After climbing up to the lowest Medicine Field, Li Zhi was attacked by a swarm of bees.
With just one encounter, seven or eight huge welts had already appeared on his body.
If he had not promptly leaped into the mud pit beside him, he probably would have been stung to death by those bees.
Moreover, the venom of those bees was extremely potent. Li Zhi's face remained swollen for a full three days before the swelling went down.
And that was only the first time.
Next, he was targeted by a swarm of ants that were red from head to toe,
which directly ate away a chunk of flesh from his calf. If he had not reacted in time, those ants probably would have gnawed his calf down to the bone.
After fleeing beyond the Medicine Field, he rested for a full seven days before his wounds finally healed.
Once his injuries had recovered, Li Zhi changed direction and continued climbing the mountain.
Having learned his lesson from the previous attempts, he had grown smarter this time. He first picked some herbs from the Medicine Field, crushed them, and smeared the herbal juice over his body to prevent poisonous insects from tracking him by scent and attacking him.
This method worked.
Li Zhi finally succeeded in climbing up to the Medicine Field on the second level.
During that time, whenever he grew hungry, he ate some of the medicinal materials in the Medicine Field.
Unlike the outside world, he was surprised to discover that those medicinal materials still contained a trace of spiritual herb aura.
After using the method of the Longevity Art to refine those medicinal materials, the essence in his body seemed to have increased greatly, and even his recovery speed after being injured had improved tremendously.
However, Li Zhi soon no longer dared to continue cultivating the Longevity Art.
He was afraid that eating those spiritual herbs would open up his Bitter Sea.
Who knew whether he would have any chance of surviving the journey while hitching a ride after opening his Bitter Sea?
After that, Li Zhi cultivated only the Breathing Method.
The Breathing Method strengthened his own essence, spirit, and energy, without involving cultivation of the Bitter Sea.
It seemed to follow a different path from the Secret Realm Method.
It could likewise help him refine the trace of spiritual power within those medicinal herbs.
By the time he climbed up to the fifth level of Medicine Fields, the strength of one arm had already broken through to two thousand jin.
His speed was faster, his strength greater, and his spiritual perception sharper.
Yet even so, there was still no sign of his upward progress speeding up. Instead, it seemed to be growing slower and slower.
Li Zhi realized that although the mountain appeared to be no more than a terraced field, it was actually filled with the mysterious Power of Law governing space.
The true distance between the two places was definitely not as short as it appeared on the surface.
In fact, Li Zhi's guess was correct.
Although the Hundred Herbs Diagram possessed no offensive power, as a Quasi-Emperor Divine Weapon, the space within it was capable of forming a self-contained world.
Back then, to ensure the integrity of the Medicine Garden, Longevity Daoist had forcibly refined a Chaos Small World into the diagram.
From then on, the space of the Medicine Garden had become firm and indestructible, giving the Hundred Herbs Diagram a certain amount of power to harm enemies.
It could release a mountain resembling a Small World and suppress people with its momentum.
At the same time, to ensure that the Small World within the Divine Weapon would not wither, Longevity Daoist had carved many Array Patterns into the diagram to draw in essence from all directions and nourish the Chaos Small World.
The purpose was to ensure at all times that the Divine Tree at the mountaintop would not fall in rank.
It was a Half-Divine Tree, the Longevity Fruit Tree, cultivated from a Ginseng Fruit pit through Wa Huang's Secret Art.
At the same time, those Medicine Gardens on the terraced fields were not used to cultivate spiritual herbs.
Instead, special Magic Arrays gathered the power of those spiritual herbs together and offered it as a sacrifice to the Longevity Fruit Tree at the mountaintop, allowing the Fruit Tree to grow healthily.
Because of the overall environment of Heaven and Earth, if a Demigod Medicine was not constantly watered with Divine Spring Water, it could easily fall in rank, degrade into Saint Medicine, or even directly regress to the level of spiritual herbs—in other words, what this era called Medicine Kings and Little Medicine Kings.
Although Longevity Daoist had obtained great Fortune back then, he had never obtained a Fortune Spring Eye or the Life Divine Spring. Therefore, he could only rely on this method to ensure that the Fruit Tree did not fall in rank.
The Great Sage sitting beneath the Longevity Fruit Tree at this moment had also once obtained great Fortune and acquired a pot of Divine Spring Water.
This allowed the Longevity Fruit Tree to bloom and bear fruit once more, producing a Ginseng Fruit with thirty percent of its medicinal efficacy.
In the blink of an eye, more than two hundred days passed.
After enduring countless hardships, Li Zhi finally climbed to the mountaintop.
At this moment, only a tattered pair of shorts remained on his body, and his body was covered with all kinds of crisscrossing scars.
They were all the results of Li Zhi's battles of wits and courage with those insects.
He even had a penetrating wound over his heart.
It had come within a hair's breadth of piercing through his heart.
The insect that had inflicted such a severe injury was one he did not recognize. A horn twenty centimeters long protruded from its head.
That horn was incomparably sharp.
With just one encounter, it had pierced through Li Zhi's palm and chest at the same time.
If he had not circulated the Breathing Method at the critical moment and forcibly altered the arrangement of his internal organs, he would probably have died.
After climbing to the mountaintop, Li Zhi was disheveled and grimy, looking exactly like a vagrant.
He also had two huge welts on his head.
They had been smashed into him by a flying insect with an extremely hard shell.
At the time, he had suffered a concussion. If he had not eaten many spiritual herbs, greatly increasing the toughness of his body,
that single blow would probably have split his head open.
Lying on the platform at the mountaintop, Li Zhi felt that he had been unbelievably unlucky.
Suddenly, he realized something.
He touched the welts on his head and the wound over his heart, and could not help breaking out in a cold sweat.
Since arriving in this world, he had killed only two people. One had been killed when he smashed his head with a hammer, while the other had had his chest pierced by the Luoyang Shovel.
Now, he had suffered an injury severe enough to make an ordinary person's head explode, and his chest had likewise sustained an injury severe enough to pierce an ordinary person's heart.
Li Zhi immediately remembered a passage from Stealing Heavenly Secrets: "Steal Heaven's great fortune, and Heaven and Earth will not tolerate it. The Karmic Cycle will make the body answer for the calamity. Be exceedingly cautious."
Li Zhi also remembered the vague sensation he had felt when offering the sacrifice to Heaven that day: the great fortune he had borrowed would remain on him for only three years.
Now it seemed that the three years had passed, which was why he had ended up in such a sorry state.
Compared with the previous two times, when he had obtained opportunities smoothly and effortlessly, this trip to the Great Sage Mystic Realm had nearly cost him his life.
During those more than two hundred days, he had been like a wild man, drinking muddy water from the fields whenever he was thirsty and gnawing on spiritual herbs of unknown toxicity whenever he was hungry.
Hard work had paid off. After enduring countless hardships, he had finally reached the Longevity Fruit Tree.
Thinking of the Ginseng Fruit he was about to obtain, a trace of a smile immediately appeared on Li Zhi's face.
However, the scars on his face made his smile look especially ghastly.
After lying on the ground to rest for more than half an hour, Li Zhi finally felt his strength return.
Then he sprang up from the ground in one swift motion.
His bouncing movement seemed to be too vigorous, causing the ground to tremble.
The corpse beneath the tree instantly turned into a pile of powder.
This took Li Zhi by surprise.
He cautiously walked forward and discovered a miniature scroll, blue all over, within the pile of powder.
Recalling the records he had read earlier, Li Zhi quickly determined that it was the page containing the complete "Primordial Longevity Art," a Scripture forged from Eternal Blue Gold.
Li Zhi carefully used a withered branch to pull the Scripture out from the pile of powder.
He then discovered that the powder seemed to possess no spirituality at all and was similar to ordinary lime powder.
It was not the bone powder left behind after a cultivator underwent Dao Dissolution.
Although the blue scroll was only three inches long, it was not light in the slightest. It weighed a full forty or fifty jin.
Excited, Li Zhi pulled open the scroll and immediately saw the passages of the Primordial Longevity Art recorded upon it.
The Beginning Chapter, the Wheel and Sea Scroll, the Dao Palace Chapter, the Four Extremes Chapter, the Dragon Transformation Chapter, and the Celestial Platform Chapter—all the Scriptures were complete, without a single sentence missing.
At the very end of the scroll, a Longevity Secret Art was also recorded.
Moreover, the characters recording the Secret Art differed from those used for the Scriptures before it, seeming to have been added later.
After reading that Longevity Secret Art, Li Zhi was shaken to the core.
He first lowered his head to look at the pile of powder on the ground, then raised it to gaze at the lone Ginseng Fruit hanging from the tree.
The Great Sage who had previously sat beneath the tree had also been someone of tremendous fortune. In his youth, he had not only obtained Longevity Daoist's Dao Lineage,
but later, in his old age, he had found a Land of Fortune left behind by Wa Huang.
There, he had obtained a Longevity Method that Wa Huang had once deduced.
Wa Huang had seemingly glimpsed the truth of the Immortality Elixir through her research into it, learning that all those Immortality Elixirs had been transformed from immortals who had once died.
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