Sunny stared intensely at the Phantom Ash Scorpion resting silently at his booted feet.
To the Vanguard cohort, the beast appeared as a perfect, flawless nightmare of the Demonic Path.
It was fast, venomous, and completely silent.
But Sunny, fueled by a potent mixture of transmigration-induced paranoia and a desperate desire to not die, was overthinking everything.
When he critically analyzed the scorpion's combat potential against the righteous Orthodox Sects, he realized it was far from perfect.
First of all, it was bound to the earth. It possessed no levitation arrays and lacked the innate ability to manipulate the winds.
If an Orthodox swordmaster took to the skies on a flying sword and began hurling localized radiant-fire talismans from above, the scorpion would become nothing more than a grounded, panicking target.
Furthermore, the scorpion's primary combat style relied on stealth and assassination.
While its obsidian carapace looked intimidating, it was actually designed for flexibility, not for withstanding direct, heavy impacts.
Sunny had spent his morning reading the gruesome field-reports delivered by the sect's scouts.
The Orthodox Paladins utilized heavy, light-infused warhammers.
A single, solid strike to the scorpion's cephalothorax would instantly shatter its spirit core.
Unlike the mindless sludge-abominations that could survive being chopped into a dozen pieces, the scorpion's anatomy was centralized. Once the head was crushed, the toxic venom in its tail became entirely useless. The beast would simply twitch and die, leaving Sunny completely defenseless.
'I have to increase its physical defense,' Sunny concluded internally, feeling a fresh wave of anxiety wash over him. 'If this bug dies, the righteous cultivators are going to turn me into a human pincushion.'
Because their souls were tethered through the System's absolute binding, any catastrophic damage the scorpion suffered would send a massive psychic backlash directly into Sunny's mind. He needed his beast to be an impenetrable fortress.
But how did one increase the defense of a demonic insect without access to top-tier defensive elixirs?
Searching through the dark, chaotic memories of the body's original owner, Sunny recalled a terrifying breed of monsters known as the Abyssal Grave-Hulks.
They were towering, mindless giants forged from stitched corpses.
The Grave-Hulks possessed no innate armor. Instead, the sect's beastmasters would chain them to the bottom of the abyssal ravines and subject them to constant, bone-shattering impacts from falling boulders.
The trauma would tear their necrotic flesh apart. The beastmasters would then force-feed them high-grade corpse-bloom petals, forcing the wounds to heal instantly.
The newly healed flesh would grow back significantly denser.
By repeating this horrific cycle of destruction and forced regeneration, the Grave-Hulks eventually developed layers of impenetrable, calcified scar tissue that could deflect flying swords.
They utilized brutal, agonizing trauma to force a physical evolution.
Sunny looked down at his Phantom Ash Scorpion. The System's interface hovered quietly in his vision, offering no simple "upgrade defense" button.
To fuse a heavy, defensive earth-attribute material into the scorpion, the system required the beast's carapace to be in a state of 'structural malleability.'
In short, Sunny needed to physically crack the shell to force the beast's dark Qi to rush to the surface to repair it.
'This is going to be terrible for both of us...' Sunny thought, letting out a slow, silent sigh.
He stood up from his spine-throne and walked over to a heavy weapon rack. He bypassed the elegant, blood-drinking swords and picked up a crude, massive mallet forged from Resentful-Iron.
It was a weapon meant for an ogre, radiating a freezing, heavy aura.
Just lifting the mallet made Sunny's uncultivated, aristocratic muscles scream in protest.
"Do not move," Sunny commanded.
The Phantom Ash Scorpion immediately flattened itself against the obsidian floor, its ruby eyes glowing with absolute obedience.
Sunny gritted his teeth, raised the massive Resentful-Iron mallet high above his head, and brought it down hard against the beast's thickest backplate.
The sound was deafening, like a temple bell being struck by a meteor.
The heavy wooden handle of the mallet vibrated violently, sending a shocking wave of kinetic recoil straight up Sunny's pale arms.
He nearly dropped the weapon, his elbows popping painfully.
The scorpion flinched, a low hiss escaping its mandibles, but it did not dare retreat.
'Ow! Mother of mercy, my shoulders are going to dislocate!' Sunny screamed in his mind, desperately trying to mask the wince of pain threatening to break his cold, emotionless facade.
'Did I eat an entire bowl of weakness for breakfast? This body has zero upper body strength!'
He forced his trembling fingers to tighten their grip on the mallet. He needed to loosen the carapace just a fraction more.
"Endure." Sunny whispered coldly.
Another massive strike. The scorpion let out a sharper hiss, its body trembling under the immense physical pressure.
Standing near the entrance flap of the pavilion, Disciple Zhao was practically paralyzed with horror.
Zhao had come to deliver the morning casualty reports, but what he witnessed froze the blood in his veins.
The Young Master was relentlessly, mercilessly bludgeoning his own perfect, Elite-grade fiend with a crude iron mallet.
Zhao watched the Young Master's face. Sunny's pale aristocratic features were locked in a mask of supreme, chilling apathy.
He wasn't even using demonic Qi to strike; he was using pure, raw physical force, drawing out the beast's suffering with slow impacts.
'The beast is entirely submissive, yet he tortures it just to discipline its soul! He is breaking its perfect shell merely to remind it of his absolute tyranny! If he treats his greatest weapon with such casual cruelty, what horrific torment awaits a minor servant like me if I ever displease him?'
"Y-Young Master!" Zhao suddenly choked out, unable to bear the terrifying tension any longer.
"Allow this worthless servant to beat the fiend for you!"
Sunny paused mid-swing, his arms trembling so badly.
He slowly turned his head, his glowing crimson eyes locking onto the kneeling disciple.
Internally, Sunny was crying tears of relief. 'Yes! Please! Take this stupid hammer before my spine snaps in half! I am so tired!'
But outwardly, Sunny could not break character. If he handed the mallet over, it would look like weakness. He had to maintain the illusion of an unfathomable demonic lord.
"..."
Sunny simply stared at Zhao in absolute, freezing silence. The heavy, dark aura of the pavilion seemed to press down on the disciple's shoulders.
Zhao whimpered, realizing his fatal mistake. He had presumed to interfere with the Young Master's personal methods. He had questioned the necessity of the torture.
"I spoke out of turn!" Zhao cried frantically, backing away on his knees.
"I am blind to the profound depths of your flesh-mending techniques! I shall leave at once!"
Zhao scrambled out of the tent, fleeing as if a horde of radiant paladins were chasing him.
Sunny slowly lowered the heavy mallet, letting the heavy iron head rest against the floor. He took a long, deep breath, trying to steady his violently shaking hands.
'I am never doing manual labor again. If the bug dies, it dies...'
Leaving the scorpion to process the dark Qi rushing to its bruised carapace, Sunny stiffly walked over to the reinforced iron cage in the corner of the pavilion.
He expected to see the wretched, starving Shadow-Ghoul Ape cowering in the shadows. Instead, he was greeted by a notification hovering brightly in his vision.
[Shadow-Ghoul Ape has successfully condensed dark essence.]
[Shadow-Ghoul Ape has reached Tier 2 (Peak).]
Sunny stared at the skeletal monkey. The beast had literally just sat in a cage for three days, passively chewing on the pile of Corrupted Spirit Stones Sunny had dumped inside, and it had naturally leveled up. It hadn't been hit with a hammer once.
The logic of demonic cultivation was infuriating. A beast's level was merely a reflection of the density of the dark essence saturating its core. Like a parasitic weed, as long as it was drowning in high-grade necrotic energy, it would passively mutate and grow stronger. The expensive Corrupted Spirit Stones had simply accelerated a process that normally took years of hunting and scavenging.
'So the monkey gets to eat snacks and get stronger, and I have to swing a hundred-pound hammer until my arms fall off?' Sunny thought bitterly, rubbing his aching shoulders.
He walked over to his silk-draped cot, collapsed face-first onto the pillows, and instantly fell asleep, his exhausted mind completely shutting down.
***
While the other disciples of Cohort Seven were thrown into the meat grinder of the front lines, fighting bloody skirmishes against the Orthodox Sect's vanguard, Sunny utilized his status as the Vanguard Commander to remain safely sequestered in the rear camp.
He spent his days executing his bizarre, exhausting "carapace loosening" routine, and his nights sleeping.
Though a week of clumsy mallet strikes wasn't enough to physically transform the scorpion's shell, the constant minor trauma, combined with the incredibly dense ambient death aura of the battlefield, had a profound effect.
The Phantom Ash Scorpion's appetite became voracious.
Every evening, Sunny would order Zhao to drag the toxic, venom-soaked carcasses of defeated Orthodox beasts into the pavilion.
The scorpion would devour them whole, absorbing their residual spiritual energy and lethal toxins directly into its own core.
By the end of the seventh day, the beast had grown nearly a full foot in length. Its obsidian carapace was thicker, gleaming with a sickly, purple iridescence.
[Phantom Ash Scorpion has absorbed sufficient essence.]
[Phantom Ash Scorpion has reached Tier 3 (Peak).]
[Structural malleability achieved. Host may now initiate Tier 4 Fusion sequence.]
Sunny stared at the blue text, a genuine, terrifying smile finally crossing his face.