Seacloud City

"Lin Tianheng's deep blue eyes—I saw the same thing on Wei Daocheng. Is that some standard-issue eye technique of the Taiheng Sect?" Yang Ning asked within the Spirit Realm.

"Heavenly Eye of Insight, an Earth-grade Technique. It can perceive, pierce delusions, observe the minute, and measure spirits!" Deep Blue replied.

"What does measuring spirits mean?"

"Detecting soul fluctuations and calculating distance!" Deep Blue answered. "It is a sensory technique that can distinguish friend from foe through soul fluctuations and sense their distance. But the same technique produces different effects in different hands. Perhaps he can use it to sense the Dragon Pearl in a person's sea of consciousness!"

"That was my guess too!" Tuo Buchuan said Lin Tianheng did not know that pearl was a Dragon Pearl, and Yang Ning believed him.

After all, Dragon Pearls were never gray in their natural state. A gray Dragon Pearl meant it had been corroded by nightmare force, and nightmare force was something from three hundred thousand years ago.

A Dragon Pearl corroded by nightmare force could not possibly have lasted for three hundred thousand years!

The Dragon Pearls still remaining in the world today were either obtained by humans more than two hundred thousand years ago before the corrosion was complete, after which the nightmare force had been removed, or they had never been corroded by nightmare force at all.

Seeing a murky gray pearl in a newly excavated ruin, anyone's first instinct would naturally be to rule out the possibility of it being a Dragon Pearl. Lin Tianheng was no exception.

Yet Lin Tianheng still kept his Heavenly Eye open and scanned everyone.

Clearly, he was playing it safe—better to be safe than sorry.

Unfortunately, after recognizing its master, the Dragon Pearl had hidden within the Spirit Realm rather than Yang Ning's sea of consciousness. Lin Tianheng's scan found nothing but air.

"Master, I have a question. May I ask it?"

"Go ahead."

"Just now... did you deceive Miss Ning Rong?"

"Hm?" Yang Ning froze. "Deep Blue, are you speaking up for her?"

"No. Your will is my will. I am merely curious why you did that. As Ning Rong believed, helping that girl should not have been difficult for you."

"It really wouldn't have been difficult. Her prince died, but surely someone else's maid died too. She could have gone over and formed a new group of four!" Yang Ning said. "But if I opened my mouth, that girl would remember this matter as something I did. If things went well for her in that team, she might not thank me. But if things went badly, she would definitely resent me!"

"Her gratitude means nothing to me, and I do not want her hatred either. I would rather be strangers with people like that! Once you see that, isn't the choice easy?"

Deep Blue understood. This was a very simple game theory problem.

If he helped, there was a one-in-four chance the girl would be grateful, a one-in-four chance she would not be grateful, and a one-in-two chance she would resent him.

If he did not help, there was a one-in-four chance the girl would understand, a one-in-two chance she would be indifferent, and a one-in-four chance she would resent him.

Yang Ning's choice, meanwhile, was not to help while also playing up his own misery.

That turned her response into a one-in-four chance of sympathy, a one-in-four chance of contempt, and a one-in-two chance of indifference. The possibility of resentment had become negligible.

"As for Ning Rong, she lacked the ability to bear the consequences of helping, yet she wanted to drag me into it. I'll have to avoid her from now on. Of course, that is also a mess left behind by me not knowing this was a Cultivation World before and acting too impressively. I happen to need to lie low anyway, so she has given me an assist."

"This is, after all, a world of cultivation, not the peaceful age of my previous life. Back then, no matter how many women you provoked, how many people hated you, or how flamboyant you acted, the law protected you. At worst, you went in and worked a sewing machine. But here, one careless step can truly cost you your life!"

With Great Dragon Physiognomy and the Spirit Realm, two Golden Fingers in hand, he had no need to show off to earn the sect's attention. What mattered more was growing steadily and not getting carried away!

Otherwise, if he died before he had grown strong, he would truly die choking on his grievances.

Laozi said: "The sage is square yet does not cut, upright yet does not wound, straight yet does not unrestrainedly flaunt himself, bright yet does not dazzle."

Modern times had their sayings too: the rafter that sticks out rots first; the gun shoots the bird that sticks its head out; the tree that stands above the forest will be destroyed by the wind.

Yang Ning understood far too many such grand principles.

Deep Blue understood as well. A cultivator's foremost duty was survival! Compared to survival, love and beautiful women were not worth mentioning at all.

After returning the Spirit Artifact chisel to the Artifact Forging Room, Yang Ning returned to the deck.

The Flying Boat was currently heading toward the Ascension Academy. Everyone was on deck, eagerly looking forward to the place where they would study and live in the future. This was not the time to work hard.

"This speed... 1,698 meters per second!" Feeling the silence around his ears, Yang Ning was speechless. A wooden ship that completely defied aerodynamics was flying through the sky at five times the speed of sound. How absurd was that?

He had clearly read in the Vast Universe Records that talismans and formations in the Cultivation World were not all that developed, yet they could bring such an outrageous transformation to a wooden ship.

Then what would the better-developed fields of artifact forging and pill refinement be like?

Besides, if something that defied aerodynamics could fly this fast, then if I built a Fighter Jet with a wave-riding body structure and added the same kind of formation to it, how fast could it fly?

Three hours later, Yang Ning saw a vast azure sea, along with a bustling city by the shore. He silently said to himself, Ascension Academy, we've arrived!

The Taiheng Sect had not previously had something like the Ascension Academy, this preschool class. After disciples were recruited, they became Outer Disciples and were left to work hard on their own. Once they broke through to the Qi Refining Stage, they became Inner Disciples.

But later, the Taiheng Sect discovered that the Inner Disciples promoted this way were all cultivation maniacs focused wholeheartedly on breaking through realms. Other than cultivating and fighting, they knew nothing else.

So before the Outer Disciple level, the Taiheng Sect established the Ascension Academy. There, students received systematic instruction in runes, formations, pill refinement, and artifact forging. It gave disciples with other interests an opportunity and opened a new path of development for disciples with poor cultivation talent.

That was the Taiheng Sect's official explanation.

The Ascension Academy had existed for eighteen thousand years. Its enrollment quotas included not only the nations within the Taiheng Sect's sphere of influence, but also the children of small sects, minor schools, and small Lineages, as well as exchange students from sects around Taiheng. Altogether, roughly twenty to thirty thousand new students enrolled every year.

Yang Ning's ship was merely one of the many Ascension Boats.

After graduating, some of these students entered the Taiheng Sect, some joined other sects under Taiheng, and some returned to their homelands, though the last group was very small.

A vast number of students gathered around the Ascension Academy, along with merchants drawn by the students' need to sell the pills and artifacts they made while learning their crafts, sect outposts established for recruitment, industries built by the students themselves, and the descendants born after the students married.

Generation after generation, a supercity centered around the Ascension Academy had developed nearby.

Because the main material of the dam at the city's edge, which held back the seawater, was the bones of Seacloud Beasts, the city was named Seacloud City.

Looking down at the city from the sky, Yang Ning found that it seemed no smaller in area than the supercities of his previous life.

Octagonal towers more than a hundred meters tall stood everywhere. Courtyards of every kind of Chinese-style architecture could be found throughout the city. Greenery covered the streets, mist and clouds curled through the air, and nature blended perfectly with human architecture. Yet it was scenery one could never see on Earth.

Waterways and roads ran side by side through the city. Boats traveled on the ground, while Flying Boats soared through the skies. Some were so plain they were little more than a few wooden planks, while others were so intricate and magnificent that even Yang Ning was left staring in astonishment.

At the port outside Seacloud City, tens of thousands of ships came and went, while carriages and freight wagons flowed back and forth across the land.

The whole city looked highly developed, yet its architecture, built primarily of wood, gave Yang Ning the feeling of waking from a dream back in the Tang dynasty.

In short, it was modern yet antique, prosperous yet decayed, dazzlingly varied and grand beyond measure!