On the second day since Young Miss Huang Biren had gone to the party, she was fully expected to return to the Huang mansion, but she didn't. Most people in the estate thought she might have simply decided to stay at the royal palace for one more day, so no alarms went off. The only one who thought differently was the white wolf, who knew the young miss never changed her plans so casually. To make things even more difficult, the patriarch had also left the capital for official business and wasn't expected to return for at least a week.
The wolf was genuinely worried about the human girl, but he tried to push this nagging worry down as much as possible so he could begin his new cultivation. Unlike the catastrophic disasters that had nearly extinguished his life force before, this maiden attempt entirely spared the wolf from death's icy threshold. He successfully harnessed the raw power of his surroundings, allowing the raw qi to flood his being with a seamless, unrivaled fluidity. He then began to carefully circulate the qi through his meridians before directing it into his source core, located near his belly button. Finally, he directed the purified qi straight into his bones.
When the qi entered his source core, the wolf felt as though he had transcended. His entire essence was violently reforged, shattering his natural limits and propelling his power to a higher state of existence. His perception became razor-sharp, granting the beast a godlike clarity that pierced through the veil of the physical world. His bones grew drastically harder, and the wolf felt as though they had become completely unbreakable. This was all due to a single circulation of his new technique, and yet the increase in cultivation was far beyond what the wolf had ever expected. Throughout the night, the wolf cultivated as though there was no tomorrow. Even the most marginal breakthrough sparked a fire of hope, making the impossible feel inevitable.
When the sun finally rose, the white wolf opened his eyes. In them, one could see pure excitement mixed with the burning flames of vengeance. The wolf had created his technique with inspiration from human cultivation, so some structural similarities couldn't be avoided. The wolf had officially entered the Bone-Forging Realm, the first realm of human cultivation. He was no longer walking the traditional cultivation path of beasts. He hated humans, but he had to admit that their cultivation path seemed better, at least regarding the levels he had witnessed so far. This wasn't to say the white wolf had found no issues with the human path.
Human cultivation traditionally relies on siphoning the diluted essence of origin qi from the vast, untapped reservoirs of the world. Origin qi is nothing more than a microscopic fragment of the boundless, chaotic ocean that is true world qi. Humans cultivate using origin qi not because it's the most powerful, but because it's one of the easiest to control and doesn't harm the fragile human body. Demonic beasts, on the other hand, absorb world qi without choosing any of its specific components; they simply use the raw world qi itself to cultivate.
The white wolf speculated that a demonic beast in a certain cultivation realm would be far more powerful compared to a human in the equivalent realm. Armed with this theory, the white wolf had created a unique technique that could use untamed world qi for cultivation while still following the human principles of refinement, which seemed far more thought-out and organized for maximum growth in power.
The white wolf didn't know what long-term consequences this untested technique would have on his body and mind, but he didn't care. He was still far too focused on vengeance to analyze the spiritual dangers carefully. Had he paused to reflect, he would have unearthed the grim truth that he was treading a forbidden graveyard of failed pioneers who had once dared to merge the Beast and Human cultivation paths.
While reaching early Bone-Forging seemed like a modest step, the fact that he conquered this milestone in a single night was nothing short of a miraculous anomaly. In the days that followed, the wolf cultivated day and night, taking only short breaks to check if the young miss had returned. As the second day vanished with no sign of Huang Biren, the wolf ascended rapidly to mid-Bone-Forging, his skeleton hardening into impenetrable fortress steel. The only thing the wolf worried about was the young miss, and this intense worry for a human female made him feel as though he was actively betraying his heart of vengeance. He tried to mask his concern with cold pragmatism, labeling the girl a simple necessity for his survival, but the undercurrent of unease continued to gnaw at his soul.