Sunless World

The gushing waterfall breezed through Feng Chao's body, scraping off flakes of dried blood and accumulated sweat. His well-trained physique was laid bare without the usual robe covering it. His current form was still that of a nine-year-old, but the extensive training had sculpted his muscles, forming a dense, sturdy base incomparable to a mere village kid's.

Thankfully, his size didn't swell up after all those training. A buff kid was a bit…

Sniff. Sniff.

He took an entire two hours just to finish his bath. From time to time, he would take a sniff at his arm, making doubly sure that his stench had gone away.

His pride definitely wasn't hurt after that bear- err, person, refrained from eating him due to his smell, alright? He was doing this to prevent animals from spotting him! Purely for the sake of his hunting!

"My robe… doesn't seem to be usable anymore."

The fabric had started to tear. He was able to clean it up somehow, but sooner or later it would just break apart on its own. Getting a change of clothing might be imperative.

Just right, he had a pile of boar hide laying around.

After hanging the robe to dry in his cave, Feng Chao flung a sheet of boar hide over his shoulders like a jacket while wrapping another one around his waist to cover his lower part. Although he had scraped them clean of flesh and fat, it still felt a bit sticky when touching his skin.

He pulled out a few more crafts from his stash. With a serrated stone knife, he had managed to saw off the boars' bones, allowing him to create spears using thick branches with sharpened bone wrapped at one end as the tip.

They were less sturdy than the stones he used for his dagger, but faster and easier to make. He also virtually had an infinite supply of the raw material as long as he kept on hunting.

"Heh. I looked like a real caveman now."

With bone-tipped spear in his hand, stone dagger at his waist, and boar hides as his clothes, Feng Chao did look like those primitive wildlings from creation myths…

Oh well. When in Southern Hui, do as the Huis do.

"I should waterproof these hides later. Maybe I should try tanning them instead…"

He should be able to make bows and arrows as well, although he didn't prefer to use them. If he shaved the bones into thin shapes, maybe he could also make hidden weapons?

"...Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

Aside from his usual training, Feng Chao also practiced spear techniques, mainly to get his new body accustomed to the moves.

His primary weapon in the past life was a sword. Sadly, he wouldn't be able to procure one at the moment. There was an idea to find copper ores, if possible, and do some metalworking, but… after contemplating it for a while, he gave up on the idea.

Too much work.

He didn't plan to stay here for the rest of his life. Rather than starting a single-person metalworking shop in the middle of nowhere, it would be faster to just find other humans and leave the work to them.

Feng Chao was quite confident that there were humans other than him in this world. In the first place, there wouldn't be a little boy without at least two people doing the work. Babies don't just pop out of thin air, okay?

His immediate concern right now was to finish the third layer as soon as possible. Unfortunately, it might take quite a while to achieve that.

As a result of his brutal training, his strength and stamina had raised considerably. Conversely, he didn't feel as tired even after increasing the severity of his exercises. With less fatigue and wounds to recover from, the benefit from mending his body with qi was drastically reduced.

Still, Feng Chao persisted, taking the drop of efficiency in stride. It was nothing compared to bottlenecks that he would face in later stages. Having a relaxed session once in a while wasn't too bad either.

The monotone days would continue for the next four months. That was how long it took until he ultimately broke through to the fourth layer.

He tried out a straight punch. A swiping kick. A quick draw of his dagger. A quick thrust of his spear as the finale. Each move was executed as swift as the wind, as fierce as a storm, as firm as the earth.

"Hmmm… hahaha!"

Feng Chao was satisfied. Really satisfied!

He had reached the pinnacle of what a mortal could achieve from persistent, arduous physical exercises. It was night and day compared to the time when he had just reached the first layer.

"And in just half a year… even though it'll take a genius at least a full year to get this far."

Then again, those geniuses started far earlier than his current age. They also did it with proper guidance, not with a weird and reckless method like what Feng Chao was doing. He felt a bit sick when thinking of what the repercussion for shoving so much unrefined qi into his body would be.

"Oh well… at least I won't have to do it every day from now on."

Feng Chao had also upgraded his tools. He was now armed with two bone-tipped spears, which were tied on his back, and a trusty stone dagger on his waist. The rawhide jacket from before was no more. After numerous trials and errors, he eventually managed to tan the hides using animal fat and an excessive amount of rinsing.

From the resulting leather, he fashioned a tunic to wear, as well as a pair of pouches; one to store jerky and another for bone needles.

His survival rate had definitely increased with better equipment!

"Alright, it's time to address the topic that I've been putting aside all this time..."

This world was just too weird.

For starter, he had been here for at least half a year. If he had started in spring, as he surmised from the climate, he should be close to winter at this point.

And yet, everything around him stayed the same.

The temperature stayed the same, plants grew and flowers bloomed at a constant rate, and there was no sign of his usual prey, the boars, preparing themselves for change in season.

Feng Chao noticed early on that the ground felt a bit warm on touch. Even without sunlight reaching the forest's floor, the heat coming from the earth was enough to provide energy for the wildlife to thrive.

This was not the way the Earthly Realm that he knew work...

In order to investigate this forest in its entirety, Feng Chao decided to finish his climb over the trees that covered the entire area. The reason was twofold: not only he could gain an aerial view of the entire forest, giving him a good grasp of the land, he could also search for signs of nearby settlements.

There wasn't any reason to single out a specific tree, but he wanted to do it at the very place where he had woken up in this world, on the first tree that he had touched. At that time he was so parched that his throat hurt just from taking a breath.

"Thinking about it, this should be the first thing that I have done upon waking up in this world… it's already six months late. Let's do this."

He climbed up without much difficulty until he reached the last branch that he usually could reach. Starting from here, the bark turned slippery, prohibiting him from getting any further.

Then again, he was now a fourth layer Body Tempering cultivator. The damned tree shouldn't think that he was the same as before!

Feng Chao hooked his fingers like claws, and then tried to grip on the smooth bark. When he felt that his hold was starting to loosen, he jolted his hand forward, exerting his entire strength until his fingers carved a niche on the surface.

"Hmph!"

...He was just brute-forcing his way through, but hey, as long as it worked, right?

Now that he had a way to push himself up, Feng Chao repeated the process, leaving shallow holes over the bark's surface as he paved his way through. The higher he went, the more he felt that the trunk was shrinking in size. Soon, he was stopped by a thick layer of foliage.

He reached out at the endless shroud of darkness above him, and then tore off a piece of it at random. Suddenly, there was a slight pain in his palm. In his hand was a jumbled mess of sharp-edged black leaves and small-sized twigs that were covered in tiny thorns.

"Seriously… someone is trying really hard to prevent me from reaching the top."

Feng Chao used his dagger to cut a small piece off his tunic. With a layer of leather protecting his hand, he continued to pry off the veil of blackness one twig at a time. It was a staggeringly slow process, but for every fistful that he took, he would be able to inch upward ever so slightly.

"Ah, it's done."

That was the twelfth piece of leather that he had cut off. Thankfully, he managed to finish before he used up his entire tunic.

The trunk of the tree had shrunk at the top part, its radius only as wide as his own. Its top was rather flat as if someone had cut it off with an axe. There was still another layer of dark twigs above the top of the tree, which Feng Chao had to further claw through before he could see what lies beyond the thick foliage.

What he saw… was a pitch-black sky.

No, it wasn't the night sky. There was no moon. There was no star. It was a dark, vast field of emptiness as far as Feng Chao's eyes could see.

"What the heck?!"

He pulled himself up onto the uppermost layer of the tangling twigs. Every time he made the slightest of movements, his fragile footing would squeak and creak before slowly sinking. He had to balance his weight meticulously to be able to stand up straight.

Feng Chao could finally taste the refreshing breeze of the open sky after so long.

The entire place was covered in a blanket of dense twigs and foliage. Every direction looked the same, causing him to feel a bit disoriented.

He mentally started counting. A number for each second. While he was doing that, he also swept his gaze around.

A glimpse of light from bonfires, puffs of smoke from cooking... as long as humans lived in this world, they would always leave visible signs. That was what he wanted to find.

Regrettably, there was none in sight.

'Three-thousands seven-hundreds and twenty-four, three-thousands seven-hundreds and twenty-five…'

It took his eyes an hour before they adjusted to the darker ambiance of the sky.

"That's…"

Feng Chao slowly made out the outline of a towering triangular shadow in the distance. It looked like a mountain, but the slopes were too steep for a structure made by nature.

How far would that be from his current position? He noted the direction in his mind.

Feng Chao did a few more rounds of observation, but that distant shadow was the only object worthy of interest. Perhaps everything else was hidden below the veil of foliage.

'Sixty-five-thousands…'

He stopped counting.

From the moment that he had started until now, the sky remained the same. There was no change in lighting at all.

Reluctant as he was, he had to pull a conclusion.

"...A sunless world."

A world kept in perpetual darkness.

Was it the Void Gateway Realm?

No, the Void Gateway Realm was a place of emptiness. Every attempt to colonize that realm had ended in failure. While it was possible to create structures for temporary residences, to actually have living creatures permanently inhabiting that realm was deemed impossible.

"Then again, I shouldn't let premature assumptions cloud my judgment."

There was also the possibility that the length of the night was different in this world. If he waited long enough, perhaps the sun would eventually show up.

...Or he could stand here like an idiot for years without seeing even a glimpse of it.

"I did get something out of this."

That shadow. He definitely had to check it. Just right, it was also time for him to move out of that cave now that he was strong enough to protect himself. After finishing his preparation, he would move toward that direction and see what else he could discover.

Feng Chao nimbly hopped down the branches until he reached the ground. The hole that he made above was rather conspicuous though…

Bah, no matter. These trees would just cover it back in a few days' time.

He was about to head back to his camp when a chill abruptly went down his spine. His acute senses had detected its presence way before his brain could react.

The faint huffing. The soft noise of a heavy object sinking into the wet ground. The rustling of bushes as that thing caught a whiff of Feng Chao's location and made its rush toward him.

The cultivator readied his stance, standing his ground with his bone-tipped spear at hand.

Appearing from the thick shade of darkness was the visage of a beast, a monstrous figure standing two-and-a-half times Feng Chao's height. With enormous strength and armed with a pair of sharp-clawed front limbs, the creature exhumed a sense of dread, a death sentence for those it deemed as prey.

The first time he had seen it, he had merely watched it from afar, safely perched on the trees. This time, he was facing the beast in full force, finally realizing how frightening that experience would be.

With its dark-purple coloration that blended perfectly into the shadows, a Cyclopean Bear stood on his way.

And it certainly looked hungry.