Chapter 203: A Great Dream in One Night

Duan Rong slept very soundly that night.

In his dreams that night, there were all sorts of silhouettes of Shen Ping, moving to and fro...

At one moment, he saw him pounding medicine...

At another, he saw him boiling various medicinal herbs in a stone pot, and from time to time, he would use a dagger to stir inside the stone pot...

At another moment, he saw him using all kinds of strange techniques to process some rare medicinal herbs...

When Duan Rong awoke from his deep dream, he stared blankly at the craggy rock walls at the top of the cave, and a familiar feeling suddenly rose in his heart...

It was as if he had truly already lived in this cave for twenty years.

Duan Rong turned his head to look; at the cave entrance, it was bright as snow, and the sky had long since turned fully bright.

He climbed up from the bed and stared blankly at the cave before him; that strange sense of familiarity resonated with him everywhere...

Duan Rong realized in a daze that this was because he had devoured too many of Shen Ping's things.

After completely digesting and absorbing them, he had almost imprinted many things from Shen Ping's soul, and even some deep-seated insights, because Shen Ping was obsessed with the way of medicine and poison, and his understanding of this path was inextricably linked to the various objects within this cave.

And all these things had been absorbed by Duan Rong.

"It can even be like this?" A look of astonishment appeared in Duan Rong's eyes.

Because, at this moment, he could even feel Shen Ping's sentiments toward the various items in the cave—which things were used very handily, and which ones he had long wanted to replace but had never found suitable ones for, so he had just made do.

Duan Rong walked to the stone table in the middle of the cave.

On the stone table sat more than ten porcelain bottles of different sizes and colors; these were the medicines and poisons Duan Rong had sorted out yesterday.

Standing before the stone table at this moment, Duan Rong could tell at a single glance what kind of medicine or poison was contained in each of those porcelain bottles, and their properties and uses were perfectly clear.

Duan Rong picked up one of the porcelain bottles, because in his impression, this bottle contained the Corpse Rot Poison.

Duan Rong picked up the porcelain bottle, opened the stopper, and immediately smelled a familiar, nauseating, rotting stench.

"Corpse Rot Poison!" Duan Rong put the stopper back on, but the faint stench in the air still lingered for a long time.

Duan Rong's gaze swept over those porcelain bottles, reviewing all the information in his mind regarding the contents of the bottles.

There were only two types of medicine, and the rest were all poisons; there was almost every kind of poison imaginable, but there was no Joyous Poison.

Although using poison was considered an underhanded tactic, Shen Laotou was obsessed with this path but had his own bottom line; he clearly found the Joyous Poison too base and disdained to use it.

Looking at these porcelain bottles, Duan Rong returned to the cave entrance once more, picked up the notebook from yesterday, and began reading it again.

Upon reading it this time, Duan Rong could not help but smile.

The parts that had been utterly baffling yesterday were, upon viewing them today, like looking into his own heart; his mind resonated with the text, and he understood it all at once.

Not only did he fully grasp the meaning of the words, but even the intentions behind the details and omissions were as clear as looking at a fire.

The parts that were vague were resolved like melting ice, flowing out like a spring.

Even why it was vague, why it was repetitive, and why it was glossed over—Duan Rong understood it all.

Yesterday, it had taken Duan Rong several hours to read just two pages, and he was full of doubts, unable to understand the meaning; but now, standing at the cave entrance, he read ten lines at a glance, flipping the notebook with a rustling sound.

In just a few breaths, he had finished reading the thick notebook, and he had understood it all.

Or rather, he did not understand it by reading the notebook. He had already understood it; at this moment, the notebook had merely become a clumsy annotation of what was already in his heart.

Duan Rong could not help but sigh; he shouldn't have read this notebook yesterday. If he had studied this on his own, even with ten years of effort, he might not have been able to fully understand it.

But after he devoured the Spirit Tool, in a single night, he understood it all, and even had surplus.

"Truly a thousand realizations in one night!" Duan Rong closed the notebook and couldn't help but exclaim.

The moment he closed the notebook, Duan Rong's stomach suddenly rumbled, and a wave of hunger surged up.

Only then did Duan Rong realize that he hadn't eaten much yesterday and had actually been hungry until now.

However, this was Wild Boar Mountain; if he wanted to eat, he had to do it himself.

Duan Rong licked his tongue; having not been here for so many days, he actually missed the game in Wild Boar Mountain.

Duan Rong prepared to go into the forest to find something to satisfy his hunger; just as he was about to leave the cave, his gaze suddenly sharpened, and he turned to look at the stone table against the rock wall in the middle of the cave.

Duan Rong walked to the stone table, tucked a porcelain bottle into his sleeve, and then his figure flickered, exiting the cave and arriving on the cliff.

Duan Rong walked into the forest and was just about to release his Divine Sense when, at that moment, a black shadow flashed on a tree branch beside him; it was actually a venomous snake lunging at him.

The instant the black shadow flashed over, Duan Rong flicked his sleeve, and a faint white mist brushed over the black shadow that had lunged at him.

That black-spotted snake, as thick as two thumbs, was covered by the white mist and went limp, falling onto Duan Rong's shoulder...

The snake seemed as if it had fainted, hanging motionless on Duan Rong's shoulder like a dead object...

Duan Rong pinched the black-spotted snake on his shoulder; it felt cold and slippery to the touch.

Duan Rong laughed: "Little snake, I'll use you to fill my belly today."

After Duan Rong devoured and digested the Spirit Tool, he already knew that the white mist Shen Laotou had scattered on him when he left yesterday was just a type of anesthetic he had refined.

This anesthetic had a strong numbing effect; one would faint upon smelling it, but it caused no real harm to the body, and one would wake up on their own after a few hours.

Therefore, as he walked along, the snakes, insects, and birds that had fallen from the forest yesterday were nowhere to be seen.

It stood to reason that once the effect of the medicine wore off, those little fellows had all woken up and scattered.

Duan Rong gathered some branches, sat on a large blue stone on the cliff, lit a fire with a Fire Folder, and began to roast the snake meat.

Before long, the snake meat, which Duan Rong had chopped into three sections and tied with pine branches, was roasting until it sizzled with oil, and the fragrance overflowed...

Seeing that it was roasted, Duan Rong blew on it and took a bite.

The piping hot snake meat entered his mouth; Duan Rong slurped as he chewed, and the taste was actually not bad at all...

In his previous life, Duan Rong was born in the north and had never eaten snake meat; he didn't expect that the first time he ate it, he would find it so delicious.

Duan Rong finished the three sections of snake meat; with something in his stomach, a sense of satisfaction welled up, and after wiping the oil from his mouth, his figure flickered, disappearing from the cliff and returning to the cave once more.

As soon as he returned to the cave, he sat cross-legged at the entrance and continued to flip through the notebooks.

It took about half an incense stick's time for him to finish reading all three notebooks left behind by Shen Ping.

Duan Rong closed the last notebook, his eyes flickering.

Although these notes were densely packed and, in some places, even interspersed and disorganized, Duan Rong found them effortless to read.

It was less like reading and more like verifying one against the other, because the things recorded in the notes were already in his heart to begin with...

However, reading these three notebooks was still very useful, as it allowed him to go over the most important parts of the insights from Shen Ping that he had already digested and absorbed once more.

At this moment, Duan Rong's heart could be described as clear and bright...

(End of chapter)