At once, Yuan Tianzong returned to the house, sat cross-legged, and examined the withered seed in his hand again.
"How can I make this Dao seed flower and bear fruit?"
The Daoist texts in the Celestial Master Temple's Sutra Pavilion contained no instructions on how to plant a Dao seed. In fact, their descriptions of Dao seeds were extremely vague. They only said that a Dao seed contained traces of powerful beings from the past and was an "undying" testament to undying life.
A terrifying future...
Dao seeds.
Divine Smoke of Entering the Dao.
Countless threads wound through Yuan Tianzong's mind, and for a moment, he couldn't make sense of them.
He wanted to find the path of cultivation beyond this point, but the more he searched, the farther away it seemed.
He took out his phone and browsed the latest information from various sources.
The night passed without incident. The sun rose in the east.
As Yuan Tianzong stepped outside, he immediately spotted Bone standing on a boulder. A flicker of surprise crossed his eyes.
At that moment, bathed in the morning sun, Bone's entire skeleton shimmered with a faint radiance, thin as a solar corona.
His posture was exceedingly strange. He stood at an angle on one leg, rather like an upright sleeping arhat.
He was cultivating in an unusual way.
Yuan Tianzong was intensely curious. He walked closer, kept still and quiet, and avoided disturbing him, hoping to observe something deeper.
In the Dharma-ending era, Yuan Tianzong had truly been shown through the door by his master, then left to rely on himself for cultivation.
His master had been an obscure nobody. By the second year after Yuan Tianzong became his disciple, the student had already surpassed the teacher.
Once his master was no longer able to teach him, Yuan Tianzong had naturally embarked on the path of cultivating on his own.
That experience had given him an exceptional ability to learn.
"Strange. A skeleton with no lungs can still have a breathing rhythm?"
Yuan Tianzong was astonished. This ran counter to everything he understood about "breathing." It was like a cook conjuring a meal without rice.
He approached slowly, circling Bone as he observed him closely.
Yuan Tianzong had always possessed astonishing comprehension, to the point of seeming monstrous. Otherwise, how could he have fought his way into a forbidden zone in the desolate Dharma-ending era, and stepped into the Grandmaster realm amid such bleak conditions?
His comprehension had improved again after he absorbed and refined the Golden Lotus King's secret power.
In a daze, specks of gold appeared in his pupils, allowing him to see subtle changes beyond the perception of ordinary people.
"His bones are vibrating ever so slightly in some hidden way. That's his breathing!"
"His body is breathing, taking in energy from beyond the heavens in turn?"
"Is there really a cultivation method like this?"
"Rhythm... What kind of rhythm..."
Murmuring to himself, Yuan Tianzong, obsessed with cultivation, unconsciously began to learn and imitate Bone's method.
Bones.
He couldn't vibrate his bones to breathe the way Bone did.
Still, his comprehension was astonishing. He applied the principle by analogy and tried to produce a similar effect using his muscles, which were easier to control.
After a good while, Yuan Tianzong stopped imitating. He couldn't get the hang of it.
Just then, Bone "woke up." Seeing Yuan Tianzong right beside him, he shifted in alarm, scrambling backward before tumbling straight off the boulder in a most ungainly fashion.
"Tok, tok, tok?" Accompanied by gestures, the sound of a wooden fish asked what Yuan Tianzong was doing.
Yuan Tianzong was direct, answering seriously, "Your cultivation method just now was fascinating. I was trying to learn it."
At that, Bone understood. His mouth opened and closed repeatedly, and the tok-tok sounds rang without pause.
When he saw that Yuan Tianzong couldn't understand, he gestured anxiously.
Yuan Tianzong shook his head to show that he couldn't understand.
Bone gave up and lowered his arms.
"Are you willing to teach it to me?" Yuan Tianzong ventured.
Bone nodded repeatedly without the slightest hesitation. He had no intention of holding anything back. His straightforwardness made Yuan Tianzong feel a little guilty, as if he were taking something from a fool.
That feeling didn't affect Yuan Tianzong. With that opening, he continued guessing. "You're willing to teach me, but we can't communicate freely yet, so you're frustrated?"
Bone nodded again. He thought Yuan Tianzong was clever, able to see exactly what he was thinking.
"All right. In that case, teaching you to write will have to be moved up the agenda."
Bone was incredibly clever, like a sponge, and learned quickly.
In barely half a month, he had learned most of the Chinese characters and could write.
Then he fetched a small stick and began writing and gesturing on the bare ground.
When the writing had filled his entire field of vision, Bone finally stopped and turned to Yuan Tianzong. He pointed at the text on the ground. "Tok, tok."
"Understood."
Standing on the boulder, Yuan Tianzong looked over the long text, memorizing it one character at a time and etching it into his mind.
Then Bone wrote a few words beside it: "Master, I'm a little tired. I'm going to sleep."
Master?
Yuan Tianzong looked slightly taken aback. He suddenly recalled Bone bowing to him not long ago. At the time, he had assumed it was an expression of gratitude. Now it seemed Bone had been paying homage to his master.
Yuan Tianzong hadn't thought much of it then, so he hadn't refused.
From Bone's perspective, that meant Yuan Tianzong had agreed to become his master.
Having worked out the details, Yuan Tianzong said nothing. He accepted Bone's claim that he was his master.
For one thing, Bone had taught him this strange art without holding anything back. Yuan Tianzong was willing to take him under his wing and protect him from being bullied by other beings.
Besides, Yuan Tianzong had already thought Bone's origins mysterious. What other explanation could there be for a Yin Bone like him?
Now Bone even knew such a wondrous breathing art, further strengthening Yuan Tianzong's suspicions.
He put those thoughts aside and focused on the method before him.
Soon, he had committed every word to memory and confirmed that he hadn't missed anything.
Yuan Tianzong then sat cross-legged and began studying the ten-thousand-character breathing method in his mind.
Before you continue