Chapter Thirty-Six: A Great Number of Earth-Level Techniques Released

“Is this a dog?”
The members of the Samsara Squad, who had hurried over at the news, regarded Little Black with curious eyes.
In this world, there were no such creatures as dogs. This was a land teeming with savage beasts, where ferocious monsters roamed unchecked, locked in a constant struggle with humanity for survival—a perilous existence.
They mistook Little Black for the pup of a wild beast, perhaps a young wolf, for the resemblance was uncanny.
Yet Little Black showed none of a beast’s savagery. He was clever, lively, and utterly devoid of ferocity—utterly endearing.
His arrival stirred up a ripple in Yi Tian’s household. Yi Xiaoting’s laughter grew more frequent as she played with Little Black daily, often tempting him with delicious morsels, though he always turned up his nose at them with disdain.
Once again, it was time to distribute the primordial stones.
This past month, Yi Tian had earned ten thousand primordial stones from the tribe.
He returned most of them to Yi Feng and the others; though not yet fully repaid, in another two or three months, his debt would be settled.
On this particular day, as Yi Tian took out a primordial stone from his storage pouch, preparing to cultivate, a dark shadow darted in.
Little Black’s eyes shone as he fixed his gaze on the stone in Yi Tian’s hand.
“You want it?”
Yi Tian asked.
“Woof!”
Little Black nodded vigorously, his face full of longing.
“Here!”
Yi Tian tossed the stone over.
Swish!
Little Black leapt forward and swallowed the stone in an instant, then lay down to digest it.
Yi Tian immediately noticed a faint sheen spreading across Little Black’s fur. He could even vaguely hear the rush of blood within the pup’s body; muscles, bones, organs, and flesh were undergoing astonishing change.
Little Black’s potential was extraordinary.
As Yi Tian marveled, Little Black soon stood up, spat out the powdered remnants of the stone, and looked at Yi Tian with bright, expectant eyes—he wanted more.
Impossible!
Yi Tian stared in shock.
A single low-grade primordial stone contained an immense amount of energy; even at full effort, it would take him several days to absorb one completely. Yet Little Black had devoured it in less than a moment.

Then Yi Tian remembered what Little Black truly was—an egg that had survived from the ancient era, undoubtedly the descendant of a legendary beast. Such feats, then, were not so surprising.
Unbeknownst to Yi Tian, before Little Black hatched, most of the egg’s essence had been absorbed by the Astral Mud, leaving him extremely weak at birth. Even so, his origins were extraordinary, and his potential vast; his ability to absorb the energy from primordial stones far exceeded Yi Tian’s.
What’s more, Little Black had hatched prematurely because of Yi Tian, which left him even more frail and hungry for energy.
Seeing the pitiful look in Little Black’s eyes, Yi Tian could only continue tossing over primordial stones.
And so, Little Black absorbed stone after stone until more than half of the thousand stones in Yi Tian’s storage pouch were gone. Only then did he stop, curled up, and lazily squinted his eyes to sleep.
Staring at the slumbering Little Black, Yi Tian felt a headache coming on.
Before, his Astral Mud avatar was a bottomless pit; now this Little Black was an even greater devourer of primordial stones. If it wasn’t for the tribe mining a large vein and his share of the spoils, there was no way he could afford to feed them both.
Now, Yi Tian was even tempted to swallow that entire primordial vein himself.
During the day, Yi Tian cultivated Pure Yang Art and the Sword of the Vault of Heaven; at night, his consciousness descended into the Astral Mud, taking on the form of his other self to deduce the next stage of the Pure Yang Art.
He repeatedly altered the path of the Pure Yang Art’s circulation, trying to blaze new trails.
But in each attempt, the Pure Yang True Qi would careen wildly through his meridians, rupturing them at every turn. If his true body had tried this, he would have long since fallen into madness and become a cripple.
Yet it was not without gain.
Through relentless deduction and exploration, new and increasingly profound pathways for the Pure Yang True Qi were carved out.
After absorbing most of the essence from Little Black’s beast egg, the Astral Mud underwent an evolution; the avatar it formed became even more adept at such deductions, and could observe every change in his physical body in greater detail. Under his optimization, even the perfected Featherflight Technique was found to have over a dozen flaws.
Moreover, Yi Tian’s progress in deducing the advanced Pure Yang Art quickened.
While working on the advanced Pure Yang Art, he did not neglect to further optimize the Savage Ox Splitting Mountain Technique, the Gale Tiger Dominance Technique, and the Wind and Thunder Technique.
Through the newly evolved Astral Mud avatar’s refinement, these arts were elevated to top-tier human-grade techniques and, under his continued efforts, broke through to become earth-grade techniques.
All of this required an immense expenditure of primordial stones.
Especially after the Astral Mud’s evolution, the energy required to maintain other states was more than tenfold what it used to be.
Yi Tian passed these three newly deduced earth-grade techniques to Yi Feng, Yi Shan, Yi Li, Yi Hong, and Yi Kuang, leaving them utterly astonished.
Yi Tian had managed to elevate the tribe’s inherited techniques to the earth-grade—a rarity even among ancient sects and clans. Even if they were only low-grade earth techniques, they were priceless, the core legacies of any great power.
In exchange, Yi Tian extracted more than ten thousand low-grade primordial stones from each of them.
Yi Feng, Yi Shan, and the others cared little for this price.
With these earth-grade arts, they would have handed over every last stone they owned to Yi Tian without hesitation.
When Yi Tian presented the Savage Ox Splitting Mountain, Gale Tiger Dominance, and Wind and Thunder Techniques to the chieftain, the chieftain and the clan elders were left speechless, as if in a dream.
These were earth-grade arts!

Even the greatest powers, standing for thousands of years, possessed few such treasures, yet here were three.
For Yi Tian, with the Astral Mud avatar’s aid, every transformation and hidden mystery within these techniques was laid bare before his mind’s eye. Though his martial rank could not match that of the true masters, his understanding and insight into these arts was unparalleled. He was, after all, their creator; the cultivation paths he recorded were the purest, most orthodox forms.
However, recording these earth-grade arts nearly exhausted his spirit, the complexity of their mysteries overwhelming, and each transformation had to be captured in one unbroken flow, with his full essence, energy, and will concentrated and without the slightest error.
With the chieftain and the clan elders, Yi Tian showed no mercy.
Citing the immense cost in primordial stones required for such work, he extorted a tenth of the tribe’s entire reserve.
The demand for stones was simply too great.
As for why he delivered these deduced earth-grade arts to the tribe, Yi Tian had his reasons.
As a member of the Yi Clan, only by strengthening the tribe could he and his family have a secure place in this world.
Especially now, with the discovery of a massive primordial vein, any leak would bring destruction upon the entire tribe. Their only hope was to grow powerful, and quickly.
Moreover, by revealing his “talent” for improving martial arts to the tribe’s leadership, he ensured that they saw this as a blessing, not a threat—no one would seek to suppress or covet such an inborn ability, especially since he hinted that this talent had its limits and could not endlessly improve the arts.
With this suggestion, the elders all believed he had reached the pinnacle of his ability.
In the end, Yi Tian wrung one hundred twenty thousand low-grade primordial stones from the tribe—so many that his storage pouch, several yards across, was nearly filled to bursting.
In return, at the chieftain’s and elders’ request, he agreed to further refine the remaining arts as time allowed. They then hurried off to meditate upon and cultivate the improved earth-grade techniques.
With this vast supply of stones, Yi Tian’s cultivation and deductions made great strides.
His dantian space had begun to tremble, signaling the imminent sixth metamorphosis—soon, he would become a seventh-rank martial artist.
After the five members of the Samsara Squad cultivated the advanced arts deduced by Yi Tian, their ranks dropped and their true qi capacity fell to that of third-rank martial artists. However, the strength of their true qi was comparable to that of those at the eighth or ninth rank.
Given their considerable wealth, they would soon return to the peak of the sixth rank.