2,000-Fold Cultivation Effect Doubles

Lin Fan traveled with several villagers from the hunting party all the way to the cave, but he was worried about his younger sister, Lin Ruoruo. He decided to take his bundles and return to the mountain village first.

As for Uncle Wang and the other villagers from the hunting party, they were merely ordinary villagers and did not hold any deep grudge against the other side. There was no need to worry that the other side would vent their anger on Uncle Wang and the rest.

The villagers all knew that Lin Fan was worried about his sister. After all, wild beasts occasionally descended from the mountains near Small Mountain Village. Though several hunting party members had remained in the village, if Lin Ruoruo were to suffer anything because they had held Lin Fan back, that would truly be troublesome.

Lin Fan gripped several bundles filled with Gunala's goods and belongings in one hand and held a spear in the other. Like a martial expert who had mastered lightness skill, he flashed across the winding mountain paths, drawing closer to Small Mountain Village.

After Lin Fan left, the villagers stared at one another wide-eyed. After resting for a while, they finally decided it would be best to return to the village overnight. After what had happened, they all felt faintly uneasy.

Thus, beneath the night sky, several villagers pushed their unicycles along, moving slowly down the dim mountain road by moonlight.

Upon returning to the thatched hut, Lin Fan immediately relaxed all over. Home still felt best. Though it was only a thatched hut, it was far more comfortable.

After spending some time with his sister Lin Ruoruo, whom he had not seen for two days, and the Golden Rat Mao Mao, Lin Fan watched as Lin Ruoruo and the Golden Rat ate nearby. He opened his panel and decided to spend 200 taels of silver to activate a 2,000-fold, twenty-four-hour cultivation effect acceleration.

That was right. After giving it some thought, Lin Fan decided not to activate the 7,000-fold cultivation effect doubling. Otherwise, he might not be able to control his body's strength when the time came, and his combat power might instead fail to show much of its force. A 2,000-fold cultivation effect acceleration was already extremely high.

Besides, the other side could not possibly send their gang leader over in the middle of the night to wipe out an entire household just because a few lackeys had been robbed of 100 taels of silver. Anyone with even a little sense could see that such a thing was unlikely to happen. Otherwise, would their gang leader even have time to cultivate, if he had to personally go around exterminating families every day?

And if their Bone Tempering Realm gang leader did not come, Lin Fan was confident that he had nothing to fear. Even if he could not win, if all he wanted was to hold his sister in one arm and flee, even someone in the Late Muscle Refinement Realm would find it difficult to keep him behind.

As he cultivated, Lin Fan considered that he should avoid going into the mountains to hunt for the next few days. During the previous stretch of time, he had already dug up nearly all the medicinal herbs on the nearby mountains. As for ordinary wild beasts, given his current combat strength, he estimated that he would slaughter them all within a few days. Then the villagers would lose their livelihood in the mountains.

He should not hunt ordinary wild beasts either. Now worth several hundred taels of silver, Lin Fan had no interest in common wild goats and beasts. Besides, there were scarcely any medicinal herbs left nearby.

If he wanted to hunt from now on, he could only set his sights on Ferocious Beasts. A single Ferocious Beast was worth at least 1,000 taels of silver, nearly a hundred times the value of an ordinary wild beast. Ordinary beasts were generally eaten by common people and had no special effects on martial artists.

Ferocious Beasts were different. Even a Skin Tempering Realm Ferocious Beast had countless uses, whether its flesh, blood, hide, fur, scales, or horns. They could be used to refine martial arts pills and other martial supplies. Their meat could also be cooked and eaten directly to speed up a martial artist's cultivation.

Because Ferocious Beasts were expensive and demand exceeded supply—after all, naturally occurring Ferocious Beasts in the deep mountains were relatively rare—some martial artists of the Qi-Tendon Three Realms who no longer wished to continue cultivating would use their Inner Qi to catalyze wild beasts into Ferocious Beasts. It was equivalent to using Inner Qi to empower a wild beast up to Skin Tempering Realm cultivation.

Yet ordinary people were generally unwilling to do such a thing. It required consuming a vast amount of Inner Qi, and over time, their Inner Qi would run dry, making it even harder to climb toward higher martial realms. Besides, martial artists of the Qi-Tendon Three Realms had many other ways to earn silver.

Ferocious Beasts were scarce, while Skin Tempering Realm martial artists were relatively more numerous. By searching through all the memories in his mind, Lin Fan learned that using martial artists as substitutes for Ferocious Beasts was the way of the demonic path. If discovered, they would be hunted down by all under heaven. Even some utterly vicious gangs would never dare do such a thing. Otherwise, once exposed, the intensity of the campaign to encircle and suppress them would rise by more than a level in an instant.

Perhaps this rule existed to protect martial arts newcomers with good innate talent. Otherwise, once such people became Skin Tempering Realm martial artists, those with higher cultivation would hunt and capture them like wild beasts. If this continued over time, martial arts experts would suffer a severe gap in succession. In the end, aside from a handful of top-tier martial experts, no one else in the entire country would cultivate martial arts anymore.

And that was not even the most terrifying part. If all the martial arts newcomers with good innate talent were hunted down, then the martial arts talent of the people in that country would only worsen from generation to generation. In the end, the only fate awaiting that country would be extermination by other nations.

After all, martial arts talent had some connection to inheritance. When both parents possessed relatively good martial arts talent, their children generally had far better martial arts talent than children born to parents with ordinary talent.

This rule was also the consensus of nearly everyone. After all, if you treated martial artists weaker than yourself as prey to be hunted, who could guarantee there was no one with a higher cultivation than your own? What would happen if others treated you the same way? Once the dark law of the jungle was unleashed, no one could guarantee that they would be the one laughing last.

Over the next few days, aside from occasionally going up the mountain to help the villagers slaughter wild boars that had fallen into traps, Lin Fan spent all his remaining time cultivating the Azure Cloud Method beside his thatched hut in Small Mountain Village.

As for the Azure Cloud Method, it was a commonly practiced technique throughout the Zhao Kingdom. However, it was not the only technique for the Three Body-Tempering Realms. There were other methods, some of which cultivated faster than the Azure Cloud Method. Yet with his 2,000-fold cultivation effect acceleration active, Lin Fan no longer cared about the differences between those techniques. In any case, the Three Body-Tempering Realms techniques of this world merely made cultivation slightly faster or slower; they would not create any gap in combat strength between people of the same realm.

It was like using different ladders to climb onto a roof. Some ladders could be climbed quickly, while others could be climbed slowly, but the final height of the roof was the same. The roof would not suddenly rise higher just because you climbed faster.