103: Chapter 103 Cultivation Techniques

The cultivation room in the Immortal Cave had been rearranged by Jiang Yan.

The Spirit Gathering Array Formation Plate had been moved to the center of the cultivation room. The octagonal Formation Plate was embedded in the gaps between the floor tiles, and the dozen or so spiritual jades along its edge emitted a warm, milky white halo under the light of the night-luminescent pearl.

He had moved the snake egg Spirit Gathering Array to the southeast corner of the cultivation room. Between the two Formation Plates, he had set up a simple spiritual power barrier made from the leftover scraps of spiritual jade—the barrier was only three feet high, standing on the stone floor like a low wall, with a very faint cyan light film flowing across it.

This barrier could not block any attacks, but it was enough to isolate the fluctuations of Spiritual Qi that leaked out during cultivation, so as not to disturb the incubation of the snake eggs.

Jiang Yan sat cross-legged in the center of the Spirit Gathering Array and poured two peiyuan pills from a jade bottle, placing them on the stone floor to the right of his knees.

The Medicinal Pills made a very faint clinking sound as they rolled, sounding exceptionally crisp in the quiet cultivation room.

He closed his eyes and began his long, arduous cultivation.

The way the Azure Wood Longevity Art operated was completely different from the Bloodthirsty Demon Scripture.

When cultivating the Demonic Technique, spiritual power felt as if it were being forcibly dragged into the Meridians—it didn't flow in; it crashed in. Every time he absorbed Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi, it was accompanied by a stinging sensation as the inner walls of his Meridians were brutally stretched.

However, the spiritual power of the Azure Wood Longevity Art seeped in. From the Baihui acupoint to the Dantian, and from the Dantian to the rest of his body, it was like spring rain seeping into parched soil—unhurried, steady, and natural.

A tender green vortex slowly rotated in his Dantian. With every rotation, a sliver of the Spiritual Qi gathered by the Spirit Gathering Array was absorbed.

The speed of conversion was not as violent as the Demonic Technique—the amount of spiritual power gained from one day of cultivating the Demonic Technique would usually take at least three days for an ordinary Righteous Path Cultivation Technique to catch up to.

But the purity of the spiritual power was different.

The spiritual power of the Demonic Technique was a murky dark purple, like muddy water mixed with ink.

The spiritual power of the Azure Wood Longevity Art was a clear, emerald green. As it flowed through his Meridians, it carried a faint, subtle sweetness, like the scent of freshly cut grass after being dried by the sun.

The first month or so was the hardest.

It wasn't because of pain—compared to the excruciating agony of having his Meridians torn apart alive when dispersing his cultivation, sitting in meditation was practically like soaking in a hot spring.

What was hard to endure was the monotony. Every day, he would swallow a peiyuan pill, refine the medicinal power, and once the medicinal power was exhausted, he would meditate to absorb the Spiritual Qi in the Spirit Gathering Array. Once the spiritual power in his Dantian was full again, he would swallow another peiyuan pill, repeating this cycle over and over.

There was no sunrise or sunset in the cultivation room, only the cold, dark green light of the night-luminescent pearl shining unchangingly upon the four stone walls.

Time became viscous in such an environment, like stretched syrup, and the boundary between one day and the next gradually blurred.

Fortunately, he had the experience of several hundred years from his previous life, and had sufficient patience and determination.

The Bottleneck between Qi Refining Stage 2 and Stage 3 was easily broken through with the accumulation of Medicinal Pill.

The vortex in his Dantian expanded from the size of a pigeon's egg to the size of a chicken's egg, and the tender green color gradually deepened, shifting from the light green of early spring sprouts to the emerald green of lush midsummer shade.

He could feel that the Spiritual Root Aptitude of this body was indeed as mediocre as he had initially judged—a Low Grade Spiritual Root, with an affinity for wood-attribute Spiritual Qi that was no better than lower-middle tier.

If this were an ordinary Loose Cultivator, with this kind of Aptitude, cultivating a Tier 4 Cultivation Technique would take several months just to understand and apply it, and there would be a high probability of getting stuck at some critical point, unable to make any progress.

But he had the foundation of his Golden Core Perfection Realm from his previous life. Every critical point in the operation of the Cultivation Technique, every route of spiritual power circulation, and every node of Bottleneck Breakthrough were as precise as if measured with a ruler; he did not take a single wrong turn.

It was like a carpenter planing wood. An ordinary apprentice had to glance at the ink line before every stroke, but he didn't need to look; as soon as he put his hand on it, he knew exactly how deep to plane.

Starting from the fourth month, he began to intersperse the practice of Spell while recovering his cultivation.

The first one he practiced was the Azure Wood Escape.

When the incantation for this escape technique unfolded in his Sea of Consciousness, he read it word for word, and couldn't help but feel a sense of admiration—the person who created this technique was indeed a Genius.

Ordinary escape techniques involved pushing one's own speed to the extreme, relying on the explosive force of spiritual power detonating under one's feet; in essence, it was a form of extremely fast movement.

But the principle of the Azure Wood Escape was completely different. It involved resonating and fusing the caster's own wood-attribute spiritual power with the wood qi of the surrounding vegetation, allowing the caster to "transfer" from one plant to another in an instant.

It wasn't flying over, it wasn't flashing over; it was merging in and then merging out.

He couldn't practice this in the cultivation room, so he had to go to the courtyard to practice late at night.

The courtyard was not big, with the bluestone floor paved neatly. A few clumps of weeds grew in the gaps between the stones, and a crooked locust tree at the base of the courtyard wall had half of its branches poking in.

On the well curb of the stone well in the center of the courtyard, a few dead vines were crawling. The roots of the vines were still stuck in the stone crevices, but the leaves above had long since fallen off.

He stood in front of the only decent tree in the courtyard—that crooked locust tree—and pressed his right hand against the rough bark.

When he tried for the first time, his spiritual power was bounced back the moment it touched the bark.

It wasn't a rebound; it was that feeling of having your hand pushed back by water pressure when you reach into water.

His whole body was shaken back three steps by the backlash, and his back hit the courtyard wall with a thud, shaking a layer of fine dust off the top of the wall.

A few sparrows perched on the branches of the locust tree were startled and flew up, circling twice in the night sky before landing back down, tilting their heads to look at him.

He brushed the dust off his shoulders, walked back to the locust tree, and pressed his palm against the bark again. This time, he was not in a hurry to inject his spiritual power.

He extended his Divine Sense into the trunk of the tree to feel the rhythm of the locust tree's wood qi—it was an extremely slow, extremely steady pulsation, countless times slower than a human heartbeat.

It wasn't a beat-by-beat thumping, but a long, continuous expansion and contraction that felt like breathing. Between one inhalation and one exhalation, it seemed to span several hours.

He adjusted the rhythm of his own spiritual power circulation to synchronize with the locust tree.

Inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale; the skin where his palm pressed against the bark gradually stopped feeling the roughness of the bark—it wasn't that the bark had become smooth, but that his perception had undergone a strange change during the resonance.

He could feel the sensation of the tree roots extending into the soil, could feel the arc of the leaf veins bending as the leaves swayed gently in the night wind, and could even feel the slight rise and fall of the feathers on the chest of the sparrow perched on the branch with every breath it took.

On the seventh night, his body merged into the old locust tree for the first time.

That was an experience completely different from any other escape technique.

His consciousness was still there, his Divine Sense was still there, but his body felt as if it had turned into a part of the tree sap, flowing slowly through the fiber bundles of the tree trunk.

He could perceive the sensation of the tree roots digging deep into the earth—the humidity of the soil, the hardness of the gravel, and the subtle movements of a few earthworms wriggling between the root systems.

He could perceive the extent to which the tree crown swayed gently in the night wind; when the wind blew from the east, the crown shifted three inches to the west, and when the wind force lessened slightly, the crown sprang back two inches.

He could even perceive the weight of an owl landing on the branch, causing it to sink slightly—the owl weighed about three jin, and the force of its claws gripping the branch was evenly distributed across its four toes.

He stayed in the locust tree for ten breaths, then, following the incantation, re-condensed his form from an ancient cypress tree three zhang away outside the courtyard.

The moment he walked out of the cypress tree, he looked down at his hands—his fingers were intact, and his robe was stained with the faint fragrance of pine resin.

The corners of his mouth twitched slightly. Azure Wood Escape: Minor Achievement.