Boring Journey

He was seriously short on spirit stones, and luckily, he had quite a few of the various new products he had made on a whim some time ago. Finding a city to sell them in would make up for the shortfall.

For the first two days after taking flight, Lin Xiao remained quite disciplined, flying normally and carefully recording the map along the way.

But traveling alone was ultimately boring. Although Lin Xiao still had Sys to exchange a few words with, those exchanges were limited to a few words at most. Sys was not the sort of good System who enjoyed chatting at length.

By the third day of flying on his sword, Lin Xiao began to feel bored. His whole person had grown listless, and collecting information for the map had become a mechanical, repetitive task performed almost by muscle memory.

Seeing this, Sys was puzzled. Sys was confused.

Back when Lin Xiao had been secluded in the sect, he had spent more than two days in seclusion at a time, yet he had never displayed symptoms like these.

Sys was not the sort to keep its questions bottled up, so it asked him directly.

Lin Xiao gazed into the distance and said in a melancholy tone, “You wouldn’t understand.”

Sys: …

Sys’s first attempt to start a conversation had failed. Someone who kept shouting about being bored had managed to kill the conversation stone-dead.

Lin Xiao did not notice that the System had fallen silent. Sitting cross-legged on his flying sword, he began wondering whether he should find a city and go in for a look around. Traveling alone really was no fun.

Earlier, he had asked the Yuan family for a map of the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains. He had been making his way toward the Profound Extremity Domain by the shortest route, and judging from what he could see, he should have more or less left the territory of the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains and entered the Profound Extremity Domain.

However, the map was rather crude and only showed the general boundaries. Lin Xiao could use it to determine his approximate direction, but he could not estimate the distance with any precision.

Highly precise maps were not popular in the cultivation world. For one thing, producing such maps would certainly cost a great deal, which meant they would be expensive. Most people only needed to know the general direction and had no use for such fine detail. As a result, there was little market for precise maps, and naturally, few people specialized in making them.

Perhaps some of the larger sects, with sufficient manpower and resources, had the ability to produce them, but they certainly would not allow such things to circulate on the open market.

It might seem that Lin Xiao had effortlessly flown from Yuanling City, at the very edge of the Southern Spirit Domain, into the Profound Extremity Domain in just over two days. That was only because he could maintain full speed without ever needing to stop and replenish his energy.

Any ordinary Nascent Soul cultivator would have been incapable of this. Even with spirit stones or pills to replenish spiritual power, it would still have been difficult. Not to mention the enormous quantity of spirit stones and pills required to absorb them while flying at full speed, rapidly taking in large amounts of spiritual power that could not be properly circulated by one’s cultivation technique would itself damage one’s meridians.

Unless they were fleeing for their lives or faced some other desperate situation, cultivators basically never did such a thing.

More importantly, the Primordial Essence Heart Sutra Lin Xiao cultivated was an extremely high-grade cultivation method with an exceptionally high conversion rate. The amount it could accomplish in a single circulation was far beyond what could be achieved by the ordinary cultivation methods practiced by most cultivators.

Not to mention that Lin Xiao had now unlocked primordial qi as well.

To a cultivator, primordial qi and spiritual energy were roughly like dry firewood and kerosene in terms of how long they could burn.

With the same intensity of flame, spiritual energy was dry firewood that would be gone after burning for a while, whereas primordial qi was kerosene that could keep burning without being exhausted.

After flying onward for a while longer, Lin Xiao keenly sensed that the spiritual energy around him seemed to have grown slightly denser.

He had probably really entered the Profound Extremity Domain now.

However, there was no obvious boundary between one Spirit Domain and another. He had originally thought he would have to pass through some checkpoint or cross some kind of barrier.

He had not expected it to be so easy.

If that was the case, why did so many cultivators from the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains still choose to settle and cultivate there instead of moving to the Profound Extremity Domain, where the spiritual energy was denser?

The moment this question arose in Lin Xiao’s mind, he thought it over and came up with the answer.

The reason was certainly not a single one. To many cultivators from the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains, that place was their homeland and hometown. There, they were the local experts, thoroughly familiar with all the rules of survival. Moreover, many cultivators had their own clans or sects, and the spiritual energy and spirit veins available to them there were certainly incomparable to places in the Profound Extremity Domain where no spirit veins or concentrations of spiritual energy could be found.

Even for ordinary rogue cultivators, although the overall concentration of spiritual energy in the Profound Extremity Domain was somewhat higher than in the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains, it was not so much higher that they would be willing to make the long journey there. The expenses of the trip alone would be considerable. What was more, the spiritual energy was denser there, and the cultivators’ overall level of cultivation was higher as well, which meant the place was also more dangerous than the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains.

The cost of cultivation there was higher too. Although the Northern and Southern Spirit Domains were remote, many things could not command a high price there and were far cheaper than in the Profound Extremity Domain.

It was true that they lacked many high-end treasures, but such things had little to do with ordinary cultivators in the first place.

Not to mention all the connections involving local relatives, friends, and acquaintances.

All these conveniences could not be made up for by a mere difference in spiritual energy between Spirit Domains.

Thus, many cultivators were unwilling to leave their homeland and settle in another Spirit Domain.

With nothing better to do, Lin Xiao entertained himself by asking questions in his own head and answering them himself.

Even his posture while flying on the sword gradually became more unusual.

He began controlling the flying sword and playing roller coaster in the sky.

If someone on the ground had happened to look up at that moment, they would have seen a streak of light flying rapidly through the sky, trailing a winding, twisting vapor trail behind it.

A few rogue cultivators who lived in seclusion in the mountains happened to be passing by with their child and actually saw it.

The several-year-old child tugged on his father’s sleeve and pointed at the winding trail lingering in the sky, exclaiming with longing, “Daddy, I want to play that!”

The father followed the child’s pointing finger and looked up. He was so frightened that he hurriedly pushed down the hand pointing toward the sky. Then, facing the direction in which the vapor trail had disappeared, he repeatedly bowed and apologized.

“My child doesn’t know any better. Please don’t blame him, Immortal Venerable. Please don’t blame him.”

Although Lin Xiao had long since flown a thousand kilometers away, he still sensed the disturbance just now.

He merely shook his head slightly and continued onward without stopping.

This world was vast, and everyone had their own rules for survival.

There were differences in cultivation, differences in talent, and differences in opportunities and fortune. These differences inevitably gave rise to differences in social class.

Many people did not truly hate the existence of class. They simply hated that they were not among those standing at the top. They hated that they were not the ones capable of stepping on others.

When people like that really did reach the top, they became the very kind of person they had once hated…

Huh, an Inkcloud Stone? There’s actually such a large patch here. It looks like it’s ownerless too. Better record it, better record it.

And Three-Valley Grass? Record it, record it.

…

Thus, while letting his thoughts wander wherever his observations led them, adding what he saw to the records in his storage ring, and occasionally playing sky roller coaster, Lin Xiao flew deeper and deeper into the Profound Extremity Domain.