Volume 2, Chapter 50 – The Path to Embracing the Core

Xiang Xian was more or less done talking and shut herself off. She took a jade box from her sleeve, handed it to Bai Xiang, then rose and left.

Bai Xiang watched her go, then opened the jade box and took a look. Inside were ten Demon-Transforming Pills.

This was good stuff.

Only after experiencing firsthand how troublesome it was to “feed” herself did she truly understand the beauty of being fed. These past days she’d been killing demons and sacrificing their blood to her sword till she was half dead from exhaustion, and still the nourishment wasn’t as plentiful as what a Demon-Transforming Pill could provide.

One Demon-Transforming Pill was fifty years of dao-age. Even if, after feeding Feixiang Heaven, the converted blood-qi wouldn’t carry that full amount of years, it was still absolutely richer than ten-odd days of “hunting.” Naturally, Bai Xiang wasn’t going to look down on it.

The moment she opened the jade box, Feixiang Heaven started radiating a sense of impatience. Bai Xiang immediately fed it one pill, watching the pellet quickly dissolve along the edge of the blade, turning into a blood mist that was drawn into the sword.

Then a surge of pure qi-force flowed back in return, and her qi sea swelled a little more.

Standing in the courtyard, Bai Xiang suddenly had a stroke of insight from nowhere: this kind of expansion and amplification had an upper limit.

She hadn’t hit that ceiling yet, but she could vaguely sense it already—that before long her qi-force would no longer be able to keep expanding. This path was like it was nearing its end.

So what then?

Looking at Sword Dao’s path of advancement, the answer was clear: Embrace the Core.

Horsepower was energy. Human strength was energy. Demonic power was energy. Qi-force was, of course, also energy.

Anything that was energy could have its nature altered. Bai Xiang couldn’t prove it through practice yet, but she felt it was worth a try.

So for the next few days, she practically holed up in her room without going out, even suspending her daytime sword lessons with Bai Zhuqing.

Every day it was either cultivation or studying the Jade Spirit, constantly testing out new ways to exploit the Jade Spirit’s wonders.

The Jade Spirit really was a marvelous thing.

From the start, Bai Xiang hadn’t expected it to give her any direct boost in combat power. She’d only treated it as an arithmetic script engine.

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And the Jade Spirit indeed lived up to that expectation. Before she started cultivating, as long as she engraved the operation steps and computational goals for her soul body into the Jade Spirit, then during cultivation the Jade Spirit would run them in her stead, letting her both train and calculate the Spirit Tiger Heart-Meridian Diagram at the same time.

Whatever humanity felt when it first invented computers, that was what Bai Xiang felt now.

It was so satisfying.

Her efficiency had gone up by too much.

Previously she’d estimated that it would take nearly a hundred nights of calculations to derive a new meridian line. But with the Jade Spirit running for just ten days, she already had a rough outline.

She directly activated her soul-ability and modified her current circulation diagram based on the results. Instantly, even without using her soul-ability, she felt the harmony between her mind Aspect, soul, and body—and her control over her body—jump up another level.

Most importantly, she could entrust her ideas about “Returning to Origin and Embracing the Core” to the Jade Spirit and have it run experiments on her soul body for her.

She even spared a bit of spare computing power to help Bai Zhuqing derive a new circulation diagram as well.

It was just that Bai Zhuqing had no soul-ability—so even if she had the diagram, she couldn’t really use it.

After “indulging” like this for ten days and nights, Bai Xiang finally discovered that running the Jade Spirit at such high load came with a price.

First was her mental state.

The Jade Spirit’s computational power didn’t come from nowhere. Essentially, it borrowed her brain’s computing power. Running at high load inevitably squeezed her mental energy, which meant that over those ten days, her condition worsened by the day, the feedback being that she grew more and more sleepy.

On top of that, the consumption was enormous. Each day she ate more than twice her usual amount, and just eating alone wasted a lot of time.

If this kept up, the Spirit Tiger Heart-Meridian Diagram would be nowhere near fully analyzed before she dropped dead from sudden exhaustion.

A normal person might not be able to hit the brakes at this point, because the Jade Spirit, bluntly speaking, was like a built-in support plug-in for anyone who had just obtained it.

The experience of feeling it, using it, was too wonderful. It was a sort of spiritual-level elevation—and that itself was addictive.

But once Bai Xiang realized something was wrong, she immediately pulled herself out of that state, forcing herself to adapt back to the feeling of being an “ordinary person,” and that adjustment lasted three full days.

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For three days, she resumed her sword lessons for Bai Zhuqing. She tried to eat more high-calorie food, drank lots of ginseng soup, and stopped cultivating, sword-practicing, or working out entirely. She just followed Bai Shengju’s example and spent her days lying back in a reclining chair.

Bai Zhuqing had absolutely no idea what she was playing at. Tentatively, she warned Bai Xiang, “This might make you fat,” and got her little feet in white stockings grabbed and vibrated with the Vibration Art for a full hour.

“Auntie only knows how to bully me!”

Clambering back up, Bai Zhuqing stormed out of the courtyard in a huff, not forgetting to toss a threat over her shoulder as she left.

“Just you wait, Auntie! One day I’m going to bully you like this too!”

I’m just afraid you won’t be able to wait that long.

Expressionless, Bai Xiang sat there.

She’d long since figured out all of this annoying little sister’s petty thoughts.

She wants to surpass me in cultivation, to take the lead in some things herself… It’s a good idea. Having that kind of drive is praiseworthy.

But can you really surpass me?

Even though Bai Zhuqing had already begun to show the characteristics of her qi, she still had a long way to go before truly completing Transforming Qi.

Bai Xiang, meanwhile, was already blazing a trail ahead based on the Spirit Tiger Heart-Meridian Diagram.

She hadn’t truly succeeded yet, but she had a feeling that the path of Embracing the Core within the Transforming Qi system she was creating was no longer out of reach.

Once the three days of recuperation were over, Bai Xiang planned to go out today and do some commissioned jobs.

But Xiang Xian intercepted her. The bargain master dragged her back inside, then carefully checked whether the doors and windows were truly all shut.

What was this about?

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Bai Xiang stared at her, puzzled.

“All your foolishness these past days—your teacher has actually seen every bit of it.”

Turning around, Xiang Xian coughed lightly.

“Do you know why I never came to see you this whole time?”

What was so hard about that…

Bai Xiang answered immediately, “Because Teacher wanted me to see through it myself, to pull myself out of that state on my own.”

“Correct,” Xiang Xian nodded.

“Jade Spirit, Luminous Heart—why are there still the two words ‘Luminous Heart’ at the end? Because only by clarifying your heart and restraining yourself can you control the Jade Spirit.”

“With the Jade Spirit’s blessing, a person can filter out a huge chunk of their instinctual desires and immerse themselves completely in calculation and crafting.”

“But if you rely on the Jade Spirit and indulge in the Jade Spirit, how is that not just another form of desire?”

“The fact that you could stop yourself—your teacher is very pleased.”

Xiang Xian wasn’t exaggerating. She truly was shaken by Bai Xiang’s mental character.

Yes—shaken.

Compared to Bai Xiang’s already utterly inhuman talent, it was her temperament that Xiang Xian found truly incomprehensible.

When Xiang Xian had first raised her own Jade Spirit, she’d been addicted for nearly three months, eating her master’s spiritual pills and tonics like snacks every day to make up for the mental drain.

And she hadn’t managed to pull herself out of it. It’d taken her master’s wake-up call to make her stop.

To wean herself off that feeling, she’d had to quietly recuperate for half a year. Only after those six months did she feel she was truly ready to try to ride the Jade Spirit—rather than letting the Jade Spirit ride her.

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Her disciples were the same.

Even her master was the same.

Only Bai Xiang was different.

She’d been able to notice it herself—and step out of it herself.

Just how much self-restraint and willpower did that take… Her mental character could only be described as terrifying.

“Teacher, is there anything else?”

Bai Xiang didn’t feel there was anything worth praising here. She kept thinking about Xiang Xian’s earlier door-and-window check and suspected she had something good to give her again.

She guessed right.

Xiang Xian gave her a long, deep look. This time, instead of taking something from her sleeve, she reached into the front of her robes at her chest and pulled out a small white-jade bottle from somewhere.

“Jade Spirit Pills.”

“The main ingredient is an eight-hundred-year-old Spirit King Ginseng.”

Holding the little bottle out to Bai Xiang, Xiang Xian finally smiled.

“If you want to maintain a Jade Spirit, ordinary dietary supplements aren’t enough.”

“There are thirteen pellets in here.”

“Take one every three days. It’ll make up for the depletion from feeding the Jade Spirit.”