A Bountiful Harvest

Mo Chen had barely taken a few steps before someone called out for him to stop.

He had thought some good fortune had come his way, but it turned out to be a tout, which spoiled much of his mood for admiring the scenery.

"Please wait, fellow Daoist. Is this your first visit to the blessed land of Maozhou? I'm a referral agent for the Cloud Arrival Inn at the foot of the mountain. You look travel-worn, fellow Daoist, so I imagine you urgently need somewhere quiet to stay..."

Mo Chen could not even be bothered to respond. Leaving aside whether he could afford it, even if he stayed there, there was no guarantee someone would not tamper with the inn's isolation formations.

The secrets and stolen goods he carried could never be exposed.

If anyone saw them, he would be finished.

Mo Chen certainly would not stay there. Wouldn't it be better to head into the countryside outside the city, find a mountain, and carve out a little Cave Abode like Zhou Ping had?

"I'm not staying. Find someone else!"

Mo Chen showed him no courtesy. He even used the Divine Movement Technique and shot away like a wisp of smoke.

Afterward, Mo Chen left the city again and found a secluded spot deep in the mountains fifty li outside it. He used a Flying Sword to carve out a simple Cave Abode, intending to spend a long stretch of time improving his cultivation.

There was an open patch of ground in front of the Cave Abode, which Mo Chen turned into a simple garden. He planned to grow spiritual herbs and medicinal plants, both to consume and to develop his alchemy skills.

In truth, Mo Chen had always wanted to find a cushy job in a Scripture Pavilion or guarding a medicinal garden and quietly lie low. But he had never expected something like a Monster Uprising to happen. If he cultivated with an attitude of withdrawing from the world his entire life, there was no telling which uprising would leave him dead in a Demon Beast's jaws.

I still have to improve my strength!

Thus, Mo Chen planted the seeds he had just bought, set up some warning Restrictive Wards on the mountain, and returned to his Cave Abode. He intended to sort through Jiang Jiuyao's and the old prince's Storage Bags first.

The old prince's Storage Bag looked bulging and full. There was probably something good inside!

So Mo Chen opened the old prince's Storage Bag first.

As the spiritual glow around its opening dispersed, the contents came tumbling out onto the ground.

Spirit Stones were the most numerous. Piled together, there were at least four hundred.

Mo Chen weighed them in his hand and understood.

Although the prince had been accepted into the Twin Crane Sect, he had ultimately come from a mortal imperial family. However far the Great Qian Dynasty had declined, it could still afford to support a prince who cultivated.

Among rogue cultivators, these Spirit Stones would count as a windfall. Presumably, imperial attendants brought them all the way from the capital to Flowing Cloud Immortal City every year.

There was also a silvery-white Flying Sword. Its blade was slender and still keen, and when infused with Spiritual Power, Sword Ray flickered from it.

Earlier in the dense forest, this sword had chased Mo Chen and thrust at him several times. If his protective jade talisman had not blocked one strike, it would have pierced straight through his chest.

What a fine sword! It was actually a mid-grade Spirit Artifact in perfect condition. It would fetch at least a thousand Spirit Stones at a cultivator market.

But Mo Chen did not want to sell it. The phantom sword lights the old prince had wielded had left him itching to learn. Mastering one more art meant gaining another way to stay alive.

Aside from the Spirit Stone and Flying Sword, the bag also held two cultivation manuals.

One was the Dark Gold Sword Art, a sword cultivation method that could take him to the peak of the Qi Refining Realm. The other was called Miscellaneous Notes on Life-Prolonging Arts, and its contents consisted entirely of insights into finding life-prolonging spiritual herbs and refining life-extending pills.

Mo Chen stared at these miscellaneous notes for several breaths. A proper sword cultivator who carried life-prolonging arts rather than sword manuals in his bag must have been nearing the end of his allotted lifespan.

Then Mo Chen set down the old prince's Storage Bag, picked up Jiang Jiuyao's, and brought out everything inside.

Jiang Jiuyao had only a little over a hundred Spirit Stones, and her few bottles of Qi-Replenishing Pills were the most ordinary kind sold on the market. But a paper talisman among the Spirit Stones made Mo Chen's eyes light up.

A talisman! And not a low-grade one, either!

The talisman paper was pale blue-green throughout, its patterns intricate and delicate. It radiated considerable power; merely staring at it for a moment made his eyes faintly sting.

Mo Chen held the talisman between his fingertips and examined it from every angle for a long while. Comparing it with an illustrated guide he had taken from the Scripture Pavilion, he finally identified it as a Second Tier Wind Blade Talisman.

Second Tier Wind Blade Talismans were crafted by Foundation Establishment Realm cultivators. Once unleashed, their Wind Blades tore through the air with power that no Qi Refining Realm cultivator could withstand head-on.

Mo Chen sucked in a cold breath. If Jiang Jiuyao had managed to free her hands and unleash this talisman earlier, never mind the Restrictive Wards—even the bluestone would have been sliced in two. Yet for some reason, she had not used it.

So Mo Chen consulted his reference materials again. The texts said that low-level cultivators needed only a thread of Spiritual Power to activate talismans of their own tier. But activating a talisman above their tier also required reciting the corresponding Incantation and forming the proper hand seals.

So that was it! No wonder Jiang Jiuyao hadn't used her Second Tier talisman. She hadn't known how!

This was the benefit of reading miscellaneous records and anecdotes. The broader one's learning, the more one knew, and the more alternative solutions one could find in an emergency.

To ensure he could use it immediately in the future, Mo Chen also practiced the specific Incantation recorded in the text.

Beneath the talisman lay two Jade Slips. One contained the Azure Wood Everlasting Spring Art, a wood-attribute Qi Refining cultivation method that matched Jiang Jiuyao's approach. It was precisely the art she had primarily cultivated.

The other had no title. Mo Chen opened it and found her cultivation insights and personal notes, written in a scrawl with uneven ink.

Mo Chen switched to the largest Storage Bag to hold everything and mentally tallied his gains.

He now possessed over seven hundred Spirit Stones, three Flying Swords, and one Second Tier talisman.

He had far more cultivation methods and spell collections: forty or fifty Jade Slips stolen from the Scripture Pavilion. As for pills, he had only Jiang Jiuyao's few bottles.

From having just thirty Spirit Stones in his Storage Bag to becoming rich overnight, only a few hours had passed.

No wonder people said murder and plunder brought money quickly!

The cultivation world never lacked geniuses. What it lacked were people who lived long enough. Only those who lived long had the right to pick up other people's Storage Bags.

Time truly flew.

The mountain fires outside Flowing Cloud Immortal City had long since been extinguished by cultivators casting rainmaking spells, and after several months, sect cultivators had repaired the cracks in the City-Guarding Grand Formation until it was as good as new.

Once the beast tide retreated, Flowing Cloud Immortal City regained its former bustle, as though that bloody night had been nothing but a nightmare.

No one would know that an old woman and a prince of the Great Qian Kingdom had died there. Of course, still fewer remembered old Mo, who had spent forty years warming a neglected bench in the Scripture Pavilion.

Even the newly hired Mo Xiaoyi was assumed by the sect disciples to have died in the Monster Uprising.

The cultivation world reserved its memory for the powerful and the gifted. As for a Qi Refining servant?

If he disappeared, he disappeared. He was not even worthy of becoming a topic of conversation.

Meanwhile, Mo Chen had long since left the Twin Crane Sect and was cultivating in a remote mountain forest outside Maozhou City, four thousand li away.

Besides medicinal plants commonly used in the Qi Refining Realm, Mo Chen also grew plenty of Solomon's seal and Chinese yam for consumption.

Ancient cultivation texts recorded that Solomon's seal was the immortals' spare grain, while Chinese yam strengthened resolve, calmed the spirit, and fortified muscles and bones. They complemented the Flame-Drinking Art best, allowing the body to be tempered through continual tearing and healing.

He swallowed fire into his belly and used it to forge his meridians.

More than seventy years had passed since he came to Maozhou. The stinging and burning sensations of those early days had long since become part of Mo Chen's body. Once he grew accustomed to them, they no longer felt painful.

Mo Chen cultivated every day according to the formulas in the manual, wrapping flames in Dharma Power and refining them before slowly transforming them into his own primal qi.

For seventy years, every day was the same: swallow fire, refine it, circulate qi through a full Heavenly Cycle. Once he finished the cycle, he went outside to tend the spiritual herbs, then casually picked up a dead branch on the mountain to practice the Vast Sea Blade Intent and basic Five Elements spells.

The cycle repeated, terribly dull.

Aside from one winter when heavy snow fell from the sky, nothing else had left a deep impression on Mo Chen.

The sun rose and set. Mo Chen let the daylight at the cave entrance brighten and fade, fade and brighten, while the Solomon's seal outside was harvested and replanted, replanted and harvested...

White clouds shifted into gray hounds. Sometimes, far in the distance, he could see sword light streaking across the sky, belonging to cultivators passing over these barren mountains on their way elsewhere.

Mo Chen never greeted them or showed himself. He simply watched quietly as the sword light vanished over the horizon. Go wherever you like, so long as you don't disturb me.

That day, Mo Chen sat cross-legged on the bluestone as usual, swallowed a mouthful of mundane fire, and closed his eyes to refine it.

Every step was no different from any other day. The flames entered his belly, Spiritual Power enveloped them, and the circulation proceeded in one seamless flow.

Yet after completing one full Heavenly Cycle, Mo Chen suddenly felt Spiritual Power far more surging than usual gush from his dantian and race through his meridians.

Seventy years had passed, and he had finally reached the Eighth Layer of Qi Refining.

"I was eighty when I got my first cultivation manual. Now I'm two hundred and forty, and I've finally reached a solid level within late-stage Qi Refining," Mo Chen said mockingly of himself.

Among sect disciples, this pace probably fell short of even the worst servant.

But so what?

Sect disciples could not live to two hundred. Mo Chen could.

But that was not the most exciting part.

There were still two minor stages to go. Once he fully cultivated the ninth level of Qi Refining, he could attempt Foundation Establishment.

Once Foundation Establishment succeeded, an ordinary cultivator's lifespan increased to over two hundred years, their body returned to an innate state, and their appearance remained unchanged. He would no longer need to disguise himself.

For others, this was a breakthrough in cultivation. For him, it was more like a chance to wipe his identity clean.

And as long as he advanced to Foundation Establishment, Mo Chen would no longer have to fear venturing into the world with an ageless face.

After Foundation Establishment, the body entered an innate state, allowing one to live without food and retain an unchanged appearance. This was basic knowledge in the cultivation world.

If anyone asked, he could use this excuse to brush them off. It would be as seamless as a heavenly robe, leaving others virtually no way to verify it.

"Heh, perfect. Time to end my seclusion and head down the mountain for a look."