624 A Tongue of Fire
A large, yellow snake slid on the ground, ready to pounce at its target, oblivious that its target was simply acting unaware of its arrival.
The snake was at True Disciple 4th realm, not bad for a beast that was so far away from the mountain range, and in the grassland.
Once it was ready, the snake suddenly jumped and bit its target. However, when it did, its target disappeared into a bunch of golden light.
Out of the tall grasses, the real target emerged. Revealing itself to not be a target, but the attacker all along.
The snake slammed its tail at its target, but Pearl was ready for it. His body shined with golden light, and when the tail hit him, it did practically nothing.
At the same time, Pearl's claws extended forward, his paw starting to shine with golden lights as well.
The snake opened its mouth, sending a ball of fire toward Pearl, but Pearl simply ignored it. The fireball directly hit him, but Pearl emerged from it mostly unhurt.
The snake got scared when it saw that and tried to dig its way down the earth, but Pearl wouldn't let it.
Along the way, Pearl roared with a loud voice that could be heard from miles over, and at the same time, the snake's vision dimmed as it forgot what it was about to do.
The mental attack from Pearl was not very weak either. It was only weaker than Alex's.
Pearl finally reached the beast and hit it with his shining paw. The snake was sent sliding across the grass, all bloody, with a massive chunk of its body missing.
Pearl then followed it, not wanting to let it go anywhere, and once again attacked it near the same location.
The snake tried to fight back, using skills related to fire, earth, and in between, but nothing stopped Pearl.
He quickly killed the snake, and finally slumped on the ground to rest.
Shen Jing flew high in the air, watching the fight between Pearl and the snake with pure awe in his eyes.
A cat that hadn't even reached the peak of its potential was easily handling a snake that was 2 realms above it.
He didn't remember if he could do that when he was young or not, and couldn't help but compare himself to Pearl.
"Even if I had all of those skills, I still wouldn't have been able to fight that snake and win so easily," Shen Jing thought. Pearl's body was definitely better than normal, and his talent at fighting was not something to scoff at either.
However, he frowned. While skills and talents could get you so far, he didn't see him reaching very high with his cultivation base. The natural limitations of an unevolved beast would soon show themselves.
Unless the potential in Pearl was tapped, he would die being mediocre forever.
'While he does have those skills, they are quite basic,' Shen Jing thought. 'I should teach the little guy somethi—'
He stopped. An aura flared from deep within the mountains. Shen Jing could feel the Dao around the world gather at a certain location in the mountain.
"Dao Enlightenment? Is a Saint beast breaking through?" he thought. "Not bad, it must be a lucky one to have understood a Dao. These beasts usually don't have the intelligence for it."
While thinking that, Shen Jing sent his senses to the far lands of the mountain ranges, trying to see what was trying to breakthrough. He followed the traces of the natural worldly laws and quickly found a cave inside a mountain.
And in there, he found Alex.
Shen Jing's smile dropped, replaced with awe. He watched Alex open his eyes and look at himself for the new understanding he had just gained.
'Did that kid… just learn a Dao?' Shen Jing felt it unfathomable even as he said that. Dao… was not something someone could learn randomly.
He saw Alex look at the mango in his hand, and while that mango should have certainly helped him focus and concentrate on what he was trying to learn, there was no way it was what directly helped him learn the thing.
If a person had the ability to learn something, he would need nothing to learn it. If he didn't, all the heavenly treasures and divine elixirs wouldn't be able to help him comprehend it.
"And that kid somehow learned it, huh?" Shen Jing thought. "How long has it been since I have heard of someone understanding a Dao before reaching the Saint realm?"
"I had done it too, but I was in the True King realm at the time, while this kid is only just starting the path of the True Realm. How many more will he learn before he breaks through to the saint realm?" he wondered.
His eyes went wide as he thought, "how many more will he then learn before…" Shen Jing didn't even want to think about the possibilities.
Shen Jing shook his head. "It could also be that he only learns this one. Best not to think about it much longer," he thought.
Then, another thought came to him. Something that should have been the first, but the shock had derailed his thought process.
'What Dao did he learn though?' he wondered. Worldly laws always descended together, and without an expert with an understanding of the many different Daos, it was impossible to discern which one someone was learning.
'True Disciple realm… will he even be able to handle the power of his own Dao?' he wondered. Dao added strength to one's use of that Dao. Which would normally be impossible for someone.
At the same time, it also cost the person using said Dao a lot of Qi.
However, that was not what Shen Jing was worried about. He was worried about the fact that the strength of Dao attacks was sometimes so strong that low leveled cultivators wouldn't be able to survive their own attacks.
"Well, I hope he didn't learn some offensive Dao. Once he is done with his training, I will teach him about Dao," Shen Jing thought. "For now, he should go and find his cauldron already. Sigh, I even went through the hassle of getting it so close to him, but he never went there."
Shen Jing shook his head and looked back towards Pearl. "Right, back to teaching this kid again," he chuckled a bit himself and remembered a technique from his mind.
"Yes, that should suit him," he thought and flew down towards Pearl who had eaten the Yellow snake's core and had started cultivating.
If he successfully broke through, he would be a True Disciple 3rd realm now.
* * * * *
Alex felt weirdly… relaxed at the moment. His mind felt serene as his understanding of explosions made him feel like he had learned something that no one else taught him.
No, he did learn something no one else taught him. His mother would have been proud if she heard that her son was now learning things on his own without her having to teach him.
His mother… he missed his mother. And his father. And… and someone else. His memories were vague. Was that a silhouette of a girl? Why was he missing a girl?
He wondered if his clone actually made a girlfriend back in his homeworld. "No way, who would want to be together with a farm boy like me?" he wondered and stopped thinking about it all.
"Right, now that I have learned a bit about explosions, I should try it out," he thought. He was about to compress fire Qi onto his hand and do what the BlueFlame monkey did, but for some reason, he felt that unnecessary.
At least, it was unnecessary to create explosions.
"Right, not inside the cave," he remembered in time and walked out of it. Once he was outside, he put his hand forward and a tongue of fire bloomed in front of him.
For some reason… he knew what to do next. He sent the fire a little ahead of him, and thought, 'Explode.'
Within a fraction of a second, he felt Qi being driven out of his body at a tremendous rate. At the same time, fire Qi in the surrounding was being pulled towards the tongue of fire.
That was something Alex had never seen happening before.
A fraction of a second later, it exploded.
A massive boom rang from the surroundings as Alex himself had been pushed back from where he stood and crashed into the mountain with a heavy slam.
He fell to the ground and tried to bring himself up as he gasped for breaths. He wheezed, trying to breathe as the pain in his body was tremendous.
He wasn't hurt like when the monkey had burned him, but this explosion, the destruction it carried was almost as terrifying.
And it had been him who had tried to make the explosion happen.
A minute later, Alex was finally able to stand up. His body was still in pain, but he was able to ignore that to a certain extent.
He looked at his surroundings and realized that trees in a 10-meter radius had been uprooted.
Alex couldn't help but be surprised when he realized that this amount of destruction had been done with just a tongue of fire.
Had he made a bigger fire, or perhaps used the compressed fire as that monkey did, the damage would have been a lot higher than he could imagine.
'But if I do that, I will certainly be dead for sure,' Alex thought. As of yet, he wasn't strong enough for his own skill.
