86: Chapter 86 Healing and Saving Lives: Zuo Ciyuan

Xie Feng spent several days attending classes in Zuo Ciyuan's Governors Mansion, feeling as though his brain had been scooped out of his cranium, thrown into a medicine-grinding stone mortar, pounded back and forth dozens of times with a stone pestle, and then stuffed back in whole.

This was the first time Xie Feng realized that the cognitive gap between a Ninth Realm Cultivator and an ordinary person wasn't just a matter of one or two Realms, but a matter of an entire species.

It was unknown how long this person had been out of the world, and no one had visited the Governors Mansion for decades or even centuries, making the content he taught obscure and difficult to understand.

On the first day, he lectured on the Cultivation system; it was alright—Nine Realms and Nine Heavens, three major Bottlenecks, with the Fourth Realm and Seventh Realm each acting as a hurdle. On the second day, he lectured on the imperial court's official system, from the cabinet to the Six Ministries and local prefectures; Xie Feng could barely remember it. On the third day, he lectured on the classification of anomalies and how to convert between Sect standards and imperial court standards; Xie Feng chewed on the end of his brush and filled half a stack of paper with notes. On the fourth day, he lectured on the distribution of Sects—how many Sects there were in Qingzhou, where their respective Peaks were located, what the Sect Heads' surnames were, and how high their Cultivation was.

Xie Feng began to space out.

The fifth day was even more brutal: Zuo Ciyuan broke down the differentiation of the Five Elements of Spiritual Qi and explained it in detail, covering dozens of variations of mutual generation and restriction among wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.

Xie Feng started rolling his eyes halfway through. Originally, he was an eager-to-learn baby, but when he asked Zuo Ciyuan how to perceive the Fourth Realm Bottleneck, Zuo Ciyuan glanced at him and said,

"You just perceive it like that. After the Dantian stabilizes, the spiritual power naturally seeps outward, and once it seeps to a certain degree, it naturally stirs the Heaven and Earth. What kind of special feeling do you need?"

"That's you." Xie Feng couldn't help complaining.

Zuo Ciyuan was born with all nine Meridians fully opened. Right after birth, he was almost blown apart by the surge of Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi, so Bottlenecks simply didn't exist in his eyes.

This was why geniuses were unsuited to be teachers. For problems that students couldn't understand, the teacher understood them even less than the students, much like seeing someone who didn't know how to breathe ask you how to breathe.

Zuo Ciyuan's reaction was just like that: "Does this even need to be taught?"

"How long did it take you to achieve a Breakthrough to the Seventh Realm?" Xie Feng poked his own forehead with his brush.

Zuo Ciyuan thought about it: "Less than a month."

Then he paused for a moment, his brow slightly furrowed, "Why are you asking this? The Seventh Realm Bottleneck isn't something you can figure out just by sitting there and thinking; it clears up naturally when the time comes."

Heh...

That night, when Xie Feng returned to the inn, he collapsed straight onto the bed. Tu Ziguan was squatting beside the table studying a new weapon, and hearing the sound of Xie Feng crashing onto the bed, he didn't even raise his head. "Crushed by the Lord Governor of Qingzhou again?"

"Tu Wu, let me ask you something." Xie Feng lay on the bed, pulled his blind cane out from under himself, and placed it outside the quilt, "When you achieved a Breakthrough from the Second Realm Nine Heavens to the Third Realm back then, how did you perceive the Bottleneck?"

The carving knife in Tu Ziguan's hand stopped. "You're asking me this? Your Third Realm Peak is even higher than mine, and you're asking me how to achieve a Breakthrough to the Third Realm?"

"My Third Realm Peak was forcibly crammed in by Cthugha, the Night Demons, and Cthulhu pouring energy together. I myself haven't even touched the threshold from the Second Realm to the Third Realm."

Tu Ziguan put down the carving knife and turned around.

"So all that hard work you put in in Ranhuo City meant your Cultivation was picked up for free? Fine. As for a Bottleneck, it's just when spiritual power gets blocked at a certain position during circulation. From the Second Realm Nine Heavens to the Third Realm, it gets blocked right in the dead center of the Dantian. You can feel that spiritual power has filled the entire Dantian, but there is simply a layer of membrane that you can't break through. You have to divide your spiritual power into countless extremely fine threads and poke them in one by one. When you poke the thousandth thread, that layer of membrane will tear on its own."

Xie Feng lay on the bed in silence for a moment. Isn't this just the thread-ification of magic? He had been doing this in his Meridians for a very long time, but he had never thought of using the exact same principle to break through a spiritual power Bottleneck.

It seemed that Wen Heng making him read cultes des goules wasn't purely a whim; that book taught him how to convert spiritual power into magic, and after completing the conversion, he would inversely convert it back to spiritual power. Thus, the precision of his spiritual power control was far higher than that of Cultivators in the same Realm.

Not a single one of these old foxes was simple!

Just as he was thinking this, Tu Ziguan spoke again.

"Speaking of which, I've always been quite curious about one thing. You lived in Qingyun Sect for over half a year, how come you never went to the Skill Transmission Hall even once? The Skill Transmission Elder gives three major lectures every month, covering all the basics from the First Realm to the Third Realm."

"Our Sect even has a Skill Transmission Hall??"

"What? I always thought you had a Golden Finger! Turns out you practiced basic introductory Cultivation Techniques in your dorm for two years???"

Xie Feng was silent for a moment before giving his answer.

"I was afraid of running into Pu Huai outside."

At that time, Xie Feng hid in his room all day, and even going out to find Mo Tang required Tu Ziguan to drag him out forcibly. The Skill Transmission Hall? He didn't even know which direction the doors of the Skill Transmission Hall opened to. Back then, he only knew a few halls he could visit; he didn't dare go anywhere else.

You couldn't really blame the two of them; it was just that their nerves were somewhat thick.

After all, in his previous life, Xie Feng's best friend was a COC player he met online whom he always called "Dragon at the End of the World". They had known each other for over ten years without knowing the other's real name.

"You really have it miserable," Tu Ziguan said. "I thought you were staying in your room cultivating with some Golden Finger of yours. Turns out you were hiding from someone the whole time?" But he immediately chuckled again, "However, he's not around anymore. After an out-of-town mission, Pu Huai never returned to Qingyun Sect. Nobody knows where he went."

Xie Feng knew Pu Huai wouldn't disappear forever; Nyarlathotep was simply waiting for the next module, the next event, the next die to land. The snickering of the three-legged creature was still echoing deep within his consciousness, and he didn't know when it would ring out again.

The next day, when he went to the Governors Mansion again, Zuo Ciyuan continued lecturing on the varied applications of spiritual power Five Elements differentiation in actual combat. Hearing only half of it and truly unable to understand, Xie Feng raised his hand to interrupt, then honestly repeated Tu Ziguan's theory regarding the Bottleneck, saying, "Senior, look, this is how normal people break through a Bottleneck. Dividing it into a thousand spiritual power threads and poking them in. That 'it clears up naturally' of yours is useless to people like us who weren't born with all nine Meridians fully opened."

Zuo Ciyuan was silent for a moment, then put down his teacup.

"Then my teaching was inappropriate." The Ninth Realm Cultivator's voice suddenly softened a fraction, as if he were introspecting, or as if he were recalibrating his understanding of "Mortals". "I started as a Loose Cultivator, taught myself all the way, and have never taken a Personal Disciple. You are the first person I have taught personally."

"?"

Xie Feng was stunned for a moment. Right, Zuo Ciyuan started as a Loose Cultivator; he probably had the same background as himself and didn't have so many channels to learn things either.

"Then did you practice basic Cultivation Techniques all along like me?"

"Yeah, I just practiced introductory Cultivation Techniques all the way until the Sixth Realm when I found out there were other Cultivation Techniques in the world."

"I have nothing to say to a Genius. Seriously, Teacher, spare me."

Xie Feng was truly speechless. Can cultivating basic Cultivation Techniques really get someone to the Sixth Realm? This damn Genius must look at Mortals like they are monkeys!

Just as Xie Feng was poking his cheek with his brush handle, Zuo Ciyuan sat across from the low table. He had just finished lecturing on the seven-variant applications of wood-attribute spiritual power in a water-attribute environment. Xie Feng had only understood two of them; the remaining five had turned into a total mess of paste in his head.

Just at that moment, footsteps came from outside the door.

Xie Feng spread out his spiritual power perception—this had already become a habit, seeing that he had been blind for so long and couldn't recover it all at once—and then Xie Feng touched upon a very familiar spiritual power fluctuation.

The door was knocked on. Without saying come in, Zuo Ciyuan directly pushed the door open.

"Elder Liu?" Xie Feng stood up, his blind cane tapping the ground, "Why have you come?"

Elder Liu stood at the doorway holding a scroll of official documents stamped with the vermilion seal of the Qingyun Sect Penal Hall.

"Sent by the Sect. Sect Master Shen had me deliver it directly into your hands. The Sect's resolution has been passed. Starting from today, you will begin an extended leave of absence of indefinite duration, and you may decide for yourself when to return to the Sect to report."

He handed over the official document. Xie Feng took it, his fingertips brushing over the vermilion seal on the cover.

Zuo Ciyuan moved. The movement technique of a Ninth Realm Cultivator was fast to the extreme; his black robe stretched into an extremely long afterimage in the air, which Xie Feng's spiritual power perception simply couldn't keep up with.

By the time he re-captured Zuo Ciyuan's position, Elder Liu's entire body had already been pinned against the wall. One of Zuo Ciyuan's hands was gripping his throat, while the other hand, with five fingers loosely curled into a claw, gave a backward pull.

Something inside Elder Liu's body was forcefully yanked out by this pull.

That was another mass of something hidden within Elder Liu's shell—grayish-white, somewhere between mist and gelatin, constantly rolling and writhing.

Spiritual power seeped out from Zuo Ciyuan's palm, forcing that mass of things entirely out of Elder Liu's facial orifices and Meridian nodes, sealing every single node tightly shut so that not even the finest wisps of mist remained.

Elder Liu's body convulsed violently against the wall, his eyes snapping wide open. His dull eyeballs regained their focus, as if he had been forcefully hauled up from the bottom of very, very deep water.

"What's wrong?!"