The Daoist temple was quickly finished. It consisted of a single room, with a thatched roof above and yellow mud and stone bricks below. Inside stood only a wooden plank bed.
Outside was a small courtyard enclosed by a fence of branches and thorny twigs. Even the courtyard gate was made of branches.
Shi Feiyang sat on the wooden bed and cultivated.
Cultivation knew no passage of time. A single meditation session lasted several months, though remaining in seclusion for years or decades would have been perfectly possible.
He used a Flying Sword Message to summon Qiu Yuan, keeping him at his side and teaching him personally.
Lin Han and Shi Sheng also visited occasionally, but their main task was still to accumulate merit through good works and help Deng Bagu transport water from the South Sea. They did not live here permanently.
The temple had only one room, which belonged to Shi Feiyang. He used a spell to move an old pine tree into the courtyard. Its trunk was as thick as a cartwheel, and a hollow at its base could accommodate someone sitting inside. This became Qiu Yuan's room, sheltering him from wind and rain.
With Shi Feiyang's abilities, he could summon wind and rain or disperse clouds and showers, but he did neither. A master could not do everything for his disciple. Flowers raised in a hothouse could not weather tribulations; they had to endure wind and rain, to be properly tempered before they could amount to anything.
If there were hardships, they had to be tempered by them. If there were none, hardships had to be created to temper them!
Little Qiu Yuan was diligent and steady. Every night, he curled up inside the pine tree to sleep. In the morning, he washed and went hunting,