Harvest

A deliberate ambush caught them unawares, and he succeeded at once!

Yet Zhang Jian did not lower his guard.

He had drawn several dozen Thunder-Summoning Talismans. They were the fruits of more than half a month of painstaking effort.

After landing the first blow, he swept his hand, and another five or six Thunder-Summoning Talismans slid from his sleeve. Controlling five or six at once was nearly the limit of his spiritual power; any more, and he would be unable to direct the lightning, inviting a backlash instead.

With a flick of his hand, six more bolts of lightning shot forth.

The lightning exploded.

Zhang Kang, who had been swaying unsteadily as he prepared to summon his bound demon corpse, was instantly swallowed by radiance once more.

When the smoke cleared, the black-robed diviner lay on the ground, charred from head to toe. Only the faint rise and fall of his chest showed that he still clung to a thread of life.

Seeing this, Zhang Jian showed no mercy. He drew another yellow talisman from his person and activated it with spiritual power. It immediately transformed into a crimson bolt of lightning as thick as a swimming snake and struck the faintly heaving chest. This time, the unorthodox cultivator fell completely silent.

"Done!"

At the sight, Zhang Jian let out a breath. After unleashing two or three successive bursts, even his abundant spiritual power had been depleted by at least a third.

Fortunately, it had all been worthwhile.

By then, Zhang Kui had directed his hardy men to shoot down nearly all the bandits in the stronghold.

The fierce bandits had long since lost their former courage. Without morale, they were far easier to deal with.

Song Heihu, Zhang Bao, and the others who still stubbornly resisted were no match for Jian Yao.

He had also witnessed the battle in the woods.

His expression held both surprise and a trace of admiration.

Rich in battle experience, he saw through the situation at a glance. Clearly, the sorcerer hiding in the grove had been ambushed by his eldest nephew.

"We didn't drill it into him for nothing!"

"Strike first for the advantage!"

"But these immortal arts truly are terrifying..."

His gaze swept over the trees destroyed by lightning. The towering trunks were blackened and blasted apart, a sight too miserable to bear.

Zhang Kui could not help sighing.

How could mortal flesh withstand such savage spells?

However, according to his nephew, so long as the imperial orthodoxy remained and they possessed the aura of dragons and tigers, people like them had far greater resistance to unorthodox arts than other martial artists. That gave him some cause for relief.

After Song Heihu, Zhang Bao, and the others were surrounded and slain by Jian Yao, he immediately shouted again.

"Clean up the battlefield! Search all of Phoenix-Tail Mountain! Don't let a single fish slip through the net!"

"Yes!"

The hardy men were brimming with morale. Wiping out the entire bandit stronghold on Phoenix-Tail Mountain was a great merit, and they would surely receive generous rewards upon their return.

The five hundred soldiers had suffered few casualties in this bandit suppression campaign. Only a few unlucky men had been lost to traps at the foot of the mountain, while two, too eager to claim credit, had been killed by Song Heihu's hidden weapons. There were even fewer wounded.

The Nine-Pearl Divine Crossbow had ensured their survival rate to the greatest extent possible.

Zhang Jian saw this as well. The money had indeed been well spent. It was only a pity that the Zhang family had been unable to buy the army's Enemy-Suppressing Armor and Ironfang Shields.

Raising a personal retinue really burns through money!

He sighed inwardly.

Zhang Jian's gaze fell upon the unorthodox cultivator before him. He stepped forward and searched Zhang Kang's body. A moment later, he held a tortoiseshell and an iron fragment in his hands.

These were the only two things on him that had remained intact.

They had endured the heavenly lightning from his hand without the slightest damage, so they surely possessed some value.

Not long afterward, with the help of the soldiers from the various government offices, Zhang Jian found the two demon corpses Zhang Kang had not yet released.

The two demon corpses had been placed in the rear mountain. Their canine teeth protruded, their eyes were tightly shut, and an alarming yin aura coiled around them.

They also reeked of nauseating human blood.

After one glance, Zhang Jian casually took out two lightning talismans and destroyed both demon corpses where they stood, lest they leave behind future trouble.

Three days later

On a rock atop the mountain, Zhang Jian was gathering the qi of the rising sun in the morning light. Dawn and dusk were the best times to gather the essences of sun and moon. Cultivators spent most of their time drawing upon the power of heaven and earth to nourish themselves, but orthodox Daoist methods also gathered the three lights of sun, moon, and stars. These three lights were especially nourishing to the Three Treasures, though those without orthodox methods found them difficult to subdue.

Zhang Jian did not yet know these things. He merely followed the proper steps, gathering the power of heaven and earth and mixing it with the medicinal power of the immortal-realm treasures within his body to temper his stainless body.

His progress was extraordinary. The spiritual power within him grew more abundant with every passing day.

His soul had been powerful to begin with, and nourished by spiritual power, it gradually approached the edge of a bottleneck.

Even Zhang Jian himself could scarcely imagine reaching the peak of Qi Refinement in such a short time.

Clearly, with the medicinal power of the Fire Apricot and golden lotus seeds, his stainless body had already been fully tempered. He had obtained the great medicine from them; once he completely absorbed it, everything would naturally fall into place, as water flowed where a channel had been carved.

This had saved him at least twenty or thirty years of bitter cultivation.

But next, he would need to subdue the delusions within his spiritual awareness before he could endure the formation of divine awareness and cross the threshold of Nurturing the Spirit.

Naturally, this required his essence and qi to be full and perfectly harmonized, providing the foundation for nurturing divine awareness.

Only after nurturing divine awareness could he gradually map his own fate and touch upon some of the profound mysteries of the Great Dao hidden in the unseen, laying the foundation for forging a supreme Dao base.

Having finished gathering the spiritual vitality of the rising sun in the morning light, Zhang Jian slowly opened his eyes. His gaze settled on the two items beside him.

Both items taken from Zhang Kang possessed considerable value.

The dark iron fragment contained an incomplete passage of the unorthodox art Yin-Yang Corpse Refining. It taught one to refine two corpse demons for protection, command corpse ghosts, and thereby form Yin-Yang Protective Gods and Devils.

It was eerie and vicious.

It was also exceedingly dangerous. Once it backfired, it could easily turn its practitioner into another Zhang Kang—half human, half ghost—until he too fell among the corpse ghosts and gradually lost his humanity.

Zhang Jian had no interest in it and no wish to touch it.

The Turtle Origin Canon within the tortoiseshell, on the other hand, intrigued him greatly. He picked up the tortoiseshell from the rock. On its jade-like back was a passage of roughly eight hundred characters written in small seal script with knotted-rope-style heads. It was a treatise on metaphysics and the principles of the Book of Changes.

It was entirely devoted to the heavenly phenomena and hexagrams of the four directions of heaven and earth. Its profundity was difficult to express, and it contained many technical terms. Even Zhang Jian understood only fragments of it.

Zhang Jian guessed that this had originally been Zhang Kang's means of making a living.

Yet Zhang Kang had clearly disdained the diviner's old trade and strayed down the wrong path instead.

Zhang Jian found it somewhat interesting, but only as corroboration for his own understanding of the principles of heaven and earth. He had no interest in becoming a diviner.

Diviners were people who stole the secrets of heaven and earth. Such methods easily invited a backlash from heavenly secrets. Zhang Kang himself was proof enough—he had never calculated that he would die here.

Zhang Jian simply treated it as an ordinary book to pass the time.

Rumble!

As sunlight fell over the rear mountain, a tremendous boom sounded, followed by Zhang Kui's delighted voice.

"Jian, Prince Mian's Tomb has been opened!"

"Looks like Grandfather's birthday gift is taken care of!"

Zhang Jian immediately smiled.

He rose and walked forward. Before him lay the dark entrance to a tomb, while Zhang Kui had already summoned the accompanying "specialists" to survey the area.

Zhang Jian spread out his spiritual awareness, his expression turning solemn as well.

Prince Mian had been an ancient king from a thousand years ago who had left deep traces throughout Fengyang Commandery. Several of the present-day dams nestled between mountains and waters in Fengyang Commandery had been built by Prince Mian. In his youth, he had indeed been a wise and mighty ruler.

But in his later years, he became muddleheaded. Seeking immortality, he ruthlessly plundered Fengyang's wealth and burned lead and refined mercury in Twin Phoenix Mountain, hoping to concoct a golden elixir to prolong his life.

Before his death, fearing vengeance from his enemies, he had deliberately hidden his tomb amid the mountains.

Zhang Jian was also very curious just how many good things Prince Mian had left behind in his tomb.