The decision settled in his soul, not with the fleeting heat of rage, but with the cold, unyielding weight of granite. The path of taming the power within him was a path of reaction, a philosophy of defense. His instincts, forged in a world where the aggressor was the sole survivor, rejected this utterly. Why learn to cage the storm when you could conquer the sky that birthed it? The tree was the source. The alpha. To truly master the serpent coiling in his gut, he had to devour its heart.
His goal transformed. It was no longer simply to forge a stronger cage. His goal was to build a body that could uproot a god.
Thus began a new, terrifying chapter in his self-made hell. His brutal regimen of Body Cultivation intensified, now fueled by a singular, blasphemous purpose. He had no master to guide him, no ancient scroll to consult. His only teachers were agony and ambition, his only classroom the unforgiving wilderness.
Seasons bled into one another, marked only by the shifting patterns of rain and sun. He lost track of the years, measuring time in broken bones and regenerated sinew.
He no longer ran up hills; he scaled mountains, with boulders the size of small huts strapped to his back with thick, groaning vines. He would run until his lungs felt as though they were filled with fire, until the muscles in his legs shredded and tore, until his vision grayed at the edges of unconsciousness. Only then would he collapse, a heap of trembling flesh, and consume a tiny, rice-grain-sized speck of the Chaos Fruit. The wild Qi would surge through him, not as a gentle balm, but as a violent forge, force-welding his broken muscle fibers with threads of spiritual iron and calcifying his bones until they were denser than river stone.
He no longer punched trees; he punched sheer cliff faces. He would strike the unyielding rock until his knuckles were a bloody pulp and the bones in his hands were a fine mesh of hairline fractures. Then, another speck of the fruit. The chaotic energy would flood his mangled hands, not just healing them, but remaking them, each time harder, denser, more resilient than before. Over time, his fists became gnarled cudgels of bone and callous, weapons capable of turning granite to dust.
The boy vanished, and a young man took his place. His frame, once lean and wiry, broadened with thick ropes of steel-hard muscle that shifted like tectonic plates beneath his skin. His skin became a roadmap of faint white scars, not marks of weakness, but testaments to a body that had been systematically broken and remade, stronger each time. The faint green ring around his pupils remained, a permanent mark of his violent ascension, but it no longer flickered with untamed energy. It now held a steady, focused light, like a lantern burning in the depths of a still, fathomless lake.
One day, he was hunting a Horned Shadow Cat, a vicious spiritual beast known for its phantom-like speed and claws that could slice through ironwood. In his younger years, he would have given such a predator a wide berth. Now, his instincts hummed with a different command: challenge.
When the beast lunged, a blur of black fur and claws aimed at his throat, he did not dodge. He planted his feet, sinking them slightly into the earth, and met the charge head-on. The creature's claws, which could tear through steel, screeched against his bare chest, sending up a shower of sparks but failing to draw a single drop of blood. His skin had become his armor. In that moment, he understood the true fruits of his years of agony. He was no longer just durable. He was a fortress.
With a single, straight punch that broke the sound barrier with a sharp crack, he shattered the beast's skull.
He was ready.
After years that felt like a lifetime, he returned to the clearing. The great, moon-white tree stood as it always had, serene and eternal. But now, as a being of immense physical power himself, he could feel a different note in its meditative hum. It was no longer just a sound; it was a presence. An awareness. It felt like a flicker of ancient amusement, as if the tree had been watching his monstrous evolution, waiting for his inevitable return.
He carried no tools. He needed none.
He knelt at the base of the tree, his calloused hands touching not the smooth, luminous bark, but the dark, rich soil beneath it. And he began to dig.
His hands were like steel spades, tearing at the earth. But this was no ordinary soil. It was saturated with the tree's dense Qi, compacted over countless centuries until it was as hard as ironstone. Each handful he ripped away was like carving a sculpture from rock. His fingernails broke, grew back stronger, and broke again. His skin tore, healed, and grew back tougher. It was a torturous, monumental task, a siege laid by a single man against a silent god.
As he dug, the tree's hum began to rise, no longer meditative, but a low, threatening thrum, like the sound of a million furious hornets trapped inside a drum. The ground beneath his feet began to vibrate with latent power.
It was a declaration of war. And he was striking the first blow with his bare hands.
Weeks turned into months. He carved a deep, wide trench around the tree, a testament to his inhuman patience and will. Finally, he exposed the prize: the tree's massive, anchor-like roots, each as thick as a man's torso, pulsing with the same blue light as the trunk. He was about to begin the arduous task of tearing through the first root when the tree's silent patience finally broke.
The hum ceased. A dead silence fell upon the clearing. The air grew heavy, the pressure immense, as if he were suddenly submerged at the bottom of the deepest ocean. A Formation—a spiritual array—had been activated.
The exposed roots sprang to life. They whipped through the air like colossal, ancient serpents, their ends sharpening into spear-like points that converged on him. It was a purely physical assault, a test of the very strength he had spent years building.
BOOM!
The first root struck him square in the chest like a battering ram. A blow that would have turned a normal man to paste merely sent him staggering back a few steps, his feet gouging trenches in the hard earth. His body absorbed the shock, the force dissipating through his rock-hard frame.
"IS THAT ALL?" he roared, his voice a gravelly challenge that tore through the oppressive silence.
He met the assault with savage joy. This was a language he understood. He grabbed a lashing root, his muscles bulging as he tried to wrestle it, to tear it from the ground. The tree itself seemed to shudder as if in pain. He was a monster fighting a god on its own terms. Dozens of roots swarmed him, beating and crushing, but his body, that fortress of cultivated flesh, endured every blow. He would not break. He would not bend.
But then, as he wrestled with a root thick as his own body, he realized it was a feint. A magnificent distraction.
As the physical assault raged, the tree launched its real attack. Not against his body, but against his mind. A sharp, acrid scent like burning straw and old regrets filled his nostrils. Screams echoed in his ears—screams he had never heard before, yet his very soul recognized their timbre. Images, uncontrolled and unwelcome, flickered violently across the canvas of his consciousness:
The glint of moonlight on polished steel swords, held by men with merciless eyes. A grand wooden manor, his home, engulfed in roaring, hungry flames. The face of a woman, her features a blur of love and terror, reaching for him. And over it all, a sound that pierced him deeper than any root: the high, thin wail of a terrified child... his own, long-suppressed and forgotten cry.
This was an attempt to trigger a Qi Deviation, to shatter his mind with the trauma of a past he didn't know he had. The physical blows were merely a screen to distract him while the true poison seeped into his spirit.
His iron will, forged in the fires of solitude and pain for years, began to crack. The agony of the lashing roots was nothing compared to this sudden, inexplicable anguish. He didn't know why he hated people. But now, the tree was prying open the door to that unknown hell, unleashing the ghosts of his own history upon him.
For the first time in this long, one-sided war, his enemy had found his weakness. And it was not the body he had forged in iron, but the past he had fled from and never understood.
He was winning the physical battle, but his mind was being torn apart.