Crackle...
It was night, the moon was bright, and the stars were sparse.
Xiaobai was already lying on the bed, fast asleep and snoring.
The burning flames made crackling sounds. Danxia sat by the campfire, watching Ye Shu sitting cross-legged outside the house, tossing medicinal herbs into the pill furnace time and time again, repeating the exact same steps over and over.
The process was dull and tedious.
It had lasted for more than sixty hours.
She had no idea how Shu'er managed to endure it. Apart from the necessary eight hours of rest, he had been constantly repeating this tedious pill-refining process. From being unfamiliar to proficient, from producing two pills to four pills, then to a pill with a single pill mark, and now, occasionally, two pill marks would appear.
This child... why was he pushing himself so hard?
If it were her in the past, there was absolutely no way she could have endured it; she would have sneaked out to play long ago.
If Ye Shu knew what she was thinking, he would definitely laugh.
Couldn't endure it after just two days?
Back in the day, working on the BYD assembly line from eight in the morning to nine at night, with only two days off a month, he could do it for a whole year straight.
And when it came to things where hard work actually yielded rewards.
No matter how long he worked, he would never find it tedious.
Because the most precious and rare thing in this world was actually the concept that hard work pays off.
But what Danxia could not understand the most was.
Why was he refining Qi-Recovery Pills? With his cultivation at the third level of Qi Refining, he should be refining Qi-Gathering Pills for his cultivation, right? Recovery-type pills like the Qi-Recovery Pill were of no help in advancing one's cultivation base.
"Shu'er, why are you refining Qi-Recovery Pills?"
"To eat," Ye Shu replied without even turning his head.
"..."
Danxia fell silent.
It was this kind of perfunctory answer again. She could feel that Ye Shu had shut her out with an invisible barrier, polite yet distant...
For a moment, the small house fell silent again.
Under the quiet night sky, there was only the crackling of the burning flames and the sound of spiritual energy surging within the pill furnace.
Until the chirp of a cicada rang out.
"Shu'er... I didn't let you kill her not because your master is soft-hearted and deliberately making things difficult for you, but because that girl was dressed in luxurious clothes. She is from the Qingxuan Sect and her status is not low. If you had rashly killed her, it would inevitably trigger the fluctuations of her protective magical treasures. When the Qingxuan Sect tracks it down... Right now, your cultivation is still shallow, and it is not suitable to make more powerful enemies."
"What's more..."
She paused, but continued anyway.
"If you killed her, once you leave the Magical Beast Mountain Range, and if your master truly leaves and no longer protects you, how would you survive under the pursuit of the Qingxuan Sect?"
"If you kill her, nothing can be explained clearly anymore."
"If you keep her alive, you still have a bargaining chip."
"..."
The cicadas chirped in bursts outside the house.
Ye Shu, who had not spoken for a long time, finally opened his mouth.
He stopped putting in the medicinal herbs for the Qi-Recovery Pills. Instead, he skinned the demonic beast he had hunted and threw the beast skin into the pill furnace.
"There are two reasons why I am refining Qi-Recovery Pills."
"First, with my cultivation at the third level of Qi Refining, it is impossible to sustain pill refining for a long time. I must refine pills while using Qi-Recovery Pills to restore my spiritual energy. Otherwise, I would waste time slowly recovering my spiritual energy naturally, and I don't have that kind of time."
Hearing this, Danxia was stunned.
This child... was very anxious.
She could tell that Shu'er was weighed down by some invisible sense of urgency.
But she didn't know what it was.
The three-year agreement? It didn't seem like it...
"Second." Ye Shu continued speaking as the beast skin began to soften and shrink under the Nether Ice Flame.
"I want to use the Qi-Recovery Pills to cultivate. Although Qi-Gathering Pills are helpful for cultivation, the speed is still too slow."
Hearing this, Danxia felt even more confused.
"With your talent, combined with the Qi-Gathering Pills, you can step into the ninth level of Qi Refining in less than three months. Is that still slow? For normal cultivators, going from the third to the ninth level of Qi Refining, even with resources, taking three to five years is a common occurrence. Three months is already a monstrously fast speed!"
"It's still too slow."
Ye Shu slapped the pill furnace.
With a bang!
A silver pill exuding a strange medicinal fragrance was revealed, and the body of the pill actually emitted an eerie metallic luster.
Ye Shu grasped the pill and said indifferently.
"I want to reach the ninth level in three days."
"Reach the ninth level in three days?"
Even though Danxia was well-informed and experienced, she couldn't help but be left speechless.
She really wanted to say that Shu'er was bragging again, but then she suddenly remembered that with their current relationship, she seemed to have lost the right to say such things, and Ye Shu had no reason to joke with her.
So she fell silent again.
She looked at the pill radiating a metallic luster in Ye Shu's hand, and the incomprehension in her heart reached its peak.
It wasn't that she didn't recognize this pill.
It was precisely because she recognized it that she was so puzzled.
The Iron Armor Pill.
True to its name, it was refined using the skin of a second-tier Iron Armor Beast as the primer, supplemented by metal-attribute herbs like the Goldstone Grass. After taking it, the entire body would harden, briefly achieving the physical toughness of the Golden Core stage.
However, despite granting physical toughness.
Its side effects were far too severe. After consuming the pill, the flesh would harden like iron, making even the slightest movement extremely difficult and sluggish, practically stripping away one's mobility.
You would become an iron tortoise that could only take a beating.
Once the medicinal effect wore off, the enemy would mercilessly tear you to pieces. Therefore, very few people ever refined this pill, and even fewer used it; it was considered the most useless of useless items.
She racked her brains but still couldn't figure it out.
Ye Shu, however, had already sat down cross-legged, assuming a cultivation posture.
"Master, please feed me the Qi-Recovery Pills in a moment until I tell you to stop."
After saying that, he swallowed the Iron Armor Pill in one gulp.
At the same time, before the medicinal effect fully took hold, he took out thirty Qi-Recovery Pills and poured them all into his mouth in one go, as if he were eating jelly beans.
"Don't!"
Danxia's eyes widened to the point of tearing as she hurriedly tried to stop him, but it was completely too late.
Thirty Qi-Recovery Pills?
With Shu'er's cultivation at the third level of Qi Refining, it was absolutely impossible for him to contain such a massive amount of spiritual energy. Just like a balloon, once it over-expands, the only outcome is an explosion.
This was simply suicide!
However, the imagined explosion did not occur.
A layer of silver luster surfaced on Ye Shu's body. His face twisted in agony, yet he gritted his teeth and forced out a few words from his throat.
"Pills... give me the pills..."
At that moment, Danxia finally understood his intentions.
Ordinary cultivators could only accommodate the spiritual energy of their current realm.
The so-called cultivation was the process of expanding the dantian bit by bit until the spiritual energy reached a certain bottleneck, and then breaking through the shackles to reach the next realm.
Shu'er was using the Iron Armor Pill to briefly attain the physical body of the Golden Core stage. By relying on the physical toughness of the Golden Core stage, he was forcibly enduring the terrifying sea of spiritual energy brought about by the Qi-Recovery Pills.
In this way, he could forcibly absorb spiritual energy comparable to that of a Golden Core cultivator for his cultivation, even while still in the Qi Refining stage.
And right now, Shu'er was entirely skipping the expansion step.
He was... pulling up seedlings to help them grow!
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
his freshman year, Su Bai accidentally bound the "Indulgence Tycoon System." 【Sleeping in? Reward: +$1,000】 【Spent $288 at a street barbecue stall? Cashback: +$2,880】 【Dropped $14,396 on in-game skins? Special reward unlocked: A brand-new Porsche Panamera!】 Luxury cars, penthouses, corporate shares, financial empires… College life was all about living freely and doing whatever he pleased! … When the adorably naive academic genius faced family medical bills and financial struggles, Su Bai waved his hand dismissively: "Your future is on me." "Wuwu~ Big Brother is so good to me! I’ll become a scientist to repay you!" When the genius girl got bullied by a shady professor? Su Bai casually dropped a billion-dollar investment, forcing the university to grovel and beg for her return. A company’s funding chain collapsing? Su Bai smirked—cash was the one thing he’d never run out of. Years later, when people traced the rise of the AI prodigy beauty, who was the man behind her success? Not just that—Su Bai also became the tsundere campus belle’s unattainable dream, the contrast senior’s daily necessity, and the beautiful counselor’s emotional anchor…
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
to panic—he has a system. As long as an investment target dies, he can claim a reward. And since he is immortal, the one thing he has plenty of is time. ... Countless years later. “Immortal Emperor of Longevity? I invested in him.” “Supreme Celestial Venerable? I invested in him.” “Undying Empress? I invested in her.” “...” “Heh. Once they’ve all died, even the Heavenly Dao will have to kneel and call me Dad.”
