Two Years

Autumn Moon Peak, Bing No. 7 Medicine Garden.

Inside a thatched hut, Xiao Yu was cultivating. He sat cross-legged on a meditation cushion, his eyes half-closed and his fingers forming a hand seal. With his palms facing upward on his knees, he breathed in and out in a prescribed rhythm.

The floor around him was strewn with layers of talisman paper, some blank and some already inscribed. On closer inspection, the best among them were Firecloud Talismans. Numerous boxes that had once held cinnabar lay scattered nearby as well, though most of their contents had already been used up.

"Whew..." Suddenly, Xiao Yu let out a long, clear breath and slowly opened his eyes.

"Alas, they're only miracle medicines of the mortal world, after all. Their medicinal potency simply isn't enough to push my cultivation to the thirteenth level." Xiao Yu sighed with some regret.

These past two years had been extremely busy for him. Every day, he had to cultivate, draw talismans, restore his magical power, learn high-tier spells, and accelerate the growth of spiritual herbs along the way. His schedule was packed, leaving him almost no time to rest, all so he could grow stronger as quickly as possible.

It had been hard work, but the results were gratifying!

First, his cultivation had reached the peak of the twelfth level. This was as far as he could manage.

During the first year, advancing from the eleventh level to the twelfth had taken him less than a year. But after he reached the twelfth level, the effects of Yellow Dragon Pills and other pills diminished greatly. Over the following year or so, he had no choice but to increase the quantities he took, struggling all the way to the peak of the twelfth level. By then, those pills had lost their effectiveness entirely. No matter how many he swallowed at once, they did nothing.

Although he was only at the twelfth level, he possessed twenty percent more magical power than an ordinary cultivator. As such, his total reserves were not much inferior to those of an average thirteenth-level cultivator.

Second was talisman crafting. After two years of uninterrupted practice, Xiao Yu's skill had improved noticeably.

He had started with Fireball Talismans, making over thirty attempts a day for a full six months. At last, he raised his success rate to over forty percent and produced seven or eight hundred finished Fireball Talismans.

Once his success rate stopped showing any significant improvement, Xiao Yu began drawing enhanced Fire Serpent Talismans.

Although he could already cast the enhanced Fire Serpent Technique skillfully and control it well, he still encountered tremendous obstacles when trying to seal it into a talisman.

For the first two months, he made twenty attempts every day. Yet out of more than a thousand attempts, he failed to produce even one finished Fire Serpent Talisman. He began to wonder whether he had gotten something wrong.

So he calmed himself and spent ten days reviewing each of those thousand-plus failures. Only after he felt he had gained some insight did he begin drawing them again.

Sure enough, after summing up the lessons from so many failures, Xiao Yu finally succeeded after another few dozen attempts. When activated, that Fire Serpent Talisman produced a fire serpent much like the one he created by casting the spell himself. Its power was only slightly weaker, yet it was nearly twice as powerful as the normal version.

With that first success behind him, the process grew increasingly smooth, and his understanding deepened. He then plunged into ten months of frenzied Fire Serpent Talisman crafting. By the end, his success rate had gradually risen to over thirty percent, and he had accumulated nearly a thousand Fire Serpent Talismans.

Of those thousand Fire Serpent Talismans, only three hundred were enhanced versions, which he kept for his own use. He planned to find time to sell the other nearly seven hundred for Spirit Stones.

By this point, Xiao Yu was no longer satisfied with mid-tier Spirit Talismans. Over that year and a half, he had learned the high-tier elementary spell "Fire Cloud Technique"—and it was the version improved by the mysterious Heavenly Book.

Thus, for the next six months, Xiao Yu kept trying to draw Firecloud Talismans.

The process of drawing Firecloud Talismans resembled that of Fire Serpent Talismans, but it was more than twice as difficult. During the first five months, he made over fifteen hundred attempts without a single success.

So he switched back to making some Fire Serpent Talismans while reviewing the lessons from his earlier failures.

Finally, a month ago,

he successfully produced a Firecloud Talisman. After another month of practice, he could now succeed once every dozen or so attempts. His success rate was still below ten percent, pitifully low indeed. At present, he had only a little over twenty enhanced Firecloud Talismans. However, once activated, these enhanced Firecloud Talismans were actually more powerful than an ordinary high-tier magical artifact's full-force strike. Xiao Yu was very pleased with this. If he activated them all at once, he reckoned few Qi Refining Stage cultivators could withstand them.

Over these two years, he had used large numbers of Fireball Talismans to practice extensively, working out a method of activating multiple Spirit Talismans at once. Only then had using talismans to subdue his enemies become a viable approach.

Besides attending to his own affairs, Xiao Yu had also fulfilled his duty of guarding the Medicinal Garden well. He only needed to accompany the inspecting deacon on the day of his visit, and hand over the required quota of spiritual herbs—which he had ripened and prepared in advance—when the Foundation Establishment steward came to collect them. For someone with the mysterious Purple Gourd, this posed no difficulty whatsoever.

In addition, after numerous experiments over two years, he had finally worked out some of the mysterious Heavenly Book's rules.

Through deduction, the mysterious Heavenly Book could strengthen or weaken the effects of cultivation methods, secret arts, and spells. However, after being used, the Heavenly Book had a "cooldown." Following each deduction, it needed some time to recover before it could be used again.

As for the cooldown on deducing cultivation methods, when Xiao Yu first used the Heavenly Book to deduce the "Fire Cloud Art," it took a year to recover. Last year, he had tested it again with the "Evergreen Technique" and discovered that it could likewise be deduced, yielding two versions. Afterward, the two large characters on the Heavenly Book again took a year to return to their original state.

This all but confirmed that the Heavenly Book needed a one-year "cooldown" after deducing a basic Qi Refining Stage cultivation method!

As for cultivation methods at Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, or higher stages, he did not know. He had none of those methods at present, and even if he did, he had no time to test them. That research would have to wait until after he reached Foundation Establishment.

For spells, he had experimented during the first year with seven or eight of them, including the "Aura Concealment Technique," "Heavenly Eye Technique," "Wind Riding Art," "Concealment Technique," and "Diamond Body Art."

He discovered that regardless of the spell, the Heavenly Book needed a month to recover after deducing it. Later, once the cooldown from deducing the "Evergreen Technique" ended, he tried again with the "Fire Cloud Technique," and the result was the same.

Thus, Xiao Yu could confirm that the mysterious Heavenly Book could deduce spells, and that its "cooldown" for elementary spells was one month.

Regardless of the spell, its enhanced version doubled its power or effect after deduction. The weakened version had only half the power.

Over the last three months, he had also experimented with pill formulas for the Foundation Establishment Pill, Spirit-Restoring Pill, Beauty-Nourishing Pill, and others. Unfortunately, the Heavenly Book showed no response.

He then tried talisman-drawing methods, runic inscriptions, and the like, but again there was no response.

Judging from this, the Heavenly Book apparently could not perform deductions on the hundred arts of cultivation-at least not alchemy or talisman crafting.

Xiao Yu had also tested whether Spirit Stones could shorten the "cooldown." He discovered that the Heavenly Book could slowly absorb their spiritual energy, shortening its "cooldown" somewhat, but the effect was not very pronounced.

Since he possessed fewer than three hundred Spirit Stones in total, the number of experiments he could conduct was limited. After one trial with a spell deduction and another with a cultivation-method deduction, he concluded that consuming one hundred Spirit Stones could shorten a spell deduction's "cooldown" by one-third.

He had not, however, established the corresponding reduction for cultivation methods. After those hundred Spirit Stones were consumed, the "cooldown" had decreased by only a few days. He suspected that this was because he had not used enough Spirit Stones. With a sufficient supply, it should probably be possible to shorten it by one-third as well.

Xiao Yu was already very satisfied. The ability to deduce cultivation methods and spells alone could bring him boundless benefits!

At this thought, Xiao Yu swept his broad sleeve. White light flashed, and everything on the floor vanished without a trace.

After tidying his appearance, Xiao Yu left the No. 7 Medicinal Garden and flew toward the sect.