My Dao Is Accomplished

Chen Ye waited quietly until dawn, but no second shooting star ever streaked across the sky.

The one-legged lone wolf had finally grown tired. It lay sprawled on the ground, panting heavily, yet its blood and qi remained vigorous. Even its lame leg seemed to have mostly healed.

Chen Ye smiled at the wild wolf. "If I succeed in cultivating immortality one day, you'll have made a great contribution."

Unfortunately, the wolf was so exhausted it could barely lift its head. It could only bare its teeth at him, venting its displeasure.

Chen Ye smiled and tossed it what little remained of the Wolf Blood Pills as a token of his appreciation. Then he headed toward the ruined temple, striding beneath the rising sun.

He had found the cause of the Beast Blood Pill's maddening effects. He only needed to remove the lingering beast souls from the heart's blood; after that, taking the pills would cause no further trouble.

It sounded simple, and it wasn't difficult to do. At least, Chen Ye was seven or eight tenths confident he could manage it.

The word "fate" was truly mysterious.

Earlier, to protect Mo Ci's soul, Chen Ye had devoted himself to studying the Ten Thousand Soul Banner. After months of hard study, his understanding of souls had actually surpassed Mo Ci's by a fair margin. When it came to solving the problem of these lingering beast souls, he had thought of quite a few ways. That was the benefit of tracing something back to its roots: if you truly understood the principles behind it, you could naturally work out countless applications.

Pleased with himself, Chen Ye crossed a hill—only to run into Zhao Hezhou, who was disheveled and had several fresh cuts on his face.

Seeing him, Chen Ye looked puzzled. "Mr. Zhao, what happened to you?"

"Hero... I..." Zhao Hezhou's face flushed crimson. He had gone out into the darkness to look for Chen Ye because he was worried something might happen to him on the road at night. He had searched all night without even catching sight of Chen Ye, and instead had taken several spills himself.

Now that Chen Ye had appeared without a scratch, Zhao Hezhou was mortified. He stammered, "I was afraid it'd be difficult for you to travel at night, so I... I brought you a torch."

Seeing the bloody scratches all over Zhao Hezhou's hands, Chen Ye knew he'd had a rough night. He smiled and thanked him, then escorted the bedraggled man back to the ruined temple.

Over the following days, Chen Ye remained absorbed in cultivation.

Zhao Hezhou and his wife truly seemed to think of themselves as servants, taking care of every odd job. Chen Ye didn't call them out on it. Hunting a little extra game each day to feed the family of three was no trouble for him.

In his spare time, Chen Ye buried himself in piles of books, sometimes repeatedly sketching symbols on the ground. Zhao Hezhou prided himself on having read ten thousand books, but the symbols Chen Ye drew looked just like a Taoist priest's talismans. He was completely baffled and couldn't understand a thing.

Sometimes Chen Ye would furrow his brow, as if backed into a dead end; other times he would burst into laughter, as if he had found a treasure beyond compare. Day and night, he neither ate nor slept, lost entirely in his work.

Zhao Hezhou had seen this sort of thing before. His mentor, that venerable elder of exalted status, had worn the same crazed look whenever he became engrossed in his studies. Completely immersed in his work, he would lose himself in it until, to outsiders, he seemed no different from a madman. But it was precisely such people who could make progress and achieve something in their fields of study.

Chen Ye's frenzied state didn't last long. On the fifth day after the flying sword's shooting star had vanished, he suddenly burst into laughter. "At last, it's done! My Dao is accomplished!"

With that, Chen Ye paid no heed to Zhao Hezhou's family standing nearby. He went straight to the stove, lit a fire, and poured in oil. He had saved up quite a bit of beast blood over the past few days, and he dumped all of it into the pot to begin refining pills.

Zhao Hezhou's family had never witnessed anything like this. As the thick, rank stench spread, they nearly threw up their leftover meat.

Seeing this, Chen Ye hurriedly warned them, "You should all wait outside the temple. These pills have a strong smell and are somewhat toxic."

Zhao Hezhou promptly led his wife and children out of the ruined temple, leaving Chen Ye to work inside alone.

Following his previous method, Chen Ye refined a gourdful of Beast Blood Pills. The process was no different from before. But this time, he didn't put the pills straight into the gourd. Instead, he took out the Ten Thousand Soul Banner and spread it flat on the ground.

Then Chen Ye's hands flew as he drew talismans without pause, activating his spirit eye at the same time. In an instant, his pupils turned gold, and everything in his eyes was stained with the colors of the five elements.

But that still wasn't enough. Chen Ye gritted his teeth, bit his fingertip, and used his blood as ink to draw a multitude of talismans on the Ten Thousand Soul Banner. His spiritual energy rapidly drained away along with his blood. His face went white as paper, and a stabbing pain swept through him, as if his body had been hollowed out. Yet Chen Ye clenched his jaw and struggled to endure it.

He had rehearsed this countless times over the past five days, and now he drew more than a hundred talismans with perfect precision.

When he had finished the final talisman with a flawless stroke, Chen Ye forced his weakened body to pour the gourdful of Beast Blood Pills over the Ten Thousand Soul Banner.

His body was as limp as a noodle, but he kept his eyes fixed on the pills. Flecks of light seeped out of them, then were all absorbed by the Ten Thousand Soul Banner.

Chen Ye clenched both fists in excitement.

Success! These were the lingering beast souls inside the Beast Blood Pills!

But before he could enjoy the moment, Mo Ci's furious roar came from within the Ten Thousand Soul Banner. "You unworthy disciple! You used your master as bait?!"

Chen Ye replied feebly, "Master, I had no other choice. I couldn't gather the materials for a second Ten Thousand Soul Banner."

These lingering beast souls were fused with spiritual energy and sealed inside the blood pills. Removing them was no easy task. Chen Ye's cultivation was still shallow, and he lacked the ability to reach out and instantly refine the remnants with a single grab. With no other option, he had to find a way to make the souls leave on their own.

The Ten Thousand Soul Banner was designed to capture souls. Though this shoddy version wasn't very effective, Chen Ye could only improve it again and use Mo Ci's soul as "bait" to lure out the beast souls.

The remnants had no reason, only an instinctive malice, so of course they would try to devour Mo Ci's soul.

Mo Ci had never expected that, only a few days after saying his disciple was too softhearted, the brat would sell him out like this.

"Master, don't be angry. These remnants are nothing to you—like a gentle breeze brushing past..."

"I'd die if the wind blew on me right now!"

In Mo Ci's current state, even a gust of wind could immediately scatter his soul.

In truth, Mo Ci wasn't really afraid of these remnants. He was furious at Chen Ye's habit of acting first and informing him afterward.

A surge of anger rose in his heart. Mo Ci treated the beast souls as if they were Chen Ye, the unworthy disciple, and raised a hand to slap them into oblivion.

Chen Ye kept his eyes fixed on the Ten Thousand Soul Banner, his hands constantly forming seals as he repeatedly checked that every last beast soul had been released from the blood pills, without a single trace left behind. Only then did he carefully put the pills into the gourd.

Everything was ready now. He only needed to wait three days before taking out the blood pills for testing. He thought to himself that as long as the animals who ate them remained unharmed and suffered no side effects, it would mean that from then on, he could focus on training with the Beast Blood Pills and his path to greater cultivation would open up before him.

Perhaps the Heavenly Dao truly watched over him. Three days later, Chen Ye went deep into the mountains as usual and caught a number of wild beasts. Nervous yet hopeful, he fed them the pills. Whether wild boar or bird, green snake or spider, every beast and bug that ate a pill survived without the slightest abnormality. None of the terrifying side effects from before—the violence and madness—appeared.

Even Mo Ci couldn't help but be moved by the sight. He sighed with feeling. "You brat, you really did solve the problem with the Blood Refining Method."

Many secret arts of the demonic path were incredibly powerful, but practicing them required vast quantities of human blood. If livestock blood could be used instead, practitioners could unleash them as they pleased without worrying about killing too many people and drawing endless pursuit from the righteous path.

Who would have thought that the Blood Refining Method, which had always been a magnet for trouble and a headache for countless demonic-path seniors, would be cracked by a Qiling Realm cultivator who had only been practicing for a few months?

But Mo Ci couldn't help wondering: if so, was it still the demonic path he was cultivating?

I said back in the second chapter of this book that someone should have studied this sort of thing already. It's just that their findings may have been kept secret or not passed down for some other reason. The male lead's master is the type who never studies anything, so he doesn't understand and has no idea. How can Mo Ci, a Rogue Cultivator who was established from the start as lacking in knowledge, speak for the entire cultivation world? I'm not afraid of spoilers: later, the male lead will discover that many of his studies had already been considered by those who came before him. They may have reached different conclusions, or they may have reached exactly the same ones. But that's the result of information not being shared, not because everyone else is stupid and only the male lead is clever.