Volume 4, Chapter 92 – The Precious Jade Stirs the Heart; the Newcomer Comprehends the Mysterious Art (Two-in-One)

At present, Bai Xiang’s progress in manifest refinement on the body-tempering side was roughly this: she had opened four hidden great meridians, along with a little over twenty hidden acupoints.

Compared with the total of twelve hidden great meridians and more than three hundred and sixty hidden acupoints, that could not be called slow. One had to remember that not much time had passed since she entered the Origin Realm. If her earlier estimate was correct, namely that the main focus of cultivation in the Origin Realm was to find every last one of those hidden meridians and acupoints without omission, then in theory her attainments in this area were already close to the limit of the early Origin Realm.

Still, the way she had manifestly refined them was somewhat lopsided.

Take those four hidden great meridians as an example. Most of their acupoints and meridians were concentrated in a single one of Bai Xiang’s arms. Although that could greatly increase the power in her arm, it also meant that if she exerted herself at full force, it would place a burden on the muscles and bones connected to it.

And those four great meridians still could not really be said to have been fully manifestly refined.

Because meridians were, in truth, just the pathways that linked acupoints together. If you had not opened many of the acupoints yet, then what use was it to find the meridian route first? It was impossible to fully bring out the meridian’s true function that way.

The reason Bai Xiang valued the Zunyue Vajra Scripture was precisely because, although its meridian routes overlapped with information she already knew, one of the routes recorded within it was complete. With its guidance, she could fully connect one meridian within her right arm, along with all the hidden acupoints along that route.

With soul-vision of the Body-scape and the Golden-Pupil Illusory God, doing something like this truly cost Bai Xiang very little effort. She only needed to compare body and soul, then draw the soul back into the body, and the corresponding locations and insights would naturally pour into her consciousness from the void.

“With that, the Hidden Taiyin Lung Meridian is fully connected.”

Once Bai Xiang finished the manifest refinement, she felt a numb itch spread through her right arm, as though countless ants were crawling through her marrow. The sensation ran straight along a single line into her lungs, then through the network of organs and nerves, all the way into the Heavenly Pillar of her spine.

After enduring that feeling, she clenched her fist and could feel that her strength had risen again compared with before. But if she pushed herself to the limit, there was a faint stabbing pain in the rest of her internal organs. That clearly meant that the strength of the other parts of her body was still not sufficient. If she forced the issue, hidden damage would be the result.

“The average lifespan of a cultivator after entering the Venerable ranks is three hundred years. But cultivators who walk the body-tempering path usually die before reaching two hundred. It seems the reason is that they train their bodies unevenly. Every time they fight, they consume some of their own lifespan.”

It was just like when Bai Xiang had previously met the crazed Wu Emperor head-on and forcefully suppressed him. She had still paid some price in lost lifespan.

Searching through the memories she had acquired, she found that this kind of loss was normal. No matter what cultivation level or realm a cultivator had reached, as long as they fought others, they would definitely lose lifespan. The difference was only that spell cultivators lost less, and body cultivators lost more.

Only soul cultivators had no clear records in this regard. There were, however, rumors that soul cultivators could not only avoid loss, but actually replenish lifespan by devouring the souls of sentient beings. That was also why soul cultivators were so mysterious and feared in the Upper Realm, and why so many people coveted soul arts.

Unfortunately, most divine soul arts could not be passed down. The reason many cultivators mastered a soul art at all was because they had received a void inheritance in a dream. But that inheritance could not be stolen. Even if you killed them, you still could not refine out its secrets.

That explained why the Xuandi Scripture was so sought after. Many believed it was one of the very few divine soul methods that could actually be advanced through study. And since that was a path tied directly to increasing one’s lifespan, it would be stranger not to be interested.

As Bai Xiang thought about all this, she moved her right arm through various motions. At the same time, within her Inner Body-scape, a qi-core was spinning, continuously refining and transforming the sharply surging qi and blood into two kinds of energy: heart-force and Qi-Origin.

Because she possessed all Three Flowers in full, any improvement in body, spell, or soul would synchronously drive up the other two as well.

The efficiency was astonishingly high. Heart-force and Qi-Origin were constantly being refined out and used to replenish Bai Xiang’s Qi Sea and divine soul. The feeling was far more comfortable than simple body tempering. It was practically more stimulating than dual cultivation with her younger sister Bai Zhuqing.

Even with Bai Xiang’s astonishing willpower, as she cultivated with her eyes closed, the skin across her body still gradually flushed faintly red. A rosy glow rose on the face that was usually cold and aloof as frost, making her so charming and beautiful as to be beyond description.

Unfortunately, there was no one there to appreciate the sight. Before long, as the three forces fed one another, balanced one another, and once more found equilibrium, that wonderful feeling faded away.

“To think the gains from fully manifestly refining a single great meridian would be this astonishing?”

Even Bai Xiang herself was somewhat shocked.

Purely in terms of body-tempering cultivation, her improvement was not especially great. But that increase in qi and blood drove Qi-Origin and divine soul upward at the same time, and the combined increase was far from small.

“One twelfth of a perfect Origin Realm. A boost like this does make sense.”

Gradually calming the surprise in her heart, she began studying the other hidden acupoints recorded in the Zunyue Vajra Scripture.

Unfortunately, although some of those hidden acupoints were also unknown to Bai Xiang, manifestly refining them only increased her qi and blood somewhat. The resulting gains were nowhere near as obvious as before.

In other words, only a complete great meridian, with every acupoint along that route opened, would bring that kind of improvement.

If that was the case, then there were still eleven more such improvements remaining in the Origin Realm.

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At the same time, Jade Spirit sent her a sensation. It was her divided train of thought reminding her that the lifespan she had spent suppressing the Wu Emperor had already been replenished, and on top of that, she had gained another ten years.

Bzzz—

Bai Xiang felt something vibrating inside her waist sash.

Her first thought was her phone, but in truth the phone she carried had already been smashed to pieces and destroyed in the great battle. What she pulled out was the storage jade plaque, and the source of the vibration was a black wooden box.

She opened the box and saw that inside was the little yellow jade.

It seemed to have sensed something. The moment it was exposed, it flew out of the box on its own and floated into the air, circling around Bai Xiang again and again, as though cheering joyfully for her advance.

But Bai Xiang did not look pleased at all.

“The root method of the Path of Qi that I created really is strange.”

She stared at the scene in thought.

Ordinarily speaking, cultivators needed replenishment in order to cultivate.

If a person broke a bone, it had to be nurtured back to health. To nourish the body, one had to take medicine, drink restorative soups, and replenish qi and blood. By the same logic, a cultivator could not possibly train a method out of thin air. They also had to take in something from outside to replenish themselves.

So cultivators had to consume many things. And once they consumed too much, they affected the operation of heaven and earth. Order would naturally reject such behavior.

Bai Xiang had read many xianxia novels in her previous life in which heaven and earth would directly retaliate. Anyone who stepped onto the path of cultivation would be tainted by some mysterious poison and die violently.

That logic truly was sound. But in the case of the Path of Qi, things were different.

Although the Path of Qi could also accelerate its progress by devouring energy, one had to admit that this was not the core fuel of the Path of Qi.

It was the sort of thing one could consume, and doing so was useful, but the usefulness was not that great.

The core fuel of the Path of Qi was the excavation and manifest refinement of more hidden meridians and acupoints after entering the Origin Realm. Through that act, it extracted the Great Medicine of the Human Body, and that great medicine was the true key behind Bai Xiang’s repeated breakthroughs.

Which meant that this was… wildly inconsistent with the laws of physics.

It was almost like creating something out of the void.

It was called hidden great medicine, but how could there possibly be that much energy hidden inside the human body?

Just by taking the amount of energy Bai Xiang had extracted a moment ago as a unit, if a human body truly contained energy on that scale, then blowing it up out of nowhere ought to produce a violent energy reaction, a shock wave far stronger than a nuclear explosion.

But what about reality?

Kill a person, and they were just dead.

A lump of ruined flesh. No explosion of any kind.

It was precisely because the root method of the Path of Qi was so unscientific, because it interfered only with the Inner Body-scape and had nothing to do with the outer world, that the little yellow jade, avatar of the outer world, was so close to Bai Xiang.

From that, Bai Xiang sensed just how strange the Path of Qi was. But even she, its founding ancestor, could not understand why those hidden meridians and acupoints contained so much great medicine.

Surely it could not really be just as the Buddhist scriptures described, with every single cell containing a universe inside it?

“It seems there weren’t many body cultivators in the Void Realm who managed to refine many extra meridians and acupoints, either.”

Bai Xiang tried to search through her memories and discovered that throughout history, there had indeed been people who captured body cultivators, gathered body-tempering scriptures, and tried to fully refine all the meridians and acupoints of the entire body.

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But not a single one had succeeded. Because even after collecting every scripture they could possibly gather, the meridians and acupoints were still incomplete in the end.

That made sense.

She quickly returned to herself.

After all, the Hidden Spirit Orifice had never appeared in the world. And since people could not simultaneously possess the Hidden Heart Orifice and the Hidden Field Orifice, that alone meant the Hidden Heavenly Pillar Meridian along the spine could never be fully connected.

Bai Xiang was not sure whether this trait of the body containing great medicine belonged specifically to this world, or whether the world of her previous life had possessed it as well.

Perhaps even the people of Earth in her previous life had it?

Otherwise, how could one explain that she awakened soul-abilities in that life already?

But if that were really the case, it still failed to explain why, over so many years, she alone had turned out to be such an exception.

True, she had not been anyone important in her previous life, so if such a secret really existed, she would not necessarily have known. But she could still infer something from the hospital’s reaction.

If there had been previous cases, then the anomalies that appeared in her sick body would surely have drawn intense attention from the state.

Staying in a public hospital? More likely she would have been taken to a military zone for protection the very moment it happened, with not the slightest trace of personal freedom left to her.

Unable to reason it through, Bai Xiang could only temporarily attribute the mysteries of the Path of Qi to chance.

Or rather, to “qi,” that originally metaphysical energy, having by pure coincidence been refined out by her soul-abilities.

“So why exactly did you come out?” Bai Xiang reached out and grabbed the little yellow jade, which kept darting all over the place, and rubbed its surface between her fingers. “Don’t tell me you want to devour something from me.”

Wasn’t that how so many stories went?

A mysterious treasure, recognizing its master through a drop of blood.

But Bai Xiang did not believe things would develop in such a crude way. It was obvious that if the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade could really be controlled that easily, then history would not have gone without a single successful case.

Bzzz—

The little yellow jade was probably being petted into comfort. It trembled again and again. Then suddenly it emitted a strange wave.

Hm?

The wave looked like it had no direct interference at all, yet Bai Xiang suddenly had a flash of inspiration and at that moment thought of the Sun-Chasing Scripture.

The Sun-Chasing Scripture… Divine Movement section… qi and blood coursing through both feet… stride the earth and chase down heaven and earth…

Crack!

Almost instantly, crackling sounds burst from Bai Xiang’s folded legs. It was as though she had unconsciously understood the route of qi and blood circulation recorded in the Divine Movement section, and from that route alone had inferred some of the meridians and acupoints in both legs.

Although this was not full manifest refinement, and the increase in qi and blood it brought was not very great, it still involved six great meridians across both legs and both feet. Added together, the total increase was by no means small.

Bai Xiang had no idea what had just happened. She simply followed instinct, touched her toes to the ground, and rose into a suspended Sword Contemplation stance to calm the stimulation caused by that surge of qi and blood.

Then she hurriedly stuffed the little yellow jade back into the box and shut it. Instinctively, she checked Taishang Perception, and only when she felt no aura had swept this way did she let out a breath of relief.

What exactly was that just now…

She stared at the box, unable to understand.

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It did not grant me something. It made me remember something?

Could even that kind of sudden inspiration be interfered with?

Did this count as one expression of destiny and fortune? Did it mean that, at least at the current stage, heaven-and-earth order recognized the Path of Qi and was willing to lend me help connected to it?

“You’ll regret it.”

Narrowing her golden eyes, Bai Xiang gazed darkly at the wooden box.

If one considered only the pursuit of longevity, and the fact that its efficiency was somewhat superior to other root methods, then Path of Qi cultivators would inevitably become a major future threat to order.

But no movement came from the wooden box at all, as though no awareness existed inside it whatsoever, and as though the influence just now had nothing to do with it, having been purely Bai Xiang’s own enlightenment.

Then wasn’t this, in a sense, formation, abiding, decay, emptiness?

Suddenly, Bai Xiang gained another flash of insight.

The kalpa of formation symbolized the birth of all things.

The kalpa of abiding symbolized the stage in which all things developed in a positive direction.

The kalpa of decay symbolized the collapse of everything.

And then came voidness and emptiness, until the next kalpa of formation arrived and the cycle began again.

Under that interpretation, this moment should be the twilight of Dao-Void Methods and Sword Dao, a stage somewhere between the kalpas of abiding and decay for those people.

For me, however, it is the kalpa of formation.

Perhaps this sign of calamity would only truly reveal itself after those orthodoxies had completely collapsed, that is, only after the kalpa of emptiness. But one thing was already foreseeable: as time passed, the Path of Qi might also enter the cycle of the Four Kalpas and one day fall to the point of being rejected by heaven-and-earth order.

So did heaven and earth themselves simply not care?

Whether Dao-Void Methods, Sword Dao, or even the Path of Qi, were they all just another cycle to it, something it fundamentally did not mind?

Vaguely, Bai Xiang felt there was some extremely profound truth and insight hidden within all this. But perhaps because her cultivation was still insufficient, although she had gained part of the insight, it was like viewing flowers through mist. No matter what she did, she could not clearly see what lay beyond.

Then I won’t think about it anymore.

Putting away the box, she devoted all her mind to cultivation and began shifting through all kinds of postures in midair. To her own surprise, she was actually practicing the God-Descent Calisthenics.

Of course, it was a modified form. This kind of calisthenics could push the body to explore its limits to the greatest extent, helping Bai Xiang quickly familiarize herself with her improved body without having to engage in actual combat.

If someone had been watching from the side at that moment, they would certainly have noticed that although Bai Xiang’s bodily structure and proportions had not changed in the slightest, her body, especially the legs wrapped in black stockings and long boots, looked noticeably more pleasing to the eye than before, possessing an even greater sense of gifted beauty.

Even no matter how she condensed her muscles, that beauty would not seem out of place. It would not become grotesque and bulging the way some body cultivators’ muscles did. Instead, it retained both beauty and harmony, with no visible change in outward appearance.

Although most of the acupoints along those six great meridian routes still had not been found, and thus could not count as full manifest refinement, the boost they brought to Bai Xiang was still significant. Her Three Flowers advanced another step upward.

She estimated that this was likely the kind of insight that should normally have been obtained after properly mastering the Divine Movement section. It was only that she had previously bypassed this portion of the insight, and just now, with the aid of the Heavenly Stem Precious Jade, she had experienced it naturally.

Truly strange.

After going through several sets of calisthenics, Bai Xiang found herself covered in sweat. She was not used to doing a full wash in so crowded a great ship, so after coming out, she informed the servants in the corridor and planned to return first to the medium-sized flying vessel to wash and change clothes.

“Master Bai, please wait.”

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The guard at the door was none other than Li Changwen, Steward Li. Seeing that she was about to leave, he hurriedly stopped her and respectfully offered her a jade plaque.

“What is this?”

Bai Xiang did not take it. She questioned him first instead.

“A small token of my young master’s regard,” Steward Li answered properly.

“Please rest assured, Master. It is nothing too precious. Most of what it contains is the information you care about most.”

“For example… the detailed rankings of the various lists, and the authority to connect to the Venerable Net.”

“The Venerable Net?”

This was the first time Bai Xiang had heard the term. Her face revealed nothing, but inwardly she was a little surprised.

This wasn’t in the memories. Was it some new thing they had only recently put together?

“So that Master may know, the Venerable Net really is new.” Steward Li nodded and explained, “Now that the main world is fully connected, many people discovered that the main world had developed some very marvelous things… among them an invention called the ‘internet’ that could be put to excellent use. So people began… well, you can probably guess the rest.”

I see.

Now Bai Xiang understood.

Just as she had predicted earlier, as long as the route remained closed, there was nothing to be done. But now that it was fully open, the many technological inventions of the main world would inevitably spread to the Upper Realm.

Some of those things already existed in the Upper Realm, but some did not.

The internet, for example. It was so convenient that once Upper Realm cultivators learned of it, there was no way they would remain unmoved. They would certainly try every possible means to imitate it.

The result of that imitation was the Venerable Net.

Judging from the name, it was probably for the moment open only to the Venerable ranks, with only those of Immortal Venerable cultivation having access.

Most likely it was something the Demon Court had put together…

If one really thought it through, this thing too could probably condense one or even several spirit pools related to information networks. A power like that was naturally not something the Demon Court could possibly let go of, so the Venerable Net had to have the Demon Court behind it.

Thinking of the Demon Court’s style of doing things all this time, Bai Xiang nodded and accepted the jade plaque from Steward Li.

“Thank your young master for me.”

“You are too polite, Master. It is only a small effort.”

…

At the same time, in the main world, Maozhou, in the Zhennan region, a person sat atop a mountain watching the sea of clouds rise and fall.

This ought to have been an utterly ordinary natural sight. Yet with each breath this person drew in and released, all the clouds and mist seemed to be guided and controlled by some force, rapidly circling around their body to form a great white mist formation etched with many mysterious talismans.

“Huu…”

Releasing a long breath, Xiang Xian finally opened her eyes.

“At least Xiang’er’s painstaking effort wasn’t wasted.”

“She truly is wondrous, to have actually created such a mysterious art.”