Spiritual Roots

It was a very subtle feeling. He did not know whether this was how normal people saw things, but he felt that he had seen through it all. And precisely because he had seen too clearly, he understood in an instant—none of this was real.

Everything in the Cultivation Realm was real. The fact that he was still alive was real too.

What was real? What was false? Wen Xu had rarely bothered to distinguish between such things before. To him, the present was real, being alive was real; as for everything else, he neither cared nor concerned himself with it.

But at that moment, he suddenly gained some insight. He even... no longer hated his face blindness quite so much.

At least at that moment, these eyes told him what was real and what was illusion.

The moment he understood this, the pain throughout Wen Xu's body vanished in an instant, and the wounds on him disappeared as well. He subconsciously wanted to reach out, only to discover that his folding fan and gourd had already returned to his hands.

"Ahhh, Wen Xu-Xu, you finally woke up!" Bian Chunchou jumped up in delight. "Senior Brother Wang, all three of us are awake! Does that make us the first team to arrive?"

The Yonglu Mountain disciple addressed as Senior Brother Wang smiled and nodded. "That's right. You three may go inside and rest first. Once the Heart-Questioning Realm ends, it will be time to test your Spiritual Roots and formally enter the sect under a master."

Bian Chunchou happily slapped his two good friends on the shoulders. "Wen Xu-Xu, Chen Zui-Zui, we made it!"

Chen Zui pursed his lips slightly and gave a very cool "Mm." Wen Xu, meanwhile, seemed to still be caught up in certain emotions. Only after entering the hall to wait did he let out a breath of stale air and settle all the thoughts in his heart.

Bian Chunchou, however, keenly sensed it. "Wen Xu-Xu, are you all right?"

Wen Xu had never been one to bare his heart to others, and this time was no different. "I'm fine. It was only that neither of you was by my side just now, so I was a little worried and scared."

"Hey, now that you mention it, me too." Bian Chunchou shuddered all over as he recalled his experience in the Heart-Questioning Realm: a fourth-year student trapped by his thesis, then finally graduating and entering a major corporation only to work overtime every day revising proposals. He had not earned much money, but had collected a whole stack of medical records. Just thinking about it made him feel—cultivation is truly wonderful! Capitalists ought to be hung from streetlamps!

Bian Chunchou had been scared awake, while Chen Zui... sometimes, being single-minded in the Cultivation Realm was not necessarily a bad thing.

Of the three, he had awakened the fastest, and his method had been rather crude. He saw his mother, and since she could not possibly have appeared on Yonglu Mountain, he woke up at once.

"What's there to be afraid of? You two really are cowards."

Bian Chunchou clenched his fists, but quickly lowered them again. "Forget it. I'm happy today, so I won't beat you up!"

Chen Zui was an honest man. "You can't beat me anyway. Even the two of you together can't beat me."

"Ahhh, Wen Xu-Xu, don't stop me! Today, I'm going to beat him clean!"

Wen Xu: "...I wasn't stopping you."

Just as the three were speaking quietly, more people finally arrived outside the hall, one after another. Among them was Xia Ying, the niece of Langyuan City's lord.

Even after all the sand in the hourglass outside the hall had run out, Li Zishen never appeared in the great hall. Evidently, this talented Li Family youth was completely fated to miss Yonglu Mountain.

Dong—

With a long, resonant toll of a bell, the mountain gate outside the hall suddenly shut in response.

And at the very instant it closed, a distant yet deep and gentle voice sounded beside everyone's ears:

"Welcome, everyone, to Yonglu Mountain."

Only now did Wen Xu feel a little sense of reality. He had truly set foot upon the path of cultivation. From this day onward, all turns of fate would be held in his own hands.

Spiritual Roots

There were thirty-five Qi Refining cultivators in total who had passed Yonglu Mountain's three entrance examinations.

That number was neither particularly large nor particularly small. According to Yonglu Mountain's rules, regardless of what kind of Spiritual Roots these thirty-five people tested for afterward, they would all be accepted into the sect. Of course, those with exceptional Spiritual Roots could directly advance to become Inner Sect disciples.

Since Wen Xu's group had been the first team to reach the finish line, they were also at the very front of the line for the Spiritual Root test.

"Ahhh, I'm so nervous! What do I do? My hands are shaking." The only legal gambling a college student could get involved in was opening blind boxes—Bian Chunchou simply could not resist that kind of thrill. "Aren't you two nervous?"

Wen Xu had his own mystical mindset. "I'm nervous, but I'm looking forward to it even more." He did not like this feeling of hanging in the balance, of leaving things to Heaven's mercy. If anything, he wanted to find out sooner what his Spiritual Root actually was.

What a ruthless man. Bian Chunchou looked toward the other person beside him. "What about you?"

"What's there to be nervous about? Even if I have a Five-Element Spiritual Root, I can still fight!" Chen Zui said carelessly. "My mother said Yonglu Mountain doesn't judge people by their Spiritual Roots, so relax."

Bian Chunchou: ...Relax my ass?!

Amid this cheerful (?) atmosphere, Bian Chunchou became the first cultivator entering Yonglu Mountain to have his Spiritual Root tested. In his own words, it was better to die early and be reborn early.

"Don't be nervous. Are you ready?" the elder asked kindly.

Bian Chunchou nodded with extreme nervousness. "I'm ready!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.

Even the elder testing Spiritual Roots could not help but laugh, thinking that this new disciple was truly full of energy. "If you are ready, inject your spiritual power into the Spirit-Testing Stone. You need not use too much—just enough to light the stone."

"Understood, Elder!"

The elder: ...There was no need to be so loud. He was not so old that he had gone deaf.

Bian Chunchou, however, had no such awareness. He nervously stepped forward two paces, gathered his breath, and placed a hand on the Spirit-Testing Stone. Before long, his spiritual power lit it up.

"That's enough, that's enough. Do not continue."

Only then did Bian Chunchou obediently withdraw his spiritual power, though his eyes remained fixed on the Spirit-Testing Stone without blinking. When the light upon the stone bloomed, he heard the elder's astonished voice: "Hiss—you brat are extraordinarily gifted!"

What? He was extraordinarily gifted? Do elaborate.

"Yonglu Mountain has stood for several thousand years since its founding. Cultivators with Water-Fire Dual Spiritual Roots like yours number fewer than the fingers on one hand." Water and fire were incompatible, yet they had gathered within one person. At lower realms, possessing both water- and fire-element spiritual power was manageable enough, but once one's cultivation reached the Golden Core stage, without a special cultivation method, one likely would not last long.