POP...
It was as if something had been punctured.
The barrier of the 171st Great Sun Acupoint shattered on cue!
The price, however, was that the inside of his body was already utterly ravaged.
Countless meridians had ruptured, muscle fibers had dissolved, and even his bones were covered in hairline fractures.
Without pausing, he struggled into a prepared bathtub filled to the brim with a Type I Fortified Deep-Repair Medicinal Bath.
TSSSSS...
Highly active life energy, like the gentlest of sweet springs, quickly enveloped his broken body, beginning to mend his wounds at a visible rate.
The ruptured meridians reconnected, growing even tougher. The dissolved muscle fibers re-fused, becoming even denser.
To be reborn from destruction.
Every annihilation was followed by a more powerful rebirth.
Once his physical body finished repairing, he would immediately consume a Type I Fortified Mental Power Recovery Potion. He would then sit cross-legged and visualize the majestic figure on the Golden Throne to restore the mind and spirit he had exhausted during the acupoint-opening process.
Once his spirit was restored to a state of Perfection, he would, without hesitation, pick up the next Spiritual Energy Potion.
It was a cycle of pain and destruction.
Inject, assault, break through, suffer, mend, recover...
Day after day, year after year.
For five years, Qin Feng had practically treated pain as breath and destruction as sustenance. His world had been reduced to these six tedious, cruel steps.
And the number of his Great Sun Acupoints grew at a frenzied pace that no outsider could possibly imagine.
One hundred eighty...
Two hundred...
Two hundred thirty...
Once the number of opened Great Sun Acupoints surpassed two hundred fifty, the difficulty skyrocketed.
The barriers of each remaining Acupoint were far more formidable than any before.
Often, he had to use three, or even five, Spiritual Energy Potions, launching dozens of assaults and enduring the agony of his body being torn apart dozens of times, just to barely force open a single new Acupoint.
The pace of his progress slowed to a crawl.
The initial thrill of his power soaring had long since vanished.
In its place was a suffocating, seemingly endless monotony.
It was the cruelest test of his Will.
The Cultivation Room was deathly silent. No sound, no light, no one to talk to.
Solitude, like an invisible beast, gnawed at his mind and spirit at every moment.
Sometimes, in the lulls while his body repaired, the smiling face of his father, Qin Dahai, would surface uncontrollably in his mind. The familiar faces of Shi Potian and Xiong Yanfu would appear, and he would even recall the laughter and arguments with his classmates at Qiming First High School.
But whenever this happened, he would immediately sever those chaotic thoughts.
Before his eyes, there was only the Emperor on the Golden Throne, who had solitarily guarded humanity for hundreds of millions of years.
’Compared to that eternal solitude, which bears the weight of an entire civilization, what does my mere decade or so of loneliness even amount to?’
"Only when you have passed through the seventh layer of solitude can you become a true powerhouse."
Through repeated self-interrogation and affirmation, Qin Feng’s heart grew ever calmer, ever purer.
He was like a stubborn rock, washed by a stream for ten thousand years, all its sharp edges and impurities worn away, leaving only its innermost core.
He no longer kept track of time, no longer hoped for a specific outcome.
He just cultivated.
It was as if this was life’s most fundamental state of being.
Two hundred eighty...
Three hundred...
Three hundred twenty...
The final forty Great Sun Acupoints were a true chasm.
They were hidden in the deepest, most mysterious corners of his body, their barriers fortified to an almost inconceivable degree.
Qin Feng’s resources were being consumed at an astonishing rate.
His body had long since developed a "resistance" to the excruciating pain.
He could even calmly contemplate the angle and force of his next assault while his meridians were severed and his organs shattered.
He was like the most demanding craftsman, using his Will as a carving knife and endless pain as a whetstone, performing the final and most difficult sculpting upon the divine treasure that was his own body.
Three hundred forty...
Three hundred fifty...
Three hundred fifty-nine...
When all his Potions and medicinal bath packets were depleted, when all his energy was on the verge of exhaustion, he finally stood before the last threshold.
The 360th Great Sun Acupoint.
It was located at the very center of all the Acupoints, like the imperial court at the heart of the entire Great Sun Star Map.
Qin Feng condensed the last wisp of energy in his body into an awl, pouring all the Will and strength he had accumulated over seventeen years into a final charge against that last barrier.
There was no sound.
No great boom.
The moment the assault succeeded, the entire world seemed to stand still.
Qin Feng felt as if all 360 Great Sun Acupoints inside him had been lit up at the exact same instant!
They were no longer individual stars. Instead, they were now interconnected by countless new, golden energy channels, forming a magnificent, profound, and utterly perfect... three-dimensional star map!
This star map slowly rotated within his body.
Each Acupoint was a sun. Three hundred sixty suns formed a miniature, flawless Cosmos of Perfection.
An unprecedented aura of harmonious self-consistency and ceaseless vitality began to emanate from the deepest core of his being.