Reality lay before him: on one side, making a name for himself in his twenties or thirties; on the other, not coming into his own until his fifties or sixties. It was an easy choice.
Who in the martial world didn't want to make a name for themselves and earn the adulation of the masses? And if they could win the affection of the lady heroes, that would be even better.
At the rate one cultivated Mount Hua's inner arts, one would be old and frail by the time one mastered them. No matter how many times one rescued a beauty, all one would get was, "Thank you, senior, for your great kindness. I have no way to repay you, except in my next life..."
Clearly, Li Mu had never been the sort to charge headfirst into things. After figuring out the special properties of the Mount Hua Mental Method, he obediently took away the first three levels of the Hunyuan Skill.
As a great power with a history stretching back hundreds of years, the Mount Hua Sect naturally had no shortage of martial manuals. But truly top-tier techniques were few and far between. The best-known, the Purple Mist Divine Skill, was reserved for the line of succession to the sect's leadership, so it was naturally out of Li Mu's reach.
The reason for choosing the Hunyuan Skill was simple: it was one of the most widely practiced inner arts in the Mount Hua Sect. Most Mount Hua disciples switched to it after breaking through to the second-rate level.
Of course, he also made sure to copy down the later levels of the Mount Hua Mental Method.
People always had a certain "mysterious confidence" in themselves, and Li Mu hoped he might be the one most specially favored by Heaven.
Once he returned to his quarters, Li Mu immediately hung up a "Do Not Disturb—In Seclusion" sign and began his grueling cultivation.
"Mysterious confidence" still needed something to back it up. Li Mu's confidence came from the Mysterious Jade Disc that had accompanied him through his transmigration.
The origins of the Jade Disc were impossible to verify for now. In any case, when he had transmigrated, it had appeared in his mind.
It was simple to use: with just a thought, he could call it forth or put it away. So far, he had discovered two functions: deducing martial arts and assisting with cultivation.
With the Mysterious Jade Disc's help, many problems he encountered in cultivation were laid out clearly before him.
The bottlenecks that gave countless people in the martial world headaches were no trouble at all for the Jade Disc. That was how Li Mu had been able to break through so quickly and catch up with the top tier of his cohort.
Though the Jade Disc's ability to deduce techniques was astounding, it wasn't limitless. After trying it several times, Li Mu discovered that it could only work from a fixed foundation.
Take the Mount Hua Mental Method, for example. With the Jade Disc's help, Li Mu had already optimized its first four levels to suit his own circumstances. If not for the limits of his knowledge, he might even have been able to deduce the later levels.
Li Mu had tested it. Without the Jade Disc's assistance, his modified technique increased his cultivation speed by nearly fifty percent, while slightly improving the purity of his inner power.
With the Jade Disc's assistance, the results were even more astonishing: his cultivation speed tripled.
The trouble was that the technique it deduced was more like a custom-made suit. For Li Mu, it was the perfect fit. Give it to someone else, though, and they would get half the result for twice the effort—perhaps even worse than with the original.
That was why so many people got their hands on divine techniques and ended up cultivating utter trash. It wasn't that the techniques were bad; the people and the techniques simply didn't match.
To solve this problem, the great sects of the martial world had independently chosen techniques with broad applicability as the mainstay of their lineages.
As for divine arts and secret manuals with demanding cultivation requirements, they left those to fate. If a suitable successor appeared, that was good luck. If not, no matter.
With the Jade Disc's assistance, Li Mu carefully studied the later levels of the technique and finally understood why the Mount Hua Mental Method was so slow to cultivate.
At its core, it was a "play-it-safe" technique. That was hard to see in the first few levels, which merely laid the foundation. But the later levels were undoubtedly a divine art of playing it safe.
Perhaps the founder had worried that disciples who learned martial arts would go looking for trouble. Whatever the reason, the later levels of the Mount Hua Mental Method were steeped in the Daoist ideal of non-action.
Simply put, the fewer distracting thoughts one had and the less one enjoyed competing for dominance, the more suited one was to cultivating this technique.
In theory, if one could preserve the innocence of a child forever, the technique could even circulate on its own around the clock, seamlessly blending cultivation with daily life.
If one cultivated without pause for all twenty-four hours of the day, then the Mount Hua Mental Method, slow as it was to cultivate, would no longer be slow. It might even outpace the vast majority of inner arts.
Without a doubt, theory was just theory. Everyone had desires; the only question was how many.
If someone truly had no desires at all, they would be a "sage."
Now Li Mu truly believed that Mount Hua's martial arts originated with Quanzhen, rather than the sect having made up some illustrious ancestor to glorify itself.
The Mount Hua Mental Method and the Quanzhen Mental Method were simply too similar. Both were balanced and peaceful, broadly applicable, and even aimed for the same things in their later levels.
Just look at the best-known masters of the Quanzhen Mental Method. Zhou Botong had the pure heart of a child, with hardly a distracting thought in his head. Guo Jing was simply a blockhead, without a single thought to spare.
The techniques might not have been identical, but the principles they embodied came from the same source. As long as people let go of their messy, distracting thoughts, they could turn out masters by the dozen.
The only pity was that most of these masters came into their own late in life. After all, not everyone had the kind of luck a protagonist did.
In Li Mu's view, with a "divine art of playing it safe" like this, the Mount Hua Sect had taken a wrong turn by becoming nothing more than a martial-world sect.
If they had carried on the Quanzhen tradition and become a religious sect like Shaolin or Wudang, they might really have produced a few mighty masters among their broom-wielding Daoist priests.
Even if such people didn't take part in the martial world's conflicts, they would still be part of the sect's reserves of strength. At the very least, they wouldn't stand idly by when enemies came knocking.
In a sense, the strength of Shaolin and Wudang lay in their deep reserves. No one knew how many masters they had hidden away; even the leaders of the two sects might not have known themselves.
Putting those stray thoughts aside, Li Mu continued studying the Hunyuan Skill. Compared with the unassuming Mount Hua Mental Method, the Hunyuan Skill, one of the Nine Skills, had a far more resounding reputation in the martial world.
As expected, the Hunyuan Skill was completely different in style from the Mount Hua Mental Method. Not only was it much faster to cultivate, its attributes also shifted from balanced and peaceful to decidedly aggressive.
Li Mu wasn't surprised by this change. The Mount Hua Sect was, after all, a martial-world sect, with its disciples fighting on the front lines against the Demonic Cult every day. How could they manage if their inner arts lacked offensive power?
Different attributes meant different cultivation requirements. Li Mu now understood why Mount Hua disciples had to wait until they broke through to the second-rate level before switching to the Hunyuan Skill.
As an inner art that balanced offense and defense and even had some healing effects, the Hunyuan Skill was by no means easy to cultivate.
Unless one had exceptional talent, an ordinary person's meridians simply couldn't withstand it without a solid foundation in inner power.
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