"What the fuck..." Lin He stared, dumbfounded, unable to hold back a curse. "This worked way too well!"
Su Qiuran swallowed. "Lin He, we're rich. If we can keep growing them like this, we'll be able to buy spirit rice seeds in town in less than half a month."
"Keep a low profile. A low profile." Lin He forcibly suppressed his wild joy. "If even a whisper of this gets out, the grass on our graves will be three feet tall by this time next year."
Holding back their excitement, they returned inside and gnawed on coarse-flour flatbread with cold water. It felt like the tastiest meal they had eaten since transmigrating.
They had just finished eating when a knock suddenly came at the battered wooden door.
"Young Master Lin, have you gone to bed?"
Lin He warily tucked the jade gourd inside his inner clothes, then went over and opened the door. An old woman stood outside, leaning on a walking stick. It was Granny Zhao from the eastern end of the village.
When Lin He and Su Qiuran had gone to the village entrance that afternoon, they had casually given her a handful of wild scallions, and the old woman had remembered the young couple.
"Oh, Granny Zhao, please come in." Lin He immediately put on a warm, harmless smile.
Granny Zhao tottered inside and looked around the room, bare but for its four walls, then sighed. "What a sin. Such a handsome young couple, driven out to a wreck of a place like this... I just cooked a couple of coarse flatbreads and brought them over for you to try."
"You really shouldn't have. Thank you, Granny." Sitting there, Su Qiuran also thanked her politely.
Granny Zhao set down the flatbreads and looked up. In the moonlight spilling inside, she happened to see the crisscrossing bloody scratches on Lin He's arm beneath his rolled-up sleeve.
The old woman's expression changed, and she planted her walking stick against the floor. "Young Master Lin! Your arm... did you go to the shady slope in the hills behind the village?"
Lin He's heart lurched, but his face betrayed nothing. "Yes. I thought I'd dig up some herbs to sell. I accidentally scratched myself."
"You foolish boy!" Granny Zhao slapped her thigh anxiously. "You've only just arrived, so you don't know. You mustn't go deep into those hills!"
"Why, Granny? Are there wild beasts?"
"Wild beasts are nothing!" Granny Zhao lowered her voice and leaned closer, all secrecy. "Deep in those hills is a mass grave of 'immortals'!"
Lin He and Su Qiuran exchanged a glance, and neither spoke.
"According to the village elders, several decades ago, a whole lot of immortals came down from the sky and fought in those hills until heaven crumbled and earth split. A great many died, and their bodies were left rotting in the miasma woods deep on that shady slope."
"That place is heavy with Yin Qi, and ghost fires drift around at night! A few years ago, a bold village hoodlum went in hoping to pick up some spoils, and he never came back. You're both so young. Whatever you do, don't go throwing your lives away!"
Perhaps because no newcomers had arrived in the village for a long time, Granny Zhao was very talkative. She fussed over them with a long string of further warnings before finally tottering away on her walking stick.
The moment the old woman left, Lin He locked the door from inside, his eyes instantly lighting up like bulbs connected to electricity.
"A cultivator mass grave? What does that mean?"
Lin He paced excitedly around the room. "It means dropped equipment! If we can pick up even one Storage Bag, or a few Spirit Stones, or even a broken Law Artifact, we'll get rich overnight. Why would we bother growing grass?"
"Stop right there!"
Su Qiuran mercilessly doused him with a bucket of cold water.
"Lin He, have you lost your head? The old lady just said there's miasma in there. Even a local thug died going inside. You're a mortal, a weakling without even a Spirit Root. What makes you think you can go treasure hunting?"
"I was just..."
"Don't even think about it." Su Qiuran's gaze was unusually stern, without the slightest hint of a joke.
"What we can least afford to lose right now is our lives! Don't forget how we croaked in our past lives. We finally got a second chance, and we have a god-tier cheat like the jade gourd. Can't we just grow grass and save up money, one steady step at a time?"
"Once we've saved up enough Grand Yin Essence, cleansed our bodies and marrow, and gained some cultivation, you can explore that dungeon then. Going now? You'd just be making yourself fertilizer for the immortals!"
Looking at Su Qiuran's serious face, Lin He gradually cooled down from his feverish excitement.
"All right, all right. I'll listen to my wife. Stay alive first, focus on building up. I won't go, okay?" With a wry laugh, he plopped down on the edge of the bed.
Night fell.
Su Qiuran rested against her wheelchair with her eyes closed, her breathing gradually growing steady.
Lin He walked over to the water vat in the corner, intending to wipe the sweat and dirt off himself with a towel.
He scooped up a ladleful of water, ready to wash the cuts the rocks had left on his arm, when he suddenly froze.
Moonlight shone through the window onto his forearm.
There were no scabs, no redness or swelling.
The dozen or so crisscrossing bloody scratches had actually... disappeared?!
Not only had they disappeared, but the skin there was even a little smoother and firmer than the surrounding skin, as though it had never been injured.
"How is this possible..."
Lin He sucked in a sharp breath, suddenly remembering what had happened while he watered the grass seeds that evening.
When he had poured that basin of well water containing diluted Essence of the Sun, some of the remaining water had inevitably splashed onto his forearm.
Had the Essence of the Sun healed the wounds on my arm?
A thought he had overlooked all this time began growing like wild grass in Lin He's mind.
Since the Essence of the Sun could make plants erupt with terrifying vitality in an instant and grow madly, then what if... I used it on a person?
Plants were living things at their core, and humans were living things too.
Once the thought emerged, it was like ten thousand ants crawling over Lin He's body. He could not suppress the restlessness in his heart.
"Maybe... I should try?" Lin He looked at the jade gourd in his palm, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty.
Lin He turned to glance at the soundly sleeping Su Qiuran. He did not wake her. If this experiment carried any risk, he would bear it alone.
He sat cross-legged on the wooden plank bed covered with dry grass, took a deep breath, and tipped the jade gourd over his left palm.
With a slight stirring of his intent.
An exceedingly tiny golden thread, barely visible to the naked eye, emerged from the gourd's mouth and gently settled into his palm.
Undiluted. This was the purest Essence of the Sun.
The instant that golden thread touched his skin, it did not roll like a drop of water. Instead, with a "slip," it burrowed straight into his flesh!
The next second.
Lin He's eyes suddenly bulged, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints.
"Urgh-!!!"
He clamped his teeth onto the corner of the quilt, forcibly choking back the agonized scream about to tear from his throat.
Pain!
Excruciating pain beyond words!
It was as though a spoonful of molten iron was pouring along the meridians in his palm and wildly flooding every limb and bone with utterly overbearing, unreasonable force!
Crack! Snap! Pop!
A dense series of sharp cracks erupted inside Lin He. Under the terrifying vitality's catalysis, the bones throughout his body were being forcibly stretched and restructured.
He could clearly see the veins on his arms and neck bulging one after another like blue-green earthworms, as though they might burst at any moment.
"Fuck... didn't think this through..."
The pain curled Lin He up like a cooked shrimp as he rolled and convulsed miserably on the bed.
He felt as though he had been thrown into an enormous furnace. Every inch of muscle was being torn apart, then rapidly healed by the Essence of the Sun's incredible vitality, only to be torn apart again...
The process was nothing short of an endless cycle of death by a thousand cuts and rebirth.
He bit down hard on the quilt, blood seeping from his gums. The veins on his forehead throbbed, and sweat instantly soaked his coarse clothes, drenching a large patch of bedding.
He did not know how much time passed. Perhaps two hours, perhaps only a quarter of an hour.
The violent torrent of heat rampaging inside him finally began to subside like an ebbing tide, eventually settling dormant deep within his Dantian.
Lin He lay sprawled on the bed, gasping for breath, his chest heaving like a suffocating fish freshly tossed onto shore.
"I... I survived..."
He released the chewed-through corner of the quilt, the corners of his mouth tugging into a weak yet ecstatic smile.
He could feel it. His physical body had become stronger! Much, much stronger!
With all the webnovels he had read, only one term came to mind at that moment-
Body Tempering!