Shen Yue looked back.
"Black Soil Fortress scum! Prepare to die!"
A hundred meters behind him, a dark mass of people came charging after them, controlling their spirit artifacts with murderous looks on their faces.
One person lagged behind and was pierced through the chest by three wooden vines, dying instantly.
Shen Yue cursed his rotten luck and took off running.
But the people of this otherworld seemed to cultivate all sorts of strange abilities. Some had wheels of fire beneath their feet, while others had breezes wrapped around their legs. They ran incredibly fast. After two sharp turns, he was left in the dust.
Spirit artifacts howled through the air, hurtling toward them from every direction.
"Kill!"
Streams of light shot up from both sides of the road, forming a black sand-and-earth barrier in the blink of an eye. It trapped the Wu Family pursuers inside.
The situation changed in an instant.
The Black Soil Fortress forces, who had been fleeing moments earlier, broke into sinister grins, their scheme having succeeded.
"The Wu Family is nothing special!"
Before the black earthen barrier, sand and soil writhed like crawling insects, gathering into a big, black-faced man with hair standing on end.
At the same time, the Wu Family members inside the barrier transformed into tree-men and began ramming wildly against the earthen walls.
"This is the Post-Earth Absolute Green Formation. You may as well stop wasting your strength!" Black Qiu sneered. His right hand slashed down sharply. "Kill! Leave no one alive!"
In an instant, everyone from Black Soil Fortress charged at the Wu Family.
Spirit Snake Sword... Blood Bell... Wooden Puppet...
A motley assortment of spirit artifacts clashed in a chaotic melee.
The black-faced giant and a palace-dressed woman from the Wu Family fought especially fiercely. One transformed into a ten-zhang-high sand tower, while the other became a thorn-covered tree-man.
Shen Yue hid to the side to avoid the battle, but before he knew it, the earthen barrier shattered with a boom. Wu Family members poured out from every direction, and a veiled woman charged straight at him.
Looking for an easy target?
Shen Yue chanted an incantation. His Heaven Origin Golden Hands came together from either side, palms facing each other as they clapped toward the woman.
Seeing how weak his cultivation was, the Wu Family woman didn't take the giant hands seriously at all. She opened her mouth and spat out three blue vines that shot out like snakes, binding him in a tangle of blue and silver.
"Scum! Die!"
The Wu Family woman sneered again and again, spitting a sharp thorn straight toward his brow.
Bang!
The Heaven Origin Golden Hands exploded.
The Wu Family woman blew apart along with her palm, leaving only a storage pouch to fall to the ground.
Shen Yue snatched up the spoils.
Metal overcame wood, and the Separating Fire Talisman also countered wood to some extent. He really had managed to kill his opponent in a single blow.
Black Soil Fortress had come prepared, slaughtering the Wu Family until blood ran like a river. Only a handful escaped, and even the palace-dressed woman was killed.
With things temporarily safe, Shen Yue mingled among them, hoping to scavenge something.
But scavenging wasn't so easy. The corpses had already been stripped bare.
"Brother, find anything good?" Someone suddenly patted him on the shoulder.
He turned around and saw the red-faced young man who had earlier shouted for him to run. His features were all scrunched together, and his face looked just like a monkey's rear.
Shen Yue had been thinking of getting to know the man and learning more about this world when a massive black shadow dropped in front of them.
"You two look unfamiliar," Black Qiu said, his eyes bulging like a bull's. "Especially you. Why is your face so red? You look like a Wu Family spy!"
Well now, was this red-faced young man a hanger-on too?
Shen Yue felt as though a mountain were pressing down on his body. He couldn't even mobilize his spiritual power.
The red-faced young man's eyes darted around, then landed on the woman beside Black Qiu.
"Fortress Lord, you've wronged me! I'm Lin Yan. I've been following you for three years. My face is red because... I admire your daughter!"
Shen Yue listened and glanced sideways at him.
The so-called young lady had a face full of freckles, and to top it off, a huge overbite.
When Black Qiu heard someone admired his daughter, a smile instantly spread across his face. His daughter, however, looked at Lin Yan's ugly appearance with disgust.
"And you? Why isn't your face red?" Black Qiu turned to Shen Yue. The woman beside him also looked over expectantly.
"Him? He's just naturally fair-skinned. He's blushing on the inside," Lin Yan said, giving him a look as he stepped in to cover for him.
Black Qiu nodded, seeming satisfied with the answer. He withdrew his ability and turned to leave.
"Brother, I saved your life. Shouldn't you show me some appreciation? There must be plenty of treasures in the Third Young Lady of the Wu Family's storage pouch," Lin Yan transmitted to him discreetly.
Divine sense transmission! A Foundation Establishment master?!
Shen Yue's expression changed.
But right then, black sand suddenly began crawling up their legs like worms.
Black Qiu cackled. "You dared to fool this Fortress Lord? Now die!"
Chusheng Market, Refining Lake.
Shen Yue's face was deathly pale.
"I almost ascended on the spot."
"Luckily, I had the Nine Heavens Profound Mirror..."
After calming himself for a while, Shen Yue took out a greenish-blue brocade pouch.
"What a haul!"
Storage pouches were high-end goods in Chusheng Market. Even if he spent ten years recycling scrap, a wage slave like him still couldn't afford one.
"The red-faced young man named Lin Yan said this storage pouch belonged to the Wu Family's Third Young Lady. I wonder what treasures are inside."
Shen Yue controlled his spiritual power and probed into the pouch.
The space inside was three cubic meters, with a variety of things arranged in separate categories.
Spirit stones... a small blue-and-white porcelain bottle... a woman's personal belongings.
"Seven spirit stones!"
Suppressing his excitement, Shen Yue looked at the two porcelain bottles. Each held a pale green pill.
He didn't recognize the pills, but could roughly tell they were for cultivating a wood spiritual root. They were no use to him for now.
Putting the bottles back, Shen Yue took out an earthen-colored jade slip and pressed his spiritual sense against it.
[The soil of Bingchen and Dingsi is sand within the earth. This soil is not pure earth, but a mixture of sand and soil. When water comes, it washes away; when water goes, silt remains. Its nature is fluid yet concealing, and it governs secrecy and hidden accumulation...]
After reading through it, Shen Yue furrowed his brow slightly.
The jade slip recorded a qi-gathering cultivation method called Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique, which differed greatly from the methods used in the market here.
The method he cultivated, the Geng Metal Art, could be practiced by anyone with a spiritual root. One's spiritual-root aptitude determined how quickly one cultivated.
But Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique required opening the six meridians first, then gathering qi from the sand before one could truly begin cultivating.
Puzzled, Shen Yue took out a blue jade slip and examined it.
[Yimu is the wood of climbing vines. It grows by attachment, not by growing on its own. It borrows the qi of wood to nourish the body. Anyone who cultivates this chapter must first find a spirit tree...]
"Opening the meridians... gathering qi..."
This jade slip was called the Wood Spirit Chapter, and its contents were even more detailed. It included not only the cultivation method itself but also many miscellaneous notes and insights.
As it turned out, that place was called Ancient Wei. The Wu Family was an Aristocratic Clan of qi-gathering cultivators, while Black Soil Fortress was a bandit den.
Those cultivators had such astonishing abilities because once they opened all six meridians and entered the Breath-Taking stage, they could condense divine sense.
"Divine sense!"
In this world, cultivators had to reach at least the late stage of Qi Refining to develop divine sense.
With divine sense reinforcing it, the power of any spell would increase dramatically.
Most importantly, divine sense was one of the prerequisites for Foundation Establishment.
Shen Yue held the two jade slips, overjoyed.
The qi-gathering path could let him condense divine sense early, and its cultivators lived for two hundred years—on par with Foundation Establishment cultivators in this world!
"If I cultivate a qi-gathering method, doesn't that mean I have a chance at Foundation Establishment?"
"My wood spiritual-root aptitude is poor, while my earth spiritual root is middling. This Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique suits me better."
Shen Yue put the Wood Spirit Chapter back into the storage pouch and began studying Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique closely.
"If I can enter the Breath-Taking stage, I'll have divine sense from the very beginning..."
The stars shifted and time passed.
During the day, Shen Yue recycled scrap. At night, he cultivated the qi-gathering method.
Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique had two parts: opening the meridians and gathering qi. As it happened, the martial arts of the mortal world had quite a bit in common with the meridian-opening methods of Ancient Wei.
A martial arts master and top martial arts exam scholar, Shen Yue needed only half a month to open five meridians. The last one was within reach.
But opening his meridians too quickly brought its own troubles. He ran into a problem.
He still hadn't found any Star Flow Sand, which the qi-gathering section required.
[To gather this sand, choose sandy ground beneath a riverbed or a muddy-sandy layer in an ancient river channel. Avoid pure sand and pure mud...]
Shen Yue glanced again at the instructions for collecting the sand in Star Sand Return-to-Cultivation Technique, then looked outside.
"I wonder if the mud and sand in Refining Lake will work..."
Before you continue