Over the next several dozen days, Bai Yixin hacked his way through the Great Wilderness, encountering wave after wave of powerful beasts. After hundreds, even thousands of bloody battles, he was finally nearing the border of an ancient kingdom.
A child crossing endless mountains in less than a year, battling countless fierce birds and beasts and pushing through millions of miles—that was an astonishing feat by any measure.
If word got out, it would surely cause an uproar, shocking even the ancient clans with their profound foundations.
Even the most powerful Primordial Fierce Beasts trained their young in much the same way. Such a perilous trial was easy enough to talk about, but putting it into practice meant a near-certain death.
There were far too many beasts. Dense old forests stretched in every direction, without a soul in sight, while evil beasts and fierce birds lurked everywhere. It was the most terrifying kind of primeval land. Forget children—even a band of adult experts traveling together would struggle to cross it. At any moment, a Primordial Remnant might burst out and devour them, leaving not even a bone behind.
Bai Yixin's senses were keen. He avoided countless terrifying dangers along the way and survived many brushes with death. He had suffered severe injuries several times, but in the end, he made it through.
He was only a little over eight, and he had accomplished something like this! It was something he never would have dared imagine before. In his previous life, he would agonize for ages over a trip to the neighboring province. Now Bai Yixin fought his way through a thousand—no, ten thousand—miles a day. It was hard to believe!
After another two or three days, Bai Yixin crossed the wilderness and arrived at a magnificent ancient city.
People came and went in an endless stream. This vast ancient city was thriving, with a population of who knew how many tens of thousands. It buzzed with activity, and the pedestrians on the main street brushed shoulder to shoulder.
Of course, what astonished him most was the presence of living beings from all kinds of races. Some were so unfamiliar that he could not even identify their kind.
Bai Yixin saw several races with strange appearances, ones he had never heard of before, yet the passersby dared not point or gossip.
Clearly, these beings were powerful. The people who had lived here for a long time knew that trouble came from loose tongues.
There were many shops lining both sides of the street, and many were venerable old establishments. There were places like pill pavilions and weapon shops, with plenty of cultivators coming and going. Business was brisk.
Bai Yixin felt completely at ease as he wandered around. He had spent more than a year in the mountains, where things were so quiet they had almost felt desolate. Now, after suddenly entering this world of mortals, he found it quite comfortable.
"Growing tired of the clamor of the mortal world and retreating to a paradise beyond the world is a pleasure. But after staying in a quiet place for too long, coming to this bustling city brings its own kind of insight."
Bai Yixin murmured to himself, deeply moved. For a moment, he even stood there in a daze.
His thoughts turned to cultivation. Ascetics who shut themselves away to cultivate and extraordinary people who roamed freely through the mortal world had chosen two different ways of life. It was much the same.
Bai Yixin sold some of the spoils he had won in bloody battles, exchanged them for local currency, and checked into a lavishly decorated inn to rest and recover.
"It feels like a lifetime has passed. Who would have thought I'd have to spend nearly a year making my way out of the wilderness all alone?"
Bai Yixin bought a rough map and compared it with the route he had taken. He discovered that he had been going in circles much of the time.
"Wait, am I directionally challenged? That can't be!"
The ancient kingdom was truly vast, ruling over millions upon millions of miles of land. Even the territory of a single powerful vassal lord had a population of hundreds of millions, or even over a billion, and stretched as far as the eye could see.
Bai Yixin had thought he might make it to another ancient kingdom, but after asking around, he learned that he had spent a year fighting his way through the endless mountains and was still within the northern frontier of the Stone Kingdom.
After a year of bloody battles, Bai Yixin had made great progress and was completely transformed.
[Name]: Bai Yixin.
[Age]: 8.
[Realm]: Foundation Establishment, Fifth Stage (36697/50000); Cave Heaven Realm—Five Heavenly Caves (690/1000).
[Technique]: Nine-Turn Heavenly Art—Second Turn.
[Skills]: Silver Moon Precious Technique—Masterful (3968/10000), Suanni Precious Technique—Thoroughly Mastered (558/1000), Grass Sword Art—Slightly Accomplished (66/100), Luan Bird Precious Technique—Thoroughly Mastered (586/1000), Six Paths of Reincarnation Heavenly Art—Beginner (6/10)...
[Experience]: 239338
[Money]: 40,000,000
[Talent]: Dao of Grinding. The Liver Emperor has livers throughout his body. When he enters a grind-until-you-drop state, his efficiency doubles with each passing moment.
His greatest gain was that he had grasped the very first traces of the Grass Sword Art.
With a thought, a rocky cavern appeared above Bai Yixin's head, like a volcano.
It looked so real, as if it had been carved out of stone. Gray-brown, imposing, and ancient, it hung three inches above the crown of his head.
Inside this cavern, which resembled a volcanic crater, surged vigorous life force, bright and scarlet, dazzling to behold. It truly looked like molten lava.
There was not just one volcano, but five. Two more gray-brown volcanoes appeared on each side of his body. They drew power continuously from the void, as red, silver, purple, blue, and yellow "magma" surged forth and flowed into his body.
These were the five Heavenly Caves Bai Yixin had opened.
To open a Heavenly Cave and enter this realm was to seize the creation of heaven and earth. One could continuously absorb the divine essence of the boundless world beyond and replenish oneself.
At this point, one connected with the boundless void and refined the divine essence of heaven and earth from within it. The runic divine power within the body surged, far surpassing what it had been before, naturally making one immensely powerful.
From then on, the power flowed without end, continuously refined to keep the body vigorous. Unless one fought an excessively brutal battle, it was nearly impossible to exhaust one's strength, allowing one to remain at the peak of one's condition.
Aside from its basic function of replenishing spent energy, the Cave Heaven Realm had another ability worth mentioning: nurturing Treasure Techniques within a Heavenly Cave.
That, however, required reaching the third stage of the Spirit Transformation Realm. It was too early to dwell on it, but one of his Heavenly Caves would certainly be reserved for the Grass Sword Art.
As one of the three great sword arts, the Grass Sword Art tempered matter into a Sword Embryo. Any part of the body could become a Sword Embryo. If one cultivated it to the pinnacle, one could cleave through the past and present and behold eternity. Its power was peerless.
For this reason, Bai Yixin had devoted a great deal of effort to the Grass Sword Art over the past year. He had finally ground his way to a slight accomplishment, and even that had already become his strongest killing move.
Also, over the past year, Bai Yixin had studied the system panel and made another major discovery.
The items in the system shop were even more all-encompassing than he had imagined.
At first, Bai Yixin had thought this was just a low-grade cheat, but it turned out that he simply hadn't known how to use it.
One day, when he had nothing better to do, he searched for the Nine-Turn Heavenly Art again. The shop had more than 18,000 search results, and every single one was a Nine-Turn Heavenly Art.
Some were divine abilities or secret techniques, while others were martial arts or cultivation methods.
Take the Nine-Turn Heavenly Art Bai Yixin had bought, for example. He also saw another Nine-Turn Heavenly Art with a similar description. Both could lead to immortality after nine turns,
but the immortal it produced was all-knowing and all-powerful, gaining everything forever—a progenitor of the Great Dao, transcending all things and encompassing everything, profound beyond measure, the gate to all wonders.
The Three Flowers Gathered at the Crown, the Five Energies Returned to the Origin. The Three Flowers represented the Beginning, Existence, and End. The Myriad Heavens and Worlds were all illusory dreams; only I was real.
All paths were my path, everything was my transformation. I was the origin, the primordial beginning, the Great Dao, the Heavenly Heavens, eternity, the one and only, the immeasurable, the end, all living beings, all things, fate, time and space, Reincarnation, the terminus, and the Supreme.
The description went on and on, leaving Bai Yixin dumbfounded.
Bai Yixin glanced at the price again. Ugh, just looking at all those zeros made him dizzy. Well, that was what they meant by getting what you paid for. He was simply too poor.
His earlier conclusion that an Immortal King's level corresponded to the Heavenly Immortal-to-Golden Immortal range was based only on the immortals produced by the cultivation methods he had identified.
As the saying went, people differed from one another; naturally, so did immortals.
Golden Immortals from different systems could be worlds apart in strength.
But no matter how much things changed, strength and one's fists were the only truth.
The road ahead was long and arduous. He still had a long way to go!
Bai Yixin sighed, but he was not impatient or anxious. No matter how far he could go in the end, he would take one steady step at a time.
Whatever path of immortality one cultivated, state of mind mattered most.
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