"At last, a high-grade spiritual root."
Lin Changheng drew a deep breath, emotion plainly visible in his eyes.
A hundred years.
He remembered being eighteen, when he had first set foot on the Dao path. At the spiritual root assessment, his mottled fire spiritual root, possessing a mere nine strands of spirit resonance, had been casually pronounced a "mixed spiritual root." The verdict had been cold and merciless: his coming years would be wasted, with no hope of advancing along the Dao path.
Lineages and sects alike had shaken their heads and turned him away.
His heart had brimmed with youthful ambition, believing the bitterness was finally over and sweetness lay ahead. Cruel reality had shattered it in an instant, casting him straight into the dust.
Fortunately, the Blackwater River Xu Family had extended an olive branch. Otherwise, Lin Changheng could only have become a rootless, wandering rogue cultivator.
Not only would he have lost any stability in his life, he would have had no access to the Pill Dao, tacitly regarded as the foremost of the hundred arts.
In the years that followed, the limitations of his spiritual root had been painfully obvious.
After eleven years of cultivation, Lin Changheng had still been trapped within the confines of the second level of Qi Refining.
Others had easily broken through barriers he had once regarded as heavenly chasms. Amid countless battles within his own heart, he too had chewed over the bitter fruit called "unwillingness."
Resources, opportunities, comprehension-he had held no advantage in any of them. All he could rely on was this resolve: "Never dare slacken, even for a moment."
Fortunately, the Origin Cauldron had awakened one day. Now, these fifty-one strands of spirit resonance were the finest answer to his century of solitude and perseverance.
He slowly withdrew