Open Source

In terms of value, the total worth of these items had already exceeded tens of thousands of silver taels!

This was a sum Lu Wangchuan had never possessed since crossing over.

In terms of significance, the Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps would grant him an extremely powerful movement technique, greatly enhancing his abilities in combat, escape, and travel alike.

The pill formula, moreover, could save him countless silver taels, since finished pills were far more expensive than finished Body Strengthening Soup.

Lu Wangchuan carefully hid each of these items away. An innocent man may possess a treasure, but that treasure becomes his crime—as a mere Bone Forging cultivator, exposing such precious goods would only invite lethal disaster.

To prevent bandits from paying him a visit, he also stashed them in separate locations, not putting everything in one place.

After finishing this task, he immediately began cultivating the Dao Embryo Breathing Method.

Once he had learned it and imprinted it onto the Light Screen, Lu Wangchuan directly allocated points.

This time, the blood and qi within his body seethed wildly, several times more violently than when he had previously allocated points to Mountain Splitting Fist or Eight Section Brocade.

If Lu Wangchuan hadn't trained for over half a year, his physique already breaking through to Bone Forging and becoming extremely tough, he likely couldn't have endured it.

When the blood and qi gradually calmed down and the Dao Embryo Breathing Method advanced to the first layer, Lu Wangchuan discovered that his blood and qi points had decreased by a full eight hundred!

"So formidable. Mountain Splitting Fist and Eight Section Brocade only need a hundred blood and qi points to break through, but the Dao Embryo Breathing Method requires eight hundred!"

However, when Lu Wangchuan tried cultivating it once, circulating the energy through the meridians in his body, he realized it was truly worth the cost.

In the same amount of time, cultivating the Dao Embryo Breathing Method once yielded results equal to the perfected Eight Section Brocade.

And this was merely the first layer of the Dao Embryo Breathing Method. If it were raised to perfection, the daily gains in cultivation and blood and qi would be many times greater—unimaginably so!

With just over eight hundred blood and qi points remaining, Lu Wangchuan didn't hesitate. He allocated points again, raising the Dao Embryo Breathing Method to the second layer, then began cultivating in earnest.

The battle outside the city ended quickly. Though the Black Lotus Society was arrogant, they didn't dare remain exposed before everyone for long. If they attracted the imperial army, they would surely die.

The court inevitably launched a massive manhunt afterward. The city declared martial law for a full three months, and even the Martial Hall suspended its teachings. But when the restrictions were gradually lifted, it was already four or five months later.

During this period, Lu Wangchuan stayed obediently at home cultivating. Even when the lockdown was fully lifted, he didn't become too active all at once.

And so, after waiting a full six months, Lu Wangchuan finally welcomed another breakthrough.

On this day, his blood and qi roared within him, all the acupoints in his body opened, and the surrounding spiritual energy of heaven and earth entered his body at an accelerated rate, signaling that he had broken through to the fourth realm of the Physical Body Realm—Source Opening!

Source Opening meant opening the body's one hundred and eight acupoints, accelerating the absorption of spiritual energy, completing qi induction faster, and promoting the body's evolution toward the fifth realm, the Dantian Realm.

This breakthrough brought the greatest change. After breaking through, not only did his cultivation speed increase, but he also became as light as a swallow!

One must understand that as one's strength grew, the physical body became stronger, and its weight also increased, because the body began to compress and store spiritual energy within the meridians.

Before Source Opening, the physical body was powerful but not agile enough. After Source Opening, speed took a massive leap forward, and combat ability skyrocketed!

Lu Wangchuan opened his eyes, pressed his palms against the ground, and used the rebound force to instantly shoot from one end of the Training Room to the other. A distance of over twenty meters was crossed in the blink of an eye, incredibly swift.

"Such speed. Even if I encountered a Fine Steel Crossbow bolt now, I could easily dodge it."

The corners of Lu Wangchuan's mouth lifted. Every time his strength advanced by leaps and bounds was his happiest moment.

He called up the Light Screen again. The changes were significant.

Name: Lu Wangchuan. Cultivation: Source Opening Realm. Blood and Qi: 1950. Techniques: Mountain Splitting Fist (Seventh Layer), Dao Embryo Breathing Method (Fourth Layer), Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps (Not Cultivated).

"First, I'll learn the Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps."

The reason he had only allocated points to the Dao Embryo Breathing Method before was that he hadn't left his house for months, quietly cultivating and developing. In such a situation, there was naturally no need to strengthen his movement technique—only to continuously raise his cultivation and blood and qi.

Now that he was preparing to go out, it was time to improve his speed and gain a few more layers of life-saving strength.

Blood and qi seethed and churned. Moments later, the Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps advanced to the first layer.

The Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps cost even more blood and qi than the Dao Embryo Breathing Method—a full one thousand points!

Only a little over two hundred blood and qi points remained.

Lu Wangchuan executed the technique. His speed was more than double what it had been just moments ago, to the point where he himself could barely keep up.

But what surprised him even more was that this Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps movement technique was somewhat similar to the body-tempering exercises in external martial arts. Continuously using it could also slightly increase his cultivation and blood and qi, since it was, after all, equivalent to accumulated movement.

Though the gain was very small, incomparable to dedicated body-tempering exercises or internal cultivation methods like the Dao Embryo Breathing Method, every bit counted. Over a long period of accumulation, it would still yield a decent surplus.

After finishing all this, he quickly left the Lu residence and went out to purchase the materials needed for the pill formula.

Having broken through to Source Opening, his body had undergone another transformation. Combined with cultivating the fourth layer of the Dao Embryo Breathing Method and the Heavenly Dipper Eight Steps, the previous Body Strengthening Soup was no longer sufficient for him.

It was like eating—if the food wasn't good enough, you'd burn through your energy quickly, grow hungry, and be unable to continue.

Xiao Wu was sweeping the courtyard with Xiao Yue when suddenly he looked up, frowning.

"Xiao Yue, did you just see a big black rat run out?"

"What big black rat? Your eyes are playing tricks on you."

Lu Wangchuan arrived on the street to purchase materials. He first picked up some from the Longtai Merchant House, but he didn't take all the materials from there, so as not to let Lao Tan notice anything suspicious.

If Lao Tan guessed that he had obtained the pill formula in the chaos at the Moon Gazing Pavilion back then, it would inevitably cause another headache.

In chaotic times, people's hearts are unfathomable—one must remain vigilant.

He also didn't buy a furnace; that thing was too conspicuous, easy to expose, and most importantly, exorbitantly priced.

Though he had some silver, he was no wealthy lord after all. Martial arts drained fortunes, so he had to pinch every copper, splitting one into two.

Lu Wangchuan chose to simply brew it like the Body Strengthening Soup—boiling the ingredients according to the pill formula's list to produce a Spirit Elixir, then drinking it directly instead of refining it into pills. This saved a lot of time.

Others wanted to refine pills because the Spirit Elixir easily lost its essence through evaporation; pills preserved it better.

Additionally, the Spirit Elixir wasn't as concentrated as pills, containing far less essence per dose.

It was like comparing a piece of sugar to sugar dissolved in water—eating the sugar directly was easy, but to get the same amount of sugar from the water, you had to drink it all.