Medicine Master Disciple’s Cultivation Notes

Chapter 169: Pay to Change Your Fate, the Grand Heavenly Circuit

Tu Feiyun had left, leaving a ground covered in bodies.

The work of dealing with those bodies took three full days before it was complete.

Only then did various pieces of secondhand information begin to circulate.

Those unfamiliar with Tu Feiyun would think he had been massacring innocent people indiscriminately.

Those like Li Qiuchen who knew a little about him would think, well, indiscriminate killing was hard to deny, but the victims weren't necessarily innocent.

Moving troops across a border without authorization was a crime equivalent to treason.

Connected to this was a rumor that had been spreading from the neighboring Jiamu County.

Apparently a young woman from there had entered the palace and been favored by the emperor, elevated to the rank of noble consort.

When the news came back, her entire extended family had risen along with her.

Not only the Golden Valley Trading Company. Local officials, wealthy merchants, and powerful figures throughout Jiamu County had all gone into a collective frenzy.The commotion had grown so large that when the Golden Valley Trading Company arrived in Yun County, both the magistrate and the sheriff had felt obliged to give them some face.

Even though everyone knew the underlying story was implausible. Yes, the premise of this rumor hadn't existed from the very beginning.

The Great Chu Empire had no emperor, and therefore no noble consort.

There was only the imperial heir and the heir's consort.

The Emperor Lord hadn't died.

But ordinary people didn't know these distinctions.

Yun County was a remote corner of the northern frontier, an enormous distance from the capital.

What if? What if the event had genuinely occurred, but the message had gotten garbled along the way?

So without a clear definitive answer from above, the magistrate had taken the stance of better to treat it as real.

If it later turned out to be a groundless rumor, that was Jiamu County's problem. Nothing to do with him.

The key issue was precisely this matter of no clear definitive answer.

The situation had been going on for some time without any response from higher authorities, and that naturally gave people reason to wonder.

Now there was no need to worry about it anymore.

The son of the Tu family from the capital had personally gone to investigate.

Magistrate Peng's sleep quality had seen a considerable improvement over the past two days.

Let things go however they would. The headaches belonged to someone else now.

Li Qiuchen's situation was the precise opposite.

Sleep was hardly worth mentioning. He had barely closed his eyes in two days.

His most pressing task was unquestionably cultivating his Elixir Viscera.

With the Golden Valley Trading Company's troubles resolved by Tu Feiyun, Li Qiuchen had nothing left to worry about.

Yet when he read through the jade slip's contents with his spiritual sense, he found he had been oversimplifying even this matter.

The Inner Elixir Cultivation Method. Official Great Chu texts were almost uniformly straightforward in their naming.

The opening line of the very first volume read: For cultivators of the immortal path, the most important thing is the spiritual root.

That nearly triggered an involuntary stress reaction before he'd gotten past the first sentence.

The content that followed was considerably more substantive, and focused primarily on explaining the nature of spiritual roots.

Ancient cultivators had treated spiritual roots as an essential prerequisite for cultivation, and many sects, when selecting disciples, would directly disqualify anyone who lacked them.

Spiritual roots were further subdivided in many ways: the five elemental roots, wind and lightning roots, heavenly roots, earthly roots...

But what exactly was a spiritual root?

The ancients had proposed many mystical explanations, all of them speculative without any real evidence to support them.

Until the Emperor Lord put forward the concept of the Elixir Viscera, and at the same time offered a redefinition of the spiritual root itself.

A spiritual root was a mutated meridian.

The human body had three hundred and sixty-five acupuncture points, connected to each other by the meridians running throughout.

When a meridian underwent mutation, depending on its specific location, it would develop an affinity for a particular kind of energy. This was what the so-called five elemental roots were.

Just as Spider-Man gained the ability to scale walls after being bitten by a spider, or how Dr. Banner was bombarded by gamma radiation and became a being of tremendous strength.

The same principle applied.

The Elixir Viscera concept put forward by the Emperor Lord was what ancient cultivators had called the heavenly root.

The difference was that ancient cultivators either possessed a heavenly root or they didn't, entirely by chance. One might search through tens of millions of people without finding a single cultivator with a heavenly root.

But the Elixir Viscera cultivation method allowed deliberate control over meridian mutation, essentially mass-producing the equivalent of a heavenly root artificially.

Reading this, Li Qiuchen began to understand why the difference between a present-day cultivator and a traditional ancient one was so dramatic.

He was starting from a heavenly root equivalent. How could anyone compare?

Who said older always meant stronger?

Times progressed.

The disciples with heavenly roots that countless ancient immortal sects once fought desperately to secure were now available to anyone in the Great Chu Empire who passed the illusory realm trials, even in the most remote and minor of county towns on the empire's backwater frontier.

No wonder Senior Brother Yang had been buried in research on nurturing spiritual roots. Li Qiuchen had assumed he was exploring some heterodox method.

Well. Heterodox was correct, and Senior Brother Yang had never tried to hide his intentions.

He hadn't had confidence in clearing the second-grade illusory realm, so he had begun researching how to cultivate a second-grade Elixir Viscera through other means.

Back to the Inner Elixir Cultivation Method.

The inner elixir, the Elixir Viscera, could achieve an effect equivalent to a heavenly root, while being distinct from the naturally mutated heavenly root.

There were two approaches to cultivating an Elixir Viscera. One was transplantation. The other, applicable to someone like Li Qiuchen whose ancestor had cultivated one, was to attempt to activate the hidden mutant potential carried in the bloodline.

Original manufacture was naturally superior to refurbished goods.

To cultivate an Elixir Viscera, the first step was opening all three hundred and sixty-five acupuncture points throughout the body, entering the embryonic breathing state, and allowing all meridians connecting those points to enter a state of extinction. Holding this state for twelve two-hour periods before proceeding to the rebirth phase.

The complete process was called one Grand Heavenly Circuit. A single attempt did not guarantee success, but after nine repetitions mutation would inevitably occur.

If the result was still unsatisfactory, further Grand Heavenly Circuits could be run. If nothing had emerged after eighty-one repetitions, the issue likely lay with the ancestor, who may have been exaggerating.

In plain terms, the essential mechanism was: reset the account and draw the new player free ten-pull, and see if a gold card came out.

Even if the ten-pull yielded nothing, the ninety-draw guarantee would kick in.

If no gold card appeared in the first eighty draws and none came in the following pulls either, then the problem wasn't the pool. You would need to ask your ancestor whether they'd actually had a pity guarantee.

Who had invented this method?

The Emperor Lord, of course. In which case there was nothing more to say.

One could only say that the Emperor Lord was a transcendent genius whose mind operated on a completely different level from everyone else's.

Who else would have thought that meridians worked like the small button battery on a computer motherboard, where you could remove it, let it discharge completely, and then put it back in?

If one attempt didn't work, try again. If two didn't work, try three. As long as you weren't deterred by the effort, a gold card was statistically guaranteed in the long run.

There was also the paid option, of course.

This crossed from the domain of the Heaven of Freedom into the domain of the Heaven of Longevity.

According to the Inner Elixir Cultivation Method's instructions, while the meridians were in the extinction state, one could use spiritual plants carrying powerful life energy to nourish the meridians, greatly increasing the probability of a successful output during the rebirth phase.

It could even improve the quality of the Elixir Viscera produced.

The seven-colored lotus flower Li Qiuchen had received as a trial-clearing reward was precisely the sort of thing that could nourish meridians.

And it wasn't the only thing Li Qiuchen had available.

He had been carefully preserving the thousand-year peach wood core taken from the old peach tree, the very essence of a Golden Core realm Medicine Master remnant's life force.

He had never been willing to eat it himself, holding it in reserve with the intention of finding a suitable pill formula to refine it into something useful.

Now there was no need to refine anything. He could apply it directly to himself.

And life energy as a resource...

He was a Medicine Master's blessing carrier. If he was short of anything, life energy was not it.

The Inner Elixir Cultivation Method read almost as though it had been tailored specifically for followers of the Medicine Master.

Which explained why Murong Feng had become the inner hall's chief senior brother.

As for why Li Jingyun had dropped out, Li Qiuchen was not acquainted with the man and had nothing to say about him, and would prefer not to discuss him further.

So for these past few days Li Qiuchen had done nothing else. He had devoted himself entirely to preparing to open his Elixir Viscera.

After absorbing three full days of sunlight, Li Qiuchen emerged from his meditation.

The countless sprouts and tender leaves that had grown from his body fell away on their own, withering and fading.

The weather at this time of year wasn't particularly kind to plants, but that wasn't something he could worry about.

Early cultivation meant early benefit.

Having absorbed an abundant amount of sunlight, his body was now at peak condition.

Following the guidance laid out in the Inner Elixir Cultivation Method, he began opening his acupuncture points one by one, starting from the crown of his head.

Traditional cultivation used the points to absorb natural spiritual energy. What was required now was to open the points and release the spiritual energy stored in the meridians outward.

As the points throughout his body were opened and he entered the embryonic breathing state, with the meridians falling into extinction, Li Qiuchen felt as though he had become a crumbling wall with gaps letting in wind from every direction. A cold draft moved through his body like small blades cutting along his meridians.

The process was extremely painful, and had to be maintained for twelve full two-hour periods.

But Li Qiuchen had no need to endure it through sheer willpower. He took the jade case holding the seven-colored lotus flower and placed the entire bloom in his mouth.

There would be no waiting through eighty-one Grand Heavenly Circuits. He intended to succeed on the first attempt.

The medicinal power of the seven-colored lotus seeped into his body, like a thin layer of oil spread along dried-out meridians. The pain eased almost immediately.

The sun rose and set. The night brought frost across the ground.

The air temperature in deep autumn had already dropped below freezing.

Li Qiuchen sat motionless in the courtyard, lifeless as a dried-out shell.

Time flowed past moment by moment.

As the medicinal power of the seven-colored lotus was gradually consumed, the meridians within his body began to stir from their state of extinction and enter the rebirth phase.

Using the inner vision technique to examine his meridians, Li Qiuchen saw that a translucent membrane had formed along the vessel walls throughout his body. This was the embryonic form of the Elixir Viscera.

How fast an aircraft could fly depended primarily on whether the engine materials could withstand corrosion and heat stress.

The same principle applied here.

For a newcomer who had just set foot on the cultivation path, producing an Elixir Viscera on the first attempt was already an unexpected windfall.

But Li Qiuchen wasn't satisfied.

There was a difference between a Bentley and a Mazda.

He took the peach wood core in hand, contemplated it for a moment, then placed it directly in his mouth and bit off a small piece, chewing and swallowing.

The texture was agreeable, something like chewing sugarcane. There wasn't much juice to it, but a remarkable fruity fragrance filled his mouth.

Not bad as a flavor. Not particularly easy to swallow.

A current of warmth spread instantly from Li Qiuchen's stomach throughout his entire body.

Li Qiuchen gave a violent shudder. What had felt like a mild warmth in his stomach exploded in an instant to several hundred degrees of heat, like an electric scooter battery detonating.

A countless number of cells throughout his body transformed into woody fibers in a single moment. Bright green shoots burst from all three hundred and sixty-five acupuncture points across his body, growing at visible speed, pushing out along the meridians.

[NEXT CHAPTER]