If Huang Shang had obtained the Bright Jade Art before reading the Dao Scripture from cover to cover, he might not have even looked at it.
The reason was just as Xu Yue had worried: a genius who could teach himself everything, yet studied martial arts from a low-martial world, might improve quickly in the short term, but in the long run, it would only hold him back.
But with the foundation of the Dao Scripture, Huang Shang had already embarked on the path of cultivating Literary Qi. Looking back at martial arts from that vantage point was no problem.
His perspective had changed.
He wouldn't be biased by preconceived notions. Instead, he could learn from it and open up new lines of thought.
The Bright Jade Art had nine stages and was profound and vast. It wasn't merely a martial art for women.
The Nine Yin Manual, for instance, wasn't necessarily a yin-type martial art.
Bright Jade: "bright" meant the sun and moon, while "jade" meant the essence of heaven and earth.
To seize the creations of heaven and earth and take the essence of the sun and moon—that could be called Bright Jade.
Even so, the first few stages of the Bright Jade Art still followed the familiar routine of unblocking the meridians and strengthening one's true qi.
Huang Shang leafed through the thin Bright Jade Art at an unhurried pace, browsing it from beginning to end.
He closed the manual and thought with his eyes shut. When he opened it again, he began reading from the seventh stage.
The higher the stage, the fewer words there were. By the ninth stage, only a few brief sentences remained, fewer than a hundred words in all.
"The Ancestral Aperture is neither within the body nor outside it. It cannot be sought by touch, only silently kept in mind..."
"Guide it subtly with the mind, as if polishing a mirror, as if gazing upon a divine sea. The sun and moon gather between the brows, and the heart's light appears like jade..."
Many of the terms were Daoist, and Huang Shang only half understood them.
But he wasn't going to play a guessing game with the founder, who'd shrouded everything in mystery. Instead, he recalled the relevant scenes from the story.
In Handsome Siblings, the Bright Jade Art was described rather late. At the beginning, the two palace mistresses, Yao Yue and Lian Xing, had shaken the world, and the skill that made the biggest impression was Moving Flower Grafting Jade. The martial art they cultivated wasn't revealed until Wei Wuya's underground palace.
It was during that very crisis that Yao Yue mastered the ninth stage of the Bright Jade Art, just in time to face Yan Nantian, who had also brought the Wedding Dress Art to full mastery.
As the two peerless masters confronted each other from a distance, the strange phenomena around them revealed the characteristics of their supreme arts.
Normally, when two peerless masters faced off, even if heaven and earth didn't change color and the sun and moon didn't lose their light, at the very least their feet would sink deep into the ground.
But the Wedding Dress Art could be wielded and withdrawn at will without a trace of energy leaking out. The ground beneath Yan Nantian's feet remained smooth as before, while the earth beneath Yao Yue rose into a tall mound.
That was a characteristic of the Bright Jade Art. It was said that once it reached the ninth stage's peak, its power no longer flowed outward but instead drew inward. The true qi inside the body formed a vortex-like force, sucking in anything that came near as if it were iron drawn to a lodestone.
It was somewhat like Wan Wan's Heavenly Demon Force Field in Twin Dragons of the Tang Dynasty, and somewhat like the method of absorbing the qi of heaven and earth in Legend of the Emperor.
In any case, its influence spread beyond the body instead of being confined within it.
With the results of actual combat in mind, Huang Shang compared them against the manual. His eyes flickered as he began to understand what the ninth stage of the Bright Jade Art was all about.
"Cultivating the Ancestral Aperture! The Daoist Upper Dantian!"
Dantian was originally a Daoist Neidan term for cultivating essence, qi, and spirit. Later, it was widely adopted by all kinds of schools.
Martial artists considered the dantian the most important place, because true qi was born there.
But the dantian martial artists talked about was actually the Lower Dantian.
The human body had three great dantians.
The brain was the sea of marrow, the Upper Dantian; the heart was the crimson fire, the Middle Dantian; and three inches below the navel was the Lower Dantian.
The Lower Dantian stored essence, the Middle Dantian stored qi, and the Upper Dantian stored spirit.
Essence, qi, and spirit!
They corresponded exactly to the three basic attributes of Reincarnators!
Following this logic, martial arts in low-martial worlds focused on cultivating the Lower Dantian—that is, the body's essence.
That was why one grew stronger, faster, and healthier, yet remained mortal, with no fundamental change to one's lifespan.
But once one began cultivating the Upper Dantian, true qi gained certain astonishing effects, and the whole person began to undergo a complete transformation, advancing toward another level of life.
But there was a condition: the qi of heaven and earth had to be abundant.
Without enough qi of heaven and earth, the soul would perish the moment it left the body. One also couldn't look inward and perceive the soul. It was like feeling one's way across a river by stepping on stones, with very limited results.
Even so, it couldn't stop people from imagining and speculating.
Once the Bright Jade Art had reached the eighth stage, the Lower Dantian had no room left to advance. So its founder turned their gaze toward the mysterious and abstruse Upper Dantian, naming it the Ancestral Aperture.
"Yao Yue and Lian Xing's aptitude for martial arts was no less than Huang Shang's. At a young age, they had already reached the eighth stage."
"But they'd been stuck there for a full twenty years, unable to break through to the ninth. It was because of the appearance of Jiang Feng, the Jade Gentleman. After falling in love, their minds were no longer pure, which went against the Daoist requirement of a heart as still and clear as a mirror."
"Only in Wei Wuya's underground palace, when Yao Yue's emotions swung wildly under the threat of death, did she see through the obstruction and bring the art to full mastery."
"But that mastery was actually only the starting point of another realm."
Huang Shang studied the Bright Jade Art, imagining the circumstances at the time.
The idea was undeniably brilliant.
Masters from low-martial worlds were limited by their worlds. If they were given a broader realm, their futures would be entirely different.
"Then what about Huang Shang?"
"Having read the Daoist Canon from cover to cover, the real Huang Shang comprehended a supreme art on his own. Was it based on the Upper Dantian?"
The more Huang Shang thought about it, the more likely it seemed.
The Nine Yin Manual was a supreme Daoist art, originally based on the principles of yin and yang.
But the principles of yin and yang were far too broad. Where, specifically, did they manifest?
Why had Huang Shang made such a huge leap and become a peerless master of the martial world?
"The body's three dantians were originally a Daoist concept, and the Upper Dantian was also called the Primordial Spirit Mansion and the Palace of Nature."
"Huang Shang grasped the methods of returning essence to replenish the brain and refining qi into spirit from this. He learned without a teacher, so naturally he could rise from an ordinary scholar to a martial arts master. This also explains why he lived for well over a hundred years."
The Upper Dantian was the Palace of Nature, while the Lower Dantian was the Palace of Life.
When the two were united, one cultivated both nature and life!
At that moment, Huang Shang fully understood why the Reincarnators valued him.
He was truly amazing!
Masters already had ideas ahead of their time. Once brought into the higher realms of the Heavens Consciousness, they would surely advance by leaps and bounds, unstoppable once they got going.
At that point, it would be like having a private cheat code.
The Character Card truly was the greatest weapon the Main God Temple had given the Reincarnators.
Huang Shang was glad the Main God Temple had been so greedy. Plundering hadn't been enough; it had decided to raise slaves as well.
Without that, where would he have gotten the Dao Scripture or the Bright Jade Art?
As for the Bright Jade Art, he still didn't plan to cultivate it step by step. Instead, he would follow its principles and develop the Ancestral Aperture directly.
He was qualified to do so.
The Dao Scripture provided a visualization method for strengthening the spirit, and Huang Shang had also forged a path of Literary Qi suited to his own circumstances.
He would use the insights gained from the Dao Scripture to strengthen his spirit with Literary Qi.
Then he would use his strengthened spirit to develop the Ancestral Aperture.
Once the Ancestral Aperture was formed, he would have the realm of the Bright Jade Art's ninth stage. From there, he could work backward and open up all his meridians.
The latecomer would surpass the early bird!
Now that he had settled on a plan for his cultivation, Huang Shang felt as if the clouds had parted and the sky had cleared.
At last, thanks to the Reincarnators' selfless contributions, he had settled on a path of cultivation in this world.
Wu Que stood guard over Huang Shang.
His expression gradually grew dazed.
His own legacy came from the Moving Flower Palace, and he cultivated the Bright Jade Art himself. He had already reached the sixth stage.
So he could tell that Huang Shang wasn't cultivating the Bright Jade Art.
And yet his aura was growing stronger.
Had he comprehended it on his own?
No way. In a single night?
Was this what a grandmaster was like? What a big shot?
After holding it in for a long while, Wu Que finally managed to squeeze out a single phrase: "Terrifying beyond belief!"
Thanks to the readers "Tianjing Huntian Baojian," "Feng Yu Wu Fei," "Jiu Xiao Shu," "Flammable and Explosive C," and "delgnze" for their tips.
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