King Hong could understand Lin Mu's confusion, as many others were the same. Even he himself had not thought that he would reach the Dao Shell realm this quickly. He had barely been in the nascent soul realm for three years before reaching the Dao Shell realm..
This was a record that would easily stand for a long time in the empire. While it didn't come as close to Lin Mu's own record, it was still very impressive. Now, in addition to Little Shrubby and Jing Luo, there was another close ally of Lin Mu that was at the Dao Shell realm.
This increased their offensive power by quite a bit.
"Well, I had a little help and got to reap some fortune back in the Kong Plane as well. You should see the new records we've made. There is a lot more to the Kong Plane we've yet to see." King Hong spoke.
Hearing this, Lin Mu got an idea. Even back when Little Shrubby had gotten the Blood Spring carp, he knew that there were some really good locations in the Kong Plane where treasures were just waiting to be found.
And King Hong's words made sense considering the fact that with his bloodline and talent, it wouldn't be hard for him to speed ahead and reach the Dao Shell realm.
From the spirit Qi fluctuations, Lin Mu had sensed from King Hong. He could tell that he was at the Shell initiation stage of the Dao Shell realm. Though he didn't know how far he was from reaching the Shell genesis stage, as that would need input from King Hong himself.
Or at the very least, Lin Mu would have to take a look at the Dao Shell. If King Hong was going with the default Spherical Dao Shell, it wouldn't take that long to reach the Shell genesis stage.
Lin Mu went on to talk with King Hong more in detail about what he found and how he actually reached the Dao Shell realm.
The main reason behind his breakthrough was actually the remains of a dead beast. After continually cultivating, King Hong's senses were getting better and better and along with that his perception for the fire element also increased.
His talent already increased that, along with his Dauntless Ember Physique, but he was now getting control over it. And due to this, he felt something far away from him. His physique was resonating with it and made him desire to go find it out.
He didn't go there at first as he needed to deal with the matters of the Hong Lin Kingdom too. But later on, the urge only increased more and more, such that he reckoned he wouldn't be able to hold back.
Thus, he requested help of Jing Luo and made it so that he would have some time to explore. Jing Luo even gave him the improved spirit boat that helped King Hong travel way faster than he could with his own cultivation base.
He ended up traveling for about a week into the depths of the Kong Plane before finally finding what was calling out to him. The thing was buried deep within the ground and was encased in rocks.
When he finally unearthed it and broke apart the rocks, he discovered what it was, fossilized bones.
From what King Hong could tell, the bones contained something that his body desired. The fossil looked like they belonged to some kind of a lizard beast. It was once massive but due to being fossilized, its size had greatly decreased.
King Hong still memorized the shape of the fossil so that he could find out more about it later on.
Then when he finally touched the bones, his body automatically reacted!
Flames sprouted on his body and quickly flew to the fossilized bones, reducing them to fine ashes. King Hong didn't know how this happened, as it wasn't under his control at all. But when the flames had finished their work, they returned to King Hong.
As soon as they entered back into his body, he could feel a massive power surging into his body. He right away started cultivating to assimilate this power and a month later he directly reached the Dao Shell Realm!
"That… is certainly a fortunate encounter alright. If you physique responded like that, then it must have been some really powerful beast too when it was alive. Even after being for so long and being fossilized, it had power left behind in its bones." Lin Mu spoke, feeling impressed.
"I also have the records I researched. I wanted to see if I can find out more about the beast so that I might be able to use them more later. But I couldn't find out much. It's as if the beast never existed." King Hong spoke.
"Can I take a look?" Lin Mu asked.
"Of course! My last hope was that you might have some idea about what the beast might be." King Hong replied before passing a jade slip to Lin Mu.
Lin Mu quickly took a look through it and saw a lot of notes that King Hong had come up with. He had evidently read through a lot of beast records and checked for similarities in the bone structure of the beast.
But at most, he was able to come up with the conclusion that it was a lizard beast that had an affinity with the fire element.
'Let's take a look at the bones…' Lin Mu thought and saw the sketch that was drawn from King Hong's memories.
Lin Mu saw what looked like a lizard beast that was at least as big as Little Shrubby. It had Four limbs, with different set of claws. The fore limbs had three claws on the frontal side and one on the back, while the hind limbs had two claws on the front and one on the back.
Its skull and tail were similar to most lizard beasts and made it hard for Lin Mu to differentiate.
