A guan dao smashed down at incredible speeds, splitting the air until it arrived at a strong, slightly wrinkled hand. This hand absorbed and mitigated all the power from the guan dao, leaving it like the hand of a baby in an elder's palm - completely outclassed.

The wielder of the guan dao, a six year old boy, returned to his base stance, standing shirtless in a training field facing a middle-aged man in a traditional martial arts uniform. Once again, the guan dao was slashed down, to chiseled muscles in the boy's body all harmonizing for this one strike.

No Qi was used, no special technique. It was the power of the wooden guan dao and the strength of the six year old boy, combined in one strike to crash down onto the older man's hand.

With perfect form, that one strike was executed, the wooden guan dao giving off a feeling of unparalleled power and sharpness.

Another dull, fleshy thud as wood hit impossibly tough skin, and all that momentum, all that strength, was reduced to nothing as the six year old boy returned to his stance.

"Alright. I'm done with this. Give me your weapon and weights. This is pointless."

The Iron Fox spoke, and discontent flashed for a moment on Qian Feng's face before it was erased and replaced with a visage of respect as the boy did as he was told.

Gesturing him to follow him, the Iron Fox started down the mountain.

"Look here boy, for all those 'geniuses' sheltered by the clan, and for those old geezers taking charge, your training speed is something never seen before, something to be proud of. But I can tell you now. It is all superficial.

No matter how talented you are, no matter how hard you train, without life-and-death experiences, those skills will never truly be your own. You have the form down pat, boy, that's not the issue here. But you don't understand your own weapon, you can't see the essence of the guan dao. And the only way for that to happen is for you to face what makes a cultivator a cultivator: traversing the path between life and death.

What you're going to do is head into the forest surrounding this mountain. Stay near the mountain; all the truly strong creatures are strong enough to know not to come near here. You are not allowed to use Qi; in fact, the only time you can do anything only a cultivator would be able to do is when you train in the body tempering skill I gave you. You cannot accept the help of anyone else you might encounter. You will survive based strictly off your own skills and knowledge. You will fashion your own weapon out of the wood of a tree, you will make your own bandages. Should you break these rules, there is no need to come back up here - some other old geezer can train you.

I have given you the knowledge required for this - you have learned which plants are safe to eat, which beasts are easier to hunt, various survival techniques. The rest you now learn."

With that, the Iron Fox kicked Qian Feng off the mountain, something he was able to do without killing the boy because they had been descending the whole time. That, however, did not mean the now near-symbolic dismissal was anywhere near convenient.

Quite the opposite, in fact: the sound of Qian Feng crashing through the trees and landing hard on the ground would be heard by any beasts in the vicinity, prompting them to investigate the source of the commotion. That would inevitably lead to battle, which Qian Feng was woefully unprepared for.

No matter how talented or willfull he was, Qian Feng was still someone who never saw true danger in his previous life, so he was just barely in a better situation mentality-wise than a poor farmer's boy, if at all.

In other words, Qian Feng was screwed.

A body hit the ground, causing a loud thud and that body to groan softly before picking itself up.

Qian Feng looked around. He likely had no time to craft a weapon, so bare-handed it was. Thankfully, the Iron Fox hadn't neglected his foundation and had taken the time to teach him the basics of all the common weapons, taking the most time on the bare hand.

In this blissful moment of peace before the storm of blood, Qian Feng took time to reflect on what had happened over the past six months and what decisions he had made that put him in his current situation.

After combat training had started on the day following that fateful question, Qian Feng's body training had been pushed to the side. Well, "pushed to the side" in this case still means intensive body training, just not through the previous methods.

While Qian Feng's training before the combat section had started had all consisted of natural exercises(not using any special methods, just making use of the body's ability to adapt and strengthen in various ways), he now began with body tempering. These natural exercises built up a solid foundation, strengthening the body to near-inhuman levels just through relying on itself, but now Qian Feng was ready to use Qi to strengthen himself.

For that very same foundation, he had been ordered not to continue cultivating, as the blistering speed at which the young warrior cultivated was not good for his foundation, no matter how high-level his cultivation techniques were.

Qian Feng was also only given the body-tempering technique for his Earth affinity and told he would receive the Force affinity technique when he reached the Initial stage in his mastery of the technique, the Tian Mountain Technique.

Yes, in body tempering techniques and other strengthening skills, the rankings were the same as combat-oriented skills. Qian Feng, in fact, had learned all about the classifying of skills.

There were five types of skills: Offense, defense, movement, utility, and strengthening. The first four were all active - they required Qi and had only a certain time period at which they took effect. Offense skills were attacks that made use of Qi in certain ways to produce an effect, defense skills were skills that made use of Qi to defend the body through various methods, movement skills were skills that combined Qi use with skillful body movement to increase the speed at which one moved, and utility skills were the active skills that didn't fall into any of these categories - healing, for example, was a utility skill, as were crafting skills. Strengthening skills were passive; upon cultivated to the entry level, they maintained a constant effect and didn't require any Qi to keep working. Body tempering techniques and soul tempering techniques all fit into this category. As a rule of thumb, active skills were referred to as 'skills' while passive skills were referred to as 'techniques'. Cultivation techniques were not classified within the five types, however, and were a category all by themselves.

Skills were graded into five categories: Mortal, Earth, Heaven, True, and Divine. As a skill's grade increased, several things grew. First was their efficiency of conversion between Qi amount and power. If with a Mortal-class skill, 5 points of Qi equaled 3 points of power, with a Divine skill, 5 points of Qi equaled 500 points of power. However, if that was it, then Divine skills would be far more valuable than they were now. Along with conversion efficiency, their Qi quantity baseline would also increase exponentially. In other words, the amount of Qi needed to activate at the very least amount possible would also go up. While a Mortal skill could be activated by a Martial Warrior, a Divine skill could only be activated, according to the legends, above the Martial Overlord realm. Techniques were a little different, however. The higher grade a technique got, the more effects it would have at a certain level, which could be seen as the equivalent of Qi conversion efficiency. The equivalent of Qi quantity baseline was the fact that the higher grade, say, a body tempering technique was, the more strain it would place on the body in order to temper it, so a Martial Refiner couldn't cultivate any body tempering technique more violent than an especially gentle Earth grade technique.

Proficiency with skills was divided into five levels as well: Initial, Knowledge, Proficiency, Completion, Mastery.

Anyways, Qian Feng's training during the combat phase, not that it was over, consisted of combat training during the day, then body tempering during the night. Since the Tian Mountain Technique was an Earth-level technique, it would take Qian Feng, a mere level 3 Martial Warrior, quite some time to cultivate it to Initial stage, but Qian Feng knew he was close, perhaps 80% of the way there.

Tian Mountain Technique, before the Initial stage, tempered the skin. According to what was written in the scripture, once one's skin was able to withstand the sharpness of a Grade 2 sword, it would have passed into the Initial level. Of course, that was an extremely roundabout way to measure it - once Qian Feng passed into the Initial level, he would notice straight away the leap his skin had his toughness. After the Initial stage, the muscles were tempered, being finished by the Knowledge state, then the Completion stage improved the strength and toughness of his bones, and the final Mastery stage improved upon the internal organs, making it so that those scenes of rich young masters "coughing up blood" because their internal organs were just too weak(they had also been never insulted so in their lives!) would never happen.

Initially, Qian Feng had been confused about the measurement of a Grade 2 sword, but the Iron Fox had explained it to him: spirit treasures, as well as spirit beasts, were classified by grades, going from the weakest, Grade 1, to the strongest, Grade 9. There were supposedly grades above that, but those weapons were fit to be wielded only by Martial Saints and above.

Qian Feng was taken out of his pondering when the first spirit beast appeared, a Grade 2 Bone-Rending Tiger. Grade 2 beasts, in general, were comparable to a mid-level Martial Warrior stage cultivator, meaning that Qian Feng had no fear. Even if he had no weapons or armor, he was incredibly powerful for his stage due to his legendary cultivation techniques and his body strength. The only thing that fell behind(well, not "fell behind" as much as "didn't surpass his cultivation level") was his combat experience. And, hopefully, he would progress in that because of this training.

Getting into a basic bare-handed fighting stance that had been engraved into his bones quite a while ago, Qian Feng was just about to start circulating his Qi but remembered he wasn't allowed to do so.

As the tiger lunged at him, Qian Feng squatted down, moving underneath the huge beast, and quickly sent a blistering uppercut right into the soft stomach of the Bone-Rending Tiger. Qian Feng, unfortunately, was unable to sense the Qi or internal state of the tiger, else he would notice that that strike had disrupted its Qi and blood flow, causing severe internal injuries, weakening it drastically.

Now more wary of jumping and leaving so many spots open(spirit beasts began to develop intelligence above Grade 1), the tiger circled around its prey menacingly, slowly drawing closer.

Once it had gotten into the proper range, Qian Feng's attacker swatted him, forcing the boy to block the weaker blow with no sign of damage, but leaving him wide open to a ligtning-fast slash to his ribs.

And no matter how urgent this would be against a normal spirit beast, being in this situation while fighting a Bone-Rending Tiger was practically a death wish.

This was becase the beast had gotten its name for a reason - its incredibly sharp claws and teeth were indeed able to cut bone and pierce stone.

Unable to block, and unable to dodge, Qian Feng was left with no choice but to pull one final trick: he counterattacked, blasting out with an adrenaline and desperation-fueled kick in an attempt to send it flying. This failed, but did its job in the way that it pushed the beast back, even if it was by such a slight distance that the claw still grazed Qian Feng's cheek, drawing a line of blood. Thankfully, it also left the beast exposed and Qian Feng blasted several large teeth out of the tiger's mouth as he sent a right hook, mustering all his strength for the one move.

Having been slightly stunned, the tiger didn't resist as that blow landed, and as the injury was only aggravated because of it, the tiger was stunned once again for the next, killing blow: an angled strike to the throat, caving it in and ending the tiger's life.

All of this Qian Feng had done without thinking. In fact, his conscious mind hadn't even noticed what happened from the point the tiger lunged at him to when he killed it. If he had thought about it, or even been fully conscious during the fight, the result of what Qian Feng had just pulled would have been far different. It was only his master's training, that engraved the individual moves of fighting and its flow into his mind and body so deeply, that allowed Qian Feng to survive. If not for that, no matter how strong he was or how high his cultivation was(within reason), he would have lost. As someone with no acutal experience in life-or-death fighting, his mind was simply not fully equipped to handle the basic, primal fear a human had towards something like a tiger.

It took a few moments for what Qian Feng had just done to sink in. The tiger's every move and more so his response to it seemed unreal, and finally allowed Qian Feng to realize what his master had meant by throwing him out into the forest like that.

Qian Feng, not having any time to waste, started to fashion his own weapon. Having no other recourse, he ripped the Bone-Rending Tiger's tooth from its socket and used it to cut his kill open, planning on extracting both its magic core for later and its bones.

Every spirit beast had a magic core, which was the concentration of that beast's Qi collected throughout their entire life. It was where the entire cultivation of a spirit beast was located, except for very rare and unique creatures. This magic core could be used to help with cultivation as one absorbed the energy within, resulting in them being very valuable. It was also used to power some formations, be set into spirit gear, and a variety of other things.

Qian Feng couldn't cultivate, but he could still save the magic cores of the spirit beasts he killed for later, which would speed up his cultivation.

Qian Feng also wanted the bones of the spirit beast, but only because he had been kicked into the wilds without any weapon in hand, so if he wanted one, Qian Feng would be forced to manufacture it. He couldn't even form a weapon from Qi, so he was forced to trespass into an unfamiliar territory - crafting.

Normally, Qian Feng could have gotten by relatively well in crafting with skillfull use of Qi, but with the rules he had to follow, Qian Feng was forced to actually rely on his crafting skills, which were severely lacking.

But there was no time to mope! Another beast that Qian Feng had to contend with likely drew nearer and nearer, and the less finished his weapon was, the higher his chance of death was.

Qian Feng placed the magic core of the beast in the bag that his master had given him. He took out the longest bone he could find in the giant tiger's body, which was thankfully long enough so that the top part could be sharpened to make an edged spear - not a guan dao, but close enough so that it would work, and Qian Feng was unlikely to find a better option.

Just as he was preparing to sharpen the bone against one of the teeth of the tiger, a foreboding aura appeared as a giant silhoutte emerged, Qian Feng's pupils widening as he beheld what was soon to be, most likely, his killer.