After returning to the courtyard, He Yiming rested for half a day before descending into the secret chamber below.

He opened the transcribed copy of the Wood element auxiliary technique and began to scrutinize it closely.

The next moment brought him a wave of surprise: the contents of this manual felt uncannily familiar. Merely by casually flipping through it, the entire text was immediately clear in his mind.

This sensation was akin to his familiarity with the Hunyuan Force; it was utterly engraved into his very bones and soul.

Startled, he instantly recalled the incredible, inexplicable, and utterly mysterious state he had encountered earlier in the Scripture Pavilion.

He had the distinct feeling that it was precisely because of that bizarre state that everything within this manual had been imprinted upon his mind, as if he had studied it his entire life.

Bone Dissolving Art—the name sounded somewhat chilling, but in reality, it was not a malevolent technique but rather a strange method for cultivating one's own skeleton.

Once this technique was mastered, a person’s entire skeletal structure could expand and contract freely within a certain range. According to the description, an adult could even instantly shrink their body by the height of one head.

Of course, reaching this level was far from an overnight achievement, and it also demanded a specific talent for it.

If a person’s bone structure was poor, they would never achieve the optimal degree.

Furthermore, this technique was best initiated before one reached adulthood; once a person matured, their bones were fully formed. Attempting to cultivate it then would yield half the result with twice the effort, and success would not even be guaranteed.

However, He Yiming felt no worry regarding this point. His past experiences cultivating numerous strange techniques had filled him with supreme confidence in his own body.

Since that miraculous encounter in the lake, it seemed there hadn't been a single technique he couldn't cultivate, or one he couldn't bring to its peak realm.

Setting down the transcribed manual, He Yiming took a deep breath, and the internal energy in his Dantian began to churn like a tide.

That potent internal energy flowed continuously, surging higher with each wave, unleashing vast energy within him. Under the influence of this force, his bones began to exhibit strange transformations.

A searing sensation bloomed across every bone, as if ore subjected to intense heat were purging its impurities, slowly refining the most essential core.

His bones seemed subtly softening, growing pliable. The bones, once as hard as sea-worn rock tested by countless storms, slowly underwent an extraordinary change. They appeared to become spongy, starting to condense into a mass.

This was the greatest marvel of the Bone Dissolving Art: Bone Refining.

Using one's own immense internal energy as the catalyst, and the body as the furnace, every single bone was tempered anew. This process was not only lengthy but agonizingly painful. Yet, anyone who could persevere through it would not only have their bones strengthened tenfold beyond their previous resilience but would also gain the ability to transform bone into softness, allowing for voluntary contraction at will.

Admittedly, human bones could never truly compare to sponge tissue, but when this technique reached its apex, achieving the degree described in the book—shrinking by the height of a head—was certainly not difficult.

He Yiming immersed himself completely in sensing every subtle change in his body.

The pain of the Bone Refining was surprisingly not unbearable for him. This wasn't a fault of the technique; rather, his bones seemed inherently different, as if already tempered by some unknown force. Thus, this Bone Refining was merely adding lustre to fine jade, not inflicting unbearable suffering.

He Yiming was unaware that his body had already begun to slowly shrink. It wasn't just a specific area; his entire frame was compacting.

After a long while, his tightly shut eyes moved slightly, finally opening.

He let out a long breath. Cultivating this technique was far more difficult than he had anticipated. If not for the fact that every piece of the manual, including the accompanying experience notes, was firmly imprinted in his mind, he might not have succeeded on the first attempt.

Opening his eyes, He Yiming paused in surprise. He suddenly realized that everything his eyes perceived seemed to have undergone a marvelous shift.

But the next moment, he understood: it wasn't the surroundings that had changed; it was his own stature.

His body had indeed shrunk by nearly the height of a head, and his overall build had adjusted accordingly.

He raised his hand and found his arm had slipped deep into the sleeve. He stretched his legs and confirmed that his lower limbs had also reduced slightly.

A look of peculiar amusement crossed He Yiming's face. He was, after all, still only a fourteen-year-old child, and encountering such a situation made him feel rather intrigued.

Waving his arms and legs about for a good while, He Yiming finally tired of playing. He stretched both arms out levelly and pulled them slightly backward.

As he made this motion, a series of cracking sounds, like firecrackers exploding, erupted from his body.

Then, his frame began to magically elongate.

Moments later, He Yiming stood fully restored, the inexplicably lowered height fully returned.

His Bone Dissolving Art had reached near perfection in a single day.

However, He Yiming did not stop there. He drew a deep breath, and as he inhaled, his body suddenly swelled, becoming thicker and larger.

It was as if a thin man had suddenly inflated a ball inside his belly, distorting his shape entirely.

This was the other function of the Bone Dissolving Art: widening the gaps between bones to allow the entire body to extend upward.

Naturally, the difficulty of growing taller was far greater than that of shrinking. Even with He Yiming’s mastery of this technique, he could not simply sprout an extra half-body length out of thin air.

His height only increased by half a head before stopping. Reaching this point was already the practical limit for the human body.

To grow any taller, perhaps only a powerhouse in the Innate Realm could manage it.

After testing all the various functions of the Bone Dissolving Art, He Yiming finally settled down.

For him, the Bone Dissolving Art was merely a fun technique, like a favorite toy for a child.

But his true purpose in cultivating it was not play; it was to augment his internal energy cultivation and break through to the pinnacle of the tenth layer.

He settled back into the cross-legged position, and the immense internal energy within him began to circulate slowly.

This time, the circulation speed was not fast, but as it moved, it carried a rigidity as heavy as a mountain, imbued with an unyielding stubbornness—a resolve to press on until the very end, refusing to yield until the objective was achieved.

What traveled through his meridians was not the wildfire-like surging of the Fire element technique, but the Hunyuan Force, the Metal element technique he had first encountered at the age of five.

This was his foundational cultivation method, and it was the same one he now used to assault the tenth layer of internal energy.

Slowly, the massive internal energy arrived at the bottleneck of the tenth layer's pathway, lingering there.

This internal energy neither charged forward nor dispersed; instead, it accumulated, blocking the passage bit by bit.

The ultimate barrier of the tenth layer was like a colossal dam, trapping all the internal energy in the upstream reservoir. No matter how violently the water churned within the reservoir, as long as it did not rise above the height of the dam, not a single drop would spill over.

This dam was the barrier, and the internal energy was the flowing water.

When a cultivator trains internal energy, their body is like this great reservoir, where water continuously accumulates.

When the internal energy reaches the peak of that stage—when the water in the reservoir has accumulated to its absolute capacity—it is time to assault the dam.

From that moment on, no matter how much a cultivator trains, their internal energy cannot increase by even one fraction.

To accumulate more internal energy within the body, one must find a way to force the water in the reservoir to break through the dam, entering a far vaster realm.

This is the process of breaking through the limit barrier and achieving advancement.

However, while this principle is known to everyone, forcing the water to breach the dam without collapsing the entire reservoir is a difficulty compounded upon difficulty.

When faced with a limit barrier, cultivators either enter secluded retreat or wander far and wide, seeking opportunities to break the deadlock.

But truly finding an opportunity and achieving a smooth breakthrough is rarer than one in ten.

The first few layers are relatively simple, but assaulting the tenth layer is truly as arduous as ascending to heaven.

Across all of Taicang County, there were only two individuals who had reached the tenth layer of internal energy. Even in Tàichōng County, where bandits ran rampant and everyone was expected to be a warrior, the count of those at the tenth layer did not exceed ten.

This illustrates just how incredibly difficult it is to pass this checkpoint.

But for He Yiming, all of this posed no problem whatsoever.

His physique was exceptionally unique. Even when reaching the limit barrier, cultivating any new technique—even the most worthless technique in the world—could cause his internal energy to increase by just a minuscule amount.

And it was precisely this tiny increment of internal energy that served as the last straw to break the camel's back.

It was this minuscule addition of internal energy that provided the reservoir's great flood with just enough power to shatter the dam.

A near miss leads to a thousand-mile divergence.

He Yiming achieved his reputation as a prodigy precisely because he possessed that fraction more internal energy than everyone else.

Now, as he gathered all his internal energy at the entrance to the tenth layer meridian, the threshold of the tenth layer finally could not withstand the immense pressure and burst open with a loud crash.

The vast internal energy flowed into the new meridian, bringing with it a sensation of sublime beauty, a feeling of unparalleled exhilaration, like a dragon returning to the sea.

The tenth layer—he had finally reached the pinnacle realm, a height unattainable for ordinary cultivators.

Ps: Reached the tenth layer! Got any votes? Send two my way! ^_^ [bookid=1465969,bookname=《Hun Guan》]