Boom!
An explosion echoed through the room, fire and smoke filling the air.
A moment later, Lin Hong looked at the dark-faced Lovela and Celestia with a bit of a guilty conscience.
He had accidentally attacked his own people.
Due to the lingering instincts of this body, he hadn’t noticed their arrival right away because the body had long since categorized their presence as safe.
After all, one was his biological sister; even if they were distant, they shared the same blood.
The other was a childhood playmate; although they had been estranged for six or seven years, a thin layer of sentiment remained.
However, he had reacted instinctively.
Influenced by the muscle memory developed through years of constant warfare, his spatial ring flashed, and he whipped out a small explosive prop and triggered it, resulting in a massive blunder.
“Master Evan Wayne, attacking a member of the imperial family is a capital offense. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
At this moment, Celestia’s face was dark with anger.
Her once tidy dress was in disarray, and several scorched marks marred her face.
“Evan, what are you doing? Why… did you attack Her Highness and me?”
On the other side, perhaps because she had been further away, Lovela’s condition was much better than Celestia’s.
She had just finished explaining the situation to the people from the Academy who were drawn by the explosion and sent them away.
Now, she spoke as well, her brow furrowed and her expression full of frustration and confusion.
Lin Hong remained silent.
What could he say?
He quickly searched for an excuse to brush it off, claiming he had just had a nightmare and was gripped by terror, causing his reaction.
However, he didn’t expect that the two women, who had been interrogating him with grim faces, would suddenly turn serious and ask for details.
“In the dream, I saw the faces of our father, mother, you, and others. You were whispering in my ear with such malice… I couldn’t move, so I tried desperately to break free.”
“When I opened my eyes just now and saw the faces of my sister and Her Highness, I thought I was still in the nightmare. That’s why I reacted that way.”
Lin Hong spun his tale, recounting the methods the Evil Priest had used during the clash in his sea of consciousness earlier.
He channeled his acting skills, appearing as if his heart was still thumping with lingering fear.
Celestia and Lovela exchanged a solemn glance.
The youth’s description had clearly brought the same thought to their minds.
However, Lin Hong didn’t care to manage their thoughts, happy to let them fill in the blanks with their own guesses.
After all, he hadn’t lied; the real culprit was simply sealed within his sea of consciousness, hanging on by a single thread.
In two days, he would hunt down the other one.
As for everything else, whoever needed to worry about it could do so.
He was concerned about something else now and asked, “Sister, Your Highness, how were the assessment results? Did I pass?”
Lin Hong pondered.
He felt his performance was decent.
Although he had been jumping around the whole time and relying on external items to stall, he hadn’t actually lost.
He hoped he had qualified because he didn’t want to waste time on this; there were many things to do.
After this assessment, the Academy would enter a holiday period.
He should be able to get enough time to recover.
Now that he had taken over the young Evan’s body—the body being the foundation of the spirit—even if it wasn’t his own, it would still greatly accelerate the recovery of his mental cultivation.
Originally, if this accident hadn’t occurred, he would have needed another year to accumulate enough mental energy to reshape his body.
Now, that time could be shortened to about six months.
Occupying someone else’s body forever wasn’t the answer.
Moreover, things only felt secure when they were one’s own.
Thus, Lin Hong felt a sense of urgency to recover as soon as possible!
The two women’s expressions softened.
They informed him that he had passed and that his performance had exceeded everyone’s expectations.
Afterward, they told Lin Hong to rest quietly and not think about anything before leaving the treatment room in a hurry.
This was exactly what Lin Hong wanted.
Once he confirmed he was the only one left in the room, he immediately closed the door and began to slowly stretch his body, preparing for the recovery of his cultivation.
After a moment of stretching, he felt his body was limber.
He sat back down cross-legged, palms facing the sky, and officially attempted to circulate his own cultivation technique.
The Creation Return to Origin Sutra.
This was a foundational technique.
Through breathing, visualization, and nourishment methods, it awakened the innate vital life energy hidden deep within the human body—a gift born of the human race—to strengthen and grow oneself.
It treated the human body as an endless treasure trove, continuously tapping into life’s potential to nourish the soul, strengthen the physique, and elevate one’s level of existence.
Lin Hong calmed his mind and began to practice.
At first, it was difficult.
This wasn’t surprising, as this was a world dominated by magic and combat qi.
The composition of energy and the laws of heaven and earth were different from his home world.
Furthermore, the body wasn’t his own.
However, Lin Hong was very confident.
Back in his home world, when he and his fellow soldiers first practiced this technique, they had been thrown into various extreme environments simulated by great means to be tempered.
Among them were even Dharma-ending and Spiritless lands.
No matter the environment, this technique remained unrestricted and could be circulated.
Although the speed of cultivation would be affected by the surroundings, it could still be practiced.
The old geezer who taught him this technique once said that it had a great origin, designed specifically so that one could cultivate and recover even in the harshest environments.
Therefore, he was confident.
Without being impatient, he adapted bit by bit, adjusting his cultivation rhythm, merging with this physical body, and continuously practicing the technique.
Time passed quietly.
Finally, after an unknown number of attempts, a hint of warmth faintly emerged!
At first, it was very faint and flickering, but Lin Hong’s heart was already settled.
The gate to cultivation in this body had been knocked open.
He closed his eyes and calmed his heart, combining breathing, visualization, and nourishment methods to slowly capture it.
Finally, he began to reap the rewards.
That feeling became clear and undeniable.
Wisps of warm current, though very subtle, were distributed throughout his limbs, bones, and internal organs.
Now, they were awakened and gathered.
That was the primordial life energy innate to the human race—the potential for life that already existed within the body!
Lin Hong relaxed completely, his mind fully immersed.
The warmth inside his body grew stronger, eventually evolving into streams of heat.
Under his guidance, the heat traveled through his body, washing over him.
It felt as if every pore on his skin had opened, causing him to break into a heavy sweat as various impurities were expelled.
He didn’t stop his cultivation until evening, when he went to take a bath.
He felt incredibly comfortable, his entire body brimming with vitality.
In an instant, several days slipped by.
During this time, the treatment room had effectively become Lin Hong’s temporary residence and cultivation chamber.
To his surprise, Lovela visited him often, squeezing out fragments of time from her mountain of official duties.
Most of their conversations were brief.
Lovela’s concern was concise, while Lin Hong acted according to the daily interaction pattern between the two in the young Evan’s memory—answering only when asked and never saying more than necessary.
However, although the atmosphere between the two was often silent, it wasn’t awkward.
Lin Hong could vaguely feel that the relationship between this brother and sister might not be that bad.
At least, in the depths of the young Evan’s memory, he actually cared quite a bit about his sister and longed for closeness and recognition.
As for Lovela, as the acting family head, she was clearly burdened by various responsibilities, yet she still insisted on taking time to visit every day, even if she just sat silently for a while.
The concern contained in that silence could not be faked.
It was just that one sibling didn’t know how to express it, and the other had armed himself with rebellion and distance.
Coupled with their parents being stationed at the border for years and a lack of mediation, the relationship had frozen into its current state.
‘It’s a pity,’ Lin Hong would occasionally feel, but that was as far as it went.
Over the past few days, he had worked tirelessly every day.
Spent most of his time immersed in cultivation, he could clearly feel the changes in this physical body; it was becoming stronger and more vigorous.
He had quietly left the treatment room at night to conduct simple tests in a nearby deserted grove.
The results were pleasing.
His strength and speed had significantly improved; he could leave a shallow fist print on a stone without feeling anything in his hand, and he could leap onto a tree branch at will, landing silently.
At the same time, his five senses had become more acute.
His night vision was much clearer, and he could capture the whispers of Academy patrol personnel from a distance.
This feeling of a slow elevation in his life level was fascinating, but it also brought a certain trouble.
His appetite had increased.
The three meals sent by the Academy and the Duke’s mansion only left him half-full.
This led the young priestess who came for routine checkups every day to look at him with increasingly strange eyes, recording that his “vital signs were vigorous and his metabolism was astonishingly active.”
One evening, Lin Hong did not cultivate.
Instead, he changed into a set of dark traveling clothes and a cloak that were easy to move in.
He let out a breath, and invisible mental energy surged from the ancestor aperture between his brows, wrapping around his body to serve as a breath-concealing and hiding mechanism.
His body seemed to merge with the environment.
Afterward, he quietly flipped out of the window and left the Academy under the cover of night.
Because the time had come.
He was going to hunt.
He was going to slay evil!