Volume 3, Chapter 67 – Great Sun

The next day, Xiang Xian delivered the first batch of Ginseng King Pills and warned Bai Xiang, “This medicine is fierce. Go easy on it.”

If even her “discount master” with that kind of experience called it fierce, an ordinary person swallowing one of these would probably start spraying nosebleeds on the spot.

After going upstairs, Bai Xiang poured the pills from the bottle onto a piece of cloth and counted a total of fifteen emerald-green pills.

During the process, Bai Zhuqing was crouched at the side like a cat watching. Seeing this, she couldn’t help asking Bai Xiang, “Is this the new medicine Aunt asked Grandmaster to refine?”

After all, Xiang Xian had given her pills before. She’d at least seen all those common things like Demon-Transforming Pills and Jade Spirit Pills, even if she hadn’t eaten them herself. But none of them looked like this—actually emerald-green.

Bai Xiang nodded and flicked a pill over to her. “You eat one.”

Bai Zhuqing picked up the pill and sniffed it, then looked at Bai Xiang with wide, expectant eyes and tried to pop it into her mouth.

The outer coating melted as soon as it touched her tongue. She chewed, swallowed; the taste was slightly bitter.

She had just opened her mouth to say it didn’t seem like such a big deal when, in the next moment, Bai Zhuqing’s face flushed red. With a poof , two streams of nosebleed sprayed out, and she yelped as she ran for tissues.

“Don’t move.”

Bai Xiang pressed her down, brought two fingers together, and tapped her between the brows, sending a mouthful of qi into her sister’s body to help guide and digest the medicinal power.

The bitter cultivation Bai Zhuqing had done with her these days had paid off. In less than a week, her cultivation had broken through from the second layer of Refining Qi to the third.

Given that, before the tenth layer of Refining Qi, it usually took anywhere from half a year to several years to advance one layer, this was definitely rapid progress. But by Bai Xiang’s standards, it still counted as slow, and she planned to give Bai Zhuqing another shove forward.

Mm, there was absolutely no intention hidden in there of wanting to see her spraying noseblood and making a fool of herself. It was pure, unadulterated sisterly care and affection.

Bai Zhuqing knew this was a rare opportunity too. With Bai Xiang assisting her, she managed for the first time to sit upright in a half-lotus posture, her freshly washed Sword-Student Wooden Sword laid horizontally across her knees, face full of tragic bitterness as she began cultivating.

This way she wouldn’t come over and bother anyone.

Dusting off her hands, Bai Xiang swept the pills from the table into her grasp, floated into the air to sit facing her little sister, and tossed one into her own mouth as well.

She certainly wasn’t afraid of anything going wrong, because if there had been a problem with this medicine, Xiang Xian would never have brought it to her.

As the Ginseng King Pill went down into her stomach, Bai Xiang immediately felt immense medicinal force churning inside her. Her whole body was filled with a sense of blood surging; the very air felt hot for no reason.

She closed her eyes and, under the Jade Spirit’s assistance, began circulating her qi and blood, attempting to cultivate the Sun-Chasing Scripture .

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The proper cultivation method of the Sun-Chasing Scripture was either crashing into mountains or swallowing rivers. Obviously, in Listening-to-Rain Pavilion there was no way to have that sort of environment. What Bai Xiang called “cultivating” was using her divine-soul abilities to try to simulate in her inner body-scape the qi-and-blood routes depicted in the scripture.

Because the annotations mentioned “pay particular attention to meat intake during cultivation,” Bai Xiang guessed the meat referred to had to be demon beast meat rich in blood and qi. That was why she’d waited until Xiang Xian refined the pills before attempting it.

This wasn’t the ancient era anymore. Back when the Sun-Chasing Scripture had been written, perhaps the wilderness had been full of demon meat brimming with blood qi, and things like ginseng spirits and ganoderma spirits were running all over the place. But now, those conditions simply didn’t exist.

So she could only use something else as a substitute. Bai Xiang could only hope it would work.

In her plan, the Ginseng King Pills were just the primer. The main medicine was still the Ginseng King essence Lu Qingning had left inside the Immortal Martial Token. Bai Xiang had thought she’d already overestimated the circulation method of the Sun-Chasing Scripture —but the moment she started practicing, she knew something was off. The amount of qi and blood it required was far too enormous!

It was a strand of special blood qi generated by the Sun-Chasing Scripture . This “circulation” meant using all the power of the inner body-scape to drive that secondary qi through her entire body.

On the very first push, more than half of the qi-and-blood power from a single Ginseng King Pill was used up.

Then, when she tried to circulate it back and forth, on that “return” part, her total qi-and-blood pool could barely remain stable. She had no choice but to hurriedly toss another pill in her mouth.

The Mountain-Crashing section’s qi-and-blood route diagram required nine full cycles. It didn’t explain the purpose, but Bai Xiang guessed it was meant to pierce and open all the meridians in the body, allowing qi and blood to flow freely, so that with every mountain collision, the impact surface would “hammer” the qi and blood back into the limbs and bones, penetrating deeper and tempering more thoroughly.

She was cultivating according to that idea, but in actual practice, her qi and blood simply weren’t enough. By the sixth cycle, she couldn’t move it anymore.

With each completed cycle, that strand of special blood qi grew a little stronger and felt a little heavier to Bai Xiang. After six cycles, she’d already consumed eleven Ginseng King Pills, with only three remaining.

If she wanted to push a seventh time, even ten more pills wouldn’t have been enough. Bai Xiang had no intention of using other tonics to plug the gap either. She directly took out the Immortal Martial Token and began drawing out the essence within the jade.

The effect was obvious. Just from refining and absorbing the very first wisp of essence, her spirit suddenly surged. From body to divine soul, it was like she’d just sat through a steam bath, white vapor wafting up from the top of her head.

Her inner qi and blood no longer felt weak, and she smoothly completed the seventh and eighth cycles.

At this point, her qi and blood were surging through her body like a rolling torrent, already able to produce the “rushing” sound of a river in flood.

One had to remember, this was not qi-force!

This was just blood—just qi and blood! Every increment of its strength meant the toughness of her body had to increase in step, because only tougher blood vessels could contain it, and only sturdier muscles, organs, and bones could withstand it.

It was really strange.

Silently feeling things out, Bai Xiang was deeply astonished by the effects of the Sun-Chasing Scripture .

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Normally, cultivation of qi and blood and the physical body was all about strengthening from the inside out.

For example, training muscles—what’s the simplest way ordinary people train their muscles?

Pumping iron.

Working out.

Paired with proper diet, you build muscle. Once the muscles and bones are strong, your qi and blood naturally grow stronger as well.

In that case, it’s the former first, the latter after—a certain order.

But the Sun-Chasing Scripture reversed this. It first cultivated a strand of special blood qi, then relied on that qi’s countless circulations through the body to use the process itself to strengthen muscles and bones.

It completely went against natural law.

So where exactly did this strand of blood qi come from?

What was the difference between this circulation method and other forms of training?

Vaguely, Bai Xiang’s sense of “not quite satisfied” grew stronger and stronger.

It wasn’t just that she felt this route of circulation hid meridians and acupoints she could not see. Her whole body felt hot and itchy, and she itched to strip off all her clothes and run naked out into the wilderness to smash into a mountain.

That feeling reached its peak as she subconsciously tried to push toward the “ninth” circulation. The feedback was her face flushing rosy. She yanked her clothes and dress off in one go and sat completely bare in midair, sweat on her body steaming into white mist.

It was unbearable.

Truly unbearable.

To Bai Xiang’s senses, the flesh, bones, organs, and meridians of her whole body were on the verge of coming apart, held together only because she was forcibly controlling them with her divine-soul ability, pinching them back into place to maintain a stable structure.

Not enough.

Not enough.

She couldn’t push the ninth.

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It wasn’t a lack of qi and blood, wasn’t a lack of energy.

What exactly am I missing?

What am I missing?

“Aunt?”

Bai Zhuqing was also suffering as she digested the medicinal power. She opened her eyes and saw this scene and was scared stupid.

She immediately stopped her cultivation movements, nose still bleeding as she scrambled over to Bai Xiang’s side, wanting to feel for her pulse. “Aunt, are you okay…?”

Don’t touch me!

Bai Xiang snapped her eyes open, strange golden light blazing in them.

But it was already too late.

Bai Zhuqing had already pulled her hand back, yet Bai Xiang’s body suddenly emitted a powerful suction force, as if the qi and blood within her now possessed some kind of “magnetism.” That “magnetism” drew in the qi and blood inside Bai Zhuqing, forcibly slamming the two sisters together.

Bang!

The floor gave a muffled thud as Bai Zhuqing knocked Bai Xiang out of the air, the two of them rolling together into a tangled heap.

Wh-what the heck…!

W-what on earth is going on?!

Bai Zhuqing was too startled to speak. She felt a strong pull coming from within Bai Xiang; the blood in her own body seemed to be boiling. The qi-force she’d just cultivated and the qi-force she normally stored in her inner body-scape on standby were all, in that instant, yanked into riot, surging along every acupoint where their bodies touched and pouring over there!

Bai Zhuqing swore she hadn’t meant to do it, but her instincts kicked in and she used the Sword Core method to try to control the qi cluster.

She hadn’t expected that her qi-force would still be controllable after flowing into Bai Xiang’s body. The result was that all the qi sucked out of her gathered into a single sword-core qi cluster that actually shoved past Bai Xiang’s qi and blood, ramming straight into the depths of her inner body-scape.

“Mm…!”

Bai Xiang let out a muffled groan.

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This wasn’t Bai Zhuqing’s fault. She simply didn’t have that kind of ability; Bai Xiang had drawn the qi cluster in herself.

Her intention had been to use her divine-soul ability to forcibly cut off the cultivation process, then give her little sister a fierce scolding for coming over—did she want to get sucked into a dried corpse?

But just as she used “divine soul illuminating the body-scape” to look inward, she saw that sword-core qi cluster.

Hazy smoke, gathered together, being rapidly ground to pieces and absorbed by her Core. The process looked like a blazing Great Sun scattering its halo of light, making her consciousness blur.

Great Sun.

Great Sun?

Without a sound, the Sun-Chasing Scripture in her visualization flipped rapidly, soaring from the Mountain-Crashing section straight to the Sun-Chasing section. Every character and diagram exploded into fragments with a bang, then reassembled from those fragments into a single Great Sun image.

Great Sun…

Great Sun.

Bai Xiang began visualizing on reflex. Gradually, that Great Sun image overlapped with her Core on the path of qi, together radiating boundless light, as if there truly were a Great Sun blazing above her head.

The scorching sensation was like sprinting across a wasteland beneath a burning sun.

It was filled with primal wildness.

And with savagery.

Just like that, as Bai Xiang sank completely into the Sun-Chasing visualization, she suddenly felt a bit thirsty.

The moment the thought rose, the desire surged to an unbearable degree.

Drink water.

Drink water.

With those two words filling her mind, Bai Xiang scooped up the person in her arms and, without leaving room for refusal, opened her mouth.