Novel Full Chapter 55—True Peak of Level 1
Chapter 55: Chapter 55—True Peak of Level 1
Chapter 55—True Peak of Level 1
The flames continued to burn relentlessly.
Lei Cheng’s body remained wrapped in white-gold fire, his skin and muscles continuously charring and healing.
’Is he trying to...’ Hua Mingyue frowned, watching him carefully. ’Break through the limit...?’
She paused, ’Unlike the previous stages, this one requires far more time and resources.’ Her eyes turned sharp, ’Breaking the limit is extremely difficult.’
She smiled the next moment, ’His mastery over intent is far higher than his level. It’s easy for him to break the limit compared to others.’
Even so, that only explained why he could attempt it—not why he could succeed.
Inside the flames, Lei Cheng mustered a relieved smile.
’Glad I checked my status.’
A luminous panel flashed across his vision.
『 STATUS PANEL 』
[ Name: Lei Cheng (Otherworldly Being)
Age: 17 / 300
Realm: Lv.1 — Skin and Muscle Tempering {80/100}
Path: Bizarre Martial Path
Health: Healthy
Cultivation Techniques: Supreme Nine Yang Body Tempering Technique
Skills: None
Dao: Illusion Intent {31%}, Death Intent {42%}, Life Intent {40%}, Bizarre Intent {44%}, Supreme Nine Yang Intent {44%} ]
His eyes almost popped out as he glanced at his age section. ’I have more than three centuries of lifespan.’ He grinned from ear to ear. ’As expected, cultivation raised it.’ He wasn’t wrong at all. He recalled how his lifespan fell to 37 after using intents.
He then clicked his tongue, moving to the level section. ’Just eighty? But by the classification of ancient martial arts, this already counts as the peak.’
Hua Mingyue muttered, "He reached stage four. The peak, even according to ancient martial arts. The gold stage."
She paused, her voice lowering. "Beyond that peak lies something else entirely—a Limit Break, a feat reserved only for a few."
It was no longer a question of talent alone, but whether the body itself could surpass its natural limits.
She recalled the history, smiling widely. ’In the martial era and human era, the gold stage was the ceiling for ordinary geniuses. The Limit Break of skin and muscle tempering was the threshold—jade stage, the line separating true monsters from mere peerless talents.’
Lei Cheng’s black-gold skin was being torn apart, layer by layer, by the white-gold Nine Yang Intent. He shook his head and took three deep breaths.
’Speed’s dropping. At this rate, breaking the limit could take a full year.’
Had any monster who had already broken through heard that thought, they would likely have beaten him for the audacity of complaining.
Hua Mingyue’s eyes lifted slightly. ’A year...’ She glanced skyward. ’Still, this is an enormous feat. Even the monsters of the old martial and human eras needed a decade minimum. Only the luckiest ones managed it in under two years.’
Her gaze shifted toward the direction that Jiang Chen had been thrown, which was seemingly random.
’Cheng doesn’t have much time to spare.’
She turned to him directly.
"Lei Cheng—push your Nine Yang Intent past twenty percent to accelerate the tempering." She noted he had already pushed it to twenty-one. "Your body can’t sustain that intensity for long. But you can use your Life Intent at full strength to speed the recovery side of the process instead."
Lei Cheng nodded.
With every successful round of tempering, his skin and muscles had grown steadily more resistant to both the Nine Yang Intent tearing and the Life Intent healing it. His original ten percent baseline had become functionally useless; where before ten percent Life Intent could seal a wound instantly, now even a much larger dose left a wound still bleeding. The tempering itself had raised his resistance across the board.
’My life level seems to have improved,’ he noted.
Every completed tempering was reshaping more than his body. Even his vitality felt fundamentally different.
He pushed Life Intent to forty percent and Nine Yang Intent to twenty-five.
With each passing moment, he winced, cycling through the five movements, holding the breathing pattern steady—three inhales, one exhale.
Under the weight of that much Life Intent, his skin healed rapidly even as it tore. He could feel his vitality, strength, and flexibility increasing with every completed cycle. The five movements—brutal on his spine and body at the very start—had become smooth as his body loosened. He could now rotate to a full one hundred twenty degrees, where before one hundred ten had strained him. Still, he kept the sequence exactly as designed. He had comprehended it under Instant Enlightenment; there was no efficiency to be gained by improvising.
His skin darkened into a new shade.
Hours passed. A patch of light crimson skin and muscle appeared across his chest. A loud sound echoed from his body.
Boom!
The pressure radiating from his body briefly distorted the air around him.
The people in the garden were shaken. Hua Mingyue waved a hand. "It’s fine. Don’t worry."
[ Ding! You have broken the limit! You have entered the fifth stage of Level One Skin and Muscle Tempering! ]
[ Level: Lv.1 Skin and Muscle Tempering {81/100} ]
Lei Cheng nodded with a smile. ’Good... Need to grind to 100.’
He kept going as days passed. Sun and moon rotated through the sky.
By the ninety-first tempering cycle, his entire body had turned crimson red—the protruding veins receding slightly beneath the surface. Each successive tempering increased the shade of red on his body. Lei Cheng now looked like a bleeding man in white-gold flames.
"Young Master..." the head guard Zhang called out, wondering if Lei Cheng was bleeding.
Hua Mingyue waved a hand. "Stay back. There’s no problem."
She turned toward Lei Fang, who had blacked out. He hadn’t been sleeping much in the past month and a half. He hadn’t noticed what had happened in the past days.
A few more days later.
[ Ding! You have completed the Level One Skin and Muscle Tempering! ]
[ Level: Lv.1 Skin and Muscle Tempering {100/100} ]
"Finally done." Lei Cheng’s smile widened to the extreme. He nodded to himself, glaring at the luminous panel in his vision. Under the flames, his skin turned pure crimson, and the veins no longer protruded; they became more like a normal human’s, with only a slight trace here and there. The only exception was his red skin.
Hua Mingyue folded her arms and grinned. ’He is officially a monster now.’
Lei Cheng glanced at the prisoners still tied up. His green vines had continuously supplied Life Intent, keeping them alive and kicking. They all flinched under his glare from the flames.
He waved his hand, sending a wave of green Life Intent to his father, who was still blacked out in his chair.
He sighed. ’You don’t have to worry that much.’
He then walked into the main hall and entered his room. The flames began to vanish. He picked out a new purple brocade robe and inners.
He put them on and tied his long hair neatly, but kept his robe open, as he glanced at his reflection in the mirror.
A handsome man reflected back, standing at 6.1 feet. "Looks like I grew taller too..." He laughed lightly. "Ha-ha."
His long flowing hair and both irises were white-gold, his face was sharp, square-jawed, his body medium-built with rock-like muscles, and a six-pack visible on his stomach, with porcelain-white skin and no veins on his body. He touched his chest. It was very firm.
His temperament was now like a handsome noble who practiced martial arts. His body and face finally matched a strong man’s demeanor.
"Good. I’m extraordinarily handsome." He rubbed his hair with a shy smile.
"Indeed, you are." Hua Mingyue nodded, fanning herself from her chair.
Lei Cheng’s lips curved as he turned toward her. ’It’s indeed good to have a supportive partner.’
"Now it’s Level Two, right?" he asked, planning ahead immediately.
"Not so fast." Hua Mingyue shook her head. "You reached the true peak of Level One. Wait at least one month for your body to adjust."
"Okay." Lei Cheng nodded and glared at her, his gaze gleaming darkly purple.
"What? What do you want?" Hua Mingyue asked, a playful edge in her voice.
"Nothing much." He paused, thinking, then spread his arms slightly—an unmistakable request for a hug.
Hua Mingyue smiled. ’He wants a hug?’
"Fine," she said, and appeared in front of him in a flash, wrapping her arms around him tightly and patting his back. "Good. Your reward from me for something only monsters manage."
He hugged her back, feeling the warmth of her body, and grinned joyfully.
For a brief moment, almost two months of relentless pain felt completely worthwhile.
After a few moments, he pulled back and looked up at the sky, his expression turning thoughtful.
"I succeeded after just a handful of trials, in barely a month and a half, and reached the true peak of Level One—breaking the limit." His voice dropped lower. "This feels like too much of a coincidence. What do you make of it, Yue?"
She returned to her chair and sat, saying nothing at first.
"I mean," Lei Cheng continued, doubt creeping into his tone, "the ancient supreme beings themselves failed at this." He pointed at himself. "Yet I succeeded. How is that possible? Even granting that I had access to their research, there should have been at least one other person across all of history who managed the same thing. But no one did—except me."
The more he thought about it, the less his own success felt like luck and the more it felt like a missing piece of history.