"What is this?" Han Li asked in puzzlement when he saw the glowing stones in the pouch.
"These are Spirit Stones. They have countless uses for cultivators," Mo Caihuan explained. "There are twenty here, which isn't much-probably only enough to buy two or three talismans. I know you're bound to pursue cultivation, so these are for you. Spirit Stones can buy things, fuel your cultivation, and activate formations. You can't cultivate without them. From the look on your face, you've clearly never seen them before. Take them."
Han Li suddenly felt like a country bumpkin. Jia Yuan City really was a major city, far more prosperous than the remote backwater where the Seven Mysteries Sect stood. They even had the immortals' Spirit Stones here.
But he would not accept a reward he had done nothing to earn. "I only need the warm jade," he said evenly.
"You can't cultivate without Spirit Stones."
Han Li, however, remembered the half-baked cultivator he had killed earlier and the many things he had taken from him. If necessary, he could simply barter. Han Li had already embarked on a life of killing people and seizing their treasures. Other people's equipment and Spirit Stones were simply better.
"I know you don't want any ties to the Mo Residence, and you hate my father for trying to use Possession on you," Mo Caihuan said. "But he was still your master, and I'm your junior martial sister. These are a token of our goodwill. I hope you can help us fulfill our dream of cultivating. None of us have spiritual roots, and we've finally had the good fortune to meet a cultivator like you, senior martial brother. If you succeed in cultivation, it'll be as though we succeeded too. As long as you're alive, even millions of years from now, someone will still remember us. Take them."
Han Li considered it for a long while before saying, "Then let me trade some pills for them." He wanted the Spirit Stones, but he did not want to owe anyone a favor. He only wanted an exchange.
Mo Caihuan wanted to invest in Han Li, but seeing how firmly he held to his decision, she thought, He really is a cultivation fanatic. Neither beauty nor riches can shake his resolve.
"All right. What pills do you have to trade?"
Han Li had quite a few pills, thanks to his Little Green Bottle. The green liquid it produced accelerated the growth of medicinal herbs, quickly giving them several hundred years' worth of medicinal potency.
Hundred-year-old medicinal herbs could be used to refine plenty of top-grade pills.
Han Li had refined many pills for curing illnesses and treating poison. He brought them all out, keeping only the pills that increased his magical power.
Once the exchange was complete, Han Li accepted the Spirit Stones.
"Then I'll take my leave." He did not want to stay for the funeral and vanished with superb lightness skills.
Seeing how courteous Mo Caihuan was, everyone simply assumed she envied cultivators. Who didn't? She had previously invited a cultivator to their home to test their spiritual roots and had even seen a genuine cultivation sect, yet she could not cultivate herself. She must have been deeply disappointed. Seeing someone her own age cultivating, she had pinned her dreams on him instead.
They had no idea that Mo Caihuan was simply investing in the protagonist.
News of Mo Juren's death spread. The Mo Residence held a simple funeral and erected a tomb containing his clothes and personal effects. The Whale-Jiao Society was formally handed over to Mo Caihuan, and she officially succeeded him as its leader.
The four madams helped behind the scenes.
Han Li, meanwhile, went looking for a Cultivator Market to gather information. He learned that advancing from the qi refining stage to the Foundation Establishment Stage required a Foundation Establishment Pill. To obtain one, he would have to attend the Ascension Conference—a meat grinder where countless qi refining cultivators competed, but only a handful survived and were chosen by the sects.
Fortunately, he was lucky enough to have an Ascension Token from the Yellow Maple Valley, allowing him to join directly. Unfortunately, his pseudo-spiritual root left him undervalued, and someone even snatched his Foundation Establishment Pill out from under him.
Luckily, Han Li had the Little Green Bottle. He could accelerate the growth of spiritual herbs and refine his own Foundation Establishment Pills. Otherwise, with his pseudo-spiritual root, he could only have wailed in despair.
A pseudo-spiritual root was a spiritual root with multiple attributes. It offered the slowest cultivation speed and made achieving immortality extremely difficult. Cultivation required several times the resources needed by someone with a heavenly spiritual root. Only with a cheat could someone like that succeed.
Without a cheat, even the hurdle of Foundation Establishment would be difficult to clear.
Mo Caihuan had no time to concern herself with Han Li. Her body tempering was far harder than his cultivation. Without a fortuitous encounter, she had no future.
Even if she advanced technology and raised mortals' average lifespan to seventy, there still would not be enough time.
Those at the qi refining stage could live past a hundred. Foundation Establishment cultivators could live for two hundred years, golden core cultivators for several hundred, nascent soul cultivators for over a thousand, and deity transformation cultivators for several thousand. After void refinement, there was no limit to their lifespan, only the threat of heavenly tribulations.
Mortals in the Spirit Realm could achieve mastery in body tempering, and the long lifespans afforded by its abundant spiritual energy were also crucial. A mere seventy years would not be nearly enough.
Mo Caihuan took a deep breath and said, "I'll stick to my little goal for now: unite the Heavenly South and leave my name in the annals of history."
Once the iron blast furnaces were producing steadily, development of the steam engine began as well.
With Daoist Wealth as her connection, she could obtain things like lubricating oil and rubber from cultivators.
The lubricating oil was the liquid left over from failed pill refinement and could be used to lubricate gears. Rubber was replaced with a resilient material commonly found in the cultivation world.
In any case, the cultivation world had all sorts of bizarre materials, many of which even cultivators themselves had no idea how to use.
Mo Caihuan turned into a junk collector, taking any rubbish she could find and even paying high prices for it.
As a result, the Spirit Stones she earned were nowhere near enough to cover her expenses.
Mo Caihuan immediately contacted her nominal master and sold the ancient battlefield to the Covering Moon Sect for a hundred thousand Spirit Stones. The sect believed it was the site of the ancient Righteous-Demonic War and considered it highly valuable.
To keep their activities hidden, the Covering Moon Sect continued employing the Whale-Jiao Society to mine the site, but everything unearthed had to be handed over to the sect disciples supervising them.
Mo Caihuan then spent the hundred thousand Spirit Stones buying all manner of rubbish from the Covering Moon Sect. In the end, the sect profited twice, effectively trading its rubbish for an ancient battlefield.
"Twenty years old already." Mo Caihuan felt a little dazed. Time truly flashed past like a white colt glimpsed through a crack. In the blink of an eye, twenty years had passed since her transmigration.
With her robes fluttering, she looked like an immortal maiden in her white dress, but alas, she was merely a mortal beauty. By now, her martial attainments rivaled those of grandmasters in their seventies or eighties, yet she remained a mortal.
After years of growth, the Whale-Jiao Society had begun working with imperial merchants, expanding its trade throughout the Yue Kingdom.
Jia Yuan City had become the Yue Kingdom's most economically prosperous city. It continued expanding outward, with large numbers of new factories being built.
Next came the age of electricity. With steam engines, they could boil water to generate power.
As for magnets, she would turn to cultivators.
Cultivators could refine magnetic mountains. Mo Caihuan bought failed magnetic mountains to use as materials for generators. She used a magnetic mountain to generate direct current, which passed through a coil to create a magnetic rotor. A stationary coil was then fitted around it, with one moving and the other still to cut through the magnetic field lines.
After transmigrating, Mo Caihuan's memories had become remarkably clear. She even remembered fighting with other children in kindergarten in perfect detail. Some of this jumble of knowledge came from classes, some from videos she had scrolled through, some from popular science books, and some from viral online posts...
In short, knowledge gathered through all these different channels was deeply branded into her mind, clearer even than before her rebirth.
Since she had already transmigrated, there was no need to worry about such a minor detail. She would simply treat it as a transmigrator's cheat.
But she had no idea that an even greater surprise was about to arrive. On her twentieth birthday, her reward to herself was to prick her finger and examine her blood under a microscope.
The microscope had been invented the previous year. She insisted on checking once a month to observe the changes body tempering brought to her body.
It was said that Body Tempering methods had not been created by humans, but modeled on Demon Beasts and the demon race.
Demon Beasts began cultivating once animals developed intelligence. From the first through the seventh level, they gained the ability to speak. At the eighth level, they had to undergo a tribulation and assume human form. At the ninth, they became supreme powerhouses.
Demon Beasts' bodies changed constantly as they cultivated.
The demon race was much the same, with their bodies also changing in stages.
Cultivators were actually no different. As their cultivation realms rose, their bodies changed as well, becoming extremely tough.
Body tempering was the same: the body would change. Mo Caihuan wanted to know what those changes were.
"Cultivation isn't science, but it should be approached with a scientific attitude. Since cultivation is material in nature, it must follow certain laws." Mo Caihuan dripped her blood onto a microscope slide.
She searched through the microscope for the changes brought about by her years of training.
Besides blood, there were hair, dead skin, saliva, and other scraps from the beautiful woman's body.
Previously, there had never been any obvious changes, but today, golden patterns appeared in her blood.