After returning home, Chen Mu found that Duoduo was not back yet. He bolted the door, pried the wooden box out from beneath the floor again, and prepared to cultivate the Acala Heart Sutra.
Judging by the handwriting, his father must have copied the manual, and its pages were still quite new.
Although he had only skimmed it that morning, he had already discovered that the cultivation method was extraordinarily profound. He had no idea where his father had obtained it.
Though Chen Mu was already a Talisman Master, that did not prevent him from cultivating the Martial Dao.
White Turtle had also said before that many Talisman Masters cultivated the Martial Dao alongside their main pursuit, the Dao of Talismans. After all, Talisman Masters were too physically frail, and an ambush or the like could be very dangerous for them. There was no harm in having another way to protect their lives.
Moreover, spirit and flesh nourished each other. Talisman cultivators had powerful Divine Souls, making it easier for them to draw Spiritual Qi into their bodies when cultivating the Martial Dao. Martial cultivators, meanwhile, strengthened their bodies, which also helped them maintain better vigor and vitality, allowing them to get twice the result with half the effort when cultivating their Divine Souls.
Chen Mu cast aside his distracting thoughts, sat cross-legged, and focused on cultivating the Acala Heart Sutra.
The martial cultivation method was indeed marvelous. The village instructor taught the villagers to train ceaselessly, breaking through their physical limits again and again before finally condensing a wisp of Internal Force in their bodies.
But to cultivate the Acala Heart Sutra, he only needed to sit on the ground and silently recite its verses to draw upon Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi and temper his body. The results were immediate; before long, he felt much stronger.
His powerful Divine Soul allowed Chen Mu to draw in more Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi and cultivate more efficiently.
He could tell that if he cultivated like this for around ten days, his body should undergo a transformation.
The deduction shocked him!
Using the village's cultivation method, it generally took at least eight or ten years of training to cultivate Internal Force. His older cousin Chen Zihu had cultivated Internal Force at fourteen and was already hailed as a genius seen only once in a century.
Yet he himself would cultivate Internal Force in around ten days. That was truly terrifying!
Cold sweat broke out on Chen Mu's forehead, and he gained a new understanding of the manual's value.
He spent half an hour carefully memorizing the entire first section of the cultivation method, which concerned the Martial Artist stage, then buried the manual underground again.
Ten days later, early in the morning, at Chen Mu's residence.
Chen Mu, sitting cross-legged on his bed, suddenly opened his eyes. A faint flash of golden light passed through them and vanished.
"Haha! I did it! From now on, I'm a First-Duan Martial Artist!"
He was thrilled as he carefully sensed the wisp of pale-gold Internal Force condensed within him.
With Internal Force, the body would undergo earth-shaking changes. No longer bound by its mortal flesh, it would instead develop toward transcending the mundane. It was a realm every ordinary person longed to enter.
The Martial Artist stage involved constantly strengthening Internal Force and tempering the flesh, bringing the body closer to perfection. Thus, the realm Martial Artists occupied was also known as the Body Tempering Realm.
Once body tempering reached major completion, one could attempt to break through to the next realm of martial cultivation, the Qi Nourishing Realm. Martial cultivators at this stage were also called Martial Masters.
Once the body reached perfection, one opened a Qi Sea within it and could shatter mountains and split rocks with a raise of the hand. That was a Martial Master.
The Qi Nourishing Realm was still far too distant. For now, Chen Mu's goal remained to strengthen his Internal Force.
Although he had not slept a wink last night, he found himself surprisingly spirited after his breakthrough.
Since he could not sleep anyway, Chen Mu went out to his talisman-making room.
His talisman-making room had been completed four days ago.
He had therefore been very busy during this time. Besides cultivating, he also had to find ways to use runes to help the village develop.
Fundamentally, talisman paper was naturally the best way to bring out a Talisman Master's power.
But the materials used for talisman paper were very expensive, and most talismans could only be used once. The village simply could not afford them.
After much thought, Chen Mu focused on enhancement runes.
Enhancement runes could directly improve weapons, armor, and other items, and they did not need Spiritual Power to activate them, making them ideal for ordinary villagers.
Drawing runes placed a great strain on the Divine Soul, and Chen Mu also needed to leave himself time to cultivate, so he could make no more than six enhanced weapons or pieces of armor a day.
Although making them was tiring, it had unexpectedly helped him break through to the level of a Two-Mark Talisman Master the day before yesterday, so his efforts had borne fruit.
Yesterday, the village chief had come to see him.
He said that although the enhanced weapons and armor did indeed strengthen the villagers, the Martial Artists were the village's pillars of support.
Ordinary enhanced weapons and armor could not help Martial Artists very much, so he asked whether Chen Mu had any way to strengthen the village's Martial Artists.
The first thing Chen Mu mentioned was talisman paper. Martial Artists had Internal Force in their bodies, which could activate the power of the runes on talismans, making them the most direct way to improve their strength.
The chief considered it for a while and agreed to purchase a batch of talisman-making materials for Chen Mu. However, there would not be many materials, so he told Chen Mu to be sure to use them sparingly and make a few more talismans.
Chen Mu also mentioned another method: spirit casting weapons.
But the material of a spirit-cast weapon had to be compatible with Spiritual Power. It had to be a spiritual object such as a demonic beast's bones or lightning-struck wood.
After hearing this, the chief immediately gave Chen Mu the bone scepter he carried.
He said the scepter had been passed down for hundreds of years and was incomparably hard. It was said to have been taken from a very powerful demonic beast.
So after Chen Mu arrived at the talisman-making room, the first thing he did was take out the scepter the chief had left and study it carefully.
Spirit-casting runes belonged to the field of artifact refinement, and this was his first time learning to use them.
The Rune Ancestor's inheritance encompassed a myriad of things and covered every type of rune, but he had recently discovered a problem.
All the runes in the inheritance were either basic or low-level runes, and it explained only their fundamental principles. How to use those runes to better effect was left for the inheritor to figure out.
His cultivation realm was low, and those basic runes had been enough for him before, so naturally he had not noticed.
But the demonic bone the chief had left was of extremely high quality. After studying it, Chen Mu discovered that those basic spirit-casting runes were far from capable of bringing out the bone's true power. Only then did he recognize the problem.
Chen Mu was not particularly worried, though, because he had discovered that as long as he thoroughly understood the fundamental theory in the True Explanation of Runes, deriving higher-level runes was not difficult at all.
What was more, being able to create high-level runes according to his own ideas was very interesting to Chen Mu. Even if it took a little more work, he felt it was entirely worthwhile.
In his previous life, he had gone alone to a big city to make his way and had seen far too much scheming and deception.
Compared to dealing with complicated people, he actually preferred dealing with computers.
Computers did not lie. What you put in and what you got out were both certain.
If something was wrong, then the mistake had to be in your own code, and you only needed to look to yourself for the problem.
Runes were the same. According to their principles, they were what they were. They would not lie to you, and you did not need to care what they were thinking. You only needed to do one thing.
Work hard!
As long as you worked hard, you would reap the rewards! You could live the life you wanted!
That was what living ought to be like!
Just thinking about it really made his blood boil~