The Earth Spirit Pill

Lei Dong had moved into the area reserved for Personal Disciples during the Small Competition. He had no qualms about it. After all, the sooner he began cultivating in a chamber built atop a Spirit Cave, the sooner he could build up his strength. Cultivation meant fighting not only other people, but, more importantly, heaven itself. With their limited lifespans, cultivators continually defied the natural order, striving in the end to achieve immortality and endure as long as heaven and earth.

The Spirit Cave's effects were excellent. Combined with Pills for Cultivating Origin, which were even more potent than Lesser Vitality Pills, they had helped Lei Dong's cultivation improve by leaps and bounds. Every month, he went to listen to the Ancestor lecture for a day. In fact, the Ancestor had far more Personal Disciples than the three from Lei Dong's generation. Generally, he took on three Personal Disciples every ten years. This tradition had continued for more than seventy years, ever since the Ancestor had reached the Golden Core Path and gained a cave of his own. Though they were Personal Disciples in name, the Ancestor never allowed anyone at the Qi Refining Stage to call him Master. Only after reaching Foundation Establishment would they become his true inner disciples, and be regarded as one of his own.

In theory, the Ancestor should have taken in more than twenty Personal Disciples over the past seventy years. Yet Myriad Ghost Ancestor had only five inner disciples to date: the five judges who had presided over this Small Competition. The remaining Personal Disciples numbered a mere ten. The rest had either fallen along the way or remained stuck at a certain Qi Refining layer for decades, eventually leaving in dejection to establish Cultivation Lineages and raise families elsewhere. If any of their descendants had promising Spiritual Root aptitude, they would recommend them to the sect.

This showed that advancing from the Qi Refining Stage to Foundation Establishment was nowhere near as easy as one might imagine. One could guess how many of Lei Dong's generation would ultimately reach Foundation Establishment. Perhaps Ding Wanyan had a good chance. As for the rest, including Zuo Chao and Lei Dong, it all came down to luck.

The Qi Refining Stage was divided into twelve layers, and every layer could bring its own bottleneck. The higher one advanced, the harder each breakthrough became. Moreover, every four layers brought a major bottleneck: from the Fourth Layer to the Fifth Layer, from the Eighth Layer to the Ninth Layer, and from the Twelfth Layer to the first level of Foundation Establishment. Those were the three stages where cultivators most often got stuck.

Thus, the first through fourth layers of the Qi Refining Stage were known as the early stage. The next two were called the middle stage and the late stage.

Two and a half years—an entire two and a half years—flashed by.

By then, Lei Dong had been a Personal Disciple for quite some time. With the superior resources available to Personal Disciples, and his wholehearted focus on cultivation over the past two years, his progress had been swift. In a year and a half, he broke through two bottlenecks and reached the Fifth Layer. He then spent nine months cultivating to the peak of the Fifth Layer. For the next three months, no matter how hard he tried, he made no progress at all. He had attempted to force his way through the bottleneck three times, but failed each time. His meridians and acupoints had sustained some damage in the process, and he needed time to recover.

There was no doubt about it: he had encountered the legendary bottleneck. Lei Dong couldn't help giving a wry smile. He had easily broken through the stage where bottlenecks were supposedly common, from the Fourth Layer to the Fifth. But he just couldn't cross from the Fifth Layer to the Sixth. Bottlenecks were truly irritating things—impossible to predict, yet they could strike at any moment.

After reading through numerous books and records about bottlenecks, Lei Dong was left somewhat speechless. Sometimes, a sudden insight in the midst of a battle could lead to a breakthrough. Sometimes, one might suddenly grasp something while looking at a landscape. But there were also people who spent ten years traveling the world, taking in countless sights and fighting hundreds of battles, yet still failed to break through.

However, after countless years of development in the Cultivation World, who knew how many brilliant talents had emerged? Through endless trial and error, they had gradually developed many pills to increase the odds of breaking through. But most of those pills came with all sorts of risks. At best, they could severely damage one's meridians,

or even cause one's cultivation to regress. At worst, they might cost a person their life.

The truly harmless pills were all made from thousand-year-old spirit herbs. Their potent effects helped cultivators break through and increased their chances of success. But because of the materials involved, these pills were naturally exorbitantly expensive. A spirit herb with a Hundred Year Fire was already worth no less than a Hundred Spirits. A thousand-year-old spirit herb was worth at least a hundred times as much.

Add a thousand-year-old spirit herb to a few precious supplementary ingredients, and even if the cost came to only ten thousand Spirits, that was still a hefty sum. Suppose those ingredients could make ten pills, with a relatively high success rate of thirty percent. Then a single pill that could help someone break through a bottleneck without harmful side effects would cost three or four thousand just to make.

Lei Dong had checked the sect's pill exchange as well. Each Earth Spirit Pill required one hundred thousand Contribution Value. He had also asked Zhao Baiwan, who told him that Earth Spirit Pills usually sold for four to six thousand Spirit Stones in the outside markets, and were in short supply. That price was astronomical to Lei Dong. Still, there was no denying the Earth Spirit Pill's excellent reputation. Aside from cultivators at the peak of the Twelfth Layer who hoped to use one to reach Foundation Establishment—the pill wasn't quite potent enough for them—the success rate at every other layer was quite impressive. Lei Dong's current bottleneck was only the step from the Fifth Layer to the Sixth. As long as his aptitude wasn't too terrible, one Earth Spirit Pill would practically guarantee a breakthrough. The remaining medicinal power could even save him a considerable amount of cultivation time.

As for asking the Ancestor to bestow an Earth Spirit Pill on him, that was pure wishful thinking. If the Ancestor had to give an Earth Spirit Pill to every Personal Disciple who wanted to break through a bottleneck, then even a figure on the Golden Core Path would be driven into poverty. Most people who came up against an insurmountable bottleneck chose to travel, hoping to overcome it when fortune happened to smile on them.

Lei Dong, however, didn't think that was a good idea. Traveling could indeed bring an insight into heaven and earth, allowing one to borrow its power to break through a bottleneck. The problem was that it was far too unreliable. One might leave today and solve the problem tomorrow. Or one might spend three or five years on the road; worse still, there were plenty who spent eight or ten years without success.

Of course, he would have to leave eventually. Staying in Myriad Ghost Cave offered no benefit at all when it came to breaking through a bottleneck. Some people had tried sitting tight for years, attempting to break through again and again, only to fail each time and eventually lose heart. Lei Dong, however, had his sights set on the Earth Spirit Pill. To get one, he would have to scrape together a sum of money.

Including the few Spirit Stones he had plundered from Zhou Minghua's Storage Belt and the ones he had saved over the years, he had only a little over eighty. As for the Middle Grade Spirit Ghost the Ancestor had given him, he had never touched it. It remained sealed inside something called a Soul Sealing Ball. Even so, he was still nowhere near being able to afford an Earth Spirit Pill.

After turning it over in his mind, he could only set his sights on the Soul Devouring Pagoda again. Raising a single Middle Grade Spirit Ghost required absorbing the Soul Force of roughly five thousand Yin Souls. Based on how long it had taken Lei Dong to capture them a few years ago, that would have taken about a month. But Lei Dong was now many times stronger than he had been at the Second Layer of the Qi Refining Stage, so he could catch them much faster. In just a few months, he could accumulate enough capital to buy an Earth Spirit Pill, with plenty to spare.

As for selling a Middle Grade Spirit Ghost, Lei Dong was no longer the clueless little novice at the Second Layer of the Qi Refining Stage that he had once been. He was at the peak of the Fifth Layer, and over the years, his Three Ghost Soldiers had gradually grown to around the peak of level five, even though they had rarely had a chance to devour flesh and blood. He couldn't claim that this strength would let him sweep through everyone at the middle stage of the Qi Refining Stage. But unless he ran into someone particularly wealthy and decked out in Upper Grade and Middle Grade Magic Items, even ordinary cultivators at the seventh or eighth layer wouldn't intimidate him. In the lower reaches of the Cultivation World, cultivators at the seventh or eighth layer of the Qi Refining Stage already counted as local experts. Foundation Establishment cultivators, by contrast, were few and far between. Just consider that even Myriad Ghost Cave, Ghost Slaves included, had only six Foundation Establishment cultivators, and one could see how rare they were.

Of course, caution remained Lei Dong's guiding principle. If he could avoid trouble, he would keep his distance. He spent a little money on a Jade Slip map of the Yin Sha Sect's territory and marked all the lower-grade Yin Sha Lands on it. No wonder the place was called the Yin Sha Sect. When Lei Dong saw the dense cluster of markings, his scalp tingled.