This disparity was why Li Ling could place martial arts grandmasters at the peak of their practice at 10 points and body cultivators of the Mortal Flesh at the peak of their practice at 100 points. If martial artists could develop True Qi from the start, they might be able to barely catch up to Mortal Flesh practitioners, but then that would be their limit.

After all, whether it was at the end of Mortal Flesh or even martial arts, there is a limit to how much the body can be tempered with just energy. Even if one practiced dual cultivation of body and qi, raising their qi to the second realm and gaining magic power, they couldn't use this obviously superior energy to temper their bodies further.

So how did body cultivators increase their physical strength further? Or did they just focus on the esoteric part of their practice, like the fire qi or the blood qi, evolving it into an aura?

Well, yes and no. No matter how you shake it, it was impossible to just raise the basic bodily functions past a certain realm without causing physical changes.

If you wanted the strength of a giant, you needed to become big enough with enough muscle mass in order to achieve this feat.

If you wanted the speed of a cheetah, you needed to adjust your bone structure and body shape, becoming aerodynamic and mostly lightweight.

If you wanted the fortitude of a steel wall, you would need to enhance your skin and your flesh to be plentiful enough to withstand great impacts without damaging the fragile organs and bones within.

Unfortunately, given the vast disparity and requirements in each of these fields, it was impossible to have all three, so from the second realm going forward, all body cultivators had to specialize. Depending on the nature and attributes of your body cultivation technique, you would either walk the path of raw power, raw speed, or raw fortitude, while some also mixed bits of each.

From what Li Ling could tell, if the peak Mortal Flesh gave 100 points of overall power, then those 100 points could be—and usually were—evenly split between strength, speed, and fortitude, which was why Mortal Flesh fellows usually seemed to be largely equal to each other minus their special body qi.

If so, then the Body Foundation Realm should easily have 1000 points, but 90% of it was invested in one stat. For those techniques that mixed, they did not add new points, but simply split the same 1000 points, making one less focused and more versatile.

Every path had its pros and cons, so it was usually up to the practitioners to choose carefully what they were pursuing.

For the Blood Descent, it was a direct split of 800 points to speed and 200 to strength. This technique offered next to no regenerative or defensive abilities, something Li Ling had known from the Mortal Flesh stage, as this was purely a killing technique meant to hone a murderhobo who never knew when to stop.

And to effect this, one must restructure the entire body from scratch!

Like with Foundation Establishment, where qi cultivators realized they needed to elevate spiritual qi to magic power to proceed further, body cultivators also realized that they had to simply clear the shabby structure of the body and rebuild something sturdier that could be further enhanced later.

Basically, to enhance the body's foundation.

So the Body Foundation Realm was the famous 'destruction' and 'rebirth' realm mostly present in oriental mythology. However, as one could not make something out of nothing, this realm was one of the heaviest in terms of resource consumption, requiring one to utilize materials of certain grades and types to infuse into their body to do the destruction and the rebirth after.

Each body cultivation technique, due to its different focus and the different body qi it birthed, also prescribed different items. The Fire Heart Sect needed certain ores and minerals present in active volcanoes, hence setting up their sect here.

Likewise, the Asura Blood Descent also had its own prescription, one being the very Blood Fruit that Li Ling had previously given away to Bai Ruyi which had been gifted to him by Path Lady Ren Xue. There were also other materials, four of them grade 2 materials of the demonic path, all listed in the Feeding Blood Wing for disciples to redeem with merits.

But Li Ling did not need any such resource because the Infinite Slaughter System simulated any necessary resource in their peak state when converting Slaughter Points into cultivation!

｢Infinite Slaughter System

Owner: Li Ling

Status: Healthy

Age: 20/350

Slaughter Points: 10,307

Qi Cultivation Base: Foundation Establishment Perfection (Unable to Breakthrough)

Qi Cultivation Technique: Solaris Azure Meditation Mantra (Cannot be Limit Broken)

Body Refinement Level: Mortal Flesh level Perfection. (0/100)

Body Refinement Technique: Blood Asura Descent.

Mind Power Realm: Acolyte Realm Level 1 (0/2)

Mind Power Technique: Expanding Mind Sequence

Daoist Arts:

1. Fire Stream Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

2. Mana Regressing Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

3. Dao Seeing Eye – Entry (0/1500)

4. Heavenly Network – Entry (0/5000)

5. Spirit Sense Control – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

6. Earth Tunneling Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

7. Golden Blockade Technique – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

8. Restoration Spell – Entry (0/200)

9. Spirit Isolation Mantra – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

10. Yin-Yang Reversal Art – Expert (0/1500)

11. The Meteor Spell – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

12. Dao Soldier Technique – Entry (0/5000)

13. Memory Archive Extraction – Entry (0/250)

14. Blessed Augury – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

Non Daoist Techniques:

1. Li Family Spear Technique – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

2. Disguise Art – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

3. Swift Swallow Step – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

4. Sky Rending Palm – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

5. Hidden Sleeve Art – Mastery (0/4).｣

Li Ling had slightly over ten thousand Slaughter Points now, and the majority came from his slaughter of that previous mortal city plus around two thousand or so from the disciples within the headquarters. Whatever the case, he was certainly rolling in wealth and decided to use it to increase his power without stopping!

Paying 100 Slaughter Points, Li Ling grunted slightly as his body tensed and a certain burst of red light surged through his body, starting from his scalp to the soles of his feet. As he was condensing the slow tempering and breakthrough of the entire minor realm into one, it did not resemble how a normal person handled it at all.

With a cough, the red light surged into Li Ling's chest, coalescing there to form a mark that was similar to his Asura Blood Token—the Asura Blood Mark. The moment this mark formed, it integrated with the entirety of his nervous, blood, immune, and all other systems with his heart as the core, centralizing the body's power here.

Li Ling's heart, at this moment, was lit up by the Asura Blood Mark which suddenly—and shockingly—exploded!

Before the young man could perish due to the loss of this crucial organ, the fragments of the shattered heart were slowly infused with some strange substance that emerged from the void, a tempering material prescribed by the technique that was magicked from the ether by the Infinite Slaughter System.

Then, using this new material, along with the special tempering method of the Asura Blood Descent, Li Ling's heart was infused with the substance and slowly reformed, creating a heart that was slightly larger than before but more than ten times stronger, pumping blood with such force that Li Ling's skin began to release steam.

The heart took control of the established system and began working, but rather than work at full capacity, it underclocked itself because Li Ling's body could not handle its prowess yet.

Li Ling, on the outside, breathed a sigh of relief as his steaming skin rapidly cooled down, returning him to normal visually. He opened his eyes and touched his chest, feeling his heart which was no longer within the realm of human understanding—more akin to a magical creature's heart—and began to feel awe for cultivation.

Indeed, the nature of cultivation was ascendance.

It was understandable that cultivators, even those at Qi Refinement or Mortal Flesh, looked down on mortals and drew the line between them. Really, they were not even the same kind of creature by the second realm, and it would only get more intense and more ridiculous from here.

Li Ling breathed out, because this was just the first step!

Even though it should be a part of the breakthrough, it was actually up to him to handle this part reasonably, and it was not complicated at all.

It was the conversion of Blood Qi to Blood Aura!

At the first realm of body cultivation, body qi is born using the special nature of the cultivation technique to refine special materials into the body. For the Fire Heart Sect, it was using flames with some magical effects like Earth's Core Fire, which was grade 3 and found in volcanoes, to generate Fire Qi.

For the Asura Blood Descent, it was directly murdering creatures, be they demon beasts or humans, and then refining their blood right after they died which was full of their resentment, creating the corrosive Blood Qi.

To create this special body qi, it was generated from the heart, which was also incidentally the location of the middle dantian. The human body possessed three dantians: the upper dantian which was the Sea of Consciousness, the middle dantian which was the heart—that possessed the bloodline, gene locks, and human treasures—and the lower dantian, which was the basic dantian that everyone knew of.

So to upgrade body qi to body aura, one had to take the body qi generated at the Mortal Flesh realm and reroute it through the newly upgraded heart for strengthening and purification, giving birth to body aura. Whether it was Fire Aura or Blood Aura, they were severely stronger versions of the previous forms, akin to the distance between refined spiritual qi and magic power.

Sending his plentiful and exceedingly pure Blood Qi into his new heart, Li Ling felt it be tempered rapidly and fiercely, greatly reducing its quantity from ten meters around his body to merely a single meter, but its density had more than decupled.

With this one meter of Blood Aura, if imbued into his Blood Drinking Spear, it might even eat away at the semi-magic artifact and reduce it to scrap metal before even hitting the foe. If Li Ling had used this on Jian Chen's Formless Cloud Array, he could have likely punched through and been face to face with those righteous sect bastards.

Clenching his fist, Li Ling deeply understood why the Asura Blood Hall was called the strongest combat power of the sect. The sheer killing ability bestowed by the Asura Blood Descent was transcendent, making Li Ling even more satisfied that he chose this path to walk.

Alright, enough muscle flexing!

Li Ling shook his head and glanced at the cost of upgrading further, which was 200 Slaughter Points. Without hesitation, he paid the cost and felt his body being tempered with precision again, this time the focus was on the other parts in his torso, mainly his lungs and ribs, which were shattered sequentially and rebuilt using special materials eked out from who knows where by the system.

Being unable to breathe for a few seconds was not too difficult for Li Ling, but his discomfort due to having a loose torso from the lack of skeletal support was far more disturbing for him. Fortunately, it ended quickly, and his Blood Aura which was newly born extended up to ten meters around him on the spot, the exact same as when he reached the peak of Mortal Flesh.

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