Golden Iron, Golden Core

"Argh!" Ye Mu grunted, as a powerful kick sent him flying a dozen meters back.

He had expected that engaging in close combat would be more advantageous for him but it seemed that, even in this domain, Xiao Chen was an accomplished fighter, as she covered her body with intertwined ice veins, acting as an exoarmor combining the flexibility of flesh with a solidity far surpassing diamond:

"Gracious Ice Net Armor!"

Due to this killer move, the fox's single advantage disappeared.

'Ah, it reminds me of fellow Zhang's Shooting Blood Dancing Armor' Ye Mu thought as he kept battling for his life.

When thinking about it, since the beginning of the fight, she had used several moves that resembled better versions of their own. Perhaps it was simply that before reaching Nascent Soul, when options were still greatly limited, strong moves were bound to be similar. 

Still, it was frustrating. All these years training to finally reach the Golden Core realm, only to see someone else essentially be a better version of you…

'Is she really?'

If the enemy had really been a better version of them, would she actually be the only one left on her side? Would she currently be looking so exhausted even if she was the one pushing him back? 

'Yes, maybe' Ye Mu thought. 'But then, that would simply mean that in this world, just being 'better' isn't enough'

Even those who worked harder than anyone else would never be able to catch up to those with superior talent, but even those who had such superior talent would crumble in front of the wrong circumstances.

In truth, the reason Ye Mu had originally chosen to let Baotian tamper with his core and to follow him was that. The man who had overcome every possible unfavorable circumstance, and even defeated one of the six great geniuses of the realm, he wanted to see if he would be able to do it again, he wanted to be part of it himself!

He avoided an ice-covered palm aiming for his head, jumped over yet another ice spear, resisted ice shards that inflicted dozens of small cuts over his body and bit full-strength into Xiao Chen's forearm, cracking the elaborate ice armor with his fangs, which points were now red.

Immediately, Xiao Chen swung her arm, sending him flying. Then, before he could recover his balance, she flew after him, struck him again, and chased after him in the air to keep doing it, determined to eliminate him. Each blow inflicted tremendous damage upon Ye Mu and yet, he refused to give up. 

Using the first occasion he could grasp, he leaped over himself in the air, dodging most of the impact of Xiao Chen's tenth strike, and slapped her away with the back of his paw, finally creating some distance between them. Panting loudly, covered in blood, he forced himself to smile as Baotian would, revealing his bloodied fangs:

"Human cultivators are often bragging about being superior to us Spirit Beasts but, seeing how a grand perfecting stage Core Formation cultivator's capabilities only amount to that, I see that it is nothing more than that, bragging" he said. "Or maybe it is less about humanity and more about clans? It makes me happy that our Lands of Yaoling only have tribes, that way we don't have to stand the presence of lazy incompetent inbreds like you"

For the first time since the beginning of the fight, Xiao Chen's expression seemed to reveal genuine hatred. Not because of her former disciple, now tarnishing the name of her clan each day, nor because of Zhang Baotian, the one who had assisted him in doing so. It wasn't even because of Zi Moyan's foul mouth, but truly due to the calm and reasonable Ye Mu:

"It seems that a filthy beast gained quite the confidence after the mighty ones of Xuanhe decided not to bother squashing it like the lowly thing it is" she said. "As the second-in-command of a major clan, I will now take on this duty in their stead"

As he heard these words and saw her prepare her next move, Ye Mu's smile widened:

'It seems that miss Zi, fellow Zhang and junior Hanchen are really good teachers when it comes to driving people mad' he thought, preparing for the onslaught of ice.

In the meantime, Baotian had finished drawing an array on the ground, using more of his remaining blood essence. Hanchen hesitated but, seeing Ye Mu about to die, decided to make a last gamble, and lay down in the middle of the formation.

"I'm surprised you're trusting me, honestly" Baotian said flatly as he began to put his plan into action.

"I'm not" Hanchen replied. "I don't even have that much hope that I will leave this array alive. I am just doing this because I'm out of options. At the very least, that way, the others will have a chance to survive"

"Ah? I thought you were just agreeing out of spite toward the Xiao clan" Baotian said as he took out four different items from his storage bag.

Hanchen smirked bitterly:

"There might be a bit of this"

Baotian chuckled one last time, trying to relax. If he was too tense, he would fail and it would all amount to nothing. Taking a large breath, he activated the formation and used his spell:

"Crazed Demonic Blood Burial Mantra, Spiritual Source Annihilation!"

This spell was originally designed to assimilate the accumulation of a cultivator. Depending on the realm and stage, it could be Qi Components, Qi Pieces, Spirit Cores, Nascent Souls, or just lumps of energy in the first half of Qi Refining, for instance.

However, in his later years, Blood Torrent Grandmaster Zhang Ming, after a sudden surge of enlightenment, had decided to create this array, too, to evolve the use of the spell. Instead of absorbing the accumulation of a cultivator, it absorbed their talent. By refining and then absorbing it, the user of the Crazed Demonic Blood Burial Mantra could assimilate part of it, increasing their own talent.

There were a few drawbacks, of course: firstly, the sacrifice had to be in the same major realm, and at least Qi Building. Secondly, the increase would only be permanent if the sacrifice was an Earthly or Heavenly Talent: because their talent revolved around a particular ability, it was much harder to dissipate, and thus could integrate permanently into the receptor's own talent. Thirdly, no matter how many Earthly Talents were assimilated, one could never develop an Earthly talent themselves. Finally, each new use would only bring about half the increase in talent it would have done the first time.

As a sacrifice, Hanchen fulfilled the first two conditions. As for the third condition, Baotian wouldn't have counted on a single new ability to save them, anyway.

The important point was the fourth one: Zi Moyan, assuming she could still be saved, had her chances dwindle, and Ye Mu too didn't seem like he could hold on much longer. There was no time to fully complete the ritual, so he would have to stop at sacrificing only the Shadow Embodying True Physic instead of the entirety of Hanchen's talent. By doing so, he effectively limited permanently the total increase in talent he could get through the Blood Burial Mantra by more than a third.

But right now, Baotian couldn't even feel his heart ache at the loss. As he completed the ritual, ignoring the sharp screams of pain coming from Hanchen, he didn't rejoice, didn't mourn, he simply watched the four objects in his hands, using his now high talent to try and complete the method he had in his head.

Truthfully, due to the circumstances, his talent had only gone from very slightly above average to that of a minor genius like Zi Moyan, probably even a bit lower. And even someone like Zi Moyan couldn't have achieved what he aimed for in such a short span. But that was alright, because in the first place, Baotian always relied more on his own reasoning, calculations and point of view than on talent.

And so, as finally the prodigy had become a genius as well, albeit a modest one, it was enough: finally, Baotian saw the way to victory.

And so, he grabbed the first object, the damaged core he had taken from the Golden Core Owl's corpse, and used Spiritual Source Annihilation on it, but stopped halfway, a sharp pain in his chest as the nearly-shattered core was left whole in his chest.

'It will be my greatest gamble yet!'

Creating a sword out of blood essence, Baotian stabbed through his own chest.

"Ah?"

Hanchen, still alive but barely conscious, looked at him with shock as blood was gushing from the wound. But Baotian, resisting the urge to faint, grabbed the second object.

It was the artifact Hanliang of the Griffin tribe had rewarded him with, the Man-Beast Core Hatcher!

This artifact's original function was simple: sacrificing a Golden Core, it could allow a human in the Qi Building or Core Formation realm to start cultivating the Spirit Beast path on the side, effectively becoming a dual path cultivator!

Of course, if that was such a miraculous item, it wouldn't have been given so easily. While such items were rare, they weren't excessively so. The reason why they were not used much often was that the cultivation paths for humans and Spirit Beasts were drastically different, and so, to advance as a dual path cultivator, one would have to split their time between both, which was rarely an option, as cultivating the two paths didn't grant one twice the lifespan.

No, by giving the Man-Beast Core Hatcher to Baotian, Hanchen simply wanted to give him a chance to leave the demonic way. With it, he could stop cultivating the Blood Burial Mantra and instead start cultivating the Man-Beast Scroll, a Spirit Beast righteous scripture. With the status of a Spirit Beast, he could establish himself in Yaoling and join the Griffin tribe as an honorary member too, leaving his past in Xuanhe behind.

Truly, the griffin had been nothing but a saint to Baotian.

'But I'm sorry, senior Hanliang, no matter how bad it makes me feel, I'm undoubtedly a demon to the core'

Blood exiting from his mouth as well, he quickly used the Man-Beast Core Hatcher on himself, allowing it to fuse his body with the Golden Core inside, and infuse the knowledge of the Man-Beast Scroll in his mind. However, the core didn't hatch as originally planned, and that for one obvious reason: instead of first repairing the core, swallowing it, and then use the Core Hatcher as it was originally intended to, he had directly implanted the core into his body, without even bothering to repair it first, and even shattered it by his own hands.

Baotian, feeling… no, knowing that the Golden Core would soon implode, laughed, his mouth filled with blood, and began to refine all the blood that had gushed from his body into blood essence, tears of sheer pain flowing from his eyes as he laughed madly.

Now, it was time for the last step. Baotian, using Spiritual Source Annihilation, absorbed his own blood essence, back into his body before refining it.

But he didn't stop at merely refining it, no. Neither did he stop at refining the remains of the Golden Core. No, alongside both of these, Baotian refined his own Qi Cube!

Originally, for human cultivators, the formula to complete the late stage Qi Building, reach the grand perfection stage and become able to challenge the Core Formation advancement was simple: polishing the stabilized Qi Cube until it took the shape of a sphere, and then advancing to turn this sphere into a Spirit Core. For Spirit Beast, the method was to shape the Foundation into a spherical form too, and then to stabilize it into a Golden Core through advancement.

But even at the late stage, a Qi Cube already showed some similarity with a core. So if one was to use a special artifact to merge pieces of a core into himself after stabbing himself to put them in, and then use a spell to fuse these pieces around his own Qi Cube, using his own blood essence as a merger, what would happen? 

It was simple, death. In the first place, doing such a thing was madness, no different from suicide: even assuming one could survive the wounds in their chest and the energy of the unstable core pieces long enough to reach the tribulation, then what? Without a tribulation, they would not be able to advance and would die from the injury and, if a tribulation did happen, they wouldn't be able to face it and would die miserably.

'But… I did… face a tribulation'

A tribulation was a process where heaven's wrath descended upon a cultivator, forcing them to face a deadly challenge that they chose to defy on their own, and rewarding their survival by allowing them to reach the next realm. Xiao Chen, Xiao Fengyu, Liu Jianhong were mere enemies, but Liu Zhenyun was different: as a genuine Heavenly Talent, he could be considered as sent by the heavens!

Even though they didn't face him directly, he was still the one who made them run into the trap, and thus had indirectly led Baotian to this point, where he had decided by himself to challenge the 'tribulation', that was the sword piercing his chest!

Meaning that the only thing left to do to advance was to 'defeat the tribulation'. A tribulation's defeat brought along the evolution of the Qi Cube or the Foundation into a core. But by thinking backward, that meant that the transformation of the Qi Cube or the Foundation into a core was a proof of success!

Baotian, struggling to lift the last two objects he had taken out of his storage bag, ate the third, the Core Formation pill he had once extorted from Hanchen, and opened the lid of the fourth. It was a small bottle containing a mystic liquid, that he had picked up back in the Void Hurricane, years ago. 

Core Formation Restoration Elixir!

'Thanks to the pill, I already made my chances as high as possible. Now… let's test if my theory is correct'

This one time, it was not just about his own life. Zi Moyan, Ye Mu, Hanchen, all of their lives were in the balance. Even if it was just this one time…

'What were these five virtues that Hanchen once told me about? Benevolence, righteousness, code of behavior, wisdom…'

And trustworthiness. That was it: once in his life, Baotian wanted to be worthy of the truth given to him. Because the ones who had granted it to him were the ones who had made his miserable life feel a little warmer.

With a trembling hand, he stuck the lid in between his lips, and drank the elixir.

Golden Iron, that was the title that the tale revealing the truth about transmigrators had given him. A lump of iron whose golden paint would melt at the brightness of a real gem, stopping it from ever realizing its true potential. 

But if one day, after being melted with more and more gold, devouring it relentlessly until it became gold itself, then it would only be fitting for its core to be one of gold, wouldn't it?

Baotian passed the man-made tribulation, and the golden iron awakened a Golden Core.