Chapter Ninety-Four: The Aura of Calamity

At Pine Sun Temple, in the Valley of the Spirit Spring.

A spiritual carp with golden scales and red whiskers was frolicking in the brook formed from the spring, tossing its head and tail with unmistakable delight. Gone was the pitiful look of moments before, when tears had hung from its eyes.

Bai Yi found the sight amusing and plucked two apricots from the nearby apricot tree. The instant she tossed them into the water, the carp sprang up and swallowed them in one gulp.

After eating, it still seemed unsatisfied. It gazed at Bai Yi from the water, eyes pleading for more fruit.

When Bai Yi made no move, it stirred the waters of the spirit stream around it.

Now it rose like a gushing fountain, now gathered itself into the shape of a white fox, changing in a hundred ways, as though trying to amuse her into laughter.

Sure enough, Bai Yi’s eyes lit up, and she secretly tossed it a few more apricots.

In any case, these were not apricots from the ancestral tree, and the true masters did not forbid them from being picked.

After eating a few more, the spiritual carp was finally satisfied. With a shake of its head and flick of its tail, it slipped beneath the water to refine the fruit.

Lin You watched all this, deep in thought.

This carp, born not long ago, seemed to have been endowed by nature with the power to command water. It could even stir the spring waters within the very grounds of the temple.

Such an ability, bordering on divine power, appeared only in beings born with an innate seed of the Dao. It was also the embryonic form of a heavenly-bestowed miracle that would appear after building the Dao foundation.

No wonder that when Old Jin, with his second level of true energy, had tried to catch it, he had suffered considerable injury. Apart from the power of the water eye, this carp itself was no small matter.

Thinking of this, Lin You felt a little more interested. He wondered what kind of divine power this carp would gain if it one day built its Dao foundation.

To be able to cultivate in his spirit spring was itself an earth-shifting opportunity for the carp. If it seized that chance, it might even one day transform into a dragon or a flood-dragon.

After only a brief consideration, Lin You let the matter go and looked toward the sky.

The heavens were a clear, pure blue, not a cloud in sight. A blazing sun hung high above, driving the autumn chill from the mountains.

Yet in Lin You’s eyes, the entire Pine Sun Mountain was already shrouded in a faint layer of calamity qi, and it seemed that more and more dark clouds of disaster were gathering without end.

Since the little tree devoured the Plague Robe, it had returned to its source and condensed a Seed of Calamity. Through certain properties of that seed, he was now able to see the flow of calamity qi within the temple grounds.

This steadily gathering calamity qi was a sign that a bloody tribulation was about to descend upon the temple grounds.

Still, this had been Lin You’s intention all along.

Heaven’s gain and loss follow their own constant law: when water fills, it overflows; when the moon is full, it wanes.

If these disasters were allowed to accumulate unchecked, then when they finally erupted, the losses would be beyond measure. It would be better to take the initiative now and trigger the calamity early, thereby dispersing part of the calamity qi.

Even so, Lin You had the uneasy feeling that the calamity gathering over the temple grounds was not so simple.

And as the scope of the temple grounds expanded, the rate at which disasters accumulated was growing faster and faster as well.

Unfortunately, this Seed of Calamity had not yet fully taken shape. Otherwise, he should have been able to glimpse even more.

Just as he was pondering this, Jiang Liu Nian, who had been away for quite some time, returned to Pine Sun Mountain.

“Fellow Daoist Yu Chen, news of the Alchemical Origin Assembly has now spread completely! But since it happens to coincide with the grand gathering of fellow practitioners this time, there may be quite a few unusual people attending when the time comes!” He came to Lin You’s side and reported the situation.

This gathering had been settled five years ago, and as a result, loose cultivators and extraordinary beings from several nearby prefectures and hundreds of cities would all be coming here.

Judging by the scale in previous years, there would be at least around sixty people.

Among those sixty, many were unusual people from even more distant prefectures and cities, having received the news and set out months in advance.

If he were to gather such a crowd together for a true Alchemical Origin Convention, Lin You would need to prepare at least several dozen spiritual pills.

Upon hearing this, Lin You smiled and said, “No matter. They are only some pills.”

Ever since obtaining the secret legacy of the ancient Pill Sect, not only had the quality of his pills improved, but the success rate in refining them had risen by a wide margin as well.

Over the past two days, he had also used all ten remaining wisps of spiritual inspiration to accelerate the growth of medicinal herbs and refine pills.

Through the water-refining method, he had produced nearly two hundred weakened Origin-Nourishing Spirit Pills during this time.

Had he not been limited by the lack of a pill furnace, that number could have been even greater.

Still, the number of cultivators in this world was pitifully small. Among the millions of common folk in the nearby great prefectures, there were only these few dozen cultivators.

Perhaps this was not only because spiritual energy in the world was gradually fading, but also because of the massacre carried out a century ago by that orthodox immortal disciple of the Primeval Gate, who wielded his sword to sweep through all cultivators beneath heaven.

That slaughter had nearly eradicated the entire cultivation world of the time.

It had severed the path of immortality and scattered countless inheritances.

Only now, a hundred years later, had the world barely begun to draw breath again.

Though Lin You did not know why that man had done such a thing, now that he himself had entered the path of cultivation, it was inevitable that he would one day meet him.

So right now, he had to seize every moment and raise himself as much as possible.

This Alchemical Origin Assembly was exactly such an opportunity.

He had already asked Jiang Liu Nian to spread the word: whether it was spirit treasures, manuals of cultivation, or even miscellaneous relics left behind by ancient cultivators, all could be exchanged with him for spiritual pills at this assembly.

To others mired in the age of declining law, such things might have little value. To him, however, they were more precious than a few pills.

...

Within the Pill Cauldron Mountain, in a shabby little courtyard.

A pile of herbs of all kinds had been laid out beside Zhao Fan.

After leaving the pill chamber, he had wasted no time gathering these ordinary medicinal herbs from the nearby mountains, intending to temper his skill in the Dao of Pills through them.

For the moment he did not rush to begin refining. Instead, he closed his eyes and concentrated, absorbing the two secret techniques that Senior Yu Chen had just transmitted directly into his mind.

One was called the Water-Origin Pill-Quenching Art, created by an elder of the ancient Pill Sect in the embryo-soul realm.

This method took an unconventional path. It required neither a pill furnace nor spiritual fire; instead, medicine was quenched and formed into pills within water. Not only did it eliminate the risk of a furnace explosion, it also reduced the loss of medicinal potency.

However, this method could only be used to refine ordinary pills, and it demanded exceptionally precise control over a cultivator’s power.

The other was called the Hundred Herbs Profound Sensitivity Manual, which taught one how to perceive the nature of spirit herbs and, according to the changes in their properties, make all kinds of adjustments during refinement, so as to reach a perfectly harmonious state in which the sovereign, minister, assistant, and envoy roles supported one another in mutual benefit.

These two secret arts had been worthy of inclusion in the secret scriptures of an ancient great sect, which was proof enough of their extraordinary nature. Anyone who obtained even one of them and studied it deeply would be fully capable of becoming a grandmaster of the Dao of Pills in their own right.

These two methods had been directly enlightened into Zhao Fan’s mind by Lin You through the little green jade tree, saving him countless hours.

At this moment, as Zhao Fan pondered the profundities of the two secret arts, he kept feeling a strange sense of familiarity, as though he had seen them somewhere before.

Thanks to the book friend “The Boy Who Wandered Lost for Twenty Years in the Mortal World” for the two-hundred-point reward.

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