Library

The bus lurched and stopped its way along. Beyond the high-rises at the horizon, a cluster of dark green foliage gradually grew larger.

As they drew nearer, a faint coolness brushed over them, like morning dew falling upon the brow, instantly refreshing the mind.

Looking up, Jiang Ding saw a Giant Wood that would have taken ten people joining hands to encircle, 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 boughs, and humanity and nature blended in perfect harmony.

One of the Immortal Sect's great instruments, one of the carriers of the Central Array-Spirit Computer—the third-rank Banyan City offshoot of the Sky-Covering Divine Banyan.

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

"If only my family had an apartment here."

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

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 be extended 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 with neatly arranged books of every kind. Their materials varied: beast hide, jade slips, stone tablets, and all sorts of other media. Most had been seized during wars beyond the realm, while some cultivation methods and secret arts required special recording materials.

The scent of books permeated the air. It was like stepping into a world of knowledge.

Jiang Ding did not linger over the sight. He went straight to the computer reading room, swiped his ID, and sat down.

Ding!

"Your library points: 325."

Those were the gains from two weeks' worth of specimens from the Otherworld Grocery Store.

Huang Deyou truly knew his trade. In just two weeks, he had purchased over four thousand specimens: roadside flowers and grasses, cheap medicinal herbs, wheat seedlings from 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.

From then on, there would be fewer. It was no longer a matter of finding useful plants growing casually by the roadside; they had to deliberately search the countryside and mountains.

After discussing it with Huang Deyou, they raised the purchase price of each specimen to ten copper coins. Their silver reserves plummeted, and they could now only barely keep things afloat.

His fingers clattered across the keyboard.

"Hundred-Step Flying Sword."

Dong!

As usual, a dialog box marked with a red cross popped up: dangerous knowledge, minors prohibited from accessing it.

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

"Mom! There's an application here that needs your approval."

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

Thanks to the good impression Jiang Ding had built up over the years, Lin Wanqiu hesitated for a while but ultimately tapped agree on the Immortal Gate Library app, granting her ward access to "Hundred-Step Flying Sword related materials."

After hanging up, he refreshed the page. A massive list of cultivation methods and secret arts related to Hundred-Step Flying Swords appeared, and even on page ninety-nine, there was still no end in sight.

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 , from Hu Yuan and Zhang Bing of Qianling University, published in the September 6th, 11115 issue of the Qianling University Cultivator Newspaper.

"Hundred-Step Flying Swords are palm-sized, sword-shaped semi-artifacts used by mortal martial artists. Using spiritual metal as the sword embryo, one nourishes it with one's own essence blood and great quantities of medicinal ingredients aged several decades for roughly ten or more years, allowing it to gain spirituality and be wielded flexibly. It is quite an ingenious concept... often at the price of severing one's future path... Today, we improved it... The innovation lies in..."

Severing one's future path!

Jiang Ding's heart jolted. He hurriedly opened the full 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. He could not understand many parts, but he knew the general gist.

Hundred-Step Flying Sword!

It was an unorthodox secret technique created by great minds among mortal martial artists, who envied cultivators' ability to wield artifacts. They used spiritual metal as an embryo and watered it with great medicines and essence blood year after year, enabling themselves to wield a flying sword while still mortal.

This was a foolish act of seeking quick success and instant gain, one that severed the path ahead.

Essence blood was the foundation of a person.

No matter how powerful a martial artist was, their essence blood was limited. Excessively consuming it was no different from suicide. Even cautious use would inevitably harm the body's foundation, making further progress in martial arts virtually 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 the School of Dao Cultivation at every university needed to publish papers. Even if they only examined scraps and corners, over nearly ten thousand years they had accumulated an incomparably vast database of cultivation methods.

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

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

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

"The principles are not much different. Both require watering it with essence blood."

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

Unwilling to give up, Jiang Ding opened another one.

" Song Clan Hundred-Step Flying Sword , seized during the Yellow Sand Minor Realm war. When tempering the sword, 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 went through an entire page, then randomly sampled dozens more from later pages. They came in every variety, with every attribute and every unorthodox trick, but none escaped the most fundamental point—essence blood, continuously watering the sword for at least ten-odd years.

Other people's methods were completely useless.

"Looks like watering it with one's own essence blood is the most foundational basis of a Hundred-Step Flying Sword. All its flourishing branches are built upon this point."

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

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

"Yes!"

An answer surfaced in his mind almost immediately.

"A sufficiently powerful cultivation method, such as the Eagle Hatchling Takes Flight Sword Art, Sixty-Eighth Set, in relation to the embryonic Dao Body."

With his train of thought settled, Jiang Ding perked up and clicked the filter, selecting the highest grade.

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

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

Yet most people would never do so.

For corresponding to their rank was terrifying difficulty. Without peerless talent and the support of top-grade resources and treasures, one could not cultivate them.

Those who forced themselves to cultivate them were lucky if they spent their entire lives without making an inch of progress. Dying from qi deviation was the norm.

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

Great Sun Sword Scripture !

It was a name renowned in history textbooks, the sect-defending cultivation method of the Great Sun Sword Pavilion, a major sect beyond the realm.

The Great Sun Sword Pavilion had once ranked among the Nine Great Immortal Sects beyond the realm. It was the foremost enemy during the Immortal Sect's Third Interface War over three thousand years ago. At its peak, a million Great Sun sword cultivators had invaded Blue Star, occupying over ninety-five percent of its land area, taking all the Law-Breaking Immortal Gold produced on the entire planet as they pleased.

During that time, the vast majority of Blue Star's cultivators and mortals became mine slaves refining 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 mines.

Later, the taboo nuclear weapon, Immortal-Slayer, burst into existence. In a single battle, it killed the Void Refining patriarch of the Great Sun Sword Pavilion. The Immortal Sect entered its counteroffensive phase, razing the Great Sun Sword Pavilion's mountain gate to the ground with vast quantities of nuclear weapons. Even now, its former location remained a dead zone, and its sect's minor realm was nearly devoid of life.

The Great Sun Sword Pavilion's sect-defending supreme art, the Great Sun Sword Scripture , was partially seized in that war. Over the past three thousand years, experts and scholars had carried out countless studies on it, achieving abundant results and giving birth to many civilian and military technologies.

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

It was a typical result that was "valuable but useless," because the Immortal Sect's combat methods centered on combined land, sea, air, and space operations with tanks, warships, aerospace carriers, drones, fighter jets, and the like. Fighting head-on with cold weapons seemed far too primitive to most people.

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

"Then again, the Immortal Sect isn't specialized in this area. It's rather weak."

Looking further down, however, he found only cultivation methods and secret arts with Hundred-Step Flying Sword at the end of their names. Like the previous Song Clan Hundred-Step Flying Sword and the like, none contained groundbreaking research. They were all the lowest rank among "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 somewhat resembled Chinese characters while being more twisted and unrestrained, seemingly changing at any moment.

Spirit Script. Compared to Chinese characters, it could convey more information in a single character and was more precise. It was foundational material in Immortal Sect language classes.

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

Just as expected.

Jiang Ding inhaled softly.

Scripture-grade cultivation methods indeed possessed the ability to turn decay into wonder, even if this was merely an "art"-grade subchapter.

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

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

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

More than that, when receiving Law-Breaking Immortal Gold, they had to swear a Great Dao oath that they would not sell it to cultivators beyond the realm. If they died in battle or reached the end of their lifespan, the Dharma treasure would be reclaimed by the Immortal Sect, while compensation would be given to their descendants.

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

Because this Immortal Metal was simply too powerful!

It came with a law-breaking attribute. Shields, spells, formations—before a law-breaking treasure, they were like paper mache.

How could a mere mortal who had not even reached the Qi Refining realm dare to covet it!

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