Volume 2, Chapter 60 – Refinement

Demon arts and demon swords?

Bai Xiang froze for a moment, then lowered her gaze slightly.

“Don’t overthink it.”

As she spoke, Xiang Xian bent down, gathered up the bloody newspaper on the floor, folded it, balled it up, and tossed it into the trash. Only then did she lift her head to look at Bai Xiang.

“Didn’t you want to see the complete Nine Provinces Demon Atlas ?”

“Go bring me my phone.”

That night, Xiang Xian not only copied the full Nine Provinces Demon Atlas from her own phone for Bai Xiang, she also gave her the upper volume, “External Wounds,” and the middle volume, “Vessels and Bones,” of the Heavenly Healer’s Treasure Canon .

“Any proper cultivator knows medicine,” Xiang Xian reminded her. “If all you do is wait around to beg others for help, you won’t get any real benefit.”

She gave Bai Xiang a pile of examples—tearing skin and breaking bones out in the wilderness, the trouble of cashing in favors through personal connections—so many and so scattered that it was basically her pouring her own life experience straight into Bai Xiang.

Master seems to have changed her teaching plan for me.

Bai Xiang could clearly feel the difference here.

Before, Xiang Xian would seize every chance to hammer home the technical details of cultivation. That was what most teachers focused on when guiding a disciple.

But maybe because her own mind and talent for understanding were too outstanding, Xiang Xian had realized that compared to drilling those things, life experience was more important, and so she’d changed tack and adopted a different teaching approach.

Life experience was something Bai Xiang understood.

Even so, she didn’t find it annoying, because Xiang Xian meant well. Besides, her previous life and this life belonged to two different worldviews and two different social and cultural systems—her old experience might not apply.

It was just that she couldn’t shake the feeling that Xiang Xian’s mentality wasn’t quite normal.

Especially after that strange line in the afternoon and her own concern just now—Xiang Xian was clearly closer to her than before, and more urgently trying to cram experience and knowledge into her.

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“All right, off you go.”

Once she’d said what she wanted to say, Xiang Xian waved a hand at Bai Xiang.

“It’s getting late. Go to bed early.”

“Tomorrow we’re getting up at dawn so you can come watch the good show with your master.”

Bai Xiang stared steadily at her for a moment, then dipped her chin lightly.

“Then Master should remember to rest early as well.”

Only after Bai Xiang left did Xiang Xian let her face slacken, pressing both hands hard over her cheeks and rubbing.

“That little thing already knows how to worry about people.”

“On the outside she looks like she’s all ice and frost, but inside she’s sweet as honey. Honestly… who knows which bastard will get to take advantage of her in the future.”

Lying on her back, phone held aloft, Xiang Xian opened a hidden album and pulled up a two-person photo.

One figure was, of course, herself. The other was a girl of sixteen or seventeen.

The girl was half a head shorter than her, small and delicate, with a head of black hair. Her features had mostly finished growing in; they were refined and exquisite, with not a single flaw to pick at.

But the girl wasn’t looking toward the camera with her.

Even in the photo, she had her head lowered, eyes fixed on the sword in her hands.

…

On the other side, Bai Xiang returned to her room. Instead of immediately studying the Nine Provinces Demon Atlas , she started with the Heavenly Healer’s Treasure Canon .

She wasn’t in a rush to slay demons right now. Even if she memorized the entire Nine Provinces Demon Atlas , it wouldn’t do much good.

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Better to read the Heavenly Healer’s Treasure Canon first—maybe it would spark something for her research into the path of Embracing the Core.

This wasn’t just idle talk or gambling on luck. Medical texts inevitably involved research into human structure and function.

Especially the middle volume of the Heavenly Healer’s Treasure Canon , “Vessels and Bones.” After just a few pages—without fully understanding it yet, without really digesting it—Bai Xiang already felt the deadlock in her “Inner Landscape Heart-Vessel Diagram” loosening. She even had this sudden impulse: If I pull out the Fuhu Arhat Sutra now and study it again, I can definitely pull off the full integration this time.

But she didn’t hurry it, because she wasn’t the only “person” working on this problem.

“Vessels and Bones” first.

The heart-vessel diagram fusion work could be outsourced to “Yushen.”

“Yushen” directly called on Bai Xiang’s brainpower; all data and material came from her own knowledge. That meant she didn’t need to do anything at all—every scrap of new information she absorbed, every second, would sync to Yushen for updating, and that updated progress would feed directly into the work.

Most people couldn’t jump into this kind of thing so quickly.

Just like how the Daoist Canon and Buddhist sutras were full of specialized terms—if you hadn’t studied them, you wouldn’t understand the manuals even if they were handed to you—medical texts were, in many people’s eyes, even harder to understand than the Daoist and Buddhist classics.

But Bai Xiang was different.

In her previous life, she’d lived in a hospital for nearly ten years, discussing this and that with her attending physician every day. She didn’t need a dictionary for many medical terms; her reading speed soared.

When one thread moves, the whole body responds.

So this area always conflicted when she tried to connect it, because the qi at the edge had to pass through here.

And that route could circle around from the other side—what looked like a complex detour actually mapped perfectly to functional reality.

Immersed in the joy of gaining knowledge and making progress, Bai Xiang’s body and consciousness felt like a completely emotionless machine. All it knew was to mechanically take out “Yushen Pills,” swallow them to fuel the effort, and ignore everything happening outside.

It wasn’t until dawn, when the first ray of sunlight pierced the curtains and fell across her face, that she snapped out of that state on reflex.

Back to the inner landscape?

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The Spirit Tiger Heart-Vessel Diagram had already been altered and directly overlaid onto her current “Inner Landscape Heart-Vessel Route Map.”

The two diagrams blended and merged, sketching out a brand-new circulation layout her inner landscape could actually run.

Drawing a deep breath, Bai Xiang stared at this new picture for a long while, then lowered her head and saw that there were only six “Yushen Pills” left in the bottle.

Right now, her whole body was burning hot, blood boiling. Every physical and mental function felt pushed to its peak. Despite pulling an all-nighter, she wasn’t tired at all.

So this was the last edge of the peak state.

Without hesitating any further, Bai Xiang immediately drove her soul ability and, following the new layout, rewrote the old heart-vessel routes in her body.

At first, the process unleashed a bone-scraping, knife-twisting agony. But the pain came fast and went just as quickly. In the instant the picture finished being rewritten, a roaring sound like great rivers surging filled her ears, followed by a booming crash, as if all the rivers, lakes, and seas gathered together and, within the inner landscape, converged into a perfect sphere formed entirely from heart-current.

This was not the Purple Core of the Sword Dao.

Nor was it anything like the golden cores and relics pursued in Daoist and Buddhist cultivation.

It was still a fluid. The circulating heart-flow of her whole body converged here, condensed into it, then those currents spun within it once, and once more burst outward through the fluid pillars extending in every direction, rejoining the inner circulation.

Through her soul ability, sweeping the inner landscape, Bai Xiang found her heart-aspect seed was gone.

Had it become this sphere?

It didn’t look like a solid object at all, just a phenomenon.

Its appearance caused all the old heart-currents and old qi seas swept into it to be stripped of their blood hue.

Blood-colored going in, colorless coming out.

In the span of just a few breaths, the blood-qi disguise she’d painstakingly built up over two months of demon-killing was washed away by the sphere and once again turned into that original, colorless, formless mystery.

But Bai Xiang wasn’t anxious.

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She could clearly feel that these newly reconverted heart-flows and qi seas were very different from before.

Tougher.

Sharper.

So sharp that when she used her soul ability to gaze at that sphere, to watch the process of it swallowing and spitting qi-sha, her physical body—those two tightly closed eyes—actually felt a stabbing pain.

So… was this the Embracing the Core stage for the qi-path system?

Refine the heart-vessel diagram, accelerate the speed of heart-qi rushing through the body, then use the heart-aspect seed as the core, sweeping in all passing heart-qi to form a spherical vortex, and under the heart-aspect’s influence, continuously purify and refine its quality… This was the “Qi Core”?

After closing her eyes to quietly feel it out, Bai Xiang decided… she still had room to improve.

Because the purification and refinement weren’t finished yet. The qualitative shift had only just begun.

But it was already enough.

The gains were already substantial.

Not only had she taken the most crucial, breakthrough step on the path of Embracing the Core—standing just half a step away from a true Qi Core—she had essentially created a concrete route for the qi-path system from Transforming Qi to Qi Core.

Now, objectively speaking, what held back the spread of the qi-path wasn’t the later stages at all, but the entry point.

Because the “all methods advancing together” internal circulation diagram wasn’t something everyone could just copy from her.

Everyone’s body was different, their heart-vessels were different, the paths their heart-currents followed were different. That meant that if you wanted to walk the qi-path, everyone had to blaze their own trail based on their own body.

“We’ll take it slow.”

Exhaling with her eyes open, Bai Xiang handed the supervisory refinement work off to Yushen, couldn’t be bothered to shower, and simply flopped over, falling straight asleep.