The Ghost Soul Banner and the Dragon Heart Core
Dharma tools, dharma treasures, spirit treasures, Heaven-Connecting Spirit Treasures, and finally immortal treasures — for every rank of them, their outward form and their function did not necessarily match. Something shaped like a shield might be built for attack, and something shaped like a sword might be meant for healing.
Even so, there were always tendencies. A thing that looked like a shield usually meant defense.
From that standpoint, banner-type artifacts were often used for formations. They also saw considerable use for commanding spirit souls. Neither purpose required the item to clash directly against other objects in combat, and their wide surface area made it easy to inscribe dharma-script arrays onto them — reasons that were, all things considered, quite sensible and practical.
One thing, however: quite often, such banners turned out to be imitations of something extraordinarily famous.
What was it again... the Heaven and Earth Tiger-Refinement Banner? The Limitless Ghost Soul Banner?
Both were names of legendarily famous immortal treasures. Whether they actually existed was uncertain, but they were famous enough to spawn countless counterfeits — which could be considered the real reason so many banner-type treasures served as formation anchors and spirit-soul command tools.
So he could roughly guess what the banner before his eyes was for. And building on that guess, deploying his Divine Sense let him cut the verification time down dramatically.
After holding the banner for a while and probing its identity, an unexpected look crossed Han Yujin's face.
Despite this place belonging to the Ohaeng Sect — a mere secondary sect — the treasure turned out to be one meant for spirits, contrary to his expectations. Once he understood that, the heavily guarded array traces surrounding the banner also made sense.
At the very least a spirit treasure. My gut says Heaven-Connecting Spirit Treasure.
And what surfaced in his mind at that thought was none other than Ghost Wonhee of the post-apocalyptic Earth.
If I could choose this as my reward and restore it to its original state... wouldn't that mean I'd be able to command that Wonhee myself?
Even knowing it was absolutely impossible for now, a shiver ran down his spine.
During his Initiation stage, when the side effects of his Dharma Soul's sublimation had him hallucinating her constantly, he had feared that ghost more than anything. Ghosts were terrifying beings to begin with, and she had been the strongest opponent he'd ever faced one-on-one.
The thought that he might one day command such a being made his heart pound as hard as the fear did.
And why stop at Wonhee? Including the properly-dead ghosts, he might be able to command every ghost that existed in that ruined world. The ones who had completely ended an entire world.
He fiddled with the banner pole a while longer, mourning what he couldn't have, and finally — knowing full well he lacked the karma — slipped the banner into his subspace pouch. Then he looked around the rest of the area.
Every object in sight was shattered, and the floor, walls, and ceiling alike were a wreck, gouged as though by a horde of colossal beasts.
So this place was...
It looked like a storage site for demon-aspected treasures — things awkward for the righteous Ohaeng Sect to use, yet far too valuable to simply discard. A warehouse of sorts, doubling as a sealing ground.
That explained the building's bleak exterior too. Practicality, in harmony with the sealing arrays, would have been the priority — decorating the surface would only have gotten in the way.
He searched the interior a little longer on the off chance something salvageable remained, but the destruction had been so thorough that nothing but fragments was left. Even so, Han Yujin pocketed some of those fragments.
He was curious whether something broken this badly could still be restored when choosing it as a harvest reward. Consider it an experiment.
With that, he left the warehouse-turned-sealing-ground and searched every remaining location, one by one.
His blossomed Divine Sense meant he didn't miss a single hidden space — places that, back when the building had been intact, would surely have been concealed behind arrays.
The harvest was considerable.
Dozens of jade vials and jade chests whose contents had rotted beyond decay into mere dust. Numerous items estimated to be at least dharma treasures. Several dharma technique manuals that the residents must have kept for personal use, along with miscellanea containing information related to the cultivation world. Talisman-crafting tools and a refinement furnace of unmistakably high grade.
At one site, he even found a ship — one whose shrinking spell had unraveled and half-wrecked the building's interior. It looked like a flying vessel capable of riding the open air, but it was far too large for him to even contemplate taking.
I'll only be able to freely choose things from here as harvest rewards once I reach Golden Core.
He had packed away most of the items, but with his karma shortage, there was little he could actually select as rewards. The jade vials and chests with their contents removed, and the books — that was probably the extent of it.
Not that those alone didn't make for a rather juicy haul.
The jade vials and chests he'd already resolved to collect on a previous visit needed no explanation. What mattered more were the books.
Two of the dharma technique manuals immediately caught his fancy.
One was an illusion-arts technique called the Dream Illusion Mind Snatching Art — it could make a target mistake reality for a dream, and if the target was asleep, he could reach into that dream to tamper with its contents, torment them, extract information, and more. Its applications spanned a dozen different fields.
The other was a pair of farming techniques called the White Cloud Irrigation Art and the Black Cloud Deep Earth Art — knowledge he would absolutely need if he ever acquired a grotto-heaven treasure and wanted to grow a spirit field inside it.
The rest he'd classified as miscellanea, but they were by no means low in value. The knowledge they offered about the cultivation world was something he could never have enough of — sometimes such books could prove more useful than any single technique.
With his harvest roughly sorted out, he left the cave.
Now it was time to get what he'd originally come for: the gong methods and dharma tools.
The single greatest difference from his previous visit was, naturally, his Divine Sense.
He could now read the jade slips — and not only that, he could dissect the dormant dharma tools as though dissecting a specimen, examining their inner structure to determine their grade and purpose.
So before heading to the Library Pavilion, Han Yujin was able to contentedly claim two dharma tools.
One was the broken rope-form dharma tool he'd discovered before in the gorge where the cultivator mummies lay. It was probably upper-grade, and seemed designed to bind enemies. A perfect fit for patching the gap in his arsenal, which lacked any dedicated suppression techniques.
The other was the bracelet-form dharma tool from the Smoky Serenity Pavilion. It was crafted of crystals shimmering with a subtle five-colored light, with a sequence of dharma-script arrays engraved inside in silver — it looked almost like a work of art.
A supreme-grade dharma tool that assisted the casting of Five-Element-aspect techniques. He knew choosing it as a reward would cost him no small amount of karma, but nothing else appealed to him more.
Better this one thing than two or three half-decent picks.
He'd be relying on it until he reached Golden Core, so this was not consumption to skimp on.
Steel-ing his resolve inwardly, he arrived at the Library Pavilion.
He went straight to the section housing the gong method manuals and began examining every jade slip, including the ones he'd looked over before.
Reading a jade slip was simple and difficult at once. The method itself was intuitive, but absorbing the torrent of information that poured in through that intuitive method was quite overwhelming.
The dense, minute characters inscribed everywhere — inside and out, without distinction — were simply breathtaking. Astonishingly, a passage read once and passed over would later connect with a different passage and transmute into new information; some passages even linked together, forming three-dimensional diagrams.
How anyone had created such things without melting techniques into them was, frankly, a mystery.
So jade slip crafting isn't something just anyone does.
Though, of course, the slips stored here might be particularly exceptional ones.
In any case.
The slips themselves were impressive, but what was far more astonishing — and far more interesting — was, naturally, the content.
As befitted the Ohaeng Sect, Five-Element-aspect gong methods dominated the collection, and their grades weren't hard to determine. The highest grade was one that could be cultivated all the way to Nascent Soul, provided it could later be converted without major problems for the Soul Formation stage.
There weren't many gong methods of that highest grade, yet examining every single one of them took considerable time.
Han Yujin drank spirit nectar whenever hunger or thirst struck along the way, and took brief naps whenever his focus seemed to slip.
So, how much time had passed?
At last, he had read through all six of the highest-grade gong methods once each and grasped their contents.
Every one of them was devastatingly alluring, and the fact that he could choose only one was enough to drive a man half-mad.
Damn it.
Before committing to one of them, he decided to look into something else first. The information he gathered there might, just possibly, narrow down his options.
I'm pretty sure I saw it here somewhere...
After a short while of wandering and racking his memory, he finally found the book he was looking for — Essentials of Cultivation Realm Boundaries — and pulled it out. He flipped through the pages in a flurry, and then, at some point, his hand stopped.
It was the section on Golden Core formation.
Beyond the Initiation stage came the Dharma Soul stage, and the realm beyond that was the Golden Core stage. It meant the forming of a core. This dharma core was the Dharma Soul sublimated one step further — the egg, the seed, from which the Nascent Soul would one day be born.
Reaching the Dharma Soul stage was hard enough, but ascending to Golden Core was harder still. And so, throughout the history of the cultivation world, research and experimentation of every kind toward an easier ascent had never ceased.
Thus three great methods took shape.
The first was the External Core Method. Rather than sublimating one's Dharma Soul directly into a dharma core, it borrowed the power of external objects. Demonic beast inner cores were commonly used, and it was the path chosen by cultivators lacking in talent.
The second was the False Core Method. This too borrowed external power, but the cultivator — using their own essence blood along with arts like alchemy — crafted a custom-made external core, minimizing the side effects.
The last was the True Core Method. Achieving dharma core sublimation through one's own ability alone — the most difficult path, and precisely for that reason the one with the highest potential for growth, and free of side effects besides. The orthodox way.
What I have in mind is...
the External Core Method, using the Dragon Heart.
Ordinarily, the External Core Method was regarded as the desperate recourse of cultivators without talent.
The core reason for that reputation was simple: the quality of a demonic beast inner core chosen as the vessel for one's dharma core could never be high.
Problems were unavoidable from the mere fact that the vessel belonged to another being — and if its grade was low on top of that, then of course every manner of issue would arise in raising one's realm thereafter.
As for the objection that one could simply obtain a high-grade inner core, a single sentence sufficed to refute it.
Who exactly was supposed to get you one?
For the sake of a cultivator forced to abandon the True Core Method for lack of talent — a cultivator whose future growth potential had to be factored in — someone was supposed to procure an inner core of at least Nascent Soul grade?
Did they have any idea how rare a Nascent Soul-grade inner core was?
That's nothing but pipe-dream nonsense.
That said, across the long history of the cultivation world, there were indeed those who had managed just such a fortunate External Core formation.
If the family patriarch was a Soul Formation-stage monster, and one happened to be very close to that patriarch, then yes — one might luckily come into possession of a Nascent Soul-grade beast core.
Only then would one finally stand on roughly the same line as those who had achieved the True Core Method.
And so the External Core Method could only ever be the desperate choice of the untalented. An appallingly inefficient path, one that required at minimum a Soul Formation-grade inner core just to surpass the True Core Method.
But what if I obtain the Dragon Heart?
What if I use it for the External Core Method and ascend to Golden Core?
On the assumption that the Dragon Heart proved as absurdly overpowered as he hoped, he would race far ahead of even those who had achieved the True Core Method.
He couldn't say how far ahead he'd end up, but for now, no better plan came to mind.
Honestly speaking, his talent wasn't particularly good. The lowest tier of spiritual veins, no special spirit physique — never mind that his awakening ability granted him environmental advantages.
Achieving the True Core Method was nowhere near as easy as it sounded.
Which was precisely why the Dragon Heart External Core Method — with its high odds of surpassing even that grueling path — had to be his optimal plan.
And who knows — maybe it could even swap out my talent and constitution entirely.
As he turned the pages of Essentials of Cultivation Realm Boundaries, something noteworthy caught his eye.
It was a recorded case of a cultivator who had ascended to Golden Core using an exceptionally unique inner core — surpassing not only the True Core Method but even gaining a peculiar innate divine ability and a spirit physique of his own.