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At noon, sunlight filtered through the branches and leaves, falling upon a smooth gray stone at the base of a tree trunk.
"Ah, the rain had finally stopped."
The warmth of the sunlight woke the sleeping Chen Yang.
"This time, I slept for... five days."
Whenever it rained, Chen Yang would fall asleep, because he disliked the damp air of rainy days.
Rain and mist made the originally clear spiritual energy damp.
Chen Yang looked around. The scenery remained unchanged.
"Come to think of it, this should be my twentieth year in this world."
After enduring nearly half a year of nonstop, high-intensity work in his previous life, Chen Yang had finally been freed on that exhausting night.
When he woke from a single sleep, he was already lying here.
But the identity he had transmigrated into was a tiny bit bizarre.
Neither human nor beast—he was a stone.
Twenty years ago, nourished by spiritual energy, this stone had unexpectedly developed consciousness, and Chen Yang's awareness had taken residence within it at that moment.
Like all transmigrators, Chen Yang had been extremely excited at first.
Because spiritual energy existed, he knew this was a world where one could cultivate immortality.
And as a transmigrator, normally, one would have some sort of cheat by their side.
So during those first few days, Chen Yang kept searching for where his cheat was hidden.
A status panel? No.
A system? It never appeared.
An Emperor's soul possessing him? That was even more impossible.
As the days passed, Chen Yang finally became certain.
There probably was no cheat.
He was merely a stone that had been lucky enough to gain consciousness.
Other than breathing in and circulating spiritual energy, he could do nothing else.
He could not even perform the most basic movement, only lie quietly here.
After recognizing reality, Chen Yang did not seem particularly depressed or unwilling to accept it.
On the contrary, he felt this new identity was quite good. It suited him well.
Thinking of his previous life—endless overtime, his boss's manipulation and empty promises, the burden of loans, relatives and friends each placing their own expectations upon him.
That kind of life had made him feel suffocated. At one point, he had even entertained thoughts of ending his life.
Now that he had become a stone, he no longer needed to worry about all that messy nonsense.
He only needed to breathe in and circulate spiritual energy every day, then sleep whenever he grew tired.
Simple, comfortable, and wonderful.
So, in a sense, becoming a stone that could lie flat suited the state Chen Yang had hoped for.
It did not take him long to completely accept his new identity.
And then, lying there like this, he truly lay there for twenty years.
At first, he was awake for less than two hours each day. Once the time came, he would grow sleepy and fall into slumber.
Later, after years upon years of breathing in and absorbing spiritual energy, the time he could remain awake gradually increased.
By now, he could stay awake for more than ten days straight while keeping his consciousness clear.
Over these twenty years, he had lost count of how many times he had witnessed Demon Beasts devouring one another, spirit birds hunting each other, and ghosts swallowing ghosts.
If it had been the old Chen Yang, accustomed to a harmonious society, he would surely have felt that this world's laws of survival were far too cruel.
But now, tempered by the passage of time, Chen Yang's heart remained utterly still when he watched such slaughter.
"That was simply how the world worked."
"If you didn't eat, you would starve to death."
"If you didn't eat him, he would eat you."
The law of the jungle was this world's law of survival.
All the things he saw were merely living creatures following the laws of heaven and earth. There was nothing worth being surprised about.
The sunlight dried the water stains on Chen Yang's body. Once the lingering moisture dispersed, Chen Yang began gathering spiritual energy and breathing it in.
The scattered spiritual energy drifting around him was drawn in, beginning to gather toward Chen Yang.
As a stone with consciousness, Chen Yang now possessed two abilities.
One was breathing in and circulating the spiritual energy of heaven and earth.
He had known how to do it from the moment he came to this world, just as people were born knowing how to breathe.
After continuously breathing in and circulating spiritual energy for five years, Chen Yang was able to examine his own body internally.
He saw a space in the central area of his body, wrapped in a thin white membrane.
The spiritual energy of heaven and earth he absorbed was gradually transformed there into spiritual power he could use.
At the time, the spiritual power stored there occupied only around one-third of the entire space.
After another ten years of accumulation, the small space storing spiritual power was filled.
The instant it filled up, Chen Yang fell asleep.
Ten days later, when Chen Yang woke again, he could clearly feel the changes in himself.
First, the Spirit Storage Space within him had expanded by more than twice its original size.
Second, his consciousness had become more solid. He could sense farther away, and it could now be used to communicate with the spiritual power inside his body!
He realized that he had completed a realm breakthrough.
Chen Yang immediately began experimenting and quickly discovered that as long as he activated the spiritual power within him, he could draw the spiritual energy of heaven and earth around him toward himself.
The gathered spiritual energy became denser, roughly three times its original concentration.
Breathing in and circulating energy in such an environment greatly improved the efficiency with which he transformed it into spiritual power.
The emergence of the Spirit Gathering ability brought changes to Chen Yang's previously tranquil life of lying flat.
Because the gathered spiritual energy had become denser, the vegetation across an area around Chen Yang was nourished and began growing wildly, as though pumped full of steroids.
Besides these ordinary plants, the dense spiritual energy also gave rise to a small spirit plant.
It was a lush green four-leaf little grass, growing just a palm's width away from Chen Yang.
At first, Chen Yang had not noticed anything special about it. Then one morning, the spirit plant secreted a milky-white droplet of spiritual liquid from between its four small leaves.
Chen Yang sensed an extremely pure energy within that droplet of spiritual liquid.
After the droplet appeared, the little spirit plant was pressed down and happened to tilt toward Chen Yang. It slid along the leaf and fell onto him.
Chen Yang guided it into his body and spent five days digesting it. The result pleasantly surprised him.
The spiritual power produced by that single drop of spiritual liquid was equivalent to two whole months of his breathing exercises.
Good heavens. If I got one drop every day, wouldn't my spiritual power grow like a rocket taking off? Chen Yang thought.
Unfortunately, the production of this spiritual liquid also followed a cycle. It produced roughly one drop every three months.
But Chen Yang did not demand too much from it.
After all, he had the mindset of lying flat. If he had it, he would use it; if not, he would slowly breathe in and circulate spiritual energy.
The peaceful days passed one by one. By now, with the aid of the droplet spiritual liquid, Chen Yang had filled more than half of his spiritual power space.
The only problem that had troubled Chen Yang over these twenty years was that he had seen all kinds of strange and novel living creatures, yet he had never seen a single human.
Considering his surroundings—a patch of woodland with a chain of mountains stretching beyond it—Chen Yang guessed that he might have been born in some remote place rarely visited by people.
Yet the Demon Beasts and ghosts here did not seem particularly strong. None of them knew spells, and when they fought, they still relied on close-quarters brawling. This did not seem like the depths of the legendary Hundred Thousand Mountains either.
He even suspected that he had been born into a world without humans.
Unable to figure out an answer, Chen Yang eventually gave up thinking about it and stopped creating needless worries for himself.
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