Puzzled, Yi Shuyuan held the cicada shell in one hand and worked a calculation on his fingers, then turned a thoughtful gaze toward the ancient tree beside him, which he had overlooked until now.
According to the Pill Scripture, the golden cicada was the culmination of the Earth Vein's spiritual essence, nourished by the essence of heaven and earth, with all manner of wondrous qualities heaped upon it.
At Yi Shuyuan's level, however, he merely smiled at such claims and moved on. What living thing had not received the essence of heaven and earth? And most of those wondrous qualities were fantasies dreamed up by sorcerers.
At its most fundamental, it had originally been nothing more than a cicada.
One thing was certain, though: a creature that had attained spirituality, like this golden cicada, was indeed extraordinary. At the very least, the shell in Yi Shuyuan's hand was not merely a potent medicinal ingredient. The purity he saw through his Dharma Eye meant that, used properly, it could also be a treasure that drew good fortune and warded off disaster.
Yet that sense of purity was beginning to fade.
Yi Shuyuan already understood why. The golden cicada had shed its shell, leaving the husk in his hand without anything to sustain it. The cicada had also intended for its shell to decay beneath the tree.
As he pondered this, Yi Shuyuan watched the direction in which the golden cicada had departed while catching the Folding Fan that slid out of his sleeve.
Chanting Dust transformed in Yi Shuyuan's hand into a long, slender brush.
As his cultivation grew ever more refined, Yi Shuyuan's control over transformations had become increasingly precise. This was Formless's long, slender painting brush. He gently swept its tip over the split in the cicada shell, and