I just became the Pirate King, and you're telling me I also time-traveled at the same time.

Chapter 1109 The Sour Musty Smell

Orange-gold and dark gray met on his chest.

It wasn't fusion, but entanglement—the two colors formed a walnut-sized spiral sphere of light between his hands, the orange-gold and dark gray inside the sphere clearly distinct yet inseparable, like two intertwined snakes.

The energy fluctuations released by the light sphere caused the obsidian surface beneath his feet to tremble slightly. Tiny stone dust peeled off the stone surface, floated up, and slowly rotated under the gravity of the light sphere.

Chu Yang looked at the Immortal-Demon Spiral and tried to maintain its stability.

One breath, two breaths, three breaths. On the fourth breath, a tiny crack appeared in the medium of the gray fog, and the immortal power and the magical power came into direct contact at the crack.

The moment the two diametrically opposed forces collided head-on, the sphere of light exploded.

The force of the explosion sent Chu Yang flying backward, his back slamming heavily against the obsidian wall, causing his vision to go black for a moment.

Gravel fell from the rock face with a crash, hitting his head and shoulders.

He slid down, panting heavily, his hands trembling and his fingers shaking slightly.

The explosion of the light sphere left a shallow pit. A shallow pit appeared on the obsidian. Although it was only the size of a fist and half an inch deep, it was obsidian that even Sun Wukong's fist could only leave a white mark on.

Chu Yang looked at the pit and smiled.

It's not because of its power—this level of destructive force wouldn't even kill a three-year-old.

He smiled because he had found the way.

This path is feasible, but he doesn't know how to walk it yet.

"Again." He stood up and stretched out his hands again.

In the same spot on the Sutra-drying Platform, he practiced from dusk till dawn, and then from dawn till dusk again.

The two-colored orb exploded again and again, each explosion leaving a new shallow crater in the obsidian.

On the seventh day, a fist-sized piece was blown off the edge of the scripture-drying platform. The cross-section was not a neat cut, but an irregular fracture surface formed by the repeated crushing of two forces.

On the fourteenth day, he began to add gray mist between his hands to stabilize the power of the immortal and demonic forces within a small area. He could now keep the immortal-demon spiral from exploding for more than ten breaths, and his sense of balance between his right and left hands was getting better and better.

On the twenty-first day, Chu Yang's cultivation entered another stage.

He was no longer satisfied with simply standing on the mountaintop and rubbing a ball of light; instead, he began to integrate the power of immortals and demons into his body movements—fists, palms, footwork, and daggers.

He discovered that when he poured celestial power into his fist and magical power into his elbow at the moment of punching, the celestial power provided the impact force and the magical power provided the penetrating force. The two forces were superimposed on the same punch, and the force of the punch was not a simple addition of celestial power and magical power, but a product. When the punch hit the obsidian, the surface of the obsidian was first blasted into a crack by the celestial power, and then the magical power penetrated into the crack, disintegrating the entire stone from the inside.

This punch was even more effective than the full-force strike he delivered with the dagger before swallowing the pill.

He throws three thousand punches every day, each punch carrying both divine and demonic power, and each punch is an attempt to find the optimal ratio between divine and demonic power.

On the twenty-fifth day, Sun Wukong realized something was wrong.

That afternoon, Sun Wukong was practicing his incarnation technique on the flat ground with five demon bone monkeys.

Stone's clone technique has already shown some success—it can create a phantom that is exactly the same as itself. Although the phantom can only last for five breaths, it is enough to create a moment of chaos in the battle.

Shi Tou was very proud. Every day after practice, he would run to the pond and look at his reflection in the water for a long time to see if he was more handsome than the day before.

Sun Wukong sat cross-legged on his big rock, holding a handful of pine nuts in his hand, peeling them while watching the rock practice its martial arts.

Then Chu Yang came down from the back of the mountain.

He was shirtless, his pants were torn and tattered below the knees from the gravel, and his bare feet made no sound as he stepped on the gravel slope.

His body was noticeably thinner than it had been twenty-five days ago—not in a morbid way, but in a pure, lean state left after all the excess fat had been burned away, with every muscle pressed against the bone like a tightly stretched layer of leather.

His hair had turned silver-white again, but unlike the bright silver when he swallowed the pill, the current silver-white had a grayish tone, like the color of moonlight after being covered by a thin layer of clouds.

The dark red ring in his right pupil reappeared, faint and barely noticeable unless you looked closely.

"Sun Wukong." Chu Yang walked to the edge of the pool.

"Hmm?" Sun Wukong tossed a pine nut into his mouth. "Hungry? Stone, go pick some peaches." "Hit me."

Sun Wukong stopped chewing pine nuts.

He spat out the pine nut shells from his mouth and tilted his head to look at Chu Yang.

"What did you say?"

"Hit me with all your might." Chu Yang stood on the opposite side of the pool, feet apart, arms hanging naturally at his sides. "Don't hold back."

Sun Wukong slowly stood up from the stone.

He looked into Chu Yang's eyes—his left eye was dark brown, and his right eye was pale gold with red markings—both eyes were looking at him, and there was not a trace of joking in their pupils.

Sun Wukong grinned, but it wasn't a contemptuous smile; rather, it was a long-suppressed excitement that finally surfaced from the corner of his mouth.

"You said it." He pulled the golden cudgel from his ear, and the cudgel transformed into a wrist-thick iron rod in his palm. "Don't regret it." Then he made his move.

This is a full-force strike.

Sun Wukong did not test him, nor did he hold back. The golden light on his golden cudgel shone at an unprecedented level. The space around the cudgel twisted and deformed under the high temperature, and the air emitted a sharp hiss.

The stick fell from the sky with enough force to smash a mountain into a valley, heading straight for Chu Yang's head.

Chu Yang did not dodge.

He raised his right arm and used the outside of his forearm to block the golden cudgel.

It wasn't caught with the palm of the hand, nor was it blocked with a dagger; it was the side of the forearm, where the ulna is located, the hardest bone in the arm.

Celestial power covered his forearm, forming an orange-gold shield, while magic seeped out from within his bones, coating the surface of his ulna with a dark gray film.

The two forces combined around the arm bone.

The golden cudgel struck his forearm.

The golden cudgel stopped; it couldn't go any further.

A shockwave exploded from the point where the arms collided, spreading in all directions.

The shockwave created a hemispherical depression in the pool's surface, and the water at the bottom of the waterfall was propelled upwards by three feet. All the pebbles on the scree slope were blown away, crashing against the peach tree trunks with a series of loud thuds.

Sun Wukong's eyes widened.

He watched as Chu Yang's arm steadily held his golden cudgel, as if he were watching a fish flying in the sky.

Then Chu Yang made a move.

He used his left hand to push aside the golden cudgel, and with his right hand clenched into a fist, he hooked it upwards towards Sun Wukong's chin.

At the same time, the orange-gold of immortal power and the dark gray of demonic power lit up on his fist. The two lights wrapped around his fist, forming a small immortal-demonic spiral.

Sun Wukong withdrew his staff and returned to defense, using the staff to block Chu Yang's fist. The fist struck the staff, and Sun Wukong was shaken and took two steps back.

They didn't retreat voluntarily; they were attacked.

His tiger's mouth went numb, and the golden cudgel trembled and buzzed in his hand.

Chu Yang did not give him time to adjust.

The second punch, the third punch, the fourth punch—his punching speed was many times faster than it had been twenty-five days ago. Each punch landed precisely on the same spot on the golden cudgel, forcing Sun Wukong to passively parry.

Sun Wukong grew increasingly alarmed as the fight progressed, Chu Yang's punching power steadily increasing, each punch becoming several times heavier than the last.

His breathing became extremely even with the rhythm of his punches. With each inhale and exhale, the immortal power of his golden core and the demonic power of his bones were precisely allocated to his fist by the gray mist, the ratio becoming more and more reasonable and the power becoming more and more concentrated.

On the twenty-first punch, Chu Yang's fist finally broke through the Golden Cudgel's defense and struck Sun Wukong directly in the chest.

Sun Wukong retreated a full seven steps before regaining his balance.

He looked down at the fist mark on his chest—the fist mark was two-colored, with a shallow mark burned by immortal power in the center and dark gray lines left by the erosion of magic power at the edges.

The fist mark wasn't deep, but it was there.

The entire room fell silent.

The stone stood on the edge of the flat ground, its mouth wide open enough to fit a whole peach.

The entire troop of monkeys behind it stopped moving, and the old blue-eyed monkey didn't even notice the flint falling to the ground.

The one-eyed old monkey stood at the front of the troop, its single eye wide open. It rubbed its eye with its paw, then rubbed it again, before turning its gaze to Sun Wukong—the being it regarded as a "mountain"—and looking at the fist mark on Sun Wukong's chest. Then its mouth slowly opened into a grin.

Stone was the first to react.

It ran up to Chu Yang, looked up at him, and uttered two words.

"You won?"

Chu Yang looked down at his hands.

A red mark appeared on my right forearm from being hit by the golden cudgel; the skin was a little swollen, but the bone was fine.

Some of the gray mist in my body was consumed in the previous fierce attack, but more than half remained—its density was no less than it had been twenty-five days ago.

He lowered his hand and looked at Sun Wukong, who was still studying the fist mark on his chest.

"We didn't win," Chu Yang said. "Sun Wukong is sealed."

He only used 30% of his strength.

"Forty percent." Sun Wukong's voice drifted over from the other side, correcting the number.

He finally looked away from the fist mark on his chest, raised his head, and looked at Chu Yang.

His lips slowly, little by little, stretched into a wide grin that reached his ears.

"Chu Yang," he said, "do you know what level you're at right now?"

"What level?"

"Among the mortals I know, not one can withstand a blow from forty percent of my strength." He walked up to Chu Yang. "Before you swallowed the pill, you couldn't even withstand a blow from one-tenth of my strength."

"More than twenty days—" He poked Chu Yang's shoulder with a finger, "You spent more than twenty days going from not being able to withstand even 10% of the force to being able to withstand 40% and fight back."

Chu Yang moved his numb right arm and rubbed the red mark on his forearm to make it less noticeable.

"Still a long way off."

"What's so bad about it?" Sun Wukong rolled his eyes. "Do you know how long it took me, Old Sun, to cultivate to my current strength? Even though I'm sealed right now, not just anyone can withstand forty percent of my power."

The stone nodded vigorously, even though it probably only understood less than half of what it was saying.

Sun Wukong removed his hand from Chu Yang's shoulder and took a step back.

"Over in the Western Regions," he said, "there are a few very formidable fellows."

How amazing is it?

"Back then, the four of us, master and disciples, arrived in the Western Regions and met some people there who called themselves gods, but they weren't the gods from the Central Plains' immortal and Buddhist system; they were something else entirely." His tone became unusually serious. "I couldn't defeat them."

"You're sealed off," Chu Yang said.

"Even if it weren't sealed off, we might not be able to defeat them." Sun Wukong's tone was calm. "That place is different."

The immortals and Buddhas of the Central Plains speak of the Way of Heaven, cause and effect, and rules.

But those things—don't talk about these things.

Their source of power is completely different from ours, and their rules are different as well.

Lu Yuanzhou's Return to Nothingness technique can turn a person into a mortal by severing the spiritual energy of heaven and earth. However, gods do not rely on the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, so severing it is useless against them because they have their own rules.

Chu Yang did not press further.

He walked back to the waterfall, bent down, scooped up some water, and took a sip.

The water was cool, and as it flowed down his throat, he could feel the golden elixir slowly rotating in his dantian, like a sleeping sun.

"When are we going back?" He put his hand down.

Sun Wukong leaned against his golden cudgel, watching Chu Yang's retreating figure as the last rays of the evening sun shone on him.

"You decide."

"That'll be soon." Chu Yang stood up and used his wet hands to tuck his hair back.

The setting sun sank into the sea behind him, the last golden rays disappearing over his shoulders, outlining his silhouette as a slender and serene figure.

the other side.

Pigsy felt that he must have offended the God of Plague in his past life.

No, that's not right. In his previous life, he was Marshal Tianpeng, but he offended the Jade Emperor and was banished to the mortal realm to be reborn as a pig.

What about this life? In this life, he obediently followed his master to the Western Paradise to obtain the scriptures. Along the way, he fought monsters, carried luggage, was scolded, went hungry, and was bullied by monkeys. He finally achieved enlightenment and became the Clean Altar Messenger. But then he encountered those unreasonable so-called "gods" in the Western Regions. Thinking about this made him angry, so he simply stopped thinking about it.

But this mess he's in now is giving him a bigger headache than the gods of the Western Regions.

He sat on a large wooden chair covered with a tiger skin. The tiger skin beneath him hadn't been aired for who knows how many years, and it emitted a musty smell that made one's nose sting.

The armrests of the wooden chair are carved with two animal heads. The one on the left is missing an ear, and the one on the right is missing half a tooth. The carving is so rough that it looks like it was casually chopped out by a drunken woodcutter with an axe.

The table in front of him was piled with all sorts of odds and ends: a few pieces of blackened silver, a string of broken beads, a chipped waist knife, three teeth of some unknown animal, and half a bowl of wild vegetable porridge that had gone cold. A thin film had formed on the surface of the porridge, and a fly landed on the film. The fly struggled for a couple of moments and then stopped moving.

This is his mountain stronghold.

To be precise, it's Black Wind Cave.

The cave entrance is in a remote, desolate ravine. The cave itself is quite large, with interconnected passages, large caves leading to smaller ones, smaller ones to hidden caves, hidden caves leading to water caves, and below the water caves is an underground cave.