Library

The bus rolled to a stop and started again. On the horizon, amid the skyscrapers, a cluster of dark green shadow gradually grew larger.

As they drew closer, a faint coolness brushed over him, like morning dew falling upon his brow, refreshing his spirit.

Looking up, he saw a towering azure tree, so wide that ten people could barely encircle it and hundreds of meters tall, standing amid the city of steel and concrete.

Its branches and leaves flourished extravagantly, covering several kilometers around it. Fist-sized kingfishers hopped through the foliage, trains threaded between its branches, and humanity and nature blended perfectly together.

One of the Immortal Sect's great instruments, a carrier of the Central Array-Spirit Computer—the third-stage Banyan City branch of the Sky-Covering Divine Banyan.

"Closest place to the spirit vein. I'm so jealous."

"If only my family had an apartment here."

"In your dreams. Only cultivators or people who've rendered great service can settle here, and it can only be passed down for three generations at most."

The people on the bus chatted, full of envy.

Jiang Ding felt the same. If his mother and Jiang Yuan could live here, their health would surely improve considerably. The same went for their martial arts progress; over the years, their lifespans might even increase by seven or eight years.

"Banyan City Library has arrived. Please exit through the rear door..."

Jiang Ding followed the crowd off the bus, queued up, swiped his ID card, and entered the library.

The first thing he saw was row after row of towering bookshelves, packed neatly with all manner of books. Their materials varied—beast hide, jade slips, stone tablets, all kinds of mediums. Most had been seized during wars beyond the realms, while some cultivation arts and secret techniques required special recording mediums.

The scent of books permeated the air. It was as if he had stepped into a world of knowledge.

Jiang Ding did not linger. He went straight to the computer reading room, swiped his ID card, and took a seat.

Ding!

"Your library points: 325."

This was the result of two weeks' worth of specimens from the Otherworld Grocery Store.

Huang Deyou truly was an expert. In just two weeks, he had purchased over four thousand specimens—every sort of roadside flower and grass, worthless medicinal herbs, wheat seedlings from the fields.

Unfortunately, even in another world, not every specimen was a new species unrecorded by the Immortal Gate Library. Only a little over three hundred were usable.

There would be fewer from here on out. It was no longer a matter of any random roadside plant being useful; they would need to deliberately search the countryside and mountains.

After discussing it with Huang Deyou, they had raised the purchase price for each specimen to ten copper coins. Their silver reserves were plummeting, and now they could only barely keep things going.

His fingers clattered across the keyboard.

"Hundred-Step Flying Sword."

Deng!

As usual, a dialog box with a red X popped up: dangerous knowledge, access prohibited to minors.

Jiang Ding took out his phone, lowered his voice, and called Lin Wanqiu.

"Mom! I have an application here that needs your approval."

"Dangerous? It's not dangerous. I'm just curious, broadening my horizons. It'll benefit my martial arts..."

Thanks to the good impression Jiang Ding had built up over the years, Lin Wanqiu hesitated for a while before finally tapping approve on the Immortal Gate Library app, allowing her ward to access "Hundred-Step Flying Sword-related" materials.

After hanging up, he refreshed the page. A huge list of cultivation arts and secret techniques related to Hundred-Step Flying Swords appeared, with no end in sight even by page ninety-nine.

Song Clan Hundred-Step Flying Sword, Blood Refinement Hundred-Step Flying Sword, Thunder Hundred-Step Flying Sword...

Jiang Ding opened the abstract of Blood Refinement Hundred-Step Flying Sword, by Hu Yuan and Zhang Bing, published in the Qianling University Cultivator Journal on September 6, 11115.

"Hundred-Step Flying Swords are palm-sized, sword-shaped semi-artifacts used by mortal martial artists. Using spiritual metal as the sword embryo, one nurtures it with one's own essence blood and a great quantity of medicinal materials aged several decades for around ten years, allowing it to develop spirituality and be wielded nimbly. It is quite an ingenious concept... often at the cost of severing one's future path... today, we have improved it... the innovation is..."

Severing one's future path!

Jiang Ding's heart jolted. He hastily opened the detailed paper, over a hundred pages and more than a hundred thousand words long.

Several hours later, he rubbed his brow.

He had roughly read through the paper. Many parts were beyond his comprehension, but he understood its general meaning.

Hundred-Step Flying Sword!

This was an unorthodox secret art created by the great minds among mortal martial artists, who envied cultivators' ability to wield artifacts. It used spiritual metal as an embryo, then nourished it year after year with great medicines and essence blood, allowing one to wield a flying sword while still a mortal.

It was a foolish act of chasing quick success and immediate gain, one that severed the path ahead.

Essence blood was the foundation of a person.

Even the most powerful martial artist possessed only a limited amount of essence blood. Excessively consuming it was no different from suicide. Even cautious use would inevitably damage the body's foundation, and further progress in martial arts would become nearly impossible.

This was especially true for young martial artists. Losing a single drop of essence blood might take years to recover from.

Its value was not necessarily that great.

But graduate and doctoral students in cultivation departments across the universities needed to publish papers. Even if they only researched the fringes, nearly ten thousand years of accumulated work had formed an incomparably vast database of cultivation arts.

"Could Blood Refinement... be the problem with this particular cultivation art?" Jiang Ding opened Thunder Hundred-Step Flying Sword.

It was written by a doctoral student from Colorful Cloud University. Originally, it had been an inherited secret art of a martial arts sect from the Vast Sea Minor Realm, seized during the Interface War. The doctoral student had collected and corrected a few minor errors in it, then uploaded it to earn library points.

He skimmed through it, focusing especially on the sword-tempering section of the general outline.

"The principles aren't all that different. They all require nourishment with essence blood."

"The difference is the addition of a local mineral called Thunderclap Stone. It can absorb the bioelectricity of spirit beasts to strengthen the flying sword and grant it lightning attributes, making it faster and sharper."

Unwilling to give up, Jiang Ding opened another book.

"Song Clan Hundred-Step Flying Sword, seized during the Yellow Sand Minor Realm war. During sword tempering, it adds the attribute of a 'clan artifact,' allowing it to be inherited and refined by descendants, while outsiders cannot use it... Useless."

The next one, and the next, and the one after that...

Jiang Ding read through an entire page, then randomly sampled dozens more books from later pages. There were all kinds, with every sort of attribute and unorthodox technique, but none could escape the most central element—essence blood, at least ten years of continuous nourishment with essence blood.

Other people's methods were useless to him.

"It seems that nourishing it with one's own essence blood is the foundational bedrock of the Hundred-Step Flying Sword. All its flourishing branches are built upon this."

Jiang Ding pondered, but he did not lose confidence. His thoughts gradually spread outward.

"Is there anything that can challenge the principle itself, turning the impossible into possible?"

"Yes!"

An answer almost immediately surfaced in his mind.

"A sufficiently powerful cultivation art, like the Eagle Hatchling Takes Flight Sword Art, Sixty-Eighth Set, when creating the rudiments of a Dao Body."

With his line of thought settled, Jiang Ding's spirits lifted. He moved the mouse to the filter options and selected the highest grade.

"Great Sun Sword Scripture—Seed-Sword Tempering Art, Zhang Junsheng, Hu Lin, Clearwind University Cultivator Journal, July 1, 10823."

The Immortal Sect broadly classified cultivation arts into four types: scriptures, canons, arts, and formulas. Due to the First Law of the Immortal Sect, anyone could cultivate the Immortal Sect's strongest cultivation arts.

But the overwhelming majority of people did not.

Because matched to their grade was terrifying difficulty. Without being an unparalleled genius and receiving the support of top-tier resources and treasures, one could not cultivate them.

For those who forced themselves to cultivate them, spending a lifetime without making an inch of progress was fortunate. Dying from cultivation deviation was the norm.

Jiang Ding hovered the mouse over it, hesitating for a moment.

Great Sun Sword Scripture!

It was renowned even in history textbooks, the sect-defending cultivation art of the Great Sun Sword Pavilion, a major sect from beyond the realms.

The Great Sun Sword Pavilion had once ranked among the Nine Great Immortal Sects beyond the realms. It had been the primary enemy during the Immortal Sect's Third Interface War over three thousand years ago. At the height of its power, one million Great Sun sword cultivators had invaded Blue Star, occupying more than ninety-five percent of the planet's land area and taking all the Law-Breaking Immortal Gold the planet produced as they pleased.

During that period, most Blue Star cultivators and mortals had been reduced to mine slaves extracting Law-Breaking Divine Gold. The population plummeted by more than fifty percent. Over ten billion people were worked to death in endless mining, their white bones filling the tunnels.

Later, the forbidden nuclear weapon, Immortal-Slayer, emerged out of nowhere. In one battle, it killed the Great Sun Sword Pavilion's Void Refinement patriarch. The Immortal Sect entered its counteroffensive phase, using vast quantities of nuclear weapons to raze the Great Sun Sword Pavilion's mountain gate to the ground. Even now, its former location remained a death zone, and its sect's minor realm was nearly biologically extinct.

The Great Sun Sword Pavilion's sect-defending supreme art, the Great Sun Sword Scripture, had been partially seized in that war. Over the past three thousand years, experts and scholars had conducted countless studies on it, producing abundant results and giving rise to a great deal of civilian and military technology.

Great Sun Sword Scripture—Seed-Sword Tempering Art was one such result, and one leaning toward analysis of the original text.

It was a typical result that was "valuable yet useless," because the Immortal Sect fought through combined ground, sea, and air operations involving tanks, warships, aerospace carriers, drones, fighter jets, and more. To most people, battles fought through direct clashes with cold weapons were simply too primitive.

"It's now the year 11126. The result only came out in 10823, more than two thousand years after the Great Sun Sword Pavilion was destroyed..." Jiang Ding's gaze drifted over the title, as though he could see that epic past.

"Then again, the Immortal Sect isn't particularly skilled in this area. It's relatively weak."

Further down were all cultivation arts and secret techniques ending in Hundred-Step Flying Sword, similar to the earlier Song Clan Hundred-Step Flying Sword and the like. There was no breakthrough research among them. They were all at the lowest tier of "scriptures, canons, arts, and formulas," barely qualifying as formulas.

He opened the abstract.

What met his eyes was no longer Chinese characters, but a special script that resembled Chinese characters somewhat while being more twisted and unrestrained, as though it changed at every moment.

Spirit script. Compared to Chinese characters, it could convey more information in a single character and was also more precise. It was basic material in the Immortal Sect's language classes.

"...use Grand Pure Divine Iron as the embryo, Law-Breaking Immortal Gold as the bones, take one drop of essence blood as the spirit, melt and draw the essence of the Great Sun, temper it with heartfire for a hundred days, transform from mortal to immortal, and forge an unsurpassed immortal foundation..."

Just as expected.

Jiang Ding drew a light breath.

Scripture-grade cultivation arts truly possessed the ability to turn decay into the miraculous, even if this was only an "art"-grade subchapter.

Then he saw the words "Law-Breaking Immortal Gold," and his heart clenched.

Blue Star was indeed a place rich in Law-Breaking Immortal Gold, but that did not mean it was common!

In truth, only a small number of Nascent Soul Cultivators who had rendered great service could apply for barely enough material to forge one magic treasure—and even then, only a tiny amount for the finishing touch.

Nor was that all. When receiving Law-Breaking Immortal Gold, one had to swear a Great Dao oath not to sell it to cultivators beyond the realms. If one died in battle or reached the end of one's lifespan, the magic treasure would be reclaimed by the Immortal Sect, while compensation would be given to one's descendants.

Yet even under such harsh conditions, the applications from Nascent Soul Cultivators were still overflowing every year, without a moment's hesitation.

Because this immortal gold was too powerful!

It possessed a law-breaking attribute of its own. Shields, spells, formations—before a law-breaking treasure, they were like paper mache.

How could a mere mortal who was not even in the Qi Refinement realm dare covet it!