Chapter 15
Chapter 15
Episode 15
Four years of cultivation.
That was nothing to take lightly.
Especially when I remembered what it had taken to accumulate four years' worth of internal true qi in my previous life.
For example.
Say there was a martial artist who had learned the Three Powers Heart Method, a famously third-rate art.
Assume their affinity for true qi and their other aptitudes were all ordinary.
That martial artist would need to spend at least four shichen a day circulating qi just to accumulate one day's worth of cultivation.
Hard to believe, right?
But it's true.
Four shichen.
You probably can't picture it, but that's incredibly long.
In modern terms, that meant sitting in meditation for a full eight hours, regulating every breath and gathering energy—just to accumulate one day's worth!!
Yeah. That was what a mediocre art like the Three Powers Heart Method and ordinary talent got you.
Then.
Then what about someone with the Heaven-Born Martial Body—the greatest talent under heaven—training a supreme divine art?
Even supreme divine arts had separate basic introductory internal-energy methods.
To learn the Wudang Sect's greatest internal-energy art, Great Purity Gang Qi, you first had to learn the Lesser Purity Qi Art.
Lesser Purity Qi Art, Lesser Purity Divine Art, and then Great Purity Gang Qi.
After learning Great Purity Gang Qi, the standard progression was to learn the Two Principles Divine Art next.
Learning those four supreme-grade internal-energy arts alone took nearly thirty years.
Terrifying, isn't it?
Anyway.
Take the Lesser Purity Qi Art. It was quite good: someone with ordinary talent could gain one day's worth of cultivation with about two shichen of practice.
Someone with high aptitude could gain a day's worth in one shichen, while a Heaven-Born Martial Body could accumulate the same amount in just a quarter-shichen.
A quarter of a shichen. In other words, thirty minutes in current-life terms.
A day's worth in thirty minutes.
Theoretically, if you set aside roughly ten hours for eating, washing, and sleeping, then spent sixteen hours a day doing nothing but circulating qi, you could gain thirty-two days' worth of cultivation in a single day. That was the math.
Of course, even with a Heaven-Born Martial Body, no one would be crazy enough about training to actually pull that off, so it'd be impossible.
But.
Yet the experimental Jiangshi standing right in front of me had gained four years of cultivation in less than an hour.
"No. Is this for real?"
First the Necron Emperor, and now the Ossuary. This was completely broken. I couldn't tell whether I was absurdly overpowered or whether other classes were just as ridiculous.
Hmmmm.
At this rate, could my corpse actually regain the martial prowess I'd possessed in my previous life?
"Let's see...... Then. How about I check just how far this Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 can go."
I ordered Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 to perform the movements of various martial arts.
Swish! Swish! Flash!
I sat in the lobby and tested Experimental Jiangshi No. 1.
As a result, I learned two things.
First.
Even after gaining internal energy, Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 was still weak.
Second.
There was a subtle delay when controlling it.
The second was a problem, but honestly, the first was the bigger problem.
In the end, it was still a corpse. Its internal energy could grow, but the rest of its body couldn't.
"What to do? Without external arts training in martial arts cultivation, it's completely soft-bodied......."
Most people in the martial world stake their lives on internal energy cultivation, and they'll even throw away their lives just to consume a single spiritual elixir.
Because internal energy is valued that highly, a tendency arose to look down on external arts training.
But the sects and great families that are called true prestigious houses never neglect external arts training.
If internal energy is the energy source, then external arts are the vessel that contains and utilizes it.
If the vessel is as small as a soy sauce dish, what good is having a lot of internal energy?
So even if external arts aren't trained as a main focus, training them enough to balance with internal energy is essential.
But Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 was still just a corpse.
Its muscles were merely those of an ordinary person's corpse.
On top of that, it had not even been made through the Jiangshi Creation Method. It was nothing but soft flesh.
What a useless body....
A dead body incapable of tempering or training.
That's the biggest problem.
The Jiangshi transformation was still in progress... but when was it going to finish?
And.
What gets better once it becomes a jiangshi?
For now, the Corpse-Spirit Heavenly Jiangshi Whole-Body Art was still circulating through it. Once the Jiangshi transformation finished, what exactly would this thing become?
Is it becoming a Corpse-Spirit Heavenly Jiangshi?
Or just some worthless common jiangshi?
Which one is it?
"No point agonizing over it any further. How do necromancers solve this problem? Let's see......."
Awakened people can use the internet through the system even without a computer.
They can connect to GodTube, go to communities, and write posts.
After searching around for a while, I learned something.
I learned that Necromancers could modify corpses.
Among their skills, there are ones that strengthen, modify, and fuse corpses.
Some also captured souls and used them as materials, while others sought out corpses that had been powerful in life.
They also use the corpses of demons and various monsters as materials for strengthening.
But those weren't things I could do right away.
What could a low-level noob like me do?
If anything, the very fact that the corpse was accumulating internal energy was absurd.
In that case, I need to think of another method.
Should I use pill-refining arts?
At least I could still make some use of the pill-refining arts I had studied in my previous life....
Should I try strengthening the corpse with that?
I still remember the contents of the secret manual I snatched after beating the crap out of that Corpse-Spirit Demon Lord bastard, and inside it, there's a jiangshi manufacturing method.
Also, the Jiangshi Creation Method for strengthening corpses with various drugs, and pill-refining arts exclusively for jiangshi, were written in it too.
"Alright. Should I keep this in reserve?"
First, I should do what needed doing right now.
Even if it is soft-bodied, the more internal energy it has, the better.
Because the ossuary restores internal energy incredibly fast.
How could I not take advantage of that?
Now then. How much internal energy can this thing hold?
"Full internal energy charge. Here we go!"
I sat in meditation and kept pouring Necromantic Mana into Experimental Jiangshi No. 1.
Fwoooosh!
The Necromantic Mana flowed out of my body and into the corpse. Under my will, it circulated through Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 according to the Corpse-Spirit Heavenly Jiangshi Whole-Body Art.
After I'd kept at it for a few hours—
when I'd poured in roughly thirty years' worth of internal energy,
The system reacted.
[The Walking Corpse is mutating.]
Oh? My undead's status?
While I was surprised.
[The Walking Corpse has become a Jiangshi.]
[The Jiangshi's grade is Copper.]
The corpse bastard had become a jiangshi.
Heh heh...... This actually works?
[Jiangshi]
Grade: Copper
A jiangshi created through the mutation of a Walking Corpse.
A Jiangshi created when Lee Mu-seon transformed Necromantic Mana through the Corpse-Spirit Heavenly Jiangshi Whole-Body Art and caused it to settle inside a corpse.
A Copper Jiangshi.
In other words, it means the lowest-grade jiangshi.
In the martial world, Jiangshi were divided into five grades: Copper, Iron, Jade, Silver, and Gold.
Copper Jiangshi are treated as the lowest grade.
But that doesn't mean you should take them lightly.
Even a Copper Jiangshi's skin was basically as hard as metal. At minimum, you needed to be a peak-level master capable of qi projection, such as sword qi or saber qi, to destroy one easily.
If you couldn't properly use qi projection?
Then you had to smash it apart with overwhelming brute force.
But do you think that's easy?
On top of that, most martial artists in the martial world used bladed weapons as their main armament.
Honestly, the best way to destroy a Copper Jiangshi was to crush its skull with a hammer. But how many martial artists went around carrying exotic weapons like that?
Strike one with a blade and the weapon wouldn't come away unscathed either.
A sword made of something like titanium alloy steel might be a bit different, but even then, smashing one apart easily is difficult.
That made even a Copper Jiangshi difficult and troublesome to deal with.
A martial artist at the first-rate level might at least be able to run away.
That's why there was even a joke going around that to fight jiangshi, shouldn't you train in hammer arts?
Hammer Arts were martial arts that used weapons such as warhammers. Hammers were exotic weapons to begin with, and martial arts built around them were vanishingly rare.
So anyone second-rate or below who encountered one could consider themselves dead.
"Anyway...... Would a Copper Jiangshi be stronger than a ghoul?"
Ghouls.
They're undead that appear often in the Dimensional Tower too, and their skin is like steel, with monstrous strength like a wild beast stronger than a human.
They look like shriveled human corpses, and their defining trait is that their behavior is beast-like as well.
On top of that, their hands were wreathed in Necromantic Mana, so their attacks weren't purely physical.
And their claws and teeth carry corpse poison, among other things.
They're quite dangerous bastards.
Once I thought that far, I remembered something else.
By hunters' standards, didn't they say you need to be at least level 40 to handle one comfortably?
My Copper Jiangshi's body toughness is similar to a ghoul's.......
Hmm~.
Then what.
For a moment, I wondered if that meant my corpse had become a ghoul-tier undead. Then I lightly shook my head.
A Copper Jiangshi is just tough-bodied.
Its limbs are stiff, so its movements are strange, and while its strength is a bit high, it doesn't wrap itself in Necromantic Mana like sword qi.
Stronger than a zombie, weaker than a ghoul.
That's about the level.
"Anyway......."
After thinking that far, I looked at Experimental Jiangshi No. 1, and it was a bit strange.
"This bastard...... is a jiangshi...... but its limbs aren't stiff? Huh?"
This was even more surprising than Experimental Jiangshi No. 1 becoming a Copper Jiangshi!
So I sent out my will and made it perform some martial arts.
Whoosh! Flash!
It moved as smoothly as a living person!
It was even displaying power as though it had trained in external arts!
And an even more surprising point.
Its internal energy was gone!
"Aha. I think I get the principle behind this."
Once the internal energy exceeded thirty years, it absorbed all of it and evolved. The internal energy vanished, and its body became a Copper Jiangshi of iron flesh and iron bones.
Come to think of it.
Making a Copper Jiangshi in the martial world followed a similar principle.
Practitioners trained in Jiangshi arts would infuse a corpse with ritual power and simmer it in medicinal concoctions until it became a Copper Jiangshi.
In other words, I replaced that process with Necromantic Mana and the Corpse-Spirit Heavenly Jiangshi Whole-Body Art.
The reason its body was still so flexible despite being a Copper Jiangshi was probably that it had not been created by turning an ordinary corpse into one through the Jiangshi Creation Method.
I had transformed a Walking Corpse—the lowest-grade undead—into a Jiangshi instead. That was probably why it could still use its limbs properly.
Interesting.
If that Corpse-Spirit Demon Lord bastard saw this, his eyes would've popped out of his head.
Anyway, if that's the case, the story changes.
"These bastards. They can properly use martial arts now, can't they?"
My mouth is watering.
I grinned.