Silver Skin turned out to be everything the manual promised. Bai Xiaochun could now absorb roughly forty percent of any physical or elemental damage directed at him, converting it into cultivation energy. A punch that would have broken his ribs now bruised him and made him stronger. A fire technique that would have burned him now scorched him and accelerated his advancement.

He was, as far as he could tell, turning into a cultivation sponge.

'You're impossible to kill,' Hou Xiaomei said after a sparring match that had left her exhausted and Bai Xiaochun slightly more advanced than when they started. 'I've been hitting you for ten minutes and you look better than when we began.'

'I can't help it. My technique rewards being hit.'

'That's the most unfair thing I've ever heard.'

Bai Xiaochun had to admit she had a point. The Silver Skin's energy absorption wasn't infinite — every major impact still left damage that needed healing, and enough accumulated damage would overwhelm even his enhanced recovery. But in a typical fight, where attacks came seconds apart rather than simultaneously, his effective durability was nearly double what it should have been.

The downside, which the manual had neglected to mention, was that his appetite had tripled. Absorbing energy from attacks was one thing. The actual physical repair — mending cracked bones, regrowing damaged tissue, replacing the blood he lost every time something hit him hard enough — required actual biological resources. Bai Xiaochun was now eating six meals a day and still going to bed hungry.

'I'm going to starve to death while being immortal,' he complained to the kitchen's head cook, who had become his closest ally in the sect. 'That's not how immortality is supposed to work.'

The cook gave him an extra bowl of rice and a sympathetic look. It didn't help, but it was appreciated.