Yang Guo's face was flushed deep red, and his arms were beginning to tremble slightly.
Especially his poisoned right hand.
It was both numb and cold.
Ouyang Feng shouted from nearby:
"Don't let your true qi scatter!"
"Guide the qi into your right arm!"
Clenching his teeth, Yang Guo forced himself to hold steady.
Ouyang Feng grabbed Yang Guo's right hand and sliced across it lightly with a fingernail.
Two small wounds appeared on Yang Guo's index and middle fingers.
Black blood dripped from the wounds, drop by drop.
Drip, drip.
"Ke'er, while the blood and qi in all your meridians are surging in reverse,"
"Father will teach you my ultimate divine art!"
"Watch closely—this is the Toad Stance, my life's ultimate pride!"
Hanging upside down, Yang Guo's eyelids twitched violently, and the back of his head throbbed.
Toad Stance?
This was the unique supreme skill that had allowed Ouyang Feng to rank among the Five Greats back in the day.
Its moves were strangely subtle, its variations intricate, and its wonders boundless.
A slight slip in cultivation would end in qigong deviation and a burst heart-meridian, leading to death.
Back then, the old poison had been so worried for his biological son Ouyang Ke's safety that he had never dared to teach him even a single phrase.
Now, in his demented state and wild ecstasy, he threw all caution to the wind and insisted on forcing this deadly martial art into Yang Guo's mind.
While Yang Guo was still dazed, Ouyang Feng below had already flopped onto the ground with a thud.
He pressed both hands flat against the rubble, elbows turned outward, his back arched high like a giant toad.
Gurgling sounds echoed continuously from his belly.
Rolling his strange eyes, Ouyang Feng spat out a series of obscure and peculiar qi-cultivation mnemonics:
"Gather qi in Danzhong, sink it to Guanyuan, assume the form of a crouching turtle, hold the spirit of an enraged toad..."
"Power must not overflow, qi must not surge too fast; store it inward without revealing it, and a single release can shatter a mountain!"
Ouyang Feng demonstrated a stance, reciting a line of the inner cultivation mnemonic with each movement.
Hanging in midair, Yang Guo kept his eyes wide open, not daring to blink even once.
Even though his entire right arm was sore and swollen, with needle-like numbness piercing deep into the crevices of his bones,
he couldn't bear to look away for even a fraction of an inch.
Yang Guo knew well in his heart that with the Nine Yang Divine Art backing him up, he would eventually purge the cold poison from his body bit by bit.
But a grandmaster—one of the Five Greats under Heaven—personally teaching his ultimate killer move stance by stance...
If he missed such monumental good fortune once, it would be almost impossible to encounter it again!
Ouyang Feng's voice was hoarse and harsh:
"Ke'er, remember this well!"
"My White Camel Mountain's Toad Stance is the most fierce and unyielding art under Heaven—it all lies in the single word 'store'!"
The old lunatic pressed both hands to the ground, holding his power tightly contained without releasing it.
His entire body's muscles, meridians, and true qi tightened simultaneously.
Seemingly motionless, he was actually compressing all his strength inside his body.
Ouyang Feng continued:
"Look closely."
"Control movement through stillness. Store power and gather momentum throughout your body, holding back the force without releasing it, waiting for the enemy to strike."
"Then unleash it all in one blow."
The moment the words left his mouth, Ouyang Feng struck from a distance toward a stone statue.
The stone statue instantly exploded into dust, showering Yang Guo's face with debris.
Yang Guo coughed violently a few times.
He naturally understood it.
To put it simply, this technique was about building up a massive blow.
The steadier and deeper you were, the more power you could collect inside.
And when the opponent stepped forward, you exploded with supreme force in that single instant.
No wonder Toad Stance looked so strange in posture.
What was truly terrifying wasn't the crouching toad posture at all.
It was that compressed power held back and unreleased.
Ouyang Feng continued his demonstration.
Crouching, storing, swallowing, releasing.
Not a single movement was complex.
Yet when linked together, the flavor changed completely.
Yang Guo watched closely, committing everything to memory with utmost seriousness.
Even the angle at which Ouyang Feng's palms touched the ground,
the degree to which his back and waist tightened,
and how his toes gripped the earth—
he didn't miss a single detail.
...
In a muddy ditch outside the ruined temple,
Aniu and Little Shitou lay on the ground, listening to the bursts of strange croaks echoing from inside the temple.
Genuinely worried for Yang Guo, the two crouched low, crept closer, and poked their heads toward the gap in the broken wooden window frame.
Before they could make out what was happening inside,
as if Ouyang Feng had eyes in the back of his head, he whipped his head around.
His messy white hair flared out in the wind as two bloodshot eyes glared fiercely at the broken window!
"You two little beggars!"
"Get lost!"
"Do you really think you can peek at my, Ouyang Feng's, ultimate skill?!"
That roar terrified Aniu and Little Shitou so much that their legs went weak, and they collapsed onto their buttocks.
Little Shitou's face turned pale. "I told you not to look!"
Aniu panicked. "How could we rest easy without checking?!"
Hanging from the roof beam, Yang Guo's eyelids twitched wildly. He was terrified that the mad old man might casually throw out a palm strike and shatter his two brothers to pieces.
He hurriedly yelled at the top of his lungs:
"Father! Don't hurt them!"
"They're just poor beggar kids! They're Ke'er's brothers!"
Ouyang Feng's raised palm ground to a sudden halt in midair.
Tilting his head, his brow twisted into two thick ropes:
"Brothers?"
Hanging upside down, Yang Guo nodded repeatedly:
"Yes! We're not related by blood, but we're closer than real brothers!"
Ouyang Feng pulled back his palm and let out a disdainful huff through his nostrils:
"Bullshit!"
"In this world, what bloody good are brothers?!"
"Only martial arts strength matters!"
"Be Number One Under Heaven! If anyone refuses to yield, smash their head to pieces!"
...
Outside Jiaxing City, on the north side of the official highway.
Two light figures, swift as the wind, skimmed past a low wall alongside the rice paddies.
Huang Rong held the translucent green Dog-Beating Staff in her hand.
Executing the agile footwork of Peach Blossom Island, her tone was unusually grave:
"Brother Jing, although that old poison is demented,"
"that palm strike of Toad Stance earlier was vicious and tyrannical—even more sinister than back during the Mount Hua Sword Contest."
"If his mind weren't in complete chaos, I fear even the two of us joined together would have struggled to claim a swift victory today."
Guo Jing followed beside her, his steps steady as a boulder:
"Rong'er, you're right."
"If only Master Seven or Father-in-Law were here."
Huang Rong turned her face and smiled teasingly:
"Brother Jing, why is it that the older you get, the smaller your courage becomes?"
Guo Jing spoke seriously:
"There is truth to that."
"When I was young and first learned the Eighteen Dragon-Subduing Palms, with every move I learned, I felt I had grown that much stronger."
"I thought I could charge forward invincible."
Gazing into the distant, misty mountains, he let out a long breath:
"Yet now, the more my martial arts progress, the more I catch glimpses of the vastness of heaven and earth, and the depth of the martial dao."
"It's like climbing a mountain. Standing at the foot of it, you feel the mountain isn't all that tall."
"But once you actually reach the summit, looking down yields an abyss tens of thousands of feet deep, and looking up reveals an endless firmament."
"How could one not feel awe in their heart, deeply aware of their own insignificance?"
Huang Rong leaped nimbly over a small ditch, raising her pretty willow-leaf eyebrows.
She lightly tapped the Dog-Beating Staff against Guo Jing's shoulder:
"My, Hero Guo is so modest!"
"This grand lecture of yours is quite articulate—you certainly put on the full air of a martial arts grandmaster."
Teased by her, Guo Jing's weathered face flushed red, and he waved his hand repeatedly:
"Rong'er, don't make fun of me..."
"I was just speaking off the top of my head."
The corners of Huang Rong's lips curled high, her face filled with pride:
"And yet, why am I the exact opposite of you?"
"The more my martial arts improve, the more I feel I'm truly remarkable."
Amidst their chatting and laughing, the two had returned to the spot where they had fought Ouyang Feng earlier.
Guo Jing slowed his pace, his eyes scanning the ground like a hawk.
He tracked forward along the intermittent palm prints.
He noticed a large willow tree by the roadside—thick enough to require two men to encircle—snapped cleanly into two by a tyrannical palm force.
In the mud beside the trunk, a string of inverted palm prints sunk half an inch deep into the ground was clearly visible.
Huang Rong stepped forward, looked closely at them, and couldn't help pressing her lips together with a soft chuckle:
"That crazy old fool is actually quite considerate in his madness."
"When others flee for their lives, they wish they could erase every trace. But he's great—he uses these palm prints to mark out the way for us."
...
Inside the ruined temple.
Ouyang Feng was bent over, using his fingers to correct the points where Yang Guo exerted force.
"Guide the qi along the Ren Meridian! Don't squeeze it out forcibly from Danzhong!"
Before he could finish speaking,
Ouyang Feng's joyful face suddenly froze.
His headful of dry, grass-like white hair stood straight up on end like a hedgehog's quills.
His two ears twitched violently.
He felt two extraordinary inner energy forces slowly approaching.
"That fiendish couple of bullies is catching up!"
Ouyang Feng's expression changed drastically, throwing away all interest in teaching martial arts on the spot.
He rushed forward, slapped Yang Guo on the buttock, and spoke with lightning speed like popping beans:
"Good son! Practice those stances from earlier every day, all the time!"
"Father has urgent business to take care of now! I'll come back to find you in two days!"
With that, Ouyang Feng gave Yang Guo no chance to speak at all.
Pushing off the ground with both palms, he flew straight out of the ruined temple.
Leaping over the dilapidated wall, he vanished into the boundless wilderness in the blink of an eye.
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