Cultivation Manuals

"Hrmm... C-could this actually be a cultivation manual?" Uchiha Tenshu's eyes widened in disbelief as he stared at the books in his hands. He opened one to the first page, revealing a diagram of the meridians running through the entire human body.

Uchiha Tenshu carefully brought one of the books closer, as if it were a priceless treasure.

Everyone knew that cultivation manuals simply did not exist in the entire ninja world. All the training those so-called ninjas went through amounted to refining Chakra and studying ninjutsu. Everything was limited to the word "technique," and had nothing to do with the so-called "Dao"! That was what Uchiha Tenshu had looked down on ninjas most for in his previous life.

No matter how wondrous those ninjutsu were, they were like the countless leaves on a great tree. They were abundant and each had its own characteristics, but they could never touch upon the tree's true path of growth. Even if someone possessed tremendous power and could move mountains or fill seas, it still had nothing to do with achieving longevity.

What truly mattered in cultivation was the tree's roots and trunk. A cultivation method was like a path that guided the growth of the tree's roots and trunk. Practicing it was like watering and fertilizing the tree: it helped the tree grow faster and better, turning a seed into a towering giant.

At that moment, all kinds of miraculous manuals from the Eastern worlds sprang to Uchiha Tenshu's mind. These manuals spanned martial arts, immortal cultivation, and fantasy, among other realms, but without exception, they all touched upon the stages of life's evolution. They were like keys to higher levels of life, helping people transcend their original mortal state and enter an entirely new, more advanced realm of existence.

Even if the manual in his hands came from an extremely low-level world, and the method itself was nothing more than the most basic, common variety, its value did not lie in how quickly it could increase his strength. It was like a precious key, one that could unlock the door to a gold mine brimming with resources.

The ideas and path it contained were in no way inferior to the so-called forbidden techniques of this world. On the contrary, they surpassed them by countless times!

And now, such a treasure was in his hands.

Then let me see what makes this manual so fascinating, and what level it belongs to! Uchiha Tenshu's heart burned with excitement as he slowly opened the book. The first thing he saw was a diagram of the human body's meridians and acupoints. It was drawn with incredible precision: every blood vessel and every acupoint was clearly visible, leaving him amazed by the artist's remarkable skill and mastery.

It was difficult to imagine that something so precise could have been produced in an ancient world.

What surprised Uchiha Tenshu even more, though, was the dense array of ancient annotations beside the diagram.

The writing was tiny, like mosquitoes etched onto the page. Uchiha Tenshu could not recognize all of it, but he could make out some of the simpler characters. The words formed by those characters read smoothly, so he was clearly not misreading them.

Uchiha Tenshu guessed that they must have been written in the script of an Eastern world. Otherwise, he would not have been able to recognize them.

Although he could only read sixty or seventy percent of the text, Uchiha Tenshu was not discouraged. He knew that ninjas were exceptionally skilled at deciphering things, and they had meridians and acupoints of their own. With the few characters he could read and the diagrams, he could figure it out if he spent enough time and effort. And if all else failed, he still had Shadow Clones, a cultivation cheat that would let him test the method over and over.

Uchiha Tenshu took a deep breath and steadied himself before beginning to study the writing and diagrams.

He examined the characters he could recognize, one by one, trying to find clues and patterns.

At the same time, he carefully studied the meridians and acupoints in the diagram, considering how they related to the text. He also kept turning the pages, poring over the explanations of the subsequent cultivation stages.

Minute by minute, time passed. Uchiha Tenshu became completely immersed in the process of deciphering the manual. He forgot everything around him. All he could see were the mysterious characters and diagrams.

Several hours later.

Uchiha Tenshu gazed at the manual, a flicker of understanding in his eyes. As he carefully leafed through it, he realized that it truly had something to it.

On the surface, it was a fairly decent manual, divided into eight stages: Refining Essence, Converting to Qi, Refining Qi, Converting to Spirit, Refining Spirit, Returning to Void, Refining Void, and Merging with Dao.

The stages were much like those in the Daoist cultivation system he knew from his previous life. Each had its own cultivation process and description of how one's strength would improve.

However, Uchiha Tenshu soon realized that these were not quite the same as the legendary Daoist realms from his previous life.

Although every stage was explained in detail, judging by the descriptions of the realms and the strength one could attain, the manual seemed more like a cultivation system from an ordinary martial arts world than one from a fantasy or immortal-cultivation world.

In other words, according to the manual, even if someone endured untold hardship and raised their cultivation to the lofty realms of Refining Spirit and Returning to Void, or Refining Void and Merging with Dao, they would only be able to leap a kilometer into the air and wreck a few hundred meters of terrain.

Their true strength was still a far cry from the extraordinary, transcendent beings described in the novels Uchiha Tenshu had read in his previous life—the beings who were like immortals, able to move mountains, overturn seas, and summon wind and rain with a wave of the hand. Their power was simply staggering.

By comparison, even someone who reached the realms of Refining Spirit and Returning to Void, or Refining Void and Merging with Dao, would be no more than an ant before those immortals.

Their strength might have seemed beyond the reach of mortals in their own world, but before true powerhouses, it was utterly insignificant.

One could even say that their cultivation might not measure up to that of a Jonin in the ninja world. Even a Jonin's ninjutsu could easily cause that much destruction.

In this mysterious and fantastical world, Jonin possessed all kinds of unique ninjutsu and skills, and their strength was not to be underestimated. In the history of Uchiha Tenshu's original world, where no supernatural abilities had ever been seen, they could easily have been regarded as celestial beings—heavenly masters descended from the skies.

If someone were to give them a title...

They would need at least a dozen honorifics after their names.

Looking at the manual in his hands, Uchiha Tenshu saw how its so-called realms of Refining Spirit and Returning to Void, and Refining Void and Merging with Dao, paled in comparison to the immortals in those novels. They sounded impressive, but in practice, challenging a Battle Emperor on horseback would be just as ridiculous—a laughable act of overestimating oneself.

This made Uchiha Tenshu doubt the manual's actual value.

But then he shook his head.

Rather than a way to ascend to the heavens overnight, this cultivation manual was more like an inexhaustible treasure trove, full of gold waiting to be mined.

For starters, even the process of cultivating the Refining Essence Chapter was like a brilliantly composed symphony, with movements devoted to nourishing the body, storing one's essence, drawing it in, preserving it, and refining one's own vital energy.

On the spiritual level, it also included a series of preliminary exercises, such as visualization, entering a meditative state, sensing Qi, and synchronizing one's breathing. They were like a graceful poem, worthy of endless praise.

And that was not even counting the Converting to Qi Chapter.

It contained a series of wondrous methods for nourishing, condensing, and using the energy one had cultivated, like a brilliantly colorful painting.

These were all cultivation methods that did not exist in the ninja world.