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Translator: Truth
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
Vitality and Spiritual Power were the two main things to cultivate for a Spirit Creek Realm cultivator. A powerful vitality meant a powerful physique, and no cultivator no matter which cultivator faction they belonged to would argue against having a stronger body. Spiritual Power was even more self-explanatory. It was the foundation of all cultivation and combat.
The flow rate of both energies directly affected the strength of a cultivation. There were several reasons why a cultivator experienced a massive boost in strength after cultivating a Heaven Grade cultivation technique. One, their Spiritual Power control would improve by leaps and bounds. Two, the flow speed of their Spiritual Power would experience a qualitative increase.
Since the royal jelly improved the flow speed of his vitality and his Spiritual Power, Lu Ye was physically and spiritually stronger even though his cultivation level hadn’t changed one bit.
The only question now was whether the effect was permanent or temporary. If it was temporary, then it wasn’t very valuable. Some Spirit Pills such as the Qi Boosting Pill could temporarily increase a cultivator’s strength, although the aftereffects were pretty severe. A cultivator who used the pill and pushed themselves too far carried the risk of damaging their Spiritual Point beyond repair.
If the effects were permanent though, then the royal jelly might as well be priceless.
There was no way to tell if the royal jelly’s effects were actually permanent though. The only way to know was to wait and see if it would wear off over time.
With that done, Lu Ye switched his focus to the Tree of Glyphs. Speaking of which, the more he looked at the orange flames burning on the crown of the Tree of Glyphs, the more it looked like a bird to him. The impression was the same even if he tried looking at it from multiple different angles. It was quite strange to say the least.
As usual, he calmed his mind and randomly selected a leaf to examine. He was going to check out the patterns when suddenly, something unusual happened. In his vision, the “bird” along the tree suddenly came to life and flew down the tree. It flapped its wings, dragged its long tail, and filled his vision with orange flames in an instant. At the same time, a long, melodious cry resounded inside his head.
Lu Ye dropped unconscious just like that.
This was how Lu Ye had reacted when the Tree of Glyphs first came to life, and he had received his first ever Glyph in the mining caves of Evil Moon Valley. However, he hadn’t even unlocked a Spiritual Point at the time, so of course he could barely withstand the packet of complex information that was shoved into his brain.
As he grew in cultivation, something like this had never happened again. This was especially true after he returned from the Lost City of Xianyuan. His Divine Soul had become so strong that the massive amount of information in the leaf only felt like a breeze these days.
That was why he hadn’t anticipated that he would be knocked out for an entire day. It had happened so fast that he didn’t even have time to react.
…
In a dim and silent inheritance site, a naked woman suddenly emerged from a bluish pond. Translucent water slid down her smooth, white skin as she sucked in a deep breath. She looked like she had just been reborn.
She suppressed a shiver as she stared at the seemingly innocent pond in front of her. The past few weeks had been pure torture, so much so that she wasn’t sure how she had managed to endure until the end.
The pond wasn’t translucent at the beginning. In fact, it was an unnatural aquamarine. According to her inheritance, it was a pool of pure poison. Without the secret art that only she, the inheritor possessed, even a Divine Ocean cultivator would have to make a great sacrifice to survive the poison.
She recalled the day she had made the decision to accept this inheritance and wondered how she was able to muster the courage back then. Assuming she could redo her past, she wasn’t sure if she could have made the same choice.
It was precisely because she had lived through the experience that she knew just how painful it was. It was bad enough that it tormented both her body and her mind, but she didn’t even have the luxury of falling unconscious. She was aware of every second of it.
Thankfully, that was all in the past.
She slowly stepped out of the Thousand Poison Pond. After evaporating the water droplets on her body with her Spiritual Power, she pulled out a set of clothes from her Storage Bag.
She was a quiet and demure young lady, which was why the large majority of her wardrobe was made up of white dresses. But for some reason, she didn’t feel like wearing white right now. She thought for a moment before replacing the dress with a green one. Now she was satisfied.
After she was fully dressed and groomed to perfection, she tapped on her Battlefield Imprint with the intent of sharing her joy with her friends. Then, she recalled that this inheritance site was isolated from the outside world because it was a pocket space of its own. She would not be able to communicate with the others until she went outside.
She then recalled a certain someone and smirked impishly. She was going to teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget the next time he grabbed her hand without permission!
She triggered the Control Gem controlling the ward surrounding this pocket space. The scenery changed, and she found herself standing beneath a bright moon and a starry sky. She opened her arms wide as if to embrace the moonlight while feeling freer and more comfortable than ever before.
From now on, she would never have to worry that she might not be able to catch up to him anymore.
Starting today, the scariest medicine cultivator in all of Jiu Zhou had emerged from her closed cultivation!
…
Lu Ye’s consciousness was a jumbled mess right now. He didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. He felt like he was in a cramped space and instinctively tried to stretch his limbs, but something was keeping him from doing so.
An unknown amount of time later, he abruptly realized that he had fallen unconscious. But if that was the case, then how was he conscious right now?
It was strange. It was like he was experiencing a lucid dream, but not quite. The reason he said this was because he couldn’t wake back to reality no matter what he tried.
His consciousness grew clearer and clearer, but his environment remained the same as before.
An unknown period of time later, he suddenly heard a small crack. A ray of light abruptly pierced through the darkness. When he looked up, he saw that a crack had appeared in the sky.
The crack grew bigger and bigger. Finally, the world around him shattered into pieces. It was then he saw a tiny, feathery thing surrounded by a floor of egg shells.
It was only now Lu Ye realized that he wasn’t living through the experience himself. He was watching a chick being born from a third person perspective.
[On second thought, it’s probably not a chick.] The reason he thought this was because the creature was way bigger and cockier than your ordinary chick. Moreover, it immediately ate all the egg shells around it until its tummy was as full as it could be, which he was pretty sure wasn’t normal chick behavior. Finally, it burped out tiny jets of flames after it was full…
After that, time was accelerated by a great deal. The scenes before him began speeding up so fast it was like he was outside the passage of time. Long story short was that the chick had grown into a massive bird with rainbow-colored feathers. It was covered in orange flames and carrying a long, long tail behind its back.
It was none other than the Sacred Beast, the Vermillion Bird!
Lu Ye would continue to witness the Vermillion Bird’s life. He saw it growing day by day and eliminating many powerful enemies. He saw it dominating everything until one day, even the world it was born to could no longer suppress its desire to explore.
So, it took to the sky and entered the world beyond the heavens. It soared through infinite space and stars in search of a wider world.
An unknown amount of time passed, and a ball of orange flames descended from the sky. It burned through the heavens, split the sky in half, and finally landed on the ground.
The flame was so hot that it burned through the ground. The entire world was shaking from the aftermath. Everything within tens of thousands of kilometers of the epicenter had turned to dust.
…
Lu Ye abruptly opened his eyes. At the same time, he was assaulted by a pain beyond the ability of any language to describe. He could only say that it had made him curl up like a prawn and shake like a leaf. His face was so white he looked like a ghost.
His Divine Soul wasn’t as strong as a Real Lake Realm cultivator’s yet, but he wasn’t that far behind. However, the information he received from the Tree of Glyphs still knocked him out in an instant and left him as miserable as a wretch. Heavens only knew how much information he had received just now!
He took out the Soul Cleansing Water with a shuddering hand. Normally, he would try to ration his usage, but now was not the time to do so. He filled his mouth to the brim and gulped it all down in one go. It was only then the pain afflicting his Divine Soul faded bit by bit. However, he was so exhausted from the ordeal that he dropped back to the ground and fell asleep just like that.
The next day, he woke up with a start and lingering fear. When he shook his head, it felt like his brain was sloshing weakly inside his skull. It had been a very, very long time since he felt something like this. It had topped all of his previous experiences to become the most painful experience of his whole life.
Not only that, Lu Ye highly suspected that he would’ve become a retard if his Divine Soul wasn’t as powerful as it was.
After sorting out the jumbled information in his mind, he finally figured out why this had happened.
He thought he was gleaning one leaf’s worth of information when he was inspecting the new leaf, but that wasn’t the case. The power of the orange flame was so massive that it took over a hundred leaves to bear it all. In other words, he had accidentally tried to absorb over one hundred leaves’ worth of information into his brain. Not even his insanely powerful Divine Soul could consume that much information in one go. That was why he had been knocked out like a light.
The strange scenes he saw while he was unconscious didn’t originally belong to the Tree of Glyphs though. It belonged to the ball of flame that was consumed by the Tree of Glyphs.
The ball of flame had come from the Vermillion Bird of the Four Sacred Beasts. To be specific, it was an incomplete ball of True Phoenix Flame. So much time had passed that the True Phoenix Flame, which was incomplete to begin with, weakened to the point that it “only” annihilated tens of thousands of kilometers of land when it impacted Spirit Creek Battlefield. It was also why the scenes he saw in his mind were discombobulated and missing some pieces here and there.
Afterall, he did not know what had happened to the Vermillion Bird after it left its own world. He only knew that it got its ass kicked so bad that it was turned into a ball of incomplete flame and hurtled through space for Heavens know how long. In the end, it landed on the Spirit Creek Battlefield and created the Burning Lands.
It was said that a phoenix could achieve Nirvana and come back to life. While Lu Ye had no idea if that legend was true, he knew that this phoenix at least wasn’t coming back to life. Why? Because its flame had been fully devoured by the Tree of Glyphs, of course…
He had gotten a single Glyph for his misery. And it was a spell technique.
In fact, Glyphs and spells weren’t that different from one another. It was just that the former had a wide variety of uses, while the latter was heavily focused on combat.
If one had to make a comparison, then a spell technique was a simplified version of a Glyph.
The new Glyph Lu Ye obtained was called Glyph: Fire Phoenix!
