The Evil God's Profound Veins.

When Yun Che had first scanned the Sky Poison Pearl's inner space, he had found more than just a garden. He had found a legacy — the complete inheritance of the Evil God, one of the Seven God-Kings of the Primordial Era, a being whose power had once threatened to tear apart the very fabric of the universe.

The Evil God had not been evil in the way humans understood the word. He had been a force of nature — chaos given form, destruction walking the earth. But before he fell, he recorded all his cultivation techniques within the Pearl, preserving them for a successor who would never come.

Until now.

The first technique was the Profound Veins themselves. Every cultivator was born with a set number of profound veins — the channels through which profound energy flowed. Most humans had three to five. Geniuses had six or seven. The greatest prodigies in history, the founders of sacred grounds and the ancestors of imperial bloodlines, had eight.

The Evil God had fifty-four.

Yun Che couldn't open fifty-four profound veins. Not yet. But the technique described a method for forcibly opening new veins through a process of controlled self-destruction — deliberately rupturing the meridians and then rebuilding them stronger, with the Sky Poison Pearl providing the regenerative energy to survive the process.

It was insane. Every cultivator in the world would tell him it was suicide. You did not rupture your own meridians. You protected them with your life. Meridians were more precious than gold, more important than limbs. Without meridians, you were a cripple.

Yun Che had already been a cripple. He had nothing to fear from it.

He began the process at midnight, when the profound energy of the world was at its quietest ebb. The first rupture felt like dying. The second felt worse. By the third, he was beyond pain, floating in a space between living and dead where only the Pearl's relentless healing kept his heart beating.

When the sun rose, he had opened his seventh profound vein. His cultivation base had actually regressed — back to Elementary Profound — but his potential had tripled. The seventh vein pulsed with his heartbeat, a tributary of power that would grow stronger over time.

'Eight more and I'll match the greatest prodigies,' he told himself. 'Fifty-four and I'll surpass the gods.'