Ultimate Martial Venerable - Chapter 17

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Chapter 17. Destruction Mountain Collapse Fist
Two months later.
Deep within Seo Mountain, the roar of beasts and the crack of splintering wood erupted in rapid succession.
A leopard clad in black scales tore across the forest. Two thick trees buckled under the impact, and the leopard crashed to earth with nothing but a brief whimper before going limp.
Scattered around it lay five more corpses, identical in form.
Demonic Pattern Leopards.

A single mature specimen rivaled a ninth-rank martial artist in the Body Refinement Realm. The black scales were difficult to pierce with ordinary weapons, and when cornered, they spewed magical fire from their maws to incinerate their foes.

Even a martial artist newly ascended to the Internal Strength Realm found them troublesome to subdue without injury.

Yuk Beom held the last leopard’s neck in a single-handed grip.
His entire body blazed with the crimson flame of the Blazing Gold Body. His clothes were scorched black in places, and long claw marks raked across his cheeks.

Most troubling of all, one side of his hair had burned away entirely.

“Charred my hair, even in my own flames. Audacious creature.”

The leopard thrashed and spewed fire again. Yuk Beom tilted his head aside, then tightened his grip.
Crack.
Its spine snapped, and the beast went slack.
A faint milky luminescence rippled beneath Yuk Beom’s forearm—a sign that Strong Energy was about to manifest beyond the body.

He set the corpse down and pulled free the Dragon Saliva Flower planted in the earth.

“Master, is this flower not too dangerous?”

O Jin, standing beneath the eaves of a nearby tree, let out a scoff.

“You’ve been using it freely for two months. Where do you get off questioning it now?”
“Plant it in the ground, and every beast within ten leagues comes charging like madness itself. Yet despite how many we’ve slain, their numbers don’t dwindle—they seem to multiply.”

Yuk Beom surveyed the corpses around him and clicked his tongue. He extended his hand into empty air, gathered Water Qi, and watched it coalesce into a clear stream. He brought his palm to his lips and drained it in one draught.

His mastery of Qi Transformation Five Elements had grown sharper with each passing day since he learned the Limitless Evolution Formation.

At first, he wandered the mountains seeking beasts. Now he assessed terrain before enemy arrival rather than hunting for their location. The Dragon Saliva Flower had become less the bait and more the signal.
O Jin smiled with casual indifference.

“The last few days have favored us. No stronger creatures emerged.”
“You mean creatures like the Rock Armor Dragon Turtle?”

The moment those words left his mouth, the corners of Yuk Beom’s eyes hardened.
A month ago, a Rock Armor Dragon Turtle was drawn by the scent of the Dragon Saliva Flower. Its shell, hard as stone, bore no proper impression even from fists, and violet lightning crackled from the horns on its head.
Yuk Beom clashed with it head-on several times before being sent flying down the mountainside. Though O Jin watched, he never extended a hand to help, leaving Yuk Beom no choice but to flee before death took him.

“Next time we meet, I won’t run.”
“Anyone can say that.”

O Jin’s body was clearly before him. Yet the forest birds and small beasts paid him no mind. The Demonic Pattern Leopards from moments ago had attacked only Yuk Beom, never once glancing at O Jin.
Body Merges with Heaven and Earth.

It was a strange martial art that dissolved one’s presence into the natural flow. Yuk Beom had learned fragments of it, but could only manage to fade his existence when he stopped walking and held his breath.

“When will I be able to use that technique properly?”
“The day you stop rushing.”
“That’s the hardest condition of all.”

Yuk Beom dragged the corpses of the Demonic Pattern Leopards to one place. He gathered heat at his fingertips, split open their bellies, and checked their still-warm innards one by one.
The chance of a Wild Beast Crystal Core forming in such small beasts was low. Only after rifling through five bodies did a single thumb-sized black crystal emerge from the last corpse.

O Jin examined the crystal core by holding it up to the sunlight.

“No trace of Ice Heart Meteorite.”

Yuk Beom shook the blood from his hands.

“Can’t another material be used instead?”
“It can be. The results just won’t satisfy me.”

O Jin pointed to Yuk Beom’s neck—the place where the Bongryeok Seok, now retrieved, had once hung.

“If you refine the Ice Heart Meteorite and the Bongryeok Seok together, it won’t end at merely suppressing power. It will also increase the speed at which you draw and absorb the Qi of heaven and earth. It helps with mastering martial arts and cultivating Flame Practitioner arts alike.”
“Then I’ll need to search more thoroughly.”

Yuk Beom looked down at his arm, where the first signs of Gangjing were beginning to show.

“But I’m not sure how long I can contain it. Lately, even slight exertion causes my Gangjing to spill outward.”
“You must suppress it.”

O Jin’s voice turned firm.

“A martial artist’s Gangjing and a Flame Practitioner’s Original Qi must come to completion at the same time. If one takes hold first, it can begin to push out the other force.”

Yuk Beom focused his mind on his Dantian. After learning the Limitless Evolution Formation, the Original Qi in his Dantian had become far more vivid than before. Four streams of Qi—symbolic of fire and water, wind and earth—rotated slowly without pushing against one another.

Of the five elements, only one remained.

“Once the fifth Qi appears, I think I’ll be able to draw the Original Qi outside my body as well.”
“Your progress is faster than expected.”
“It seems I’m something of a genius when it comes to Flame Practitioner arts as well.”

As Yuk Beom spoke with casual confidence, O Jin let out a soft snort of amusement.

“A genius wouldn’t skip lunch, would he?”

Yuk Beom drew out the Slow Fire Cauldron from the Nine Heavens Ring as though he’d been waiting for just such an opening.

He retrieved it with a flourish.
The moment he breathed Original Qi into it, the pot—barely the size of a palm—swelled to a proper cooking vessel. He added trimmed Demonic Pattern Leopard meat and medicinal herbs gathered from the mountainside, then pushed the flame dancing in his left hand beneath the cauldron.
Soon the forest filled with the aroma of herbs and roasting meat.
O Jin furrowed his brow every time he witnessed such a display.

“I gave you that cauldron so you’d make medicine from it.”
“I’m cooking the medicinal herbs together with the meat, so isn’t that medicinal cuisine in the broader sense?”
“If you’d meant to stew meat from the start, I’d simply have bought you an ordinary pot.”
“An ordinary pot would never cook this quickly.”

As Yuk Beom lifted the lid, steam and a rich fragrance wafted up. O Jin clicked his tongue in disapproval even as he reached for the first piece of meat.
After they’d filled their bellies, the two turned deeper into the mountain range.
The forest grew denser with each step. The canopy blocked the sunlight so thoroughly that even in broad daylight the surroundings lay in shadow, and the unnamed cries of wild beasts echoed ceaselessly from distant quarters.
After half a day’s walk, the dense trees abruptly ended.
Beyond them stretched a small lake in the shape of a crescent moon.
The water was red as spilled blood. With each gust of wind, a crimson mist rose from the surface like vapor, and along the shore several enormous wild beasts lay sprawled in the sun, their bodies stretched out in repose.
The moment Yuk Beom recognized them, he concealed himself behind a tree.
They were Rock Armor Dragon Turtles.
And they were larger than the one he’d encountered before. A single creature was nearly as tall as a man’s height, and its rocky carapace was etched with ancient cracks and overgrown with moss. The horn jutting from its head flickered intermittently with purple electricity.
O Jin, however, was not watching the wild beasts. He gazed at the red lake.

“Blood Moon Lake

exists in a place like this.”

His ordinarily composed voice carried a note of genuine surprise for the first time.
Yuk Beom spoke quietly.

“Is it a place of significance?”
“The water is saturated with the Qi of heaven and earth. It accelerates cultivation of flame practice considerably and strengthens the body as well.”

O Jin’s gaze traced from Yuk Beom’s dantian to his arms in turn.

“Train within that lake for just a few days, and there’s a strong chance both your Original Qi and Strong Energy will reach completion simultaneously.”

Yuk Beom’s eyes brightened, then immediately shifted back to the Rock Armor Dragon Turtles.
Five of them lay along the shore. A month ago, he’d fled in terror from even a single one.

“I’ll need to lure them far away.”
“They might return and interrupt your training.”
“Then I’ll lure them even farther.”

O Jin laughed.

“It would be more certain to simply kill them all.”

Yuk Beom looked between the Rock Armor Dragon Turtles and his master in turn.

“Is that within my capability now?”
“Trust in yourself. And the Limitless Evolution Formation

isn’t merely a method to merge Strong Energy and Original Qi.”

O Jin pointed to Yuk Beom’s Nine Heavens Ring.

“Lately, whenever you’ve had a spare moment, you’ve been practicing the incomplete Small Destruction Fist,

haven’t you?”
“There are many missing sequences. It’s difficult to deploy it properly.”
“Use the Limitless Evolution Formation

to merge the two arts together. I’ve attempted to fuse flame practitioner techniques before, but I’ve never tried combining martial disciplines themselves.”

He was saying there was no guarantee of success.
Yuk Beom examined the Rock Armor Dragon Turtles by the lakeshore again. After turning over several alternatives in his mind, he withdrew the Dragon Saliva Flower from the Nine Heavens Ring.

“I’ll attempt it.”

He moved into the forest at a fair distance from the lake and planted the Dragon Saliva Flower in the earth.
As the scent spread, the Rock Armor Dragon Turtles by the lakeshore lifted their heads in unison. Their languid, sprawled postures vanished in an instant.
Massive bodies hurled themselves toward the forest.
Crack! Crunch!
Two misjudged their direction and plowed through the adjacent forest; two others raced past the flower entirely, so intoxicated by the scent they saw nothing before them.
Only one stopped beneath the tree where the flower was planted, searching the ground around it.
Yuk Beom threw himself from a branch overhead.
Blazing flames of the Blazing Gold Body

erupted across his entire frame.

“Blazing Mountain Collapse Fist

!”

His flaming fist drove straight into the center of the Rock Armor Dragon Turtle’s head.
Boom!
Rock-hard carapace fragments scattered in all directions. But the creature did not fall. Its body stumbled back several steps, and with eyes now crimson, it glared at Yuk Beom while scratching the ground with a ragged snarl.
The next instant, the Rock Armor Dragon Turtle charged.
Yuk Beom did not evade.
The moment his hands seized its horns, a force like a mountain bearing down crashed upon his arms and shoulders. His feet sank deep into the earth, and a long furrow carved itself into the ground beneath him.

“Will it scatter you to the winds like last time!”

Yuk Beom straightened his waist.
The muscles hardened by the Blazing Gold Body

tensed and bulged. The Rock Armor Dragon Turtle’s charge finally halted.
He held one horn with his left hand while raising his right fist.

“Small Destruction Fist

!”

His fist drove down, shattering a section of carapace on its head.
Yet it was not a decisive wound. Instead, violet lightning gathered swiftly along the creature’s horns.
If he released it now, it would charge again. If he held on, he would take the lightning head-on.
Yuk Beom’s breathing shortened.
At that moment, O Jin’s voice fell from above his head.

“Let the Qi guard the Dantian, let the Spirit command the Limitless, and all things dissolve into one

.”

Yuk Beom recited that incantation.
The roars and lightning sounds around him faded into distance. The four-hued Original Qi rotating in his Dantian flowed into his right arm, and the preliminary signs of the strong energy knotted in his muscles and bones aligned with that current.
The circulation patterns of the two different fist arts overlapped as well.
the Collapsing Mountain Fist

with its heavy, explosive force.
the Small Destruction Fist

with its power to collapse a single point.
The two currents met and pushed against each other at first. Yuk Beom didn’t force one over the other. Following the circulation of the Limitless Evolution Formation,

he redirected the colliding forces, drew them in, and wove them into a single channel.
It was the instant before lightning erupted from the Rock Armor Dragon Turtle’s horns.
Yuk Beom’s eyes snapped open.

“Destruction Mountain Collapse Fist

!”

His fist came down.
Boom!
The Rock Armor Dragon Turtle’s horns shattered at the root. The armor encasing its head burst from within, and its massive body crashed to the ground with a tremor that shook the earth.
Violet lightning flickered through the empty air a few times, then faded to nothing.
Yuk Beom stood with his fist still lowered, breathing hard.
A month ago, he had been capable of nothing but fleeing from this creature.
This time, he had faced it head-on.
And he had brought down the beast by merging two entirely different martial arts into one.
Behind him, Blood Moon Lake still gleamed with its deep crimson light, quiet and still.
Yuk Beom gazed out across the lake, past the fallen Rock Armor Dragon Turtle.
The moment when his Strong Energy and Original Qi could finally merge waited for him somewhere in those waters.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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