move like water, bringing about a change in quality through sheer accumulation of quantity.

His heart stirred, and he invested another thirty-two points, raising the third layer of the Shell-Shedding Art to one hundred percent proficiency. The dragon qi began to surge at a tremendous speed, but soon ran into a bottleneck.

The salted fish also came fully to life, growing ever more restless as it flapped wildly within the lower dantian.

Interested in the changes in his life-bound shell, Zhou Bai summoned it out from the lower dantian.

In the already cramped seclusion room there now appeared a fish-dragon a full meter long. Unfortunately, it only struggled madly on the floor and showed no other sign of marvel.

Zhou Bai picked up the salted fish by one end and felt that, aside from a hideous toughness of hide and flesh, it possessed no other distinguishing trait. This struck him as odd.

The ghost tree, at the same third layer of its own art, was already a reliable cheat that could cultivate on its own and protect its master in time.

Yet after more than a hundred points spent, the salted fish had merely turned over once?

Refusing to accept such nonsense, Zhou Bai continued to pour in points, spending another thirty-two to raise the Shell-Shedding Art to the fourth layer.

This fundamental art was even rarer than the cultivation of the Physical Object Art. Within the Nether Classics Bureau, it might not even be possible to find a second person who practiced it.

Though the art had nine layers in all, Zhou Bai suspected the later realms were nothing but conjecture. Perhaps his current fourth layer was already unprecedented.

But that did not matter. So long as the system acknowledged it, he could force a breakthrough with points. If even the Bright Eyes Technique could become Yin and Yang Eyes, what was beyond reach?

At the fourth layer, the Shell-Shedding Art indeed produced something different. The dragon qi on the salted fish had become tangible, forming a hazy white radiance that shrouded its body.

And in Zhou Bai’s mind, he had already conjured the image of an evolution light from some handheld monster game.

A moment later, as the dragon qi gradually drew inward, the salted fish’s appearance underwent a tremendous change.

The former fish body was no longer visible. What met the eye now was a creature neither quite fish nor quite snake.

Its body remained smooth, save for a lonely, solitary scale. The eyes that had been gouged out had grown back. Though it still had no limbs, the shape of a dragon could already be seen in its fish head.

The salted fish clearly possessed far greater intelligence now. It crawled like a snake to Zhou Bai’s side and rubbed its head against him.

“What is this... has it turned into a dragon?”

Zhou Bai studied the salted fish carefully, then took out the Return-to-Ancestry Art for comparison. After a long while, a single word leaped into his mind.

A horned dragon.

A horned dragon and a fish-dragon were already worlds apart. A fish-dragon did contain dragon qi, but it could not yet be counted among true dragons; at best, it was only a lower kind of dragon spawn.

A horned dragon, however, was already a dragon. Granted, it was the lowest, most insignificant sort of dragon, but one had to remember that the salted fish’s former self had cultivated for a thousand years without becoming a demon, all for the sake of crossing the Dragon Gate.

What Zhou Bai found strange, though, was that as his life-bound shell, he knew the salted fish thoroughly.

Yet compared with before, it seemed only somewhat tougher in body, with not a single divine power befitting a dragonkind.

A trace of hesitation rose in his heart. He considered whether to raise it another layer and see, but soon dismissed the thought, because advancing to the fifth layer would require a full one hundred and twenty-eight points.

Before his other divine powers and arts had yet to achieve their own breakthroughs, points had to be carefully budgeted. He forcibly made himself calm down.

Zhou Bai reached out and patted the salted fish on the head. With no scales, it did not feel pleasant to touch, so he simply returned it to the lower dantian.

Once inside, it seemed like a fledgling returning to its nest, and it rolled about there with complete ease.

The ghost tree kept staring at it, unable to make sense of the meaning behind the salted fish’s behavior.

Zhou Bai’s decision to keep the salted fish within his body was, of course, intentional. With his inner sight, he could observe its changes far better.

Sure enough, he soon noticed something unusual. Inside the salted fish, near the heart, there grew a small flesh mound much like the one within Zhou Bai himself. It was unmistakably the weak-as-a-chicken technique, one of the demon-path divine powers.

Seeing this, Zhou Bai finally relaxed. The facts proved that his life-bound shell truly possessed boundless potential and was by no means inferior to the ghost tree.

Moreover, perhaps the ghost tree could also make use of Yin and Yang Eyes. It was just that for it, as a ghost-path divine power, such a thing was rather useless.

Thinking thus, Zhou Bai also decided not to shortchange this life-bound ghost artifact, which had labored dutifully without complaint. Besides, compared with the Shell-Shedding Art, the Physical Object Art required far fewer points to improve, and advancing it to the fourth layer cost only forty.

With the breakthrough in the Physical Object Art, the ghost tree also underwent a tremendous transformation. It took the initiative to emerge from the lower dantian.

However, to avoid bursting the room apart, it kept itself to a size of only one meter.

A series of crackling sounds rang out as its trunk thickened visibly, while its branches gradually extended outward.

The one thing that made the ghost tree somewhat uncomfortable was that this seclusion room contained only demonic qi. It was now undergoing metamorphosis and needed yin qi to replenish itself.

With no other choice, the ghost tree extended its roots, drilling out along the corner of the wall into the neighboring room, which happened to be Priest Hou’s seclusion chamber.

At this moment, Priest Hou was suffering intense pain. How could a zombie spine carrying the bloodline of the drought demon possibly be so easily fused into his body?

The corpse-transformation marks on Priest Hou’s body were already no different from those of an ordinary zombie, while on his back a bulge rose and his spine writhed like a snake, as though trying to break free from within him.

At that moment, the ghost tree’s roots penetrated the chamber, absorbing the yin qi released by the formation while also locking onto Priest Hou beside it.

The roots tentatively touched his body. Seeing that Priest Hou gave no response, they immediately pierced into that spine bearing the drought-demon bloodline, beginning to absorb the yin qi within.

With the ghost tree’s intervention, the pressure on Priest Hou eased at once. Hurriedly, he began to circulate Scarlet Waste for a Thousand Miles, gradually refining the spine into his life-bound ghost artifact.

After the ghost tree had fully absorbed the yin qi, it withdrew from the room.