With Liang Chen's poison taking care of Yau Dou, the Zun twins, and the man who Tien Huang had sent along to keep an eye on them, Liang Chen was afforded the chance to let out a breath. The two adults returned to their own business and Liang Chen had the two children head over to their own house, the poison would naturally dispel over the next few hours.
Liang Chen sat down on the couch that was placed in the living room, leaning into the soft backrest and letting out another short breath. It was a strange sensation, being so grievously wounded that he couldn't even channel his Qi properly, only barely able to manoeuvre it through his body. His Anima Essence and Fiendgod Essence weren't as restricted, he just had to pull them away from repelling the eroding force to use them, but as doing that slowed his healing speed he didn't want to do it unless he had to.
But it was also a new experience so he couldn't consider it all bad, it helped him focus a bit more on his two other types of energy, which he often didn't use as much as he should. There was also another slight bonus to his current situation, the way he was being treated.
Due to his nature, especially how it evolved over time, there had basically been only four different ways he had been treated ever since he first started cultivating. The first was disregard, people considering him beneath their notice, the second was hatred, people disliking what he did or how he treated them. The third was awe at either his strength or abilities, and the final one was fear, people scared of what he had done or what he might do to them.
As a result, the number of times he had actually been treated like this, like a mostly normal person, had grown so few that he could probably count them on one hand. It would end sooner or later, it was destined to, which was why he enjoyed it for a bit now while he could. But of course, enjoying the rare sensation didn't mean that he was going to get too lax.
"When you do your little scouting, make sure you stay away from the central area of the mansion. You can most likely escape unharmed, but if you can avoid getting detected at all then that would be for the best."
There was no response as he just spoke out into an empty room, but he was certain that Yumao had gotten his message. With his law of darkness and ability to swim around within said darkness, there would be few places he couldn't sneak around and investigate. As for the central areas of the mansion, the person there wasn't bothering to hide his aura in the slightest so anyone with even the smallest bit of sensitivity would be able to detect them straight away.
Liang Chen felt a faint seeping sensation from his dantian so he closed his eyes and crossed his legs. He had full trust in Yumao so with him running out and about he could spend this private time to fully focus on his own wounds and body. And since that was the decision he had come to, he immediately sank his own sight into his body and observed the inside.
And as he inspected the inside of his own body in a much deeper fashion than he previously had, he could once again truly empathize with why Tien Huang and Yau Dou looked at him with so much pity. Most of his veins, especially the aspect that carried his Qi, the meridians, had been practically completely erased. Some of the veins on the right side of his body still remained, but they were left with nothing to connect to and were thus mostly useless.
It was a state that would leave most people dead within the hour, but Liang Chen was able to maintain his life thanks to the fact that he had reached the Mortal God realm in body cultivation. And thanks to his powerful bloodline and exalted law of the void, he managed to fight back against the eroding energy and even had a chance to fully heal from what should be certain death or crippling.
His situation would be completely different if he was lacking any one of these things, but all the small coincidences had stacked up over time to help him out now. It was definitely something to be thankful about, although he was a bit dissatisfied with the fact that he had basically been saved by coincidences. But as there was nothing he could do about it, he could only disregard the thought and focus on the scattered veins that remained on his right side.
"Now then... how do you buggers look?"
He still had a bit of the eroding force from the Origin Beast weapon inside his body, but he would be able to fully expel it in five or so days if he maintained his current speed. After that, all that remained was reconstructing his veins, especially the meridian aspect of them so that there wouldn't be a problem with how his Qi flowed. He was confident he could do it practically blindfolded, but since he had a bisected vein right in front of him, there was no harm in taking a closer look to learn a bit more.
Inspecting the inside of his veins in this manner was completely different from the way he usually looked at his veins, which was a far more superficial manner. And now that he was actually looking at them in their bisected state and studied their intricacies with his full attention, he noticed an odd fact.
"That... doesn't seem quite right, no?"
He had already finished altering his veins to the merged element he had settled on for his body, his Void Storm. It was altering them and his skin that pushed him into the Mortal God realm and he had done so when he helped Yumao upgrade his own bloodline. He had, of course, expected that his body cultivation technique, which had been created by a true and very powerful Universal Heart, would fully alter every last bit of his veins.
But to his surprise, there was a part, or rather an aspect, of his veins that hadn't been altered. The aspect of his veins in charge of moving his Qi around, the meridians, which were actually mostly conceptual, actually hadn't been altered. Of course, as they were more conceptual than physical in nature, they were just set paths that the Qi flowed along, he couldn't actually see that they weren't changed.
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He couldn't see it, but he could feel it as he fully drove his mind into his bisected veins. While the veins themselves were fully entrenched with the sensation of his Void Storm law, he could detect a very faint path which wasn't entrenched by the sensation and instead felt more like what normal Qi felt like.
It wasn't a very big thing, he wouldn't even have noticed it if it wasn't for the current horrid state of his veins, and he had never encountered any problems in the past due to it. But now that he had first detected it, how could it not nag at his mind?
Xiang Hong had reached such a realm that Liang Chen refused to believe that he didn't know about this aspect, he must definitely have noticed that his meridians weren't altered along with his veins. This, of course, raised a very simple question, why didn't the cultivation technique mention the meridians even once?
It was hard to believe that it was because altering the meridians was impossible, laws themselves were conceptual yet here they were being used to alter the body. So it stood to reason that even the meridians could be altered as one pleased, hence, Xiang Hong must have had a reason behind not including them in the cultivation technique.
Liang Chen swiped his interspatial ring and took out a vial containing a dark blue liquid, pouring out a single drop onto his right hand. He absorbed the water-element liquid into his body and brought it up to his bisected vein, diverting some of his Fiendgod Essence away from the eroding force and bringing it over to the same vein.
He merged the Fiendgod Essence and the drop of liquid, pushing them up against the meridian that he could just barely sense. And the moment the two came into contact, Liang Chen felt such pain that he almost thought that his soul had collapsed. If he had to rank the pain, it would only be beneath the pain he felt when he first bathed in Demonic beast blood and inadvertently activated the first ability of his Sebettu bloodline.
But he endured that pain so he would endure this one, his soul quivering uncontrollably as that single drop of merged energy fused with the meridian. And after just a few seconds, which felt like several years, a very small section of his meridian had taken on the same property as the rest of his body.
Liang Chen let out a long breath, his face unknowingly having become damp with sweat from the horrible pain. The merger was a success, now he just had to check what sort of result it brought about. And the result could be summed up with one word, incongruous. The Fiendgod Essence he tried to push through the meridian flowed as it normally would until it touched upon the small altered section, where it suddenly sped up drastically, nearly leaving Liang Chen's control.
It was like a tranquil river's water was suddenly forced to speed up until it became a raging rapid, the riverbed remained the same as usual so it wasn't able to contain the now ferocious water. The speed certainly increased, Liang Chen even felt that the Fiendgod Essence had gotten slightly stronger while flowing through that small section of the meridian that was the same as it. But if he couldn't control it then it wouldn't be worth a damn thing and would just be a liability.
Of course, that alone was far from enough to make Liang Chen completely disregard it, and he also refused to believe that Xiang Hong had left the meridians out of his technique because of such a small reason. But in the end, whatever reasons Xiang Hong had, his life had long since been ended so the odds of Liang Chen ever finding out the truth were slim at best. And as such, it was up to him to decide his next steps.
"...I'll take it, the path I've stepped onto is already filled with thorns anyway."
He had chosen a thorny and hate-filled path for himself, one fraught with countless difficulties. And since there were already so many difficulties, it really didn't matter if he tacked on another one, it just meant that he would have to spend a bit of time altering his meridians and training his control. The end result should be satisfactory enough to make it worth it, that was something he felt confident in.
But he had no intentions of starting the altering of his meridians straight away, he first had to expel the remaining eroding force and learn a bit more about his surroundings. Should he learn that this city was safe enough, he was considering taking the chance to alter his meridians straight away, he had to reconstruct his veins anyway.
But that was a thought to think about in the future, for now he decided to just focus on getting rid of the remnant energy that still tried to erode him. If he was on his own, he would just spend the next five days doing this so that he could finish the task. But he wasn't alone right now, the young Zun twins barging into his house one and a half hours after he made them return to their own house.
"Big Brother Chen, the Yuong Master has returned!"
"Come, Big Brother Chen! The Young Master has said that we can go around the city so that he can show you the sights!"