Cultivation

She was afraid he would abandon her...

While his brain ailment persisted, Qin Yi had to depend on her.

Once his brain ailment was cured, her existence would become dispensable to him.

Still, she was as easy to fool as ever.

Or rather, precisely because it was him, she was so easy to fool.

But Qin Yi had not lied, either.

After confirming that Ruan Su had gone far away, Qin Yi slowly let his smile fade, his expression returning to calm. He formed a hand seal, adjusted his breathing, then turned and entered the room.

He decided to release his mental control over Ruan Su.

While letting her begin cultivation, he would once more train her to independently mobilize that almost instinctive chain-deduction ability within her mind.

This had originally been a helpless choice he made only after the brain ailment had driven him into a corner. Now that it had improved, there was naturally no longer any need for it.

He took out the possessions his elder sister had hidden from a secret compartment beneath the cabinet. There was an additional copy of the Disrupted Scripture among them, and the jade pendant was still there as well.

It seemed that the old woman surnamed Meng had not taken it.

Could she have swapped it out?

Probably not.

It should not have been her first visit. Ruan Su would occasionally write about how he stayed up at night and disturbed her.

Just as he was about to put the things back for his elder sister, a faint change in the jade pendant made Qin Yi instinctively pick it up.

Holding it before his eyes and examining it carefully, Qin Yi discovered that the jade pendant, once wholly emerald green, now had many streaks of vivid red running through it like capillaries.

Had that old woman surnamed Meng done this last night?

Or was it that—

Because this jade pendant had undergone such a change, the old woman surnamed Meng had come to inspect it?

After pondering for a while, Qin Yi simply gave up. There was too little information.

He stuffed the cloth bag back inside and began preparing the rack and seasonings for roasting a lamb leg at noon.

Just like yesterday, around a hundred and fifty breaths after forming the hand seal, those blue halos once again appeared before Qin Yi's eyes and were continuously drawn into his body with his breathing.

After a night of mountain wind, the stench in the courtyard had faded considerably. Since he needed one hand to maintain the hand seal, Qin Yi was not particularly quick as he set up the roasting rack.

His elder sister loved eating what he made, so much so that it could even serve as a reward.

After Meng Qi had finished transporting both Killing Apes, scraps of flesh still remained in the small courtyard. Once he had set up the roasting rack, Qin Yi had nothing else to do, so he went to the well, used an oilcloth to gather some of the scraps and brain matter he had seen earlier, then dug a small pit in the backyard and buried them.

That Uncle Peng Jun's butchering skills were highly professional. The Killing Ape's internal organs had all been cut out, and among these scraps there should have been no shortage of fragments from the wealthy young lady swallowed by the first female ape.

Qin Yi was very grateful to that thick-nerved girl.

Though she was already dead, the gold she had dropped had cured his brain ailment. As a polite child, burying her and treating it as half a cenotaph, then occasionally buying two sticks of incense to offer her, could count as a form of gratitude.

After finishing this, Qin Yi cultivated while waiting for Ruan Su to return. This time, however, his elder sister seemed to have been gone for quite a while.

Only after roughly two full hours did the rustling sound of someone moving through the bushes come from outside the courtyard.

Qin Yi raised his eyes to look, and the sight before him immediately made his eyelid twitch.

Ruan Su's slender, delicate body carried a rolled-up bundle of tiger hide under one arm and a huge tiger leg over the other shoulder. Seeing that Qin Yi had already set up the roasting rack, her eyes curved with delight as she called out loudly:

"Xiao Yi, I... ran into this... big bug on the road. I dragged it to... town to sell, but kept a leg. It's... dozens of jin."

Qin Yi: "..."

As she spoke, the girl turned and swayed, revealing the cloth bag tucked at her waist for Qin Yi to see before continuing:

"Uncle Liu said... this... tiger whip... can help you grow if you eat it, so I... didn't sell it. Hehe."

Qin Yi: "..."

Carrying the tiger leg, Ruan Su had fine beads of sweat on her forehead as she slowly entered the courtyard.

Qin Yi silently tossed away the inch-thick sharpened wooden stake he had just whittled, went inside, retrieved a long spear with its spearhead removed, and handed it to Ruan Su.

Ruan Su took it and adjusted her posture. With the leg bone against the ground, she gave a hop and casually thrust the spear down. With a whoosh, it pierced straight through the tiger leg from top to bottom.

No special trick—she was simply immensely strong.

After doing that, Ruan Su set down the tiger leg nailed to the ground, ran into the house to carry out a small stool, then sat upon it with her cheeks propped in both hands. Without blinking, she stared at Qin Yi eagerly, waiting for food.

"..."

Qin Yi rubbed his brow and took a breath.

"It'll take at least several hours to process this thing. What are we doing for lunch?"

Ruan Su immediately and thoughtfully pulled two meat buns from her clothes and stuffed them into his hands.

Qin Yi accepted them, lowered his gaze for a look, opened his mouth, then ultimately said nothing. He glanced at the tiger leg skewered on the spear shaft, but still did not move for a long while.

Ruan Su blinked and asked softly:

"Wh... what's wrong...?"

"Do you think I can move this thing?"

"Um..."

"If you want to eat it, come help."

"...Okay!"

After a flurry of work, smoke rose from the cooking fire. With the siblings working together, they set up a roasting rack sturdy enough to bear the tiger leg. Beneath it, flames roasted the marinated meat, and a gradually intensifying peppery fragrance wafted out.

With one hand maintaining his hand seal for cultivation, Qin Yi used the other to score the meat with a small knife as he said softly:

"Since we have some free time, I'll pass the cultivation method on to you now. Try practicing it."

Ruan Su, who was attentively turning the tiger leg on the other side of the rack, immediately raised her eyes and asked strangely:

"Don't we need... medicinal herbs and... silver needles?"

Qin Yi shook his head and explained:

"No. This cultivation method only requires adjusting your breathing and forming a hand seal."

As he spoke, he raised his left hand, which had been concealed within his sleeve as it formed the seal, to show her.

Ruan Su's beautiful eyes widened in surprise.

"It's... that simple? No, no... Xiao Yi, you disobeyed me and secretly... cultivated!"

"..."

Qin Yi ignored his elder sister's angry protest and taught her the breathing method and hand seals recorded in the Disrupted Scripture.

For a cultivation method, the practice recorded in the Disrupted Scripture was absurdly simple—at least, it was to Qin Yi.

The only difficulty might have been maintaining that somewhat breathless breathing pattern continuously.

If normal breathing brought five parts of oxygen into the lungs every second, then practicing the Disrupted Scripture brought in only one. But once one endured until the blue halos appeared, breathing would naturally become smooth again.

Given Ruan Su's physical talent, this should not have been difficult.

Ruan Su was somewhat dissatisfied with Qin Yi's perfunctory attitude, but she still began forming the hand seal according to his instructions. The rise and fall of her previously steady chest immediately became faint.

Second by second, the sauce brushed over the tiger leg's surface dripped into the fire pit below along with the grease.

Ruan Su took even longer than Qin Yi had expected to enter a cultivation state.

He himself could enter the state where he saw the halos in roughly a hundred and fifty breaths. He had thought that, with Ruan Su's talent, she would be faster, but three hundred breaths had already passed and she still had given no response.

Amid the silence,

another hundred breaths passed in the blink of an eye.

At last, a change occurred within Qin Yi's sight.

At first, it was merely ripples like a breeze passing over a lake. Threads of blue halos began drifting continuously with Ruan Su's breathing.

But before Qin Yi could confirm it,

those ripples rapidly expanded, forming a vortex centered on Ruan Su that siphoned in all the blue halos around them!