The Human Race's Shield: From Border Soldier to the Bane of Ten Thousand Demons

On the day of the college entrance exam’s physical fitness test, Chen Yuan’s fiancée, Lin Qingxue, publicly called off their engagement. Her new boyfriend, Li Xuanji, the martial arts champion, crippled Chen Yuan’s dantian with a single palm strike. “A useless nobody like you should stop holding Qingxue back. A body cultivator? At best, you’ll spend your whole life hauling bricks.”

Everyone thought he was finished.

He was sent to the Seventh Fortress on the northwestern frontier. Every day, his job was to use his body to withstand the charges of low-level monsters, buying the rear guard time to aim their firearms. The fatality rate was sixty percent, and the average life expectancy was three months.

In his third month, an iron-armored rhino slammed into his chest. Seven bones broke, but as its horn shattered, a surge of searing life essence flowed into his body. He felt the broken bone fragments heal in ten seconds, their density tripling.

A System? He didn’t need one.

The world itself was his furnace, monsters his hammers, and his flesh and blood his divine weapon.

A year later, an innate monster broke through the city walls, and his captain told him to run. Chen Yuan took a claw strike to the chest. It didn’t even break his skin. Then he punched the innate monster’s head apart.

Three years later, a saying was making the rounds among the Ten Great Frontier Fortresses: There’s a madman at the Seventh Fortress who charges into the monster tide without a weapon or armor, takes a bath in it, and comes out without a single scar.

Ten years later, the Monster Emperor personally led a million-strong monster tide to breach the eastern coast. Human champions fell like rain, and most of the S-rank fighters were wiped out. In their moment of despair, someone spotted a bare-chested young man on the western frontier, carrying a Monster King’s corpse back with him.

“I heard something happened back home?”

He crushed the Monster King’s body into pulp, then punched open a straight passage stretching three thousand kilometers from the frontier to the Eastern Sea.

Just before the Monster Emperor’s head exploded, it heard his final words:

“A body cultivator? I cultivate the backbone of humanity.”