After leaving Meteor City, Lin Yan did not head straight for Yorknew City.
The Essence of Yi Wood in his sleeve radiated an increasingly powerful aura of life, pulsing softly like a living creature's heart. He could sense that the energy within it had reached a critical threshold. Unless he refined it soon, it might dissipate on its own.
More importantly, he had just forcibly redirected Meteor City's earth veins, pitting himself against the deathly energy and resentment of an entire region. Though he had appeared calm and effortless, the strain on his mind had been immense. The power of his divine sense had dimmed somewhat within his Violet Palace's sea of consciousness, and he needed this vast life energy to nourish and replenish it.
He found a deserted stretch of wilderness, a stony desert strewn with jagged rocks and yellow sand. Not even a blade of grass grew within a hundred-mile radius, making it the perfect place to avoid interruptions.
Lin Yan fashioned a simple cave dwelling between several enormous boulders, then casually laid down a few formations to conceal his aura. Only then did he sit cross-legged and take out the emerald-green fruit.
The Essence of Yi Wood belongs to wood among the five elements and governs vitality, Lin Yan mused as he studied the fruit in his palm.
This came from the Ghost-Faced Withered Vine absorbing thirty years' worth of radiation, deadly poison, deathly energy, and resentment in Meteor City, then being purified and transformed by my pure yang true qi. Its nature is exceptionally unusual. It possesses Yi Wood's ceaseless vitality, yet also carries a trace of destruction and rebirth-of rebuilding through ruin.
Swallow it directly?
No. Too risky.
The fruit contained far too much life energy. With his current mortal body, swallowing it whole would