Li Lanhao finally made up his mind. Gathering medicinal herbs was of the utmost importance right now, and taking a fierce beast with him meant he might not even make it out of the wasteland alive.
Besides, the beautiful fierce beast already viewed him as an irreconcilable mortal enemy; sparing her today was merciful enough.
Wusha lay in the snow, still weak and filled with hatred. She needed rest to recover her strength. As long as she did not engage in combat, she believed she could endure twenty days without food or water. She was confident she could overcome all difficulties and leave the Snowy Wasteland.
Li Lanhao looked back every three steps. For some reason, this was the first time he found it hard to harden his heart against a formidable enemy. Before he had walked far, he turned back. He took out a dagger and threw it in front of Wusha. Strangely, his name was engraved on the blade, making it clear there was a story behind this dagger.
"Hey, fierce beast Wusha, follow my direction, and after three days of walking on foot, you'll reach a frigid ice lake. There should still be Ice Ling Fish in the lake. Good luck. Whether you live or die has nothing to do with me. This is where we part ways."
"Get lost."
Li Lanhao shook his head, leaped across a mountain col in a few bounds, and vanished. This time, he really left, leaving the severely wounded and weak Wusha all alone to lie in a flurry amidst the cold wind.
...
In the middle of the night, Li Lanhao curled up inside a cliffside cave. There was no firewood, nor was any needed; as a Heavenly Martial Master, he could withstand the bitter cold. However, try as he might, he could not fall asleep, and everything that happened during the day lingered relentlessly in his mind.
For some reason, a restless flutter in his heart kept making him feel a pang of conscience about leaving Wusha behind, and a vague, lingering worry hovered in his mind.
"Stop it. The beautiful fierce beast is an enemy, not a friend. Her life or death is none of my business."
After thinking it over to harden his resolve, Li Lanhao got up and circulated his spiritual power. During the battle by day, he had been shaken and injured by Wusha's two blows.
Li Lanhao needed to recover quickly; pressing forward through the ice and snow while injured was out of the question. Otherwise, the fierce beast Wusha's fate would ultimately become his own final resting place.
...
Meanwhile, Wusha's physical strength was gradually recovering, though she felt much weaker and more fatigued than before the battle, and her backside ached terribly. She touched her burning backside, her eyes filled with utter ruthlessness, her stunning face contorted in agony.
"Shameless junior, do you think you can escape?"
She slowly stood up, coughed up another mouthful of blood, and propped herself steady with the Blood Demon Spear. Only then did she notice the dagger on the ground. After a brief internal struggle, she picked up the dagger Li Lanhao had left behind.
Wusha still dragged her long spear at an angle as she walked slowly forward. Her vision was excellent, allowing her to clearly see the path ahead even in the dead of night. Walking entirely alone for a long time, she crossed the mountain col. For Wusha the Blood Demon Empress, a journey like this could go on continuously for days and nights without stopping.
Wusha was certainly not like Li Lanhao, who traveled as fast as possible by day and made sure to sleep at night to alleviate his exhaustion. She would travel day and night without pausing for even a moment.
An entire night passed, and Wusha, dragging her heavily wounded body, crossed three snow-covered mountains. With legs as long as hers and such a large stride, she was relatively fast.
...
Late in the morning, with the blazing sun high in the sky, Li Lanhao was still sitting cross-legged in meditation. Golden energy enveloped his entire body. After a night of recuperation, he had fully recovered, and the internal organs injured by Wusha's shockwaves were nearly healed.
However, he faintly sensed signs of a breakthrough. Without a second thought, the opportunity for a breakthrough had to be seized; if he successfully stepped into the Layer 6 Tianwu Master, his overall strength would be enhanced in every aspect.
When facing formidable enemies in the future, he would also have more confidence. Unfortunately, his martial arts resources were limited, and the current Li Lanhao truly could not produce two decent cultivation methods and combat skills.
By noon, Li Lanhao sensed a surge in his spiritual power, causing a bursting pain throughout the meridians of his entire body. He activated the Transformation Freedom Formula, continuously channeling the surging spiritual power into his Dantian until his Dantian and sea of consciousness were completely filled.
Waves of golden spiritual power diffused outward one after another. The corners of Li Lanhao's eyes were flecked with a golden shimmer. He endured the heart-wrenching pain; he would not easily give up this opportunity, otherwise, he had no idea when the next chance for a breakthrough would come.
Suddenly...?
"Boom!"
"Boom!"
"Boom!"
Three consecutive bursts of berserk golden energy exploded outward, followed by a hundred-meter-tall pillar of golden light shooting straight into the sky, shattering the surrounding rocks to pieces.
Li Lanhao had broken through to the strength of a Layer 6 Tianwu Master quite smoothly. Just after breaking through, he still sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, but the expansion of the Dantian following a breakthrough would leave the spiritual power within the body depleted.
One could say that within the Tianwu Continent, power levels below the Peak Third Realm Heavenly Martial Master were simply a process of expanding the Dantian and sea of consciousness.
After a breakthrough, one could not slack off and had to continue practicing to absorb spiritual power. Li Lanhao continued cultivating inside the cave, completely indifferent to everything outside.
...
Meanwhile, the Blood Demon Empress Wusha had just reached the ridge of the fourth snowy col when she saw a pillar of golden light shooting into the sky from a cliff wall across two mountains. She slightly knitted her brows and stopped, propping herself up with her long spear in her left hand.
There was no help for it; the Blood Demon Spear was not light, and in her weakened state, she had been switching hands to carry it all the way. Wusha managed to stand firm with difficulty, staring blankly at the pillar of light.
"Has that shameless scion broken through? Ah! Ultimately, this is no good thing for me. Still, what if he has broken through? The next time we meet, that will be where your journey ends forever."
Wusha only paused briefly before dragging her heavy footsteps to continue on her way.
...
In the afternoon, Li Lanhao abruptly opened his eyes, feeling an endless surge of strength throughout his body. He had to admit that with his overall strength improved, his vision reached further and his hearing was sharper. However, such an increase in strength demanded a test, didn't it?
And so...? Li Lanhao drew his long sword, mobilized his spiritual power to concentrate in his right arm, and leaped out of the cave.
"Bang!"
Following a deafening crash, the seventy to eighty-thousand-jin boulder at the cave entrance was split apart by a single sword strike.
"Rumble..."
The shattered boulder tumbled down the cliff, and Li Lanhao closely followed, leaping down after it. Once again channeling his spiritual power into both arms, he grabbed the boulder and hoisted it high above his head. Driven perhaps by youthful vigor, Li Lanhao hoisted the seventy to eighty-thousand-jin boulder more than a dozen times before finally setting it down.
Afterward, Li Lanhao nodded in great satisfaction and muttered to himself!
"Mmm, feels pretty good. This kind of strength should let me go toe-to-toe with that beautiful fierce beast... well, maybe still falling just a tiny bit short."
"Glug, glug..."
Li Lanhao discarded the boulder. He was genuinely hungry, so he stepped up onto a boulder, retrieved two large flatbreads from his Ring of Holding, and sat right down atop the rock to gnaw on one.
For some reason, Li Lanhao's guilty conscience kept his eyes fixed in a single direction, staring over and over again, though that direction showed nothing but vast expanses of snow-covered mountains.
"What are you looking at? If the beautiful fierce beast doesn't starve to death, she'll freeze to death. Whether she starves to death is none of my damn business."
Before long, Li Lanhao finished off two flatbreads and pulled out another. *Crunch*—after taking a huge bite, he instantly regretted it and hurriedly shoved the bitten, expired flatbread back into his Ring of Holding.
"No way, I can only eat two a day. Tomorrow I absolutely cannot eat any extra, or I'll end up starving to death in this wasteland just like the female fierce beast."
With that, Li Lanhao leaped forward and sprinted at full speed, stepping exclusively on protruding boulders to leverage his momentum and bound onward to the next spot. He did this for no other reason than to move faster and save time.
This time, too, he traveled day and night. His speed had also increased following his breakthrough, and he no longer needed to look around left and right in search of traces of the Ice Ridge Eagle.
Until the sunrise on the third morning, when Li Lanhao arrived at a vast, open plain and finally came to a halt. Beneath the boundless white snow right before his eyes lay a lake frozen three feet deep.
That's right, Li Lanhao had arrived at the Frigid Ice Lake.