Chapter 1: The Song Clan of Qinghe

Qinghe County, Wei State, Donghuangxianzhou.

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

Mount Funiu stands nearly a thousand zhang tall, its slopes covered in lush green grass and trees, resembling a giant green ox lying prone amidst the mountains. At the summit stand dozens of ethereal pavilions and towers. It is the habitat of the Song Clan, a Qi Mount Mount Lianhua cultivation family in Qinghe County.

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

After he passed away, his descendants, facing exclusion within the sect, had no choice but to lead the clan away. They arrived in the relatively remote Qinghe County, occupied Mount Funiu with its top-grade spirit vein, and have taken root and multiplied for two hundred years.

Inside a hidden cave dwelling on the western hillside of Mount Funiu, a green-robed youth with a fresh, youthful appearance sits at a table, staring at a yellowish-brown beast-skin bag.

After a moment, the youth picks up the beast-skin bag and slowly unties the small purple cord at its mouth. A "clinking" sound of metal colliding follows, and a pile of faintly glowing stones spills out.

These stones are multicolored and variegated, each emitting a dazzling light.

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

"Seventy-five in total. Plus the fifteen merit points recorded in the clan's Treasury Pavilion, it's exactly ten spirit stones short. At the current rate of accumulation, I should be able to successfully exchange for a Qi Gathering Pill in half a year at the earliest. That way, I can break through to the mid-stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua."

After a brief moment of thought, the now-calm youth packs all the spirit stones back into the bag and carefully hides it inside a wall of the cave.

The green-robed youth is named Song Qingming, seventh in rank among the fourth generation "Qing" character cultivators of the Song Clan.

Ten years ago, when he was still a mere mortal, he was fortunate enough to be discovered by his clansmen to possess a spirit root capable of cultivation. He was thus able to enter the clan's sacred ground, Mount Funiu, to practice. He is exactly twenty years old this year, with a cultivation base at the third layer of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua.

If an ordinary mortal possesses a spirit root like him, they can enter the Qi Mount Mount Lianhua stage after successfully guiding Qi into their body through cultivation, becoming a cultivator.

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

In this cultivation world, ordinary mortals can live to be at most seventy or eighty years old, while Qi Refining stage cultivators can normally live for two sixty-year cycles—one hundred and twenty years—which is nearly double that of an ordinary mortal.

If one cultivates to break through to a higher-tier 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 World to live as long as heaven and earth. This is the Great Dao of longevity that all cultivators pursue together.

The cultivation levels of cultivators in the human world are mainly divided into five tiers: "Qi Mount Mount Lianhua, Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul, and Soul Transformation."

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

The glowing stones in Song Qingming's hands are a type of item in the cultivation world that can increase a cultivator's own cultivation speed. They are also the mainstream currency used by cultivators in this world to trade for various cultivation resources needed for practice.

And the "Qi Gathering Pill" he just mentioned is a common elixir in the cultivation world that assists early-stage Qi Mount Mount Lianhua cultivators like him in breaking through to the mid-stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua.

Every time a cultivator reaches the peak of a level, they will encounter a bottleneck when needing to break through to the next level, unless they are a genius cultivator born with outstanding spirit roots.

Ordinary cultivators can only rely on slow cultivation and absorbing spiritual energy to polish the bottleneck, making it very difficult to break through in a short time. To quickly break through a 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 top-quality elixir. In the market, one normally costs at least one hundred spirit stones. Song Qingming has been saving for nearly ten years, and he is still ten spirit stones short.

For low-tier cultivators like him, there are not many ways to earn spirit stones. The annual spirit stone stipend issued by the clan, plus the occasional low-level clan task he can take on, following clan elders out to hunt demonic beasts, only allows him to save at most a dozen spirit stones a year.

Relying on a formation technique he learned in the clan over the past few years, Song Qingming earns some spirit stones by drawing auxiliary formation diagrams for magic tools and magic robes for others in the clan, and by setting up some low-tier magic formations. Coupled with his frugality in recent years, he has finally almost saved enough.

Although his cultivation speed is average and he has yet to break through to the mid-stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua at twenty, fortunately, he was born into a cultivation family. He has been protected by clan elders since he began cultivating, and his path of cultivation has been relatively smooth.

Compared to those wandering rogue cultivators, at least Song Qingming has had a fixed spirit vein to practice on since he began his cultivation, and there have always been clan elders to teach him whenever he had questions about his practice.

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

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

Without a spirit vein, cultivating in the wild mountains and forests 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 would consume a large amount of cultivation resources.

Song Qingming has also tried to forcibly break through to the mid-stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua in the past two years, but the result was not only a failure to break through, but he also injured his meridians due to the backlash caused by the failed breakthrough. It took him several months of recuperation to fully recover, which finally made him gradually give up and realize that he is not a cultivation genius.

For him now, he cannot be in a hurry to successfully break through his cultivation base. Slowly cultivating and polishing the bottleneck is normal for him; he could succeed in breaking through naturally in five to ten years.

But this would consume too much cultivation time. Choosing to take elixirs to assist in the breakthrough is also the 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 spirit root attributes: metal, wood, fire, and earth. In the cultivation world, this is only an ordinary low-tier spirit root aptitude, and the types of spirit roots within a cultivator also have high and low distinctions.

Generally, it is divided according to the number of five-element spirit roots in the body, from few to many. Spirit roots have five attributes: metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. Cultivators with fewer spirit roots in their bodies refine the spiritual energy of heaven and earth more purely during cultivation, and their cultivation speed is correspondingly faster. Conversely, the more spirit roots a cultivator has in their body, the more mixed the refined spiritual energy is, and the slower the cultivation speed.

Cultivators with mixed spirit roots, possessing all five elements, have the slowest cultivation speed. Unless such cultivators have a large supply of resources, it is very difficult for them to even cultivate to the late stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua.

Cultivators with four spirit roots like Song Qingming belong to the category of pseudo-spirit roots. Their cultivation speed will be slightly faster. If they work hard at cultivation and the clan can provide some help with resources, there is a great chance they can cultivate to the late stage of Qi Mount Mount Lianhua.

Over eighty percent of cultivators in the entire cultivation world are ordinary cultivators with four or five spirit roots like him. Under normal circumstances, it is difficult for such cultivators to break through to the next Foundation Establishment realm.

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

(End of chapter) ===== CHAPTER 2 =====