He sat in silence, legs crossed amid the grey-white powder of spent Primeval Stones, his consciousness fully submerged in the Aperture that had just completed its transformation.
At the base of that white membrane — now circulating with a vitality and toughness several times greater than before — a shallow layer of pale-red Red Iron Primeval Essence lay quietly dormant, radiating a brilliant, unmistakable light.
Looking at that Red Iron Essence, the faint smile in Lin Mu's eyes gradually faded. In its place came a state of extreme clarity and deep reflection.
This breakthrough looked smooth and inevitable, but resources only accounted for seven parts in ten. The remaining three parts were knowledge.
He ran through it silently in his mind.
Black Blood Stockade's foundations were simply too shallow.
He had read through their old breakthrough methods and crude techniques for circulating Primeval Essence before — they were riddled with inefficiencies and flaws.
The reason he had opened the door to Rank 2 with such ease was that his mind contained the entire vast knowledge of the original work.
He had been standing on the shoulders of a giant.
Fang Yuan, reborn with five hundred years of experience, possessed methods as numerous as stars in the sky, his cultivation techniques honed to perfection by centuries of refinement.
When Lin Mu made his push, he had discarded Black Blood Stockade's brute-force approach entirely and applied the most textbook-perfect, most efficient, lowest-loss breakthrough methods described in the original story.
It was this overwhelming disparity in knowledge that had allowed him to complete the transformation precisely and cleanly after consuming three hundred Primeval Stones.
Yet thinking of Fang Yuan brought Lin Mu no satisfaction.
Instead, it was as though a thousand-jin boulder had been pressed onto his chest, making each breath feel heavier.
"I only borrowed his experience, and it carried me this far. What does that say about the man himself? That killing star who would sacrifice anything for immortality — just how terrifying is he?"
A faint cold sweat seeped down Lin Mu's back.
As his cultivation rose and he touched higher and higher levels of this world, a strong premonition settled in him.
The ten-thousand mountains were vast, but the storms sweeping the Southern Border would eventually drag every Gu Master into their currents.
The day he truly crossed paths with that old demon, perhaps even clashed with him across the game board, might not be so far off.
"Strength. Always strength. What I have now is nowhere near enough."
Lin Mu cut off that unsettling train of thought and dragged his mind back to the present.
The immediate priority was to verify his true combat floor after crossing this major realm boundary.
"Rise."
With a slight mental nudge, he drew a single thread of pale-red Red Iron Primeval Essence from the shallow layer at the base of his Aperture — a wisp no thicker than a strand of hair.
The next instant, a startling change occurred.
"Hum!"
The moment that hair-thin thread of Red Iron Essence entered his body, the muscles across Lin Mu's surface shuddered.
The killer move Earth Ring Body — which had previously required a large surge of dark-green peak-stage Primeval Essence and a full breath of time to fully form — condensed into a solid ring of light around his legs in one-tenth of a breath.
And the drain on his Primeval Essence was barely perceptible.
Lin Mu stood, threw a casual punch in the chamber, and the earth-hued light swirled as the air tore apart with a sharp crack.
"Too easy..."
He looked at his own fists, his eyes filled with genuine shock.
Maintaining Earth Ring Body — which boosted both defense and speed — now felt as natural as breathing. The Primeval Essence in his Aperture seemed to barely move at all.
Only in this moment did he truly confirm the iron law written in blood throughout the original story:
Between Rank 1 and Rank 2 lies an unbridgeable qualitative gulf.
A single unit of initial-stage Rank 2 Red Iron Primeval Essence carries the potency and purity of ten — perhaps twelve — units of peak Rank 1 dark-green Primeval Essence.
A sharp, excited light flickered in Lin Mu's eyes.
With this grade of dense, refined high-tier Primeval Essence behind him, his combat system had finally reached its true complete form.
He could now simultaneously and effortlessly drive Earth Ring Body for extreme mobility and defense, activate the Dust Escape Gu to generate a field that obscured vision, and layer on top of that the Metal Rend Gu for an all-angle, unrelenting main assault.
Multi-core. Full output.
And he no longer had to worry about burning through his Aperture in three breaths the way he used to.
"If I faced Lin Feng, Lin Yan, or any of those so-called peak Rank 1 geniuses right now..."
A cold, ruthless smile pulled at the corner of Lin Mu's mouth.
"Whatever trump cards they're hiding, as long as it isn't a Rank 3 killer move, I can crush every single one of them with absolute, overwhelming superiority."
But.
That brief surge of satisfaction at the power he now commanded lasted only a moment before his relentlessly rational, almost mercenary mind doused it without mercy.
Celebrating too early.
Lin Mu looked at the Liquor Worm floating listlessly on the surface of the Red Iron Essence sea inside his Aperture — fat, white, and playing dead — and his brow furrowed deeply.
The weaknesses in his combat system had not disappeared upon entering Rank 2. If anything, they had become sharper.
He knew it clearly. Bullying Rank 1 Gu Masters was trivial now — he could crush them like ants. But a Gu Master's horizons rose with their cultivation.
His future enemies would be genuine Rank 2 powerhouses, or terrifying beasts like that Blood Jade Python at its peak.
Against that caliber of opponent, his current lineup of Rank 1 Gu worms — Iron Leaf, Red Mud, even the newly acquired Metal Rend — would be laughably inadequate, like scratching an itch through a boot.
And the most critical problem is the Liquor Worm.
Lin Mu exhaled. The Liquor Worm was only Rank 1. It could not absorb, let alone refine, Rank 2 Red Iron Primeval Essence.
Without the Liquor Worm's amplification — his single greatest advantage — his future cultivation speed would plummet from riding a flying sword back down to walking on foot, reducing him once again to an ordinary face in the crowd.
"The entire system needs to be upgraded."
Lin Mu paced back and forth in the chamber, his mind running at full speed.
"To maintain dominance at Rank 2, my defense, mobility, scouting, and especially my main offensive Gu worms all need to be comprehensively refined and advanced."
"The Liquor Worm must be refined into a Rank 2 Four-Flavor Liquor Worm."
The moment the word refinement surfaced in his mind, his feet stopped dead.
Like standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down into a bottomless black abyss.
What did refining Rank 2 Gu worms actually mean?
It meant hunting down extraordinarily rare Gu worm recipes — the kind monopolized by major clans. It meant purchasing enormous quantities of high-grade supplementary materials. It meant finding another rare Liquor Worm.
And worse still — refinement carried a failure rate. A failed attempt didn't just incinerate all the materials. The real nightmare was the Gu worm's death backlash, the risk of Aperture damage — a bottomless pit of potential ruin.
Lin Mu looked down at the grey-white powder at his feet, then glanced at the hidden compartment where his Primeval Stone reserves sat — noticeably diminished after the breakthrough.
He had once thought that owning one or two thousand Primeval Stones made him one of the wealthiest figures in Black Blood Stockade.
Looking at it now...
Without money, nothing is possible.
Lin Mu pressed his fingers hard against his throbbing temples, a headache rising that he couldn't suppress.
"For a Rank 2 Gu Master preparing a full system overhaul, what I have is barely enough to swap in a handful of Rank 2 Gu worms. Everything beyond that still needs to be figured out."
The dread of poverty swallowed the joy of breaking through in an instant.
But Lin Mu was, at his core, the kind of man who had clawed his way back from the edge of death more than once.
"There's always a road when you reach the mountain. Upgrading the Gu worms can't be rushed. Resources can be seized, deceived, and schemed for."
He drew a slow breath and forced the tangled knot of anxiety and frustration down into the depths of his chest, setting it aside for now.
If his conventional strength had hit a bottleneck, then he had to find his breakthrough in the unconventional — in the trump cards that no one else could see coming.
Lin Mu turned sharply. His breathing quickened, just slightly.
In those dark eyes of his, a burning, intensely aggressive light reignited.
His gaze crossed the powder-covered floor and fixed — hard, hungry, unblinking — on the cold stone table at the center of the chamber.
Resting on it, perfectly still, was an object no larger than a palm. Ancient, deep Dao Mark fluctuations radiated from its surface in slow, quiet pulses.
The ultimate prize he had dredged from the bottom of the Blood Jade Python's swamp, at the risk of being reduced to ash and dust.
The threshold of Rank 2 had been crossed. He now had the strength to push open the door to a new world.
"Black Bone King..."
Lin Mu murmured that forbidden name in a low voice, stepping toward the stone table one pace at a time.
"Now — let me see what earth-shattering secrets you've hidden inside this Pitch-Black Bone Plate."