Top-Tier Perception Starts From Basic Fist Techniques

So I've descended as a corpse... Seeing as I'm still lying in the coffin, it seems I haven't been dead for long?

It was uncomfortable, but Lu Changsheng had done this once before, so he quickly got his bearings. He sat straight up out of the coffin. Through the incense smoke, he could make out a row of terrified faces.

"The young master's risen!"

The hall started to fill with screaming.

Six hours later, a physician had his fingers on Kao Wen's wrist. He frowned and shook his head.

"Strange... Very strange. The pulse is strong, and there's nothing wrong with him. I examined him myself a few days ago, and there was no pulse back then. Could this be what the textbooks call apparent death?"

Apparent death.

He had handed Lu Changsheng an excuse better than anything he would have invented. A weak, nerdy boy saw a demon; the fright terrified him to death, but it was normal for him to wake up in a few days. The physician told the old man this story, and the old man believed it. Whether it was apparent death or not hardly mattered. His son was alive.

His parents fussed over him for a while and then left him to rest. Soon, there was nobody in the room but Kao Wen.

I'm Lu Changsheng, and I've taken over Kao Wen's body. Kao Wen is me, and Lu Changsheng is also me.

Alone in the room, a series of thoughts flashed through Lu Changsheng's mind. He pushed the blanket back and sat up. For six hours, he had gone along with everything the Kao family wanted. Now, he needed to put Kao Wen's memories in order.

From Kao Wen's memories, he could tell that this world was still in its feudal dynasty era. The dynasty had been at war for years on end; the common people were worn down to nothing, and all of it was starting to look like the end of a dynasty.

He was in Drum Mountain City somewhere in the Jing Dynasty. Although it was a feudal dynasty, there was something eerie about it because this world had transcendent power in it, and that power was the existence of demons.

What a demon could do defied belief. Nobody knew when the first one had come into existence, but their history seemed to run older than humanity's.

A demon was unkillable except for death at the hands of another demon. That was the only way of killing a demon. No blades, fire, drowning, or poison ever worked.

Additionally, they ate people. Human beings carried a kind of spiritual essence in them, and eating it ensured a demon's own intelligence would remain intact, and they could even increase it. Without it, a demon degenerated by degrees into a beast with nothing behind its eyes, which set the two species against each other by their nature.

Legend had it that in the ancient world, demons hunted humans and penned them like livestock, and humans could do nothing about it. Then humans found a way, and the way was to breed with them.

Most demons and humans could not produce offspring. However, a very small number could, and what they produced was called a half-demon. A half-demon had every ability a demon had, which included the ability to kill one and to stand against them.

However, since they carried both bloods, a half-demon carried both natures, too. If the human nature were to win, it would become a human being and fight true demons alongside the rest of them. However, if the demon nature ended up winning, the half-demon would become a true demon and would have to eat people to live.

In the ancient days, humans tried everything to breed with true demons. As a result, the first half-demon came out of humanity, and that first one protected a portion of the human species. A second followed, then a third, then more than anyone counted, and from then on humans could fight back instead of being hunted.

However, the overall balance still favored the true demons by a long mile. There were even many dynasties and kingdoms occupied by demons. There, true demons had humans locked in pens as food sources. The Jing Dynasty, where he had landed, was one of the few dynasties that humans ran.

The fact that an ordinary merchant's son knew all this in detail was not mysterious. None of it was secret. Everyone knew about half-demons and true demons.

"What a dangerous world. A demon turns up now and then, and when one does, it eats people. Kao Wen must have seen a true demon. He was lucky enough not to be eaten, but ended up frightened to death anyway..." Lu Changsheng muttered under his breath.

The boy was a scaredy-cat, and his dying of fright had worked out nicely for Lu Changsheng.

"There are martial artists here, but no condensed Martial Dao, and the reason is simple enough. None of them have crossed into transcendence."

Plenty of worlds had martial artists. However, very few had ever condensed a Martial Dao, and the reason was always the same. It was that their martial artists could not yet achieve transcendence.

It had also been the same in the last world that Lu Changsheng went into. Even after creating the Extreme Martial Dao and reaching the ceiling of Second Growth, he had not achieved transcendence.

Gaining transcendence took breaking through to Third Growth, but even reaching Third Growth was not something anyone could manage without being an Earthly Saint looking down on the problem holistically, just as Lu Changsheng was.

Lu Changsheng's brows knitted together.

This world is not a simple one... Its energy-level response sits at Martial Saint and Nascent Soul, so the true demon at the top of it could be at Nascent Soul and Martial Saint tier. Even if my extreme martial path reaches the fourth stage of growth, I still won't be able to contend with the top-tier true demons in this world.

That realization was merely one of the smaller problems here. Suppose he reached transcendence through the Extreme Martial Dao. Would it let him kill a true demon? Not necessarily! Only a demon could kill another demon, and no amount of raw strength could change that.

The Extreme Martial Dao had to be rebuilt or changed. As it stood, he was not sure it fit this world at all.

After thinking for a while, Lu Changsheng's plan came together quickly. It started where it always started. He would start training his Extreme Martial Dao and build his fleshly body, as the body was the foundation of everything.

Either way, I need to build the Extreme Martial Dao back up. Even if it can't kill a demon, it can still keep me alive in front of one. It's better than being helpless.

In most worlds except for those with genuinely strange rules, the Extreme Martial Dao could be trained. With that, he practiced his Extreme Martial Dao again and "borrowed" the Kao family's money to buy up every effective tonic he could find to push it along.

It was unknown whether it was due to the presence of transcendent power or the existence of true demons, but this world had nourishing tonics far superior to the previous secret world. It was well past anything he had expected. With these behind him, his training went incredibly fast and never reached a bottleneck.

Six months later, he called up the Status Panel.

[Status Panel]

Host: Lu Changsheng

Extreme Martial Dao: Second Growth (99%)

The ceiling of Second Growth. The next step is breaking the limits of the human body and crossing into transcendence.

Six months of training had moved him far faster than the last world ever had, but he was not about to attempt it yet. Second Growth was where an ordinary man stopped, and until he crossed into transcendence, an ordinary man was all he was.

This world had no man-made electricity. Was he supposed to call down heaven's lightning to do it? Out of the question. That would kill him where he stood. Crossing over meant finding the power this world had of its own, and there was only one candidate—demons.

"It's been six months. Time to study a true demon properly, which means seeing one again. Where do I find one?"

As he spoke, a figure surfaced slowly in his mind.