Volume 3, Chapter 68 – Gathering Medicine (Two-in-One)

As she kept drawing in the river’s essence, Bai Xiang’s thoughts sank into a hazy meditative state.

All this time, she had been yearning for a true cultivation method.

She wasn’t greedy. Since this world had no so-called immortal Dao inheritances, only Sword Dao that history had bent out of shape, she didn’t demand to find a scripture that pointed straight to the Dao of eternal life.

But at the very least, it couldn’t be lopsided. She didn’t think that was too much to ask.

During her time bedridden, she had pored over Buddhist sutras and Daoist classics. Combined with inheriting and merging the memories of this body, many of her “outer Aspects” tended to lean toward a Buddhist flavor.

But she had never forgotten the essence of the Daoist canon. From theoretical works like On the Fire of Life and On the Body as Boat , she had grasped a truth that ought to run through all methods: whether the body was partner or mere fuel, once it weakened, you lost the qualification to cross to the other shore.

The divine soul had to be strong. Only with a strong soul could one comprehend the natural Dao and resist filth and demonic evil.

But the body also had to be strong. Only a strong body could bear a strong divine soul. Just as a bigger boat could carry heavier cargo, and a fuller candle of oil and wax could burn a fiercer flame, the body’s toughness was directly tied to the upper limit the soul could reach.

This was what Daoism emphasized as “cultivating both nature and life.” In Bai Xiang’s eyes, that was all it was.

Yet regrettably, a method that truly met her standard was something she had never found even once.

Without her modifications, The Scripture of Returning to Origin and Transforming Qi was just a castle in the air. The Tiger-Subduing Arhat Scripture emphasized nothing but tempering the body, and its nurturing and cultivation of the divine soul was extremely weak.

Tracing the cause backward, if the people who created that scripture had realized the importance of cultivating both nature and life, then the tragedies in Fuhu Temple’s history would never have unfolded as they did.

When the divine soul was unstable, outer evils slipped in.

Across history, there had been so many heroes and paragons. Which of them had not been thunderous names in their time? Even in the local annals of Qizhou, there were hundreds of such figures recorded. Yet their fates all ended on the same line: “circumstances after death unclear.”

Unclear, not ominous. It merely spared them the details.

In practice, there wasn’t much difference. It was just leaving the forebears a last scrap of dignity. For anyone with the heart to dig, it was still possible to find in odd legends the details the official records left out.

For example, six hundred years ago in the era of Yongwu, a great cultivator named Zheng Boqing withdrew into the wilderness in search of longevity and the Dao. That much was the formal account in the local histories.

You could search any official chronicle and never find his trail afterward. But if you dug deep into folk tales and spent good money on those unreasonably expensive “horror magazines” on the black market, you might come across a line like this:

“ In the sixth year of Yongwu, a ghost appeared in Southern Qi. It delighted in night hunts and eating people, and was especially fond of the fresh hearts and brains of children. ”

No one ever put that “Southern Qi ghost” and “Zheng Boqing” together in writing. Even if suspicion stirred and you checked the official histories and found, tucked away in a corner, descriptions of the “Ghost of Yongwu in Qi,” you would see that in the author’s rhetoric there was no intention whatsoever to link the two incidents.

Even though the timelines were consecutive.

Even though folk tales said the ghost looked seventy to eighty percent like “Zheng Boqing.”

Later on, she had obtained secret sword manuals such as The Shangqing Wave-Sweeping Lightning-Drawing Sword Formula , yet the “body tempering” in these manuals was still only so-so.

The Purple Core was supposed to be a great watershed in Sword Dao progress, because from the Purple Core realm on, the Sword Dao once again emphasized the importance of the physical body, completely overturning the prior objective reality of physically frail realms.

But there was still a lock on it. All Purple Core cultivators had to face one choice: was it worth spending their limited time on tempering the body?

Because they had to undergo Core Tribulation.

Core Tribulation killed the mind; what it slew was the divine soul. No matter how honed the body, in the face of that calamity it might as well have been useless.

So naturally, the Sword Dao missed its chance to self-correct. Nearly every method in the world had congealed at that stage into a formula, an axiom: so long as the body’s toughness met a certain standard, that was enough. What mattered was still finding the “Great Medicine,” finding ways to face the Tribulation.

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In the modern era, with all its advanced instruments and concepts, this “standard toughness of the body” had become a fixed benchmark.

It was precisely because of that benchmark that Zhou Jing’an had been able to run numbers in his head when guessing at Bai Xiang’s strength—what he’d been referring to was this “standard toughness.”

As for the Great Medicine, that brought to mind a school of traditional medicine she’d encountered in her previous life.

There was Great Medicine within the body; it could heal all wounds and illness on its own.

That school held that the human body contained many mysterious acupoints and meridians, and hidden within those acupoints and meridians was a mysterious vitality called “Great Medicine.” Collecting it could cure all injuries and disease.

Put plainly, it was a theory of “self-healing.” It emphasized nurturing and downplayed external medicine, claiming that all ailments could be smoothed away by the body’s own healing mechanisms. Under that view, too much medication was a bad thing; it would instead disrupt internal balance.

When Bai Xiang had first read that theory, she’d thought it nonsense. Even though she had always felt some drugs were pretty useless—for example, the online joke that catching a cold and taking medicine would have you well in a week, and not taking medicine would also have you well in a week—she still wouldn’t go as far as to deny all medicinal effects or ignore objective reality.

But when it came to their conclusions and practices later on, she did agree with them somewhat.

There was a saying that wasn’t wrong: all medicine carried some poison. Any external treatment would indeed disrupt the body’s balance; it was just that modern medicine was so developed that, through various means, it could restore that balance again.

In Great Yu’s culture, though, “Great Medicine” had gradually shed that meaning and shifted from “seeking within” to “seeking without,” directly leading to the rise of pill alchemy.

Pill Dao was medicine. One step up from that was “biotech.”

Xiang Xian had once complained to Bai Xiang in passing that there were very few people left who insisted on refining pills by the ancient methods as she did.

Pills looked unscientific and seemed incompatible with modern medicine, but in reality the process was much like using machines to extract elements and compress them into tablets and capsules, just with an added layer of experience in “drawing qi.”

What they drew was the qi of heaven and earth—that was what the old school said. In practice, it meant adjusting the heat by feel. Pills refined by a great alchemist could outperform capsule medicines by more than ten percent in effect, and if the luck was good, sometimes by over twenty percent. Even they themselves couldn’t precisely control it.

If luck was bad, the pills’ effect could end up worse than that of capsules. That counted as failure, as “furnace explosion.”

The rise of Pill Dao had led conservative Yu people to seek out biological pharmacology and to form partnerships with many pharmaceutical companies in the Federation nations. That much could be skipped for now.

At its root, it was still “seeking without.”

Sword Dao cultivators had abandoned exploring the Great Medicine within their bodies and turned to seeking external aid, relying on pills and other means to cross the Tribulation, or at least to reach the point where they could resist the pollution spawned by demonic power.

Bai Xiang felt that wasn’t right.

The Scripture of Returning to Origin and Transforming Qi was proof.

Cultivators in the past hadn’t believed the human body was innately extraordinary, and had been forced to borrow the power of Aberrations.

But now she had truly cultivated “qi” out of herself. In that case, could this “qi” be considered a form of Great Medicine?

According to the Daoist canon, qi was formed by the five viscera transforming into five dragons and condensing.

According to the Sword Dao system, qi was the metamorphosis of mind-flow joined with heart-aspect and will.

Bai Xiang already counted as a grandmaster in this field, a pioneer, one who had established the path. But to be honest, her divine-soul ability had played an outsized role in the process, so she was still at the stage of “knowing that it works, without knowing why.”

Like: where did the qi of the five viscera come from?

And mind-flow, heart-vessels—these concepts that sounded so terribly “metaphysical”—what exactly were they?

How had they joined with heart-aspect, will, and divine soul to produce qi-force… How exactly had that process developed? She only understood it halfway at best.

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If not for that, the spread of the path of qi wouldn’t have been so difficult.

Great Yu’s Sword Dao was clumsy in its inner cultivation. Rationally, she didn’t expect a comprehensive method to suddenly appear for her to copy. But that didn’t stop her from hoping such a thing existed.

She had once thought that wish would never come true. Yet this time, in cultivating the Sun-Chasing Scripture , she had faintly glimpsed a thread of hope.

This was also “visualization.”

Unlike the Demon Pool Visualization Charts, which visualized Aberrations and strange beings, the Sun-Chasing Scripture visualized mythic nature.

In the visualization, a blazing Great Sun hung in the sky, while she stood naked on the earth, as if heaven and earth were the true “womb palace” and she herself had yet to be “born into the world.”

Heaven and earth were endless. No matter how she ran across the land she could not escape them. All she gained instead was the burning sun, and hunger and thirst gnawing at her without end.

That should have been an unspeakably agonizing thing. An ordinary person would long since have lost themselves in the visualization, unable to stop the method’s circulation, and would be roasted to death—literally baked into a dried husk by the imagined Great Sun, all the blood in their body evaporated.

But Bai Xiang was different.

Throughout the visualization, she maintained her self-awareness. She knew clearly that this was “visualization,” and she could distinctly feel that, during the process, both her body and her divine soul were improving together.

It was marvelous.

Running to chase the Great Sun felt like tempering the body. She could feel this body thirsting and tiring, yet her spirit only grew more and more exhilarated.

The improvement was extremely slight, but it never stopped. Bai Xiang felt she was growing stronger every second.

The feeling was almost too wonderful. She sternly kept the divine-soul ability under control, determined to watch for any mistake.

Because it was like a program.

She didn’t know how the program had started running, so naturally she didn’t know whether there were bugs in it, or how many. All she knew was that in her hand, there was a button she could press to delete bugs.

Yet it was precisely because she valued this program too much that she neglected the outside world for a while.

What she was drinking was not some imagined river.

Not the energy she’d imagined, possibly supplied by Ginseng King essence or by “Great Medicine” hidden in her own acupoints.

The energy was actually being provided by an external force—namely poor Bai Zhuqing.

It wasn’t water. A human body could never hold enough water to satisfy this whale-swallowing, sea-drinking of Bai Xiang’s.

It was qi.

The qi Bai Zhuqing had painstakingly refined was being devoured by Bai Xiang, endlessly flowing away through their points of contact.

Wooo—

Bai Zhuqing’s eyes went wide, but she couldn’t speak.

At first she was intoxicated by this unprecedented, wonderful closeness, but very quickly, the loss of qi pricked her wariness.

My god, what is Sister Xiang’er doing?

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Is she trying to suck me dry? Is she planning to kill me?

Suspecting that Bai Xiang’s cultivation had gone off the rails, Bai Zhuqing tried struggling experimentally a few times.

Bai Xiang instinctively restrained her. Her arms were like iron hoops clamped around her, fingers pressing on several of Bai Zhuqing’s acupoints as the Vibration Art began cycling on its own, shaking Bai Zhuqing until she had no strength left. At the very least, she couldn’t muster any resistance on the surface.

It’s over, it’s over.

Bai Zhuqing howled inwardly.

This was absolutely not the Sister Xiang’er she knew… This was obviously a deviation into madness.

What kind of medicine had Grandmaster made for them—why was it that both of them ate it and had problems?

At this point, throwing blame on Xiang Xian was useless. Bai Zhuqing quickly realized she had to find a way to save herself, or Bai Xiang really would kill her.

Nice thought… but how?

Sister Xiang’er was at the level where she could oppose multiple Divine Fetus immortals at once and crush them all. One finger was enough to pin Bai Zhuqing down completely. There was… there was simply no way to deal with that.

Calm down. Calm down…

Forcing herself to suppress her despair, Bai Zhuqing cheered herself on.

She couldn’t just give up like this.

She refused to let her aunt end up a widow in all but name.

Thinking hard, Bai Zhuqing quickly came up with one—perhaps the only—possible way to save herself: using the “property” of her qi.

Qi was energy manifested from heart-aspect and will; it naturally reflected a person’s inner thoughts.

Just as Bai Xiang’s qi was characterized by ferocity and sharpness, excelling at cutting, Bai Zhuqing’s qi was especially obedient to its owner’s control.

That meant that even while her qi was being devoured by Bai Xiang, she could still vaguely sense its presence.

To hell with it.

She steeled herself. One hand pressed against Bai Xiang’s “dantian acupoint” at the lower abdomen, while she forcibly directed the qi that had entered Bai Xiang’s body, trying to drive it downward.

“Mm…”

Sister Xiang’er seemed to react.

Bai Zhuqing heard a soft moan in her ears, but there was no time to savor the ecstasy in it.

The attempt was excruciating. Her qi was still constantly being absorbed and refined by Bai Xiang, and it was happening at tremendous speed. She didn’t have much qi to offer to begin with.

So she had to be fast. If the adjustment wasn’t completed in time, she’d be dead before it was done.

But how easy was that?

Their qi was all tangled together, and Bai Xiang’s qi was especially fierce and sharp. Bai Zhuqing’s control would be shredded and pulled away after just a few tries.

Another two seconds passed, and she was already drenched in sweat.

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This won’t work.

Sorry, Aunt… Forgive me.

The fingers pressing on Bai Xiang’s dantian acupoint began to run the Vibration Art.

This was an operation Bai Zhuqing had dreamed of all her life, but the situation she was using it in now couldn’t have been further from romantic.

The effect was immediate. Another soft moan in her ear, and the body binding her suddenly softened. At the same time, like a dam bursting, a massive—so violent it was beyond Bai Zhuqing’s imagination—torrent of qi rushed in through her fingertips.

Finally got some…

Relief washed over her. Bai Zhuqing hurriedly pressed her own dantian in as well to shorten the transfer.

The rest… the rest really had nothing to do with her anymore.

This was all she could manage. That energy flooding into her body contained a lot of Bai Xiang’s qi, which she certainly couldn’t control. But Bai Xiang herself would draw it back out.

It was a cyclic process. The two of them had, this way, achieved an exchange and circulation on the level of essence and qi.

Hiss—

Bai Zhuqing couldn’t help a muffled hiss in her heart.

She’d escaped the calamity of being sucked into a dried corpse, but now she had to endure the agony of her meridians being forcibly widened by Bai Xiang’s qi-force.

She had no idea that the move she’d made purely to save herself actually followed the natural Dao.

Bai Xiang’s body already formed its own circulation.

Bai Zhuqing’s circulation had also been set up by Bai Xiang.

Now, the two systems were joined together into one great circulation. In the process, a mysterious acupoint appeared above the dantian of each of them, constantly releasing a mysterious energy to balance their inner body-scapes.

If Bai Xiang had been paying attention here, she would have been astonished.

Because this not only proved that her guess was right—that the human body really did have hidden meridians and acupoints—it also proved that those meridians and acupoints really did contain mysterious energy.

Bai Zhuqing, preoccupied with the pain, didn’t realize the miraculous changes happening inside her.

Both her heart-vessels and meridians were being widened.

It seemed that the body-tempering effects Bai Xiang had gained were being drawn over along with the Great Medicine. Bai Zhuqing’s blood was surging along the circulating path, and a strand of special blood qi had begun to appear within her as well, driving her physical toughness to soar.

It was just as the verse said:

Though one may awaken to true suchness, If one still casts the body aside, one falls back into the body again. How much better to also cultivate Great Medicine, Leaping straight beyond all leaks to become a True Person.

This was what people called “cultivating both nature and life.”

This was what people called “Innate.”

In reality, it was nothing more than that.