Martial artists devoted themselves to cultivation, sometimes for extended periods. Ten days or half a month was entirely normal, but it rarely lasted more than several months.
Advancing one's cultivation could not be separated from hard cultivation, but blindly cultivating in hardship did not necessarily bring rapid growth. If hard cultivation alone could endlessly raise one's cultivation, then the vast majority of martial artists would be ascetics.
Unless they were entering seclusion to break through a realm and achieve a breakthrough after long accumulation, martial artists would emerge after cultivating for a time, either to move about or to exchange insights on martial arts with others of the same rank.
The martial path lay in both stillness and motion. Only by balancing the two could one's cultivation continue advancing. Fixating on either one alone would instead bring more loss than gain.
When Duanmu Xiao accepted this mission, he had assumed there would be a result within two or three months. Whether the assassination succeeded or failed, there would at least have been some progress.
After all, according to the intelligence he had received, Chen Fei had only broken through to the Joint Aperture Realm a little over a year ago. It was absolutely impossible for Chen Fei to be in closed-door seclusion.
Yet unexpectedly, Chen Fei remained within the sect for more than half a year without coming out. According to information from the Yuan Chen Sword Sect's undercover agent, Chen Fei rarely even left his own mountain peak.
Duanmu Xiao had not encountered such a method of hard cultivation in many years, much less in a young Joint Aperture Realm martial artist.
With Chen Fei refusing to leave the Yuan Chen Sword Sect, Duanmu Xiao did not even have a chance to observe him from close range, let alone