Yun Zhi pinched Lu Yang by the collar with two fingers and dangled him before her eyes. Still unable to figure out the principle, she put him back down.
Lu Yang was just as baffled. He'd followed the incantation his senior sister taught him and done exactly as she'd shown him, so why had the spell turned out completely different?
"That doesn't make any sense."
"I'll demonstrate it for you again." Yun Zhi was a very responsible teacher. Her teaching skills were rather average, but at least she was patient.
Yun Zhi took out an hourglass and turned it upside down on the ground. Then she held Lu Yang by the shoulders, and the two of them made a spatial leap together.
Lu Yang's vision blurred. He found himself in a strange space, with dazzling, multicolored streams of light on either side.
Instinctively, Lu Yang reached out to touch one of the streams, but Yun Zhi stopped him.
"Those are strange sights formed by spatial distortions. If you touched one, even a Spirit Transformation cultivator would be twisted to pieces, body and soul."
Lu Yang jerked his hand back in fright.
The two stepped out of the space. Before them, a colossal white serpent coiled around a mountain, swallowing the sun and moon as it refined the essence of heaven and earth. Its eyes were full of life. The two happened to land inside its mouth and went straight into its belly.
Just as stomach acid was about to drip down on them, Yun Zhi took another step, and they arrived in the strange space again.
Following Yun Zhi's footsteps, Lu Yang witnessed all manner of bizarre sights: a sea made of magma, a powerful cultivator undergoing a tribulation, a silent swordsman carrying a broad, heavy blade...
These were places Lu Yang had never seen or even heard of. It was truly hard to imagine that such extraordinary people and sights existed in the world.
At last, the two returned to their starting point. Lu Yang was panting, still shaken.
"The places I took you just now were all within Ask Dao Sect. One day, you can go there on your own."
Ask Dao Sect was vast and sprawling. Aside from its nine core mountains, much of it remained unknown territory to Lu Yang.
"Try casting the spell again?"
Yun Zhi thought it might work differently this time.
Meeting Yun Zhi's eager, hopeful gaze, Lu Yang steeled himself and cast the spell again.
After the two of them practiced for a whole day, Lu Yang finally learned how to sense the environment underground, as well as how to avoid getting stepped on after shrinking.
He hadn't managed to make himself cover a thousand miles in a single step even once. But he'd succeeded every time at shrinking the earth and turning a thousand miles into a mere inch, getting more proficient with each attempt.
By the end, he didn't even need the incantation. One thought was enough to cast the spell, as if he'd immersed himself in the art for months or years.
Lu Yang had initially wanted to learn the spell so he could use it to travel. Now that he'd learned the "shrinking the earth" part, it still counted as fulfilling his original aim.
It was just that the method was hard to describe, and a little slow.
Seeing Lu Yang freely change size and burrow around in the soil, having the time of his life, Yun Zhi casually asked, "Little Junior Brother, I heard it's hard for you to get assigned a task at the Mission Hall?"
"Yeah. Most tasks can only be done by Golden Core cultivators or above, and there aren't many suited to me." Lu Yang had been thinking of camping out at the Mission Hall for a few days to see if he could snag a suitable task.
"That's a coincidence. A few days ago, I was in a meeting with the elders. Someone mentioned that there was a problem at the medicinal herb garden. A task was posted at the Mission Hall, but no one accepted it. I think you're a suitable candidate, so you might as well go take a look."
Lu Yang knew that ever since his master went into seclusion, his senior sister had been presiding over meetings in his place.
"What's the task?" Lu Yang was puzzled. His strengths weren't particularly outstanding in Ask Dao Sect, so what kind of task would be suitable for him? Especially at the medicinal herb garden, which he knew nothing about.
He hadn't even finished learning how to identify medicinal herbs.
"You'll find out when you get there," Yun Zhi said, not answering.
In Lu Yang's eyes, Ask Dao Sect was a miniature world of cultivation in its own right. Without even leaving the sect, one could find people to help refine pills, forge artifacts, set up arrays... Most of the time, the sect could be self-sufficient.
Pill refinement required spirit herbs, and Ask Dao Sect had a great demand for them. They couldn't rely on outside purchases forever.
To solve the problem of spirit herbs, Ask Dao Sect had set aside a vast medicinal herb garden within its grounds for growing herbs. The Mission Hall also posted tasks to help cultivate them.
Cultivating herbs required specialized knowledge, and Lu Yang knew nothing about it. He still couldn't even tell which herbs or spirit beasts he ate every day, let alone grow medicinal herbs.
Lu Yang could smell the fragrance of the medicinal herb garden from far away. Unlike the fragrance at Elixir Cauldron Peak, which might turn out to be poison, this was the purest medicinal aroma. If ordinary people breathed it in for long enough, they would live longer and remain free of illness and misfortune.
An old man was sprawled at the entrance to the garden, a palm fan covering his face as he dozed leisurely in a rocking chair.
"Sir, is this the medicinal herb garden?"
The old man cracked open his drooping eyelids and glanced at Lu Yang. "Who are you?"
"Lu Yang."
"I didn't ask your name. I asked who you are."
"I'm the Sect Master's fourth disciple, and Yun Zhi's little junior brother."
The old man had shown no reaction to the first part. The Sect Master had disappeared for ten years. Who cared about him? He should retire already instead of hogging his position and making Yun Zhi do all the work. What was that about? But when he heard the rest, he suddenly understood.
A disciple of the Sect Master meant Yun Zhi's little junior brother!
The old man sprang up, more spry than Lu Yang.
That was normal. In the world of cultivation, appearances didn't reveal someone's skill or age. Put an old person next to a child, and you couldn't even tell who was the grandparent and who was the grandchild.
Nobody in the world of cultivation preached respecting the elderly and caring for the young, since both the old and the young might be able to beat you up.
"So Yun Zhi sent you here. You should've said so earlier!" The old man slung an arm around Lu Yang's shoulders, as close as brothers.
"We're all from Ask Dao Sect. Just call me Old Ba. I'm in charge of everything in this little medicinal herb garden."
Lu Yang suspected Old Ba was taking advantage of him, but he had no proof.
"What did Yun Zhi send you here to do? Pick herbs? How old do you need them? A thousand years? Two thousand?"
Seeing Old Ba like this, Lu Yang couldn't help thinking of the meals his senior sister made for him. Could she have been picking herbs from the garden—herbs that were a thousand or two thousand years old?
A thousand-year-old herb wasn't something you could find everywhere. Even in Ask Dao Sect, it was quite precious.
No, surely not. His senior sister was frugal. She wouldn't waste medicinal herbs on herself.
Lu Yang politely asked, "My senior sister said a few days ago that the medicinal herb garden posted a task, but nobody accepted it. May I ask what the task is?"
Old Ba suddenly understood. So that was what he'd come for. "Do you know how to cultivate medicinal herbs?"
"I don't know how at all," Lu Yang answered honestly.
"Then I'll give you a simple explanation. Cultivating medicinal herbs involves quite a few complicated steps. One of them is loosening the soil so the herbs' roots can better absorb the spiritual energy in the earth and exchange it with the spiritual energy in the air."
"Loosening the soil has always been done by a pair of silver-ringed earthworms, the Heavenly King couple."
"Recently, they've had a problem at home, so there's no one to do the work. I posted a task to loosen the soil in the medicinal herb garden. It requires the earth escape art, one of the five-element Daoist arts. Quite a few young disciples know it, but they all think it's too much trouble and don't want to accept the task. Then Yun Zhi happened to send you here."
"So what I'm supposed to do is..."
"Imitate the earthworms, burrow into the ground, and loosen the soil in the medicinal herb garden."
Lu Yang: "..."
Lu Yang suspected his senior sister was messing with him, but he still had no proof.
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