Besides the mental shock it brought to Evan Parker, that person also left something behind. Perhaps it was Evan Parker’s long howl at the time that caught that person’s attention, for when that person vanished into nothingness, a burst of bright light exploded. Among the rays, several actually shot in Evan Parker’s direction.

Perhaps that person’s cultivation was so extraordinary that it provoked the heavens’ jealousy. Several bolts of lightning struck from midair, hitting the objects flying toward Evan Parker squarely, shattering them into countless pieces right before Evan Parker’s eyes.

All Evan Parker could collect was a single broken piece of a weapon. It might have been a long blade when whole, but now only about a foot of it remained. After Evan Parker’s polishing, it was restored into a complete blade tip. Once he attached his handmade handle, it became a strange-looking weapon—neither quite a short blade nor a dagger. If one had to describe it, it was almost like a kitchen knife with a slightly thinner blade.

It wasn’t that Evan Parker intentionally made the broken blade look like this, but if he hadn’t, it would have looked awkward no matter what. Fortunately, to ordinary people, such a kitchen knife just looked like it had been used for many years, with a blade thinned by sharpening, and wouldn’t arouse any deeper suspicions. Evan Parker himself found it a bit amusing—a kitchen knife, wasn’t this making him return to his old trade?

Other than Evan Parker, no one witnessed what happened that day. And Evan Parker himself felt an unusual sense of regret that the person failed at the very last moment in their struggle against the heavens. Of course, that inexplicable red light also deeply concerned Evan Parker. Evan Parker was convinced that if it hadn’t been for that red light, the person would not have failed at the final moment.

And the enormous lake blasted out by that person’s punch from midair became the place Evan Parker suspected the most. Why did that person strike downward with such force at the last moment? Was there something beneath the surface?

Chapter 2: Mysterious Injury (Part 2)

At first, there was no water in that huge fist imprint, so Evan Parker began searching it bit by bit, trying to discover what could have emitted that strange red light.

After several days, he found nothing. This left Evan Parker somewhat disappointed, even doubting whether what he saw that day was real. If not for the broken weapon fragment he still carried, Evan Parker would have thought everything from those days was just a dream.

A near-immortal figure standing in midair, lightning filling the sky, the bizarre red glow—everything seemed so unreal. Only the weapon fragment in his hand could constantly remind him that it truly existed, and wasn’t just a scene from his imagination.

He found nothing unusual in the fist imprint, and the surrounding streams, affected by the sudden drop in terrain, all changed course and converged here, gradually flooding everything.

Evan Parker also stopped his fruitless search and began slowly polishing the broken blade. It took him nearly several months before the jagged break was finally smoothed out. The toughness of this broken blade was beyond Evan Parker’s imagination. If it had been an ordinary weapon, smoothing out one side wouldn’t have taken him more than a day, but this “kitchen knife” with its new handle took him so long that it was obvious it was something special. However, aside from being sharp and sturdy, for now Evan Parker couldn’t find anything else remarkable about this special “kitchen knife.”

While polishing the super kitchen knife, Evan Parker also noticed some changes in his own body. Unfortunately, these changes were not good news.

First, during his usual cultivation, for some unknown reason, the true essence that once flowed unimpeded within his body now seemed to encounter some special obstacle, moving at less than half its previous speed. Moreover, this sluggishness was becoming even more pronounced. Over the course of several months, the flow of true essence became increasingly slow.

This was only the beginning. After all, it just meant Evan Parker needed more time to recover, but it didn’t affect him during actual use. So, while polishing the blade, he could still use his true essence as normal.

However, one day after acquiring the super kitchen knife, while Evan Parker was circulating his energy and regulating his breath, his true essence, which usually flowed through familiar meridians, suddenly changed direction and rushed into a meridian he had never accessed before. The sudden change startled Evan Parker, but fortunately, his deep cultivation and the current slow flow of true essence allowed him, at the risk of injuring his meridians, to forcefully redirect the true essence back onto its normal path. The shock left him drenched in cold sweat.

This situation kept recurring afterward, each time requiring tremendous effort to get the rampaging true essence in his meridians back under control. Evan Parker was utterly baffled by this. This cultivation method, popularized in the army, wasn’t particularly profound, but it had been tested by hundreds of thousands of people and shouldn’t have such problems. Where exactly had something gone wrong?