Chapter Ninety-Eight: Enlightenment

In just two hours, her cultivation leaped ten levels, yet she had survived only by a hair’s breadth. It then took her two hundred years to stabilize that realm, and Feng Ke’er came to understand that cultivation was, in truth, a way of living: haste makes waste; impatience leads nowhere.

So once her realm was steady, she did not rush out into the mountains to keep slaying beasts and leveling up. Instead, she intended to spend some time carefully reflecting on the more than two centuries she had spent on the path of cultivation.

First, Feng Ke’er asked herself what exactly she had been doing all these years.

After sorting through it in detail, she reached a conclusion. On the surface, she seemed to have been endlessly fighting monsters and leveling up, but in reality, she had been refining spiritual energy all along. Yes, refining spiritual energy.

All things in the world possessed spiritual energy. Some was innate; some was later absorbed from the outside world. And spiritual energy was consumable. When an individual absorbed external spiritual energy faster than it was spent, the energy within would grow and grow, and the individual would become stronger and stronger.

However, the ability to absorb spiritual energy would gradually decline as one aged. Once an individual reached adulthood, the amount of spiritual energy consumed each day would remain roughly stable. Thus, when that ability began to weaken, the spiritual energy within would steadily diminish.

In the end, the ability to absorb spiritual energy would vanish entirely with the passage of time. By then, the body’s spiritual energy would be in a state of only outflow and no replenishment.

When the stored spiritual energy was exhausted, that would be the end of the individual as well.

In the modern world, people called this the course of life. In the cultivation world, cultivators called it the Heavenly Way.

Thus, cultivation was nothing more than constantly strengthening the ability to draw in spiritual energy from the outside world, trying one’s best not to let that ability decline, or at least to slow its natural deterioration, so that the individual could obtain more spiritual energy and prevent life from fading away—that is, achieve so-called immortality. That was why the path of cultivation was called a defiant path.

Moreover, spiritual energy came in five forms: metal, wood, water, earth, and fire. In this world, many beings were born with affinity for one or more kinds of spiritual energy. One might even call it a gift. They could actively absorb a certain type of spiritual energy from the outside world. At some unknown point in time, someone had noticed the connection between life and spiritual energy and began using this gift to absorb outside energy, then refine it, then build bodies capable of storing more of it, thereby artificially altering the course of life. And so cultivation came into being.

All things could cultivate. Because humans stood above all living things, human cultivation made one a cultivator. As for everything else, so long as it could actively absorb spiritual energy, it too could cultivate—but it first had to take on human form before going further, and thus it was called demonic cultivation.

There also seemed to be another kind of cultivator: demonic cultivators. This classification reminded Feng Ke’er of something the goddess of creation had once said before betraying the lower realms: victory makes gods, defeat makes demons. The very nature of cultivation determined that cultivators would inevitably wage brutal struggles over spiritual resources. Just as history is written by the victors, so too in the cultivation world. Those who prevailed, whose fists were strongest, could openly establish and alter the rules, thereby obtaining more spiritual energy and resources. Thus, they became the gods admired by all. And the losers became the drowned dogs... well, in the eyes of others, their actions mostly did not conform to the rules set by the gods. They were rebellious and unorthodox. If not demons, then what were they?

Very well, Feng Ke’er admitted that she had been far too obsessed with fighting monsters and leveling up, to the point that she had not had enough contact with the cultivation world as a whole and did not understand it well enough. Her grasp of the greatness of gods and the cruelty of demons was not very deep. In other words, her outlook had been a little warped. This too was a kind of illness, caused by being seriously out of touch with practice and with life. She would have to change.

After roughly grasping the essence of cultivation, Feng Ke’er formed her own understanding of realms and cultivation levels. In the earliest stage, a cultivator’s ability to refine spiritual energy was very weak; one could only refine it into a form the body could absorb. That was the energy-refining stage. Later, once the body had been tempered into greater strength, a cultivator could refine absorbed spiritual energy into liquid form—spiritual liquid—and store it. That was the foundation-building stage. Then, with the body growing even stronger, the cultivator could refine spiritual energy into a solid form—a golden core—and store it. This was the stage she currently occupied, called core formation.

During this process of refinement, Feng Ke’er felt deeply that spiritual energy, once refined, was no longer merely spiritual energy in the sense of sustaining life. It became intimately tied to the cultivator and gradually acquired some of the cultivator’s own characteristics. In other words, the spiritual energy within a cultivator began to mutate. It started to take on certain traits of life. By the core formation stage, this characteristic became even more obvious. She could clearly feel that each golden core seemed to contain the gestation of a life!

Truly, she was not exaggerating. She really felt a living presence within them.

Could it be that, because they had life force, the golden cores would evolve into nascent souls upon the next advancement? And then, after further progress, would the nascent souls gradually grow into spiritual bodies? Thereafter, as the cultivator’s physical body and spiritual body gradually harmonized, would the flesh become dispensable once a certain realm was reached? Even stripped of the mortal body, a cultivator’s spirit, or soul, could continue living in the world by relying on the spiritual body alone. No decline, no exhaustion, existing forever and ever... was that immortality?

And another thing: if a dantian could evolve into a golden core, then could a golden core also transform into a nascent soul? Good heavens, she had a thousand golden cores. If she entered the nascent-soul stage in the future, would she end up with a thousand nascent souls? And then a thousand nascent souls growing up... oh my goodness!

Feng Ke’er could not help shivering violently.

Still, she quickly pressed a hand to her little heart and comforted herself: these were all unfounded guesses, after all. Whether they were right or wrong would have to be tested in practice. Right now, the golden cores were behaving themselves and showed no sign of advancing again. Why waste time agonizing over things that had not happened yet? A road will reveal itself when it reaches the mountain; she would deal with it then.

Thus, her sorting was complete. To hell with the golden cores, to hell with cultivation! Someone who had frightened herself thoroughly decided to find something else to soothe her wildly pounding heart.

What should she do next? Feng Ke’er scratched her head, and her gaze fell upon the phoenix jade tablet. Before, all her attention and all her divine sense had been devoted to tempering those thousand golden cores. For more than two hundred years, she had never managed to spare any thought for it.

Feng Ke’er took down the phoenix jade tablet and held it in her hand, studying it over and over again. Then she drew in a sharp breath. She had advanced ten levels in succession, and her cultivation had greatly increased. By rights, this thing should have changed too—so why was it still veiled beneath a layer of sand-like crust, not revealing its true appearance?

Never mind. First, she would go read the diary of the great god Pangu. She could read ten entries at once. Who knew whether there had been any progress between the great god and the Green Lotus Immortal Maiden? A serialized story continuing after more than two hundred years! Her gossip-loving heart swept everything else aside, and she excitedly spread her divine sense over the phoenix jade tablet.

She read ten entries in one breath.

The result... how should she put it? Slightly disappointing. The great god Pangu was a man of his word and would not go back to see the Green Lotus Immortal Maiden until he had gathered enough vital force. However, he too had formed a golden core: three of them! Three dantians had condensed into three glittering golden cores, pure and flawless.

Seeing this, Feng Ke’er looked in conflicted silence at the prosperous, gleaming things in her own sea of cores. Fine, then—ignoring their slight color difference, she was finally reassured. If the great god Pangu could condense three golden cores, why should she, a later generation, not be able to crush the earlier waves against the shore and condense a thousand? Besides, from the time of chaos to the present, how earthshaking had the changes in climate, temperature, environment, and so on been? Not to mention that she was the heroine who had transmigrated here from countless years in the future... in short, all was well!

The next few diary entries quickly shifted her attention. As expected of a great god, he had his own opinions. Pangu very soon accepted the reality of three golden cores coexisting. More than that, through practical experience, he soon derived a method for managing them: assign each core a separate function.

One core was devoted solely to enlightenment and thought, pondering philosophical questions like the ten thousand whys—for example, why did a dantian grow larger and become a sea of cores? Why, after being tempered and compressed, did core fluid finally condense into a golden core? And so on.

One core was devoted entirely to figuring out how to heal injuries. In battles against vital energy, Pangu was often wounded. Through long and brutal combat, he gradually discovered many methods of healing. Especially after the first burst of dantian fire sprang from his fingertips, he unintentionally tempered the vital energy he had captured with that dantian fire. Once this vital energy perished, some of it eventually condensed into sphere-like objects similar to golden cores. Thinking in terms of not wasting anything, he tried swallowing those spheres. In the end, aside from some poisonous ones, most were useful treasures. Some could promote the healing of his wounds, some could directly temper golden cores, and some could strengthen the body and dispel fatigue. Pangu liked them very much, so he allocated one golden core to study this matter in depth. Feng Ke’er, reading this, suddenly came to a realization: so that was the origin of alchemy.

The remaining golden core was used mainly for refining spiritual energy. Like Feng Ke’er, he too had come to understand certain connections between spiritual energy—Pangu called the mysterious energy refined and tempered from the vital energy he had slain spiritual energy—and life. Thus, he devoted great effort to energy refinement. From his description, Feng Ke’er discovered that the way they tempered their golden cores was remarkably similar, and she could not help feeling a little smug.

Once the three golden cores were divided among their duties, he could understand, refine pills, and refine energy simultaneously, greatly improving his efficiency. Moreover, through this training, his divine sense also advanced by leaps and bounds.

This was an excellent way to manage golden cores. Feng Ke’er planned to borrow it well: first, she would learn from Pangu and divide her thousand golden cores into three broad groups, each responsible for enlightenment, alchemy, and energy refinement. Then, she would refine the division further as needed later on.

Beyond that, Feng Ke’er also learned another trick from the great god Pangu: distinguishing the hidden types of spiritual energy within an object by sight alone.

During the process of alchemy, Pangu had summarized a set of experiences for identifying, with the naked eye, the types and amounts of spiritual energy contained within vital energy. It had proven effective every time.

Although the environment in the great god’s era was much better than now—vital energy differed only by being big or small, unlike the myriad strange and ugly shells of the present—after this advancement, Feng Ke’er found that her eyes had also evolved to an unimaginable degree. Good heavens, she could see through objects. And this vision was not only physical but chemical as well. For instance, if she casually scooped up a handful of sand and soil, then following Pangu’s method, pointed the middle and index fingers of her right hand at the center of her brow and focused her mind, she could discern the sand and soil’s tangled impurities, their chemical composition, and that faint, nearly imperceptible trace of earth spiritual energy, fire spiritual energy, and so on. So she figured that, if one stripped away the surface of appearances to see the essence beneath, Pangu’s experience should still be usable.

After understanding all this, Feng Ke’er suppressed her eager desire to go out and test it. She opened the Heaven-Reaching Manual to see whether there were any new skills she could learn. Although her understanding of skills had already reached a state of returning to the uncarved block, and her once-fervent pursuit of all sorts of skills had gradually become calm, the old saying still held: the more skills one had, the better. Even if she did not want to use them, learning more would broaden her horizons and deepen her understanding.

Unexpectedly, the Heaven-Reaching Manual actually offered dozens of skills. One of them, called spatial art, drew her profoundly.

Spatial art: by condensing five-element spiritual energy into four or more types, one can create new space from nothing! This space is a miraculous existence. If one’s cultivation is not a thousand times greater than that of the creator, one cannot even sense its presence!

However, after Feng Ke’er read the specific method of creation, her heart turned cold at once. Spatial art consumed an enormous amount of spiritual energy. The required spiritual energy had to be one hundred percent pure. Within her body, the only pure spiritual energy she could claim was fire spiritual energy. As for another type, according to the Old Ghost Huang and the Old Ghost Yin, although it was pure spiritual energy, it was a mutated form of water spiritual energy—ice spiritual energy—and no one knew whether that would count.

Perhaps spatial art was very complicated. Therefore, the manual also explained its principles in great detail. The five elements of spiritual energy generate and restrain one another; when they reach a state of balance, they can condense into crystals. Once the crystal fragments accumulate to a certain amount, the massive energy they gather can give birth to a new space.

The moment Feng Ke’er saw the words condense into crystals, her heart gave a hard leap. It seemed that her ice spiritual energy could directly condense into crystals. Perhaps... whatever. How would she know whether it worked if she did not try?

So Feng Ke’er carefully sorted through the creation method provided in the manual, then combined it with her own actual situation and began the experiment.

No one knew how much time had passed before she noticed the air before her beginning to condense and solidify. As the ice spiritual energy continued to pour forth, this phenomenon became more and more obvious. In the end, that layer of air finally turned into a pale blue, shimmering curtain.

Hmm, that did not seem quite right. The manual clearly said it should be black... After a brief hesitation, Feng Ke’er kept chanting the spell while following the method in the manual, lightly brushing that curtain with her right hand.

With a hiss, a bright slit appeared at the curtain’s center.

Did it work? Feng Ke’er clutched her heart, which felt ready to burst from her chest, and stepped into the slit.

Cold. So cold! A suffocating chill rushed straight at her face. Then Feng Ke’er saw a pale-blue, glittering world of ice, about five square meters in size and roughly a meter and a half high—wastefulness was shameful. Since it was only a prototype, naturally she had not made it too large.

Good heavens, how many degrees below zero would it have to be to freeze this way? In the blink of an eye, thick white frost had gathered over her body, eyebrows, and eyelashes.

Feng Ke’er figured this was probably because the five elements were seriously out of balance. Hmm, next time she would combine it with fire spiritual energy. Otherwise, this space would seem to have no practical use beyond serving as a portable block of ice. Thinking this, she was preparing to leave the space and try again, since the manual said that without spiritual energy to sustain it, the space would eventually perish.

Who would have thought she now felt as though her whole body were soaked in glue—bound hand and foot, unable to move at all?

As expected, cutting corners was wrong. Feng Ke’er groaned inwardly. No wonder that old geezer still wanted her to purify the other two kinds of spiritual energy... but why did he want her to create space in the first place...?

At last, frozen into an ice lump, she used all the strength she had to crawl out of the space she had made.

Just then, one of the illusion mirrors in the cave abode suddenly blazed with dazzling light.

Someone was fighting outside again!

Feng Ke’er quickly used fire spiritual force to melt the solid ice on her body and lifted her eyes toward the illusion mirror hanging directly above the cave abode. Because of the breath-concealing talisman, she had spent the past two hundred years watching the excitement through that mirror quite often.

In the mirror, black smoke billowed thickly. Almost at the same moment, she heard a low roar rising from within the smoke: “Die, you old thief, where do you think you’re running!”