2 - Rebirth

A few hours later, when Xu Xin woke up, he felt a pain from the back of his head, and, touching it, he quickly remembered what happened.

As he sat up, he felt a giant branch on his head, but he managed to barely push it out of the way, allowing him to sit up.

He then touched his face again, confirming that it had indeed changed. He didn't know how to feel about this.

He remembered what the voice had said, and he knew for a fact that that was the reason his face had changed, and he also realized that he felt much better despite being poisoned.

Looking at his arms in front of him, he realized that about a fifth of the poison had completely faded away, and his body was rapidly healing. The gash on his side had completely stopped bleeding, and it was about a tenth of the way healed, which meant that his healing had increased several times over.

He was very happy to get this chance, and he wouldn't waste it, but as he thought about it, he wasn't happy.

His entire life had still been destroyed, and although he had been given a second chance to live, he still had to live with the burden of the torture he had gone through when he had fallen, and the shame that accompanied it.

Everyone had betrayed him, and not only was everything he ever knew torn away from him, even his wife-to-be, who he loved more than anyone in the world, had been brutally killed right in front of him.

At this point, he had long ago decided that the only reason he was still alive was so that he could kill everyone who had betrayed him, and although he never knew how he could do so previously, this chance had come from seemingly nothing to allow him at the very least a chance to do so.

From what the voice said, he had been given a second chance. As such, he tried to sense the changes that had happened in his body, and the moment he did, an ugly expression covered his face.

His dantian was still completely shattered, and his meridians were still burned out of existence.

He didn't understand how he could have a second chance at life if his dantian and meridians hadn't even recovered.

However, he quickly calmed down. After thinking about it for only a second or two, he came up with the answer.

Just because that mysterious voice had said he had gotten a second chance, that didn't mean that everything came instantly.

Dantians and meridians were famously hard to recover if they had been damaged, and it was next to impossible to fix them if they were destroyed like his were. As such, why would they recover just because he had been given a second chance?

He didn't even question what the voice was or where it came from, because it obviously had to do with this tree.

After all, he had fallen unconscious under it while it was perfectly alive and bursting with vitality, but when he woke up, it was rotted and falling apart, meaning that something in this tree was the source of its life, and he figured that he might have gotten some sort of inheritance.

Inheritances were things left behind by experts to continue their legacy even after they had died, and it was something that everybody wished they could find.

Some inheritances had heaven-defying powers, like healing broken dantians and meridians, hence why he didn't question it too much. They also usually contained skills and cultivation techniques, but it seemed that this 'inheritance' didn't have such things.

However, only a few minutes later, he realized that this wasn't the case at all.

There were no inheritances that could change a person's face, and Xu Xin only realized this after a few minutes of looking around, making him wonder what exactly had happened if it wasn't an inheritance.

However, he didn't really care since he had been given a second chance at life. After all, it would be revealed later on what had happened anyway.

After a few more minutes of looking around and seeing that he would get no answers here, Xu Xin continued on his journey out of the kingdom. After all, even if he had gotten a second chance and his face had changed, he wouldn't stay here.

During his journey, he realized that his side was rapidly healing, and his muscles had also slightly recovered, allowing him to move faster and for longer than before while also being able to move easier.

His journey was long and slow, but after a week of traveling, he realized that his side had almost completely healed, while all the poison had been purged from his body.

He had also realized that, just like he predicted, his dantian had started to heal, while his meridians had completely healed already.

He didn't even understand how this was possible, because this poison was one of the strongest poisons in the kingdom, the core shattering poison. It was designed to disintegrate the dantian of someone and burn their meridians away even if they were extremely powerful like Xu Xin had been previously.

Previously, he was known as Xiao Xin, the number one genius in all of the surrounding kingdoms, being stronger than some geniuses almost twice his age and stronger than most people would ever be in their lifetimes at only the age of fourteen.

If people actually cultivated from birth, this wouldn't be surprising, but people only started to cultivate at the age of ten due to the stress that it put on your body being too much for a child, meaning he had done all this in only four years.

He had broken through the body rank, the stage before cultivation, in only a month, setting a thousand year record, and after that, he had reached the peak of the martial arts path at only the age of fourteen, setting a record for all time.

The martial arts path wasn't the only realm of cultivation, but it was the realm that 99% of people were at, therefore his achievements put him at the top of the kingdom in terms of strength while only being fourteen years old.

It was an extreme understatement to say that he was merely a genius, and that wasn't even considering his intellect, which was higher than anyone in the kingdom within a hundred years.

He was referred to as a cultivation maniac, and many people thought he was extremely arrogant because of it, which he was, but that didn't mean that he didn't know his limits.

He was actually far more aware of himself and others than other people, and he had never failed to do something, because he would never do something he wasn't confident in.

For these reasons, he was considered a terrifying adversary across all the surrounding kingdoms, and nobody could fight against him. Nobody wanted to be his enemy, because if he was this strong at only fourteen years old, imagine how strong he would be when he was grown up.

However, everything had fallen apart in one night, when he was accused by his brother of betraying the kingdom in such an unforgivable way that, even without direct proof, he was sentenced to death along with his wife-to-be, who was killed right in his arms.

In the blink of an eye, everything he had ever known had been torn away from him, and he only barely managed to escape death, sustaining grievous injuries in the process.

He was then hunted down by the entire kingdom as if he was a wounded dog, humiliating him beyond anything he had ever experienced.

For a while, he couldn't truly accept what had happened, but he was forced to accept this reality as the humiliation of his first ever defeat sank in. His first ever failure had nearly killed him and stripped away any hope of him recovering. As such, he vowed never to lose again.

Previously, he had no hope of ever recovering, but now, with this second chance, he wouldn't waste it, and he would rise above those who had betrayed him and kill them. He had never failed to complete one of his goals, and he wouldn't start now.

Given that he had almost fully healed now, Xu Xin started to work out on his journey, trying to start the process of recovering his cultivation.

Because his body had recovered, he was considered to be in the body rank of cultivation, which was a fast period that every person managed to break through. It just varied how much time it took to get past, hence why he was previously weaker than even commoners.

The body rank was considered to be foundational in that nobody could cultivate without a strong enough body, and the body rank strengthened your body.

Most people would complete the body rank at about fourteen years old, but Xu Xin had finished it the first time at only ten years and a month old, showing his insane talent.

Most people only started to train their body at ten years old since doing it younger would be too harmful to a young body, but Xu Xin had only taken a month total to break through the body rank.

By the time he was twelve, he had passed the cultivation of the average fifty year old, and by the time he turned fourteen, he had surpassed the cultivation of every single person his age in the kingdom and the surrounding kingdoms, being ten times as strong as the average person at the peak of their entire life.

It wasn't for nothing that he was considered to be terrifying.

However, he couldn't cultivate yet on account of the fact that he hadn't broken through the body rank yet, and he needed to do so as quickly as he could.

He figured that his dantian might start to repair by the time he broke through the body rank, and that he would then be able to cultivate as it recovered.

There were nine stages of the body rank, and each stage was stronger than the previous one. During this time, the cultivator would strengthen their body and increase their resistance and durability, which is what would allow them to be able to withstand Qi and cultivate.

By now, Xu Xin had reached the second stage of the body rank. This meant that he was far below average among those his age, with the majority having already broken through the body rank.

Because his body had had the poison completely expelled two days ago, he had already started to cultivate yesterday, and he had broken through to the second stage of the body rank in only a day, showing that he still had quite good talent.

He had also gone into a small town during this week, and he had discovered something quite interesting. Not only had his face changed, but his entire body had changed. He was now quite handsome and even his eye color had changed.

His eyes were now the same aquamarine color as the drop of blood in his body, and they were extremely pretty.

But not only that, even his hair had changed color to that aquamarine color, though it was only in the roots, where his hair had grown since he got the aquamarine blood.

He had no clue why this color in specific, because he didn't know about the aquamarine blood in his body, but he didn't really care since it was a pretty color and vanity didn't matter to him anyways.

Little did he know that these were just the side-affects of his rebirth.

After stopping in the town to see the changes brought to his body, he continued.

A week later, he reached the edge of this kingdom and passed into the next one.

Then, as he was just about to continue his journey into the next kingdom, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, getting a bad feeling, like something was about to happen.