Chapter 1: The Song Clan of Qinghe

Qinghe County, Wei Kingdom, Donghuangxianzhou.

In the northeast corner of Qinghe County lies a mountain shrouded in clouds and mist, exuding an ethereal aura. It is known as Mount Funiu.

Mount Funiu stands nearly a thousand zhang tall, covered in lush greenery, resembling a giant green ox crouching amidst the mountain range. At its summit stand dozens of ethereal pavilions and towers. This is the habitat of the Song Clan, a Qi Refining cultivation family in Qinghe County.

The ancestor of the Song Clan was originally a Foundation Establishment cultivator within the "Carefree Sect," a hegemon in the cultivation world of the Wei Kingdom.

After he passed away, his descendants, facing exclusion within the sect, had no choice but to lead their kin away, arriving in the relatively remote Qinghe County. They occupied Mount Funiu, which possesses a high-grade spiritual vein, and have taken root and flourished there for two hundred years.

Inside a hidden cave dwelling on the western hillside of Mount Funiu, a young man in green robes with a youthful appearance sits at a table, gazing at an earthy-yellow beast-skin pouch.

After a moment, the youth picks up the pouch and slowly unties the small purple cord at its mouth. A "clinking" sound of metal colliding follows, and a pile of stones emitting a faint glow spills out.

These stones are multicolored and vibrant, each radiating a dazzling light.

The youth then takes two stones emitting a faint red glow from his own person, places them among the others, and begins to softly count the pile of glowing stones before him.

"Seventy-five in total. Adding the fifteen points of merit recorded in the family's Treasury Pavilion, it is exactly ten spirit stones short. At the current rate of accumulation, in another half a year at most, I should be able to successfully exchange for a Qi-Gathering Pill, which will allow me to break through to the middle stage of Qi Refining."

After a quick moment of thought, the youth, having calmed his mind, packs all the spirit stones back into the pouch and carefully hides it inside a wall in the cave.

The youth in green is named Song Qingming, the seventh in the fourth "Qing" generation of the Song Clan.

Ten years ago, he was merely a mortal, but he was fortunate enough to be discovered by his kin to possess a spiritual root capable of cultivation. He was thus able to enter the family's sacred ground, Mount Funiu, to practice. He is exactly twenty years old this year and has a cultivation base of the third level of Qi Refining.

If a mortal possesses a spiritual root like him, they can enter the Qi Refining stage after successfully guiding Qi into their body, becoming a cultivator, also known as a practitioner.

Qi Refining cultivators can wash their marrow and strengthen their physique by inhaling and exhaling the spiritual energy of heaven and earth during their daily practice. They can also drive the spiritual power refined within their bodies to use various spells. High-grade cultivators can even ride the wind and clouds, move mountains and fill seas, and turn decay into magic.

In this cultivation world, ordinary mortals can live to at most seventy or eighty years, while Qi Refining cultivators can normally live for two cycles of sixty years, or one hundred and twenty years, nearly twice as long as ordinary mortals.

If one breaks through to a higher cultivation base, their lifespan will increase exponentially. Once they cultivate to the point of ascension, they can become like the legendary immortals, ascending to the immortal realm and living as long as heaven and earth. This is the path to longevity that all cultivators pursue.

The cultivation levels of cultivators in the human realm are mainly divided into five stages: "Qi Refining, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, and Soul Transformation."

It is said that there are higher levels beyond Soul Transformation, but the spiritual energy in this realm is relatively thin and cannot support cultivators to reach higher levels. Once a cultivator reaches the late stage of Soul Transformation, any further breakthrough will be repelled by the interface force and they will automatically ascend to other higher interfaces. Therefore, the highest cultivation level in this realm is the late stage of Soul Transformation.

The glowing stones in Song Qingming's hands are items that can increase a cultivator's cultivation speed and are the mainstream currency used by cultivators in this realm to trade for various cultivation resources.

The "Qi-Gathering Pill" he just mentioned is a common elixir in the cultivation world that assists Qi Refining early-stage cultivators like him in breaking through to the middle stage.

Every time a cultivator reaches the peak of a level, they will encounter a bottleneck when trying to break through to the next level, unless they are a genius cultivator with exceptional spiritual roots.

Ordinary cultivators can only rely on slowly cultivating and absorbing spiritual energy to polish the bottleneck, which is very difficult to break through in a short time. To quickly break through the bottleneck, one needs to rely on the assistance of external objects such as elixirs and spiritual items.

Although the Qi-Gathering Pill is not a rare elixir in Qinghe County, it is a first-grade high-grade elixir. One pill costs at least one hundred spirit stones in the market. Song Qingming has been saving for nearly ten years, and he is still ten spirit stones short.

For low-grade cultivators like him, there are not many ways to earn spirit stones. The annual spirit stone stipend issued by the family, plus the occasional low-level family task and following family elders to hunt spirit beasts, allows him to save at most a dozen spirit stones a year.

Relying on the array techniques he learned in the clan over the past few years, Song Qingming has earned some spirit stones by drawing auxiliary array diagrams for magic tools and robes for others in the clan and setting up some low-grade arrays. Coupled with his frugality in recent years, he has finally almost gathered enough.

Although his cultivation speed is average and he has not yet broken through to the middle stage of Qi Refining at twenty, fortunately, he was born into a cultivation family. Since childhood, he has been protected by family elders, and his cultivation path has been relatively smooth.

Compared to those wandering rogue cultivators, at least Song Qingming has had a fixed spiritual vein for practice since he started, and there are always family elders to guide him when he has questions.

In Qinghe County, most cultivators are rogue cultivators. Most of them do not have a fixed spiritual vein for practice and have to run around all day for a little cultivation resource.

A spiritual vein is the foundation of a cultivator's practice. Cultivating on a spiritual vein provides abundant spiritual energy, and the speed of absorbing spiritual energy is several times faster than in the outside world, making practice twice as effective with half the effort. A high-grade spiritual vein like Mount Funiu can easily support more than twenty Qi Refining cultivators of the Song Clan.

Without a spiritual vein, cultivating in the barren mountains and wild ridges of the outside world, the supply of heaven and earth spiritual energy is limited. If a cultivator wants to increase their cultivation speed, they can only rely on refining spirit stones to fill the gap, which will consume a large amount of cultivation resources.

Song Qingming has also tried to forcibly break through to the middle stage of Qi Refining in the past two years, but the result was not only a failure, but the backlash from the failed breakthrough also injured his meridians. It took him several months to fully recover, which finally made him give up and realize that he was not a cultivation genius.

Now that he wants to successfully break through his cultivation base, he cannot be impatient. Slowly cultivating and polishing the bottleneck, for him, it would normally take five to ten years to successfully break through naturally.

But this consumes too much cultivation time. Choosing to take elixirs to assist in the breakthrough is also a method used by most cultivators in the cultivation world.

Although Song Qingming has always been very diligent in his cultivation, he is only a cultivator with four spiritual root attributes: metal, wood, fire, and earth. In the cultivation world, this is just an ordinary low-grade spiritual root qualification, and the types of spiritual roots within a cultivator also have high and low distinctions.

Generally, they are divided according to the number of five-element spiritual roots in the body. There are five attributes: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The fewer the number of spiritual roots in a cultivator's body, the purer the spiritual energy refined during cultivation, and the faster the cultivation speed. Conversely, the more spiritual roots a cultivator has, the more mixed the refined spiritual energy, and the slower the cultivation speed.

For cultivators with mixed spiritual roots who possess all five elements, the cultivation speed is the slowest. Unless these cultivators have a large supply of resources, it is difficult for them to even cultivate to the late stage of Qi Refining.

Cultivators with four spiritual roots like Song Qingming belong to pseudo-spiritual roots. Their cultivation speed will be slightly faster. If they work harder and the family can provide some resource assistance, there is a good chance they can cultivate to the late stage of Qi Refining.

More than eighty percent of cultivators in the entire cultivation world are ordinary cultivators with four or five spiritual roots like him. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult for these cultivators to break through to the next Foundation Establishment stage.

However, on the path of cultivation, besides spiritual root qualification, luck and opportunity are also very important. Although Song Qingming's spiritual root qualification is average, since he embarked on the path of cultivation, he has been diligent for ten years and has never slackened in his own practice.

(End of Chapter)