Chapter 13
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 13
One year later.
Three hundred li southeast of Cheongryu County City, in the Imgang Province of Untaek Kingdom.
A gentle, nameless mountain rose quietly against the sky.
Lacking spiritual veins, medicinal herbs, or valuable minerals, this barren hill had so few fruit-bearing trees that even wild beasts rarely made it their home. Woodcutters, herb gatherers, and hunters never set foot upon its slopes. Shunned not only by cultivators but by mortal villagers as well, it was as utterly ordinary as a mound of dirt could be.
Swish—
Something darted swiftly through the dense mountain grass.
At first glance, it looked like an oversized serpent slithering beneath the foliage. Upon closer inspection, however, it was a person clad in drab brown robes, gliding forward flat against the soil.
It was Lee Hyun.
Without twitching a single arm or leg, he layered the Soil-Turning Spell atop the Earth Escape Technique, sliding his prone body smoothly across the terrain.
Slither—
Feet-first with his head trailing behind, he parted the thick undergrowth. His pace was faster than that of a viper, yet the grass blades and low shrubs barely swayed in his wake.
Lee Hyun had dubbed this bizarre movement method the Reclining Escape Technique. Strictly speaking, it was more of a prone crawl than an escape art, but since he was the only person in the world using it, he could name it whatever he pleased.
He had good reason to move in such an eccentric fashion.
If someone spotted him walking openly to and from the mountain on a regular basis, baseless rumors might spread that the hill concealed some hidden treasure. On the other hand, burrowing underground from miles away and relying purely on the Earth Escape Technique drained far too much spiritual power.
The Reclining Escape Technique, by contrast, merely skimmed the surface rather than plunging his entire body beneath the earth. It consumed less than a tenth of the spiritual power required by a standard Earth Escape.
Furthermore, sliding through the grass from the foot of the hill made him virtually impossible to spot from a distance. Even if an onlooker caught a glimpse of movement, they would simply assume a wild beast was rustling through the brush.
The reclining figure soon reached a wide, flat boulder nestled along the mountainside. Without breaking momentum, he melted smoothly into the soil beneath it.
Slip—
Even if an observer had been staring directly at him, the transition was so seamless that they would have struggled to pinpoint the exact breath in which he vanished.
Roughly ten li—about four kilometers—beneath the surface.
Whoosh!
Lee Hyun dropped lightly from the vaulted dark ceiling.
Thud.
Back inside Tunnel No. 1, he made a straight line for the storage room.
A thick slab of stone served as the door. Sliding it aside revealed rows of sturdy wooden shelves and earthenware jars of varying sizes.
Lee Hyun took six hefty bundles from his storage pouch and set them on the floor.
Thump, rustle—
Untying the hemp cords released a cascade of plump walnuts, pine nuts, hazelnuts, dried peeled chestnuts, roasted ginkgo nuts, pitted jujubes, and cored lotus seeds. All were top-grade provisions procured from Cheongryu County City.
Lee Hyun carefully portioned the food into the jars. Before sealing each lid, he placed a lump of charcoal wrapped in thin paper inside to draw out any ambient moisture.
In all honesty, keeping them inside the storage pouch was the ideal method for long-term preservation. But this was a batch he intended to consume before it could spoil anyway, so storing them by hand made little difference.
Finally, he picked up a walnut and pressed it between two fingers.
Crack!
The hard shell split cleanly. Popping the nutmeat into his mouth, Lee Hyun stepped back out into the corridor.
Standing before the narrow passage beside the storage room, the earth beneath his boots rippled like dark water and swallowed him whole.
An instant later, he emerged into another corridor dozens of zhang away.
Before him stood a crude wooden sign driven firmly into the soil.
[Spirit field No. 1-1]
It marked the very first subterranean field of Tunnel No. 1.
Beneath the title, several lines of small, neat characters were inscribed:
–Date Cleared:
–Cultivars Sown:
–Last Spiritual Rain Spell Applied:
–Spirit Insect Log:
It was modeled directly after the spirit-field ledgers he had maintained back in Cheongha Valley.
Lee Hyun pushed the heavy stone door open and stepped inside.
Spirit field No. 1-1 was a long, narrow chamber measuring two zhang across and sixteen zhang in length, covering an area just over half a mu.
The ceiling hung about one zhang overhead. Along both flanks of the cavern, the solid bedrock had been intentionally left intact to serve as natural load-bearing pillars, reinforced by thick upright logs wedged tightly together to prevent any risk of a cave-in.
Lee Hyun had excavated this entire chamber using only the Soil-Turning Spell and his Earth-Shoveling Sword. Every basket of dislodged earth and stone had been repurposed to reinforce the surrounding tunnels or pack away useless voids.
Along the perimeter of the field grew a dense border of Earth Vein Flowers, their roots steadily drinking in the faint, ambient earth qi permeating the geological strata.
Just inside them stood a defensive wall of Purple Poison Orchids with drooping violet petals. In the central furrows lay rows of ivory Bone-Corroding Flowers and deep, indigo-hued Yin Soul Grass.
The miasma steadily exhaled by the Bone-Corroding Flowers and Purple Poison Orchids formed a lingering, pale-purple mist that hovered over the soil.
The toxicity was venomous enough that even an ordinary Qi Refining cultivator would struggle to endure it unprotected; mundane beasts and vermin could not even dream of drawing near. Even Lee Hyun, the master of the field, never stepped inside without his Spherical Qi Barrier and Breath-Holding Formula fully engaged, and he unfailingly cast both the Cleansing Spell and Detoxification Formula the moment he stepped outside.
Pacing slowly along the central furrow, Lee Hyun inspected the condition of the leaves and stems. Near the root base of an Earth Vein Flower, a tiny white cluster caught his eye.
“Laying eggs again, are you?”
Parting the dark soil revealed a small clutch of translucent insect eggs. A soft spark flickered at Lee Hyun’s fingertip, and a slender needle of concentrated silver light pierced cleanly through them with surgical precision.
Several species of spirit insects dwelled within this deep earth that he had never encountered in Cheongha Valley. Some were long and segmented like earthworms with wicked pincers on their heads; others were beetles so rough and mottled they were indistinguishable from clods of dirt.
These subterranean insects dared not approach the lethal toxins of the Yin Soul Grass, Bone-Corroding Flowers, or Purple Poison Orchids, choosing instead to target the milder Earth Vein Flowers. Yet because of the drifting poisonous mist, they could rarely reach the petals or stalks, managing only to deposit eggs near the tips of the roots.
Even left alone, the freshly hatched larvae would almost certainly perish in the fumes before doing real damage. Still, Lee Hyun eliminated every clutch the moment he noticed it, taking no chances.
“My very first subterranean spirit field… A proper system is finally taking shape.”
Lee Hyun took in the sight with quiet satisfaction.
Truth be told, conditions down here fell far short of Cheongha Valley’s Withered Yin Field. The growth rate of the three medicinal plants was barely a third of what it had been under optimal conditions. Yet aside from that slower pace, he had ironed out every major hurdle.
Perhaps because of that sluggish growth, there was no need to cast the Spiritual Rain Spell constantly; drenching the field once every ten days was more than sufficient.
His current crop stood at 120 stalks of Bone-Corroding Flowers, 300 clumps of Yin Soul Grass, and 80 bulbs of Purple Poison Orchids.
If they continued to grow without interference, they would take roughly three centuries down here to develop the potency of century-old spiritual medicines.
Lee Hyun had chosen to build his underground sanctuary ten li deep for two fundamental reasons.
First, the ambient temperature barely shifted at this depth.
Back in his past life, modern trivia had taught him that the earth grew steadily hotter the deeper one drilled. Geothermal plants plunged three to five kilometers down into the crust to harvest temperatures climbing into the hundreds of degrees Celsius.
Yet in this cultivation realm, descending ten li—four full kilometers down—produced almost no change in heat.
Spurred by curiosity, Lee Hyun had once driven his Earth Escape Technique and Earth-Shoveling Sword even further down. Only around twenty-five li deep—roughly ten kilometers—did the ambient temperature spike violently, venting crimson heat through cracks in the bedrock.
He had deduced that an Earthfire Vein or some subterranean magma flow ran beneath that threshold, and he saw no reason to push any deeper.
Second, the immense mantle of rock and earth completely stifled divine sense detection from above.
A cultivator’s divine sense traveled most efficiently through open air. Its range shrank dramatically when passing through dense water or packed soil, and encountering layers of bedrock and dense mineral veins degraded its reach even further.
Through careful tests with his own senses, Lee Hyun had discovered that soil cut his perception by nearly ninety percent. In practical terms, to project a divine sense scan ten li into the solid earth, a cultivator needed a divine sense strong enough to sweep across more than a hundred li of open sky.
If the rumors he had gathered during his time in Cheongha Valley held true, sweeping a divine sense across a hundred li was a feat reserved for supreme experts beyond the Golden Core Stage. In fact, many Nascent Soul cultivators would struggle to discern a tiny hollow at this depth with naked divine sense alone.
Naturally, a low-realm cultivator might stumble onto the hideout if they methodically searched the entire mountain with specialized detection artifacts or the Earth-Sensing Technique.
Yet such a scenario was virtually impossible. Why would any passing cultivator waste their precious time and spiritual power painstakingly combing the deep subterranean bedrock of a barren, spiritless hill? The world was unimaginably vast; doing so was equivalent to throwing jade into a bottomless swamp.
On top of that, very few cultivators ever bothered practicing the Earth Escape Technique. It was terribly inefficient for travel. A Qi Refining cultivator could sprint faster across open ground, while anyone at the Foundation Establishment Stage or above could simply step onto a flying sword and glide through the clouds.
Thus, Lee Hyun concluded that unless an enemy specifically targeted this nameless hill with prior knowledge, the odds of Tunnel No. 1 being discovered by sheer bad luck ten li underground were effectively zero.
His only minor inconvenience was food.
Cheongha Rice simply refused to take root in an underground field. Whether due to the total absence of sunlight or a clash with subterranean earth qi, cultivating it was impossible, forcing him to rely on mortal provisions.
That was why Lee Hyun periodically surfaced to visit Cheongryu County City or neighboring markets to purchase nuts and dried rations, just as he had done today.
His experimental crops of Blood-Clotting Grass and Clear Dew Herb had also failed to thrive. But neither plant gained immense value from prolonged aging, nor could they serve as staple sustenance like Cheongha Rice, so he abandoned them without a second thought.
Having completed his daily rounds in the spirit field, Lee Hyun followed the winding tunnel back to his cultivation chamber.
The chamber had been fashioned from a natural bedrock cavern he had stumbled across while excavating his complex.
A vault of smooth gray granite arched into a domed ceiling three zhang above the floor. He had planed the stone ground level with his Earth-Shoveling Sword, while one side of the cavern featured a sleeping slab and storage shelves chiseled directly out of the living rock.
Upon the shelves rested rows of wooden tablets inscribed with spell formulas, sealed jars containing subterranean insects for study, and small cedar boxes holding various soil samples. In the center of the cavern sat a simple wooden table and chair.
There were no windows, and with no Glimmer Spell cast, an absolute, ink-like darkness swallowed the space. Yet strangely, stepping into that sunless void filled Lee Hyun’s heart with an overwhelming sense of peace.
One corner of the chamber connected to the storage room, while a low, twisting tunnel led toward the spirit field. Near the dome of the ceiling, three wrist-thick ventilation shafts had been carefully bored through the stone.
He had intentionally dug the passage leading to the spirit field at a significantly lower elevation than his quarters. This ensured that the heavy, toxic miasma stayed pooled at the bottom rather than creeping up into his living space.
Passing through the chamber, Lee Hyun made his way down a newly excavated branch.
This was the designated site for Spirit field No. 1-2.
“Time to dig a little more.”
Lee Hyun drew the Earth-Shoveling Sword from his side.
Hummm—
As he channeled spiritual power through the hilt, the runic inscriptions along the broad blade began to hum, casting a warm ochre glow. He thrust the Earth-Shoveling Sword forward into the rock face. Instantly, the packed earth and stone softened like moist clay. With a casual flick of the Soil-Turning Spell, he tossed the excavated dirt behind him.
He had driven the passage forward about three zhang when—
Squelch.
The sensation at the sword tip changed without warning.
“Hm?”
Ahead lay a loose vein of fine sand mixed with rounded river pebbles. The surrounding dirt was completely waterlogged.
Lee Hyun pinched a bit of the wet silt between his fingers.
“Water?”
A forgotten scrap of knowledge from his past life drifted through his mind.
An aquifer…? A subterranean layer carrying pressurized water?
He knew very little about geology—only that underground veins of sand and gravel sometimes held massive reservoirs of water, and that digging a well meant tapping into them.
Lee Hyun took the tip of the Earth-Shoveling Sword and carefully prodded the wet vein.
Pshhh!
A slender jet of water burst violently through the puncture.
Gussshhh—
An instant later, the breach caved inward, opening a hole the size of a man’s fist that disgorged an explosive torrent of freezing water.
“Gah!”
The icy cascade slammed into Lee Hyun’s face and chest, nearly knocking him off balance. Water surged across the passage floor, rising toward his shins at a terrifying pace.
Damn it!
Lee Hyun cast the Soil-Turning Spell to force the surrounding clay into the rupture, but the furious current tore the mud away as fast as he packed it in.
Thinking quickly, Lee Hyun hauled a massive stone slab leaning against the tunnel wall.
Thud!
Activating the Soil-Softening Technique imbued within the Earth-Shoveling Sword, he softened the stone floor around the breach and slammed the edge of the slab a full cheok into the bedrock, wedging it directly over the leak.
Releasing the spell allowed the stone to snap back to its natural hardness, locking the slab into place like a vice. He swiftly layered heavy clay and gravel around the edges, compressing the mixture with the Soil-Turning Spell.
Water seeped through the hair-thin gaps for a brief moment, but once he packed the seams with treated clay, the violent rush finally died down.
“Phew…”
Standing ankle-deep in frigid water, Lee Hyun pushed his drenched hair back from his forehead.
The stone slab before him hummed with faint vibrations. Trapped directly behind it was an enormous reservoir of pressurized groundwater.
“Was that really an aquifer…? One bad swing and I almost drowned my own fields.”
Lee Hyun pulled up the wooden sign he had originally planted in the tunnel floor.
[Proposed Site for Spirit field No. 1-2]
Flipping it over, he drew his sword and carved fresh characters into the blank wood:
[Aquifer No. 1. Do Not Breach Recklessly.]
After a brief pause, he added two more lines below:
[Potential use as a future water reservoir.]
[Potential for cultivating aquatic spirit plants.]
After stripping off his soaked robes and changing into dry clothes, Lee Hyun returned to his table in the central chamber.
“Spirit field No. 1-2 will have to be moved far away from that aquifer… I’ll need to carve in a completely different direction. In any case, now that Tunnel No. 1 has its basic framework in place, it’s time to establish a real cultivation schedule.”
He took out a blank wooden tablet and began listing the cultivation methods and spells he needed to master, writing them down one by one.
[Primordial Unity Body, Qi-Concealment Technique, Spirit-Concealment Technique, Earth-Shrinking Step, Cheonggang Sword Formula, Spirit Light Shield, Fireball Technique, Sword Control Technique, Farsight Technique, Enhanced Hearing Technique, Night Vision Technique, Scent-Tracking Technique, Qi-Observation Technique, Earth-Sensing Technique…]
Looking down at the packed script, Lee Hyun’s face pulled taut.
“There are so many… but every single one of them is essential for survival.”
Mastering any technique required endless repetition. Yet as a mere 2nd layer Qi Refining cultivator, his spiritual power reserves emptied after just a handful of casts, making sustained practice nearly impossible.
“I have to forge the Primordial Unity Body first. Once I have more spiritual power, these spells should be easier to learn.”
Lee Hyun settled cross-legged upon the stone platform. Recalling the manual’s instructions for the Primordial Unity Body, he drew a single wisp of Primordial Unity True Qi from his dantian.
The true qi guided smoothly through his meridians, passing through his chest and shoulder down into his right arm. But rather than confining the energy within the palm’s meridians as ordinary arts dictated, he coaxed it to permeate outward, seeping into the surrounding flesh and bone.
Ssshh—
The wisp of Primordial Unity True Qi dispersed in an instant.
Probing with his divine sense, he discovered that the energy had spread so thinly through the muscle fibers of his hand that it was almost impossible to perceive.
Lee Hyun drew a second strand of Primordial Unity True Qi.
The second strand yielded the exact same result, as did the third.
He channeled qi from his dantian for an entire shichen without pause, yet his palm showed almost no perceptible physical change.
He could not help but remember the words Steward Wang Jin had spoken back in the sect:
—You will feel the sheer hopelessness of trying to fill a boundless ocean all on your own.
Lee Hyun looked down at the lines of his palm.
“It really is daunting. But if you keep pouring water into an ocean, day after day, year after year… then someday, even an ocean must fill.”
From that day forward, he poured every spare moment of his life into cultivating the Primordial Unity Body.
* * *
One hundred years later.
The wooden sign marking Spirit field No. 1-1 had weathered the long passage of time, its pale grain turned dark and aged.
The Bone-Corroding Flowers, Yin Soul Grass, and Purple Poison Orchids had seeded and propagated across generations, while the oldest rootstocks in the center held over thirty years’ worth of genuine medicinal potency. Considering the sluggish growth rate deep underground, they were maturing right on schedule.
Up on the mountain above, the seasons had cycled through rain and snow thousands of times.
The mortal magistrates of Cheongryu County City had come and gone across generations, and the shopkeeper from whom Lee Hyun had first purchased his provisions had turned to dust decades ago.
Every decade or so, Lee Hyun had shifted his excursions to different mortal towns, sometimes donning a false beard or smearing soot across his face to disguise his features.
Yet his true appearance and vitality had not aged a single day from a century prior.
Deep inside Tunnel No. 1’s quiet cultivation chamber.
Lee Hyun lay comfortably on his back.
Within his body, the traditional boundaries of the dantian below his navel had ceased to exist.
Primordial Unity True Qi saturated every corner of his physical being—skin, muscle, blood, bone, and organs alike.
At the beginning, it had taken an entire day just to disperse a single strand of true qi across one arm.
Ten years in, he had linked his limbs and torso into an unbroken circuit.
Thirty years in, the Primordial Unity True Qi began fusing deep into the marrow of his bones.
By his sixtieth year, the Primordial Unity One-Qi Art circulated effortlessly on its own with every breath he took and every step he walked.
While he had initially cultivated sitting stiffly cross-legged, he had gradually adapted the art until it moved constantly—whether he was tending the spirit fields, carving through bedrock, or cracking walnuts between his fingers.
Eventually, he had even gained the ability to refine spiritual qi at peak efficiency while lying completely at his ease.
And today, a full century later.
Vrrr—
Primordial Unity True Qi surged like a torrent through his entire being, washing downward from the crown of his head straight to the tips of his toes. Every meridian hummed with power, and every strand of energy pushed into the furthest reaches of his physical form. The moment the true qi fully saturated every last extremity—reaching the tips of his fingers, the soles of his feet, and sinking deep into the finest fibers of muscle and marrow beneath his skin—
Boom!
A muffled tremor echoed within his flesh and spirit. A subtle, luminous radiance burst outward from Lee Hyun’s body, casting soft shadows across the stone chamber before flickering away just as quickly as it had appeared.
Within him, a profound transformation was taking place. His bones, muscles, and viscera chimed in harmonious resonance, vibrating like tuned bells. The boundless Primordial Unity True Qi that had spent decades dispersing and settling into every corner of his physical frame suddenly snapped together, fusing into a seamless, unified whole!
Lee Hyun slowly opened his eyes, a glint of quiet satisfaction lingering in his gaze.
“Finally… the 2nd Stage of the Primordial Unity Body!”
Reaching the 2nd Stage of the Primordial Unity Body carried a weight that few ordinary cultivators could ever fathom. It signified that every single inch of his physical frame—from the very crown of his head down to the soles of his feet—had expanded and tempered itself to match the storage capacity of an ordinary 2nd-layer Qi Refining cultivator’s dantian.
In other words, Lee Hyun was no longer relying merely on a single spiritual vessel located in his lower abdomen. His entire body had effectively transformed into one colossal, living dantian!
The depth of his reserves was staggering. Where others possessed only a small pond, every drop of blood, bone, and sinew in his body now acted as a reservoir to store boundless true qi.
To test this newfound state, Lee Hyun slowly raised his right hand, extending an index finger forward into the dim air of the chamber.
Flash!
With a subtle shimmer of light, metallic qi condensed at his fingertip. Within a fraction of a heartbeat, a slender, razor-sharp needle of polished silver manifested out of thin air, humming with concentrated lethal force.
Thunk!
The silver needle shot across the room like a streak of cold lightning, piercing dead center through the thick wooden target board mounted on the far wall. The impact was clean, leaving only a hairline perforation that drove straight through the timber.
Lee Hyun did not pause. Circulating his qi once more, he immediately unleashed the Yang Metal Formula a second time, followed instantly by a third and a fourth needle fired off in rapid, unbroken succession.
Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!
The needles hammered into the wood one after another with rhythmic precision. Ten needles. Twenty needles. Thirty needles.
Even after casting the Yang Metal Formula dozens of times without a single breath of rest—a feat that would have completely drained dry any standard Qi Refining cultivator of his tier—the Primordial Unity True Qi brimming within his flesh and bones had barely diminished at all. The reserve inside him felt as deep and untamed as an endless wellspring.
Yet, rather than outright triumph, an odd expression suddenly crossed Lee Hyun’s face. He blinked, tilting his head slightly as he examined his outstretched hand and the way the qi was continuing to circulate through his limbs.
“Huh?”
A strange realization took hold in his mind. In the wake of this breakthrough and the barrage of spells he had just unleashed, he had uncovered an entirely new, unexpected secret of the Primordial Unity One-Qi Art and the Primordial Unity Body.