86 Humanoid Divine Beast. (1/2)
Time continued to pass without pause, Jinwu helping Li Yang absorb more and more of the glacial energy. While Li Yang's body was disintegrating under the horrifying cold, he also made sure to use the extremely potent energy to work on raising his cultivation, everything seemingly going smoothly.
But a problem quickly arose when the glacial energy tried to rebuild his body from scratch. It went fine at first, when only a small portion of his body was being rebuilt, but the problem arose when the ice tried to rebuild the rest of his body. His body had already been disintegrated and rebuilt once before, practically turning his body into pure flames.
Ice and fire were natural enemies, so now that the glacial energy was trying to rebuild his entire body, the fire that made up his body quickly revolted, refusing to coexist with the glacial energy. His body was quickly torn, half of it supporting the ice while the other half supported his fire.
Before Li Yang started to cultivate using this glacial energy, he was aware that there was a chance that this might happen. But he also knew that there was a chance that the two elements might be able to coexist thanks to his ice and fire runes, much like how they coexisted inside Jinwu's body, which was why he had decided to do what he did.
The parts of Li Yang's body that had yet to be rebuilt using ice appeared in a flash of fire, uncontrollable flams roaring out from his body, doing their best to push away the glacial energy. Sweat quickly started to pour down Li Yang's body, gritting his teeth so hard that they almost shattered.
This was the worst possible scenario he could have encountered. He had reached the breaching point in his cultivation, only half a step away from the Ascending Heaven realm. It was too late for him to stop his cultivation, as he was in the middle of his breakthrough, interrupting it might end up detonating all his runes, destroying his body.
But if he let the ice and fire continue to battle like this, there were three possible outcomes. One was that the fire won, pushing away the glacial energy. He wouldn't get to increase his strength any more using the glacial energy, but he would survive. The second was that the ice energy won, completely replacing the fire that his body was built up off. He would lose his greatly strengthened affinity with the fire element and lose the ability to turn his body into pure heat and flames, but he would survive. And the third outcome was that the two elements would never find a winner, his body and soul exploding under the might of the two battling elements. No matter which outcome he got in this situation, he would end up losing in one way or another.
Li Yang could only do his best to split off part of his concentration to support the fire element that was trying to push away the glacial energy, he still needed to keep most of his concentration on his current breakthrough. He had given the three outcomes some thought and come to the conclusion that he would lose the least if his fire element won.
But just as he was starting to support his fire element, a piercing screech rang out from inside his body. Jinwu flew out from within his body, temporarily undoing their fusion and flying in front of Li Yang. Thanks to the fire raging around Li Yang, he didn't have to worry about suddenly freezing to death under the assault of the glacial energy.
Jinwu let out another screech, drops of blood suddenly flying out from his chest. This blood was a brilliant golden in color, wisps of blue mist floating around within the blood. Li Yang's expression quickly dropped when he realized what Jinwu was planning, but he couldn't divert more of his concentration, so he couldn't stop him.
The drops of blood gathered in front of Jinwu, who now looked far weaker, even having shrunk back to being palm-sized. The blood then flew over to Li Yang, sinking into his body and integrating with his blood and his ice and fire runes, greatly nourishing them and filling Li Yang's body with a tremendous amount of energy.
Shenlong, who was looking at this scene from around Li Yang's neck, seemed to suddenly think of something. He uncoiled himself from Li Yang's neck and flew over to Jinwu, floating in front of Li Yang. Li Yang looked at Shenlong with pleading eyes, but Shenlong completely ignored him.
Drops of golden blood flew out from Shenlong, who started to grow weaker and shrink. Once several drops of blood had left his body, he sent them into Li Yang's body, integrating them into his blood and his lightning rune. Both Shenlong and Jinwu had now grown far weaker, so they flew over to Li Yang and fell asleep on his shoulders.
The two different types of Divine Beast blood simply contained far too much energy, far more than Li Yang's body should be able to bear. Mixing together with the energy of his battling fire element and the glacial energy that was trying to rebuild his body, it became too much for Li Yang's mind, which shut down to protect itself.
But even though his mind shut down, his consciousness did not drift apart and scatter, even his breakthrough continued unimpeded. He was unconscious, but changes started to quickly happen to his body, moving on without his control or supervision.
The first changes were to his runes, especially his ice, fire, and lightning runes. With Jinwu's blood sinking into his fire runes, they started to grow and change, turning from their normal fire-like state into nine brilliant golden suns. His ice lotuses also changed, turning into nine roaring white tigers that brimmed with glacial energy. His lightning runes started to twist and turn, stretching out and turning from lightning bolts into nine golden-purple coiling dragons, golden lightning dancing around them.
After his runes changed, his body itself started to change. His blood grew thicker and more vigorous, hints of golden and blue color present in the blood. When all his blood had turned into this strange color, his fire element suddenly stopped battling against the glacial energy, sinking back into his body and allowing the ice energy to continue disintegrating and rebuilding his body.
The glacial energy continued to rebuild his body, but it didn't push away the fire energy, the two contradicting energies started to spin around each other, fusing together into one as they continued to destroy and rebuild the unconscious Li Yang, his body growing stronger at a terrifying rate.
The last change was to his appearance, his previously azure hair turning icy-blue, and his previously pitch black eyes turning completely crimson, as if they were made from scorching flames. None of the changes that happened to Li Yang would normally happen to other people, even if they were given the blood of Divine Beasts.
The reason these changes happened was that the blood that Jinwu and Shenlong had given to Li Yang wasn't normal, it was something called Essence Blood. This blood was the complete essence of a person or a Demonic beast, and they only had a limited amount of it. Any loss of this blood would lead to a severe drop in strength, and it might even outright kill the one who lost the blood.