Soon, Gu Qinghe carried the heavy mortal iron furnace through the courtyard gate.
He paid no attention to Han Yu and Lu Chang'an sweating in the front courtyard and headed straight to the rear courtyard.
"Bang!"
He slammed the three-hundred-jin iron furnace down beside the freshly tilled soil, gouging a deep pit.
Su Yueli came over from the front courtyard, looked at the crude iron furnace, and nodded.
"Close the gates. Seal the sect."
The gates of the Eternal Life Martial Sect closed. For cultivators and martial artists alike, time was the most direct measure of changes in strength.
The Eternal Life Martial Sect entered a brief period of secluded growth, cut off from the world.
The seasons of spring, summer, autumn, and winter took their turns along the streets of the Outer City.
Outside, rogue cultivators still came to blows over a handful of spirit stones, and Greenwood Valley's blacklisting order indeed prevented Gu Qinghe from buying so much as a single medicinal herb on the market.
A year passed.
The two mu of spirit fields in the rear courtyard underwent an earth-shaking transformation.
The soil had changed from its original dark brown to a deep purplish black.
That was the result of Gu Qinghe sparing no expense in his wood-attribute qi and blood essence every day to frantically improve the soil.
All manner of low-tier spirit herbs grew with extraordinary vigor in the spirit fields.
Their stems were as thick as an adult's fingers, and their leaves were an intensely deep, inky green. Sharp serrations had even grown along the leaf edges, and they gave off a powerful, pungent medicinal fragrance.
They possessed none of the ethereal grace of spirit herbs in the Cultivation World. Instead, they bristled with the aggression of savage growth.
Beside the spirit fields,