It was long after sunrise when Cade finally closed the map. After a dozen hours spent poring over the contents of the crystal, his initial excitement had been brutally quenched by an ocean of destroyed palaces and ruined grounds that showed very little variation. Finding anything within that mess was going to be a huge challenge.

  The Divine Realm was humongous, and the map covered a roughly circular area with a radius of 15,000 miles, give or take 1,000. The crystal not only contained the map itself but also many notes and landmarks. Searching for a sprawling courtyard with a large transportation formation and an adjacent intact palace shouldn’t have been a problem—if not for the sheer amount of land he had to cover.

  Cade’s vision didn’t show him an exact route to the underground chapel—chapel felt like a fitting word for a place with such a sanctified aura—but instead took him straight to his destination at an insane speed, blurring everything around him beyond identification. Not only did he not know which direction he should be searching in, he had no guarantee the area from his vision was even on the map.

  With less than three weeks until the opening of the Life and Death Divine Realm, he was now faced with a difficult decision.

  Should I continue searching and risk wasting my time, or should I focus on training?

  For what felt like the fiftieth time, he analyzed the vision—perfectly preserved in his memory—trying to find anything that stood out. It started with an image of the Realm, but the area lacked anything unique that could help him locate it on the map. Then came the sense of flight at tremendous speed, followed by the first clear image of the large courtyard.

  If I could slow down this initial rush, maybe I could find a clue to point me in the right direction.

  Releasing a dispirited sigh, Cade left his realm of consciousness. Today was his first training session with Brickwall and King, as the latter had sent him a message last night saying he’d appreciate a few pointers. Sparring would take no more than a few hours in the evening, and with it still being early morning, Cade had time to spare.

  He decided to work up a sweat with a puppet for a while—it had been some time since he last entered the training chamber.

  After paying his fee to a clerk, he entered the chamber and promptly adjusted the automaton’s settings: cultivation to early Foundation Establishment, difficulty to 4. It took him only three exchanges to realize this setting was no longer challenging—the puppet moved far too slowly. He could clearly remember how punishing the same difficulty had been the last time he trained.

  The realization immediately improved his mood. While he did feel stronger, faster, and generally more capable, this was real, tangible proof of progress.

  Cade first changed the cultivation of the puppet to the middle stage, then to the late stage. Eventually, he settled on the great circle of Foundation Establishment.

  It still wasn’t enough.

  His current battle power was far higher than before. Not only had he advanced by a full stage—doubling the number of spherules in his muscles and bones—but he had also integrated the devil king hydra’s laws into his body. Buzzing with positive energy, Cade increased the puppet’s difficulty from 4 to a conservative 5, then to 6, finally settling on 7. At this level, he once again found himself pushed to his limits, and the sensation of exhausting himself in a dire battle was priceless.

  This was the true road to progress: hard training bordering on total depletion, followed by recovery, only for the work to begin again as soon as possible.

  He loved it.

  Each time he landed a serious hit on the automaton, Cade laughed like a maniac. He fought by combining Four Faces of War with Feral Path, and with all of his attributes improved, he found it much easier to perform some of the more advanced techniques. He was still in the beginner stage, but with every drop of blood spent, he could feel himself improving as his skills and instincts adjusted to his significantly enhanced body.

  When it came to his physical attributes, they were all greatly augmented, but neither the growth in his speed nor strength came close to the profound leap in his regenerative ability. It was now utterly inhuman, all thanks to the hydra blood. He could only imagine what it would be like if he shapeshifted.

  After six hours of nonstop fighting, and despite being struck well over two hundred times, Cade had no trouble recovering. Whenever the puppet scored a shallow wound, his body closed it within a couple of heartbeats; deeper injuries took only a few breaths. A grave wound wouldn’t take more than an hour to heal—unless he lost a limb, and he wasn’t keen on testing that.

  He had to take a few short breaks to refill his voracious heart, but aside from that, it was a relentless, grueling battle against a soulless, fearless opponent. Every strike the automaton made was intended to end him, or at least cripple him.

  During that time, Cade began to realize his own fighting style had started to resemble the automaton’s. With his recovery now in such a superior state, he could push the difficulty much further, no longer afraid of taking a serious hit as long as it gave him an opening to land a definitive killing blow.

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  Not one to deliberate for long, Cade cranked the puppet’s difficulty setting to 10.

  The result was a fight most cultivators wouldn’t have survived—not without powerful defensive arts and strong protective artifacts. Because he wanted to improve as quickly as possible in both Asura combat arts, those were the only techniques he used. The experience was tormenting and exhausting, posing a real, meaningful threat to his life. Yet, the satisfaction he felt was unlike anything else—perhaps second only to breaking through.

  This long, brutal training session, and the elation it brought with it, helped clear Cade’s mind. Despite the pain, the mental drain of facing a puppet with lethal intent, and the many liters of blood spilled, he came to a firm conclusion: skipping training was not an option, no matter how important finding the chapel might be.

  He would not trade a faint hope of gaining a boon for a tangible, measurable increase in strength earned through blood and sweat inside the training chamber.

  Most importantly, he would not trade away how he felt right now.

  Yet the experience yielded an unexpected gain. It pushed him to think outside the box, granting him a flash of revelation.

  When he had first fought the puppet on the old settings, he could literally run circles around it. While his agility had clearly improved, it wasn’t just physical speed—his reaction time had increased dramatically as well. His mind was processing everything faster, more efficiently. To him, the puppet had simply been moving far more slowly than before.

  That realization gave him an idea for a new approach to finding the chapel.

  There were pills commonly used by addicts—and occasionally scholars and cultivators—that sped up all mental processes, allowing for heightened perception and comprehension. A minute of sensation could be stretched into an hour of sustained experience, or so it was said.

  Such pills weren’t spiritual in nature but entirely physical, meaning they should work on him—assuming he could get them past his voracious heart’s… well, voraciousness. Unfortunately, addicts who relied on these pills rarely lived long. The black-market versions were notoriously low in quality, packed with harmful toxins.

  Luckily, Sword Dao possessed a massive storage of high-quality pills with far greater purity. Even those would cause toxins to accumulate over time, but the process was much slower.

  Mentally fatigued from sustaining extreme levels of concentration for so many hours, Cade decided to end the session for the day. He needed to recover for the evening’s sparring session, so he directed his steps toward the Pill Division.

  The Pill Division was an enormous, secure warehouse located on one of the middle levels of the citadel. It stored both finished pills and raw ingredients, while its workers managed shipments to and from the Tower of Arts, whose alchemists were hired by the monastery to produce pills according to Sword Dao standards.

  “Apologies for interrupting your work, Brother. I’m in need of some pills,” Cade said as he approached one of several outer disciples seated at their desks, taking the chair opposite him.

  The clerk was busy adding new lines to a thick ledger, its pages filled with dense columns of cramped writing.

  “Mhm,” the man mumbled without lifting his gaze.

  After a few breaths passed with no further response, Cade spoke again.

  “Could you please prepare five lightning thought pills for me?”

  “Mhm,” the man muttered, sounding more like maybe than agreement.

  “Junior Brother,” Cade said, smiling, though his voice had lost its warmth, “I’d appreciate it if you put down the quill for a moment and helped me out.”

  The Pill Division workers were known for their arrogance. Pills were essential to qi cultivators and body refiners alike, and offending the staff often meant receiving the oldest, lowest-quality pills with one’s monthly stipend. However, Cade was now part of the inner court, and he didn’t care about the quality of his stipend.

  The man sighed and finally looked up, seemingly unbothered by the fact that Cade outranked him.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy? Wait like everyone else,” he scoffed, returning to his scribbling.

  There were many things Cade could tolerate. Disrespect—especially after he had shown courtesy—was not one of them.

  “Junior Brother,” Cade snarled, smashing his palm into the desk with a resounding crack, “you either walk into that warehouse and fetch me those pills, or I swear you’ll end up in the infirmary. I’m happy to pay the fine.”

  The disciple sprang to his feet with a girlish yelp, ink spilling across the desk—fortunately missing his precious writing. Despite Cade using only a fraction of his strength, the reinforced wooden surface split down the middle.

  Every other clerk in the room looked up in alarm.

  “What’s going on here?” a man in his late thirties demanded as he approached. Dressed in high-quality dark silk, he was Sword Dao staff—neither servant nor disciple—one of those employed for administration and logistics.

  “I need five lightning thought pills,” Cade said flatly. “This disciple was about to get them for me. Actually—no. I need ten. Bring them to me. Now.”

  “Do you think you can just barge in here and make demands?” the administrator snapped, planting his hands on his hips.

  Cade slowly stood, his towering frame forcing the man to look up. The administrator went pale and took an instinctive step back.

  “I don’t have time for your bullshit,” Cade growled, spreading five fingers inches from the man’s face. “You have five minutes to find me ten pills. High quality. If you bring me old, musty crap, don’t blame me for correcting your vision—painfully.”

  The Asura then clenched his large, calloused fist, finger joints creaking under the pressure.

  Whatever thoughts of resistance the administrator might have entertained had rapidly evaporated. With his cultivation at the great circle of Qi Condensation, Cade would need exactly half a slap to send him back into the great circle of reincarnation. Violence was forbidden within the Monastery—but that didn’t mean it never happened. There was a wide gray area where one could get away with it by paying a large fine, so long as the damage remained mostly superficial.

  The man quickly swallowed his pride, and a few minutes later, Cade walked out with ten high-quality lightning thought pills. He didn't mind paying a little extra, as long as the potency was assured.

  Back at the house, he swallowed one immediately.

  As expected, it did nothing.

  His voracious heart devoured it, converting the pill into a trace of spiritual energy. Cade exhaled the impurities in a thin wisp of pale smoke.

  Fortunately, he already had an idea.

  He picked up his sect token and sent a message to Elisa—the experienced healer who had once looked after Jade. Knowing how busy she was, he didn’t expect a reply so quickly.

  “Do you have a death wish?!”