Top-Tier Perception Starts From Basic Fist Techniques

Kao Wen and Kao Ping followed behind Miss Xuan, and the three of them went straight to an abandoned temple in the south of the city.

"Ah Hu is inside," she said, pointing to the abandoned temple.

Nothing was left of the temple but broken walls, and some of them even looked scorched. Weeds were overgrown on the inside, and the place was remote enough that not even beggars were willing to stay.

"You guys wait out here," Lu Changsheng said as he proceeded to walk in alone. It was the seventh month when the sun was fierce, and the weather was extremely hot.

However, cold air struck him as he walked inside the temple. He caught the faint and unmistakable smell of blood in it the moment he crossed the threshold.

Whoosh!

A dark silhouette lunged at him from out of nowhere. Lu Changsheng could clearly sense that the figure was a big, muscular youth. The only difference was that he smelled of blood from head to toe. His attack also carried an overwhelming, menacing intent that would have caused most martial artists immediate life-threatening damage.

However, Lu Changsheng simply met it with a fist.

Bang!

The punch landed solidly on the youth's body. At the peak of Second Growth, there were very few opponents below transcendence that could match him for raw strength. As such, his punch sent the boy flying with an uncountable number of broken ribs.

With a thud, the boy hit the ground hard, yet he instantly got back up with eyes as savage as an animal. The area on his chest that had caved in due to the punch was filling out again at a speed fast enough to be visible to the eye.

At the same time, the boy swelled quickly. In the blink of an eye, black hair covered him, and his nails grew out sharply into weapons. His veins bulged twice their original size all over him until what stood in the ruin was an enormous wolf on two legs.

Awoo!

The wolf threw its head back and howled, releasing a savage pressure that rolled out and filled the temple.

Lu Changsheng could finally see Ah Hu's demon body and remarked to himself, "So it's a wolf demon."

Beneath the form of a human boy, Ah Hu was a wolf demon. However, his strength looked to be quite ordinary.

Swish, swish!

In his true form, Ah Hu was fast. He was fast enough to leave afterimages such that he seemed to be lunging at Lu Changsheng from every direction at once. Regardless, Lu Changsheng was able to sense his location the whole time. He saw no reason to keep testing Ah Hu’s strength, so he swung his palm to attack.

"Heaven-Turning Seal!"

It was a palm that could bend even a person's perception. As the palm fell, the wolf demon felt as if a mountain was coming down on him, and his breathing completely stopped. Even with some distance between the two, the wolf demon felt with complete certainty that there was nowhere for him to go.

Bang!

The palm landed squarely on Ah Hu. The wolf demon shuddered from the impact before he was flattened into a smear of meat. Dead! He died so easily, and what was left intact on the temple floor was simply a wolf's hide.

Lu Changsheng couldn't help thinking to himself, That wolf demon was really weak... Speed, strength, or defense... it was only comparable to some fighters in the Divine Strength Realm. It might not even compare to those in the Divine Fortification Realm. Is it just that Ah Hu was unusually weak? Or are all true demons roughly on the same level as him?

Though he had known that true demons were not at a transcendent level, he had not expected such a level of strength from them. Then again, the problem was probably not that they were weak but that he was too strong!

With a fleshly body at the peak of Second Growth and a terrifying Martial Dao that had no business existing in this world, just how strong was Lu Changsheng? Even if he had to fight ten wolf demons, the outcome would remain the same either way.

However, what made a demon frightening was never the fight. It was their immortality, and Lu Changsheng knew not to let his guard down against them.

Moments later, he was watching something he could hardly credit. The smear on the floor quickly pulled itself back into a wolf demon, leaving behind not even a scratch from the damage it[1] had taken. It was fully restored, exactly as it had been.

A shiver went down Lu Changsheng's spine. That... is a terrible thing it can do.

He struck it again, this time bursting the head open with a punch. However, it simply restored itself quickly. Then Lu Changsheng took its head off and held onto it while he reduced the body to pulp. This time, a new body simply grew out of the head in his arms. Whatever he did, it was useless!

No matter how many times he destroyed it, it came back. This was what made a true demon so terrifying, and he had now felt it firsthand. Immortality! The demon truly could not die, and there was nothing he could do about it.

𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

And so, he was left with the last option, which was to trap it.

"Kao Ping, pass me one of the nets."

"Yes, young master."

Kao Ping, who was standing outside the dilapidated temple, quickly threw a fishing net through the doorway.

Lu Changsheng picked it up and threw it over the wolf demon. The nets were made specially for this and were extremely tough. Even given half a day, the wolf demon's claws were not going to open one.

As the demon got trapped, Lu Changsheng turned to the temple doorway. "You guys can come in now."

When the two of them came in, they were greeted with the sight of the wolf demon thrashing in the net.

"Ah Hu..."

As expected, Miss Xuan recognized him on sight.

"Bring some ropes; we need to tie it."

Lu Changsheng and Kao Ping used some rope to bind the wolf tightly. After that, Ah Hu had no strength left to fight the net and lay still in it.

"Good. To the estate, as planned."

Lu Changsheng had bought a manor outside the city some time ago, which was far enough from any road that a true demon on the premises would not be noticed. He boarded the carriage and carried all of them out to it.

"Young Master Kao, what will you do with him?" Miss Xuan asked carefully.

"What, are you afraid I'll kill him? Relax, he's an immortal demon; I can't kill him even if I wanted to. I only want to study him."

Lu Changsheng was not lying to her. He did want to study a demon, and what he wanted most was the answer to why they could not die.

"Alright, Miss Xuan. Come and see him in a while if it worries you, but don't tell anyone where this place is," Lu Changsheng said, warning her.

Miss Xuan took her leave and went back to the Pleasure Pavilion, and he went home to the Kao residence.

Then, with the excuse of training, he left once again, having secured a month away from the household to "practice.” Lu Changsheng had already planned exactly what the month was for. He was going to spend all of it at the manor picking Ah Hu apart.

"Ah Hu, come eat."

He put some meat down in front of Ah Hu, who was bound by a heavy chain. Though he was not very intelligent, he was extremely wary of Lu Changsheng and watched him with real viciousness.

However, Lu Changsheng did not mind. The two of them were going to be spending a good deal of time together.

Once Ah Hu had eaten, the experiments began. First, he tested blades. He took an arm off, then a leg. Then, he left the arm and the leg intact rather than destroying them to see whether they could grow back.

And so, screams were heard every day in the manor. He was an immortal, but he wasn’t spared from the agony at all. It still hurt! Having one’s limbs ripped off daily and one’s organs pulled out was the kind of pain that could drive any mind insane.

Regardless, the experiment did produce results. Lu Changsheng found out that cutting an arm off would cause a new one to quickly grow in its place while the severed one rotted at its own pace. What he could not detect was anything resembling spirit energy going into Ah Hu to restore it.

With nothing nourishing Ah Hu's body, where was the arm coming from? It was not normal, and it did not follow the law of energy conversion. The law of energy conversion was not a rule that applied only to worlds with technology. It held up everywhere. It was just like a law of the universe. Was a true demon really generating energy out of nothing and growing limbs with it?

Arms, legs, eyes, and organs... all of them behaved the same way. Lu Changsheng tried everything he could think of, down to slicing Ah Hu into thin sheets, yet none of it meant anything. Ah Hu came back all the same.

Then, he tried fire. Fire killed him and even burned him down to ash, but he came back from that, too. The only way that worked to deal with Ah Hu was not killing him at all, which meant holding him captive and keeping him locked up.

Rumor had it that the Jing Dynasty had places built for exactly that. Once a true demon went into one, it would never come out, which was the same thing as dying. A month of continuous testing resulted in Lu Changsheng drawing some conclusions.

A demon's immortality is likely a rule! It's this world's own rule, and the rule says a demon does not die, which is why nothing kills one. Only another true demon can... Which means having one rule striking against another might be the only way to kill a true demon.

That brought him back to his own problem. If he wanted to cross into transcendence, he needed to take this world's transcendent power into himself. However, this world's transcendent power passed only through blood. What was he supposed to do with that? Go back and descend as a true demon in the womb?

That was difficult past the point of being realistic. Descend into one that was freshly dead, then? But when a true demon perished, its body and spirit would disappear together. There would be no body left for him to descend into.

Suddenly, his eyes lit up as realization struck him.

Right! What does this world use to decide that something is a demon? A half-demon carries human blood and demon blood, and a half-demon counts as a true demon.

So suppose I take a true demon's blood into myself and swap out my blood entirely. Doesn't that make me a true demon to some degree? Or at least give me something close enough to their power to kill one?

A blood exchange! If blood alone was not enough, then he could swap out his flesh as well. Take in a true demon's flesh into his body and force it to fuse with his own. No ordinary man could survive that, as a true demon's flesh was far too strong, and it would kill him outright.

However, Lu Changsheng was not an ordinary man. He was at the peak of Second Growth, and his fleshy body was far more terrifying than an ordinary true demon's.

"Let's try it."

He cut a small piece of flesh off Ah Hu's body, opened his own forearm, then forced the piece down into his muscles, and quickly closed his own flesh around it.

Hiss...

He could feel that small piece of Ah Hu eating his own flesh. Pain! He felt pain past anything he had a word for, and it ran down every nerve he had.

Thankfully, his consciousness was an Earthly Saint's and was formidable enough to withstand the pain. He could even do more than just bear it. He could keep his attention on every change happening inside his arm.

The demon flesh ate at Lu Changsheng's body and grew stronger the more of him it ate. That was fine, though. This was his body, and the true demon's flesh was buried inside layers of it with nowhere to go.

Come eat, eat all you want! Let's find out how much you can consume.

He laughed and fed it more, even moving his own flesh to "feed" it, curious about how much it would consume. He meant to burst it by overfeeding it, until there was some of him in it and some of it in him and no line left between them. By then, his fleshly body would molt into something else.

1. pronoun change is intended ☜