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Translator: Truth
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
In the building, Lu Ye was studying Lady Yun’s books as usual.
While carrying a claypot in her hand, Hua Ci walked into the room and knelt beside him. She then grabbed a bowl and filled it with what looked like milky white soup. A fragrant scent immediately permeated the room.
“It’s time to drink your soup, dear,” Hua Ci said gently as she placed the bowl in front of Lu Ye. An outsider might’ve thought that she was his lover or his wife.
Lu Ye knew better than that though. He set down his book and stared at what he strongly suspected to be a scorpion tail in his bowl, eyes twitching.
Ever since Hua Ci had shown up at their temporary doorsteps, his health had been recovering steadily. He had to admit that his recovery probably would’ve taken twice as long without her. His injuries were mostly gone a few days ago, and today he was back at peak strength once more.
It was all thanks to the “herbal” soup Hua Ci cooked for him every day.
The herbal soup was as potent as it was tasty. If the Tree of Glyphs didn’t release a massive cloud of smoke every time he finished drinking it, he would’ve believed that it was cooked using some incredibly rare herbs.
In reality, all the ingredients had been procured from the Myriad Poison Forest. If the most common thing in the forest was the poisonous fog that shrouded it all year, then the second most common thing was its poisonous creatures. Spiders, toads, scorpions, vipers, centipedes… he had seen them all in Hua Ci’s clay pot.
While the ingredients were novel to say the least, he could not deny their efficacy.
According to Hua Ci, she saw no reason not to use her full capabilities to treat him since he was immune to poison.
Lu Ye thought she was just using this opportunity to get some payback and schadenfreude.
Lu Ye accepted the bowl and slowly drank the soup. Hua Ci had also poured a bowl for herself.
She suddenly looked at Amber and asked, “Would you like a bowl too?”
The tiger had been staring at the duo with incredulity. The moment it heard Hua Ci’s question, it immediately leaped out of the window.
Amber feared nothing and no one, but Hua Ci? She was a different story.
“Oh right, this is for you.” Lu Ye suddenly recalled something and produced a bracelet from his Storage Bag.
Hua Ci squinted at it and asked, “What is this? A token of love?”
“Oh yes. It’s the family heirloom of my Lu Family, and only the first wife has the right to receive it!”
Hua Ci accepted it and put it around her wrist. After she activated the bracelet and figured out what it was for, she tried to hand it back to Lu Ye while saying, “You need it more than me.”
The bracelet could conceal a person’s presence and turn them invisible. It was none other than the Concealment Bracelet Lady Yun had given Lu Ye before.
Lu Ye activated Invisibility without a word. It was only then she put the Concealment Bracelet back on her wrist.
She had been hunting the cultivators of Thousand Demon Ridge every day, and her method of killing was to poison her targets without their knowledge. Since the Myriad Poison Forest was overflowing with poison to begin with, practically no one had ever found out that her victims were really killed by a cultivator. The item would ensure that it stayed that way.
As for Lu Ye’s claim that the bracelet was a family heirloom and something to be passed down to the first wife only, it went in one ear and out the other as a matter of course.
It wasn’t long before the duo had cleaned out the entire clay pot of soup. After Hua Ci had cleaned up the dishes and left the building, she sought out a suitable location nearby and sat down. Then, she started inhaling the surrounding aquamarine fog into her body.
Ever since she fully inherited the inheritance at Mount Ying, her cultivation method had become very different from an ordinary cultivator’s. For starters, her need for World Spiritual Qi had greatly lessened. Two, poison accelerated her growth much faster than World Spiritual Qi. The deadlier the poison, the greater the boost to her cultivation.
The Myriad Poison Forest might be a forbidden area to most cultivators, but to Hua Ci, there was no better cultivation environment in the entire Spirit Creek Battlefield.
On the third floor, Lu Ye was lazily flipping to a new page when suddenly, he sat up straight and turned serious. It was because the page was displaying a type of Glyph he had never seen before.
Generally speaking, the Glyphs he knew could be split into two types. The first type was of course the Glyphs he inherited from the Tree of Glyphs. The Glyphs he picked up from the Tree of Glyphs could be constructed any time he wanted and without fear of failure. In fact, he had never failed to construct a Glyph that was borne on the leaves of the Tree of Glyphs. For example, Fire Phoenix was the biggest and most complex Glyphs he had ever known, and he had still successfully constructed it on the first try, though the side effects were definitely nothing to scoff at.
The second source was the books he had obtained from Lady Yun’s study. Unlike the first type, there was a not insignificant chance he might fail when constructing these Glyphs. The more complex the Glyph, the greater the chance of failure.
That was why Lu Ye rarely used the Glyphs he had picked up from the books in combat. A single mistake could result in his death.
That said, it wasn’t like the second type of Glyphs were useless. On the contrary, they could be applied to wards to great effect.
Different Glyphs had different levels of complexity. In fact, one could rank a Glyph by the amount of Yin and Yang elements they were constructed from, though no one actually did this because there was no such thing as a useless Glyph as long as they were applied in the right places.
Lu Ye himself categorized the Glyphs he knew by difficulty. Glyphs that took over one hundred Yin and Yang elements to construct were Tier-One Glyphs, Glyphs that took over two hundred Yin and Yang elements to construct were Tier-Two Glyphs, so on and so on.
The categorization did not apply to Fire Phoenix because Lu Ye reckoned that it was made up of at least a hundred thousand Yin and Yang elements. It was an unimaginable number to say the least.
Every Glyph Lu Ye had mastered so far was only made up of several hundred Yin and Yang elements at most. In fact, a small amount of them only consisted of one to two hundred Yin and Yang elements. None of them even came close to the one thousandth mark, much less the one hundred thousandth mark.
And today, he finally saw his first thousand-element Glyph.
The Glyph before his eyes was made up of nearly three thousand Yin and Yang elements. He had no doubt that it was incredibly difficult to construct. However, the introduction and the description of the Glyph’s effects intrigued Lu Ye deeply.
The Glyph was without a doubt a powerful Glyph. Although it wasn’t useful in combat, it could be absolutely incredible if used in the right time and place.
Lu Ye immediately gathered his concentration and began disassembling the Glyph as per Lady Yun’s teaching.
Disassembly was an indispensable process in learning any Glyph. To successfully construct a Glyph, one must first familiarize themselves with its structure. They must know exactly how many Yin and Yang elements it was made up of, and how they connected to one another. If the Glyphweaver made even one mistake, then chances were they were going to fail to construct the Glyph.
This was why Glyphweavers were a rare breed, and why most of them only focused on one particular field of Glyphs. For example, ward cultivators only focused on Glyphs that applied to wards, artificers only focused on Glyphs that applied to artificing, and Glyph Warlocks only focused on Glyphs that applied to combat.
It wasn’t that they didn’t want to master more Glyphs. They simply did not have the energy or the ability to do so.
Given enough time, these Glyphweavers might be able to expand their breadth of knowledge to another field, but the Way of Glyphs was as deep as it was profound. They could easily spend their whole lives studying the Way of Glyphs and never reach total mastery of even a single field, much less all of them.
Lu Ye was aiming to master them all not because he had an exaggerated belief of his talent, but because he had the Tree of Glyphs, something no one else possessed.
It took Lu Ye a full day before he finally finished disassembling the Glyph and familiarizing himself with its structure. Now, he was ready to construct it. He took out a crystalline wafer and began constructing the Glyph on it.
Constructing a Glyph on a crystalline wafer made it easier to observe the Glyph and summarize one’s mistakes. It also made the Glyph more stable, and failure would not damage him anyway. If he had tried to construct it like normal, the resulting explosion could have hurt him greatly. Lady Yun had taught him all about the benefits of using the medium since the beginning.
Time passed. The Myriad Poison Forest was fairly quiet these days. The Thousand Demon Ridge was still surrounding the forest because no one knew if they would get another chance like this if Lu Yi Ye did, as unlikely as it seemed, survive this tribulation. They had no choice but to keep waiting no matter how impatient they were.
In the wooden building, Lu Ye did not forget to cultivate while familiarizing himself with the Glyph. He continued to chug down pills like the glutton he was and unlock his Spiritual Points one after another.
When he first entered the Myriad Poison Forest, he had only unlocked two hundred and forty eight Spiritual Points, or eight additional Spiritual Points since he departed from the Crimson Blood Sect’s Outpost.
It had been a month since he entered the Myriad Poison Forest, and he now had two hundred and seventy five Spiritual Points unlocked. This meant that he had almost unlocked a Spiritual Point every day.
His cultivation speed was something no Spirit Creek Realm cultivator in the Jiu Zhou could match. It was because he had a massive stock of Spirit Pills and fuel. Besides the six to eight hours he spent on resting, he spent almost every waking hour cultivating and reading his books.
As he mentioned before, his “imprisonment” in the Myriad Poison Forest might not necessarily be a bad thing for him.
This was especially true after Hua Ci arrived, and he could afford to set up a Circle of Boon and construct Gathering Spirits in his Spiritual Points once more. His cultivation efficiency improved tremendously after that.
The reason he didn’t do that in the past was because he was worried that the flow of World Spiritual Qi would put too much pressure on the protective ward. If the ward was damaged, then Yi Yi and Amber would be poisoned for sure.
But now that Hua Ci was here, he did not need to worry about that anymore. Even if the ward was completely wrecked, they had Hua Ci to cure them of their affliction.
This was the Core Circle, so the concentration of World Spiritual Qi of the forest was pretty good even though there were no Divine Opportunity Columns to amplify the effects.
He was now only twenty five Spiritual Points away from Heaven Eight. At first, he was planning to break out of the forest after reaching that cultivation level, but his original idea expanded after he saw the Glyph in the book. Hopefully, its execution would be up to par with his planning.
Speaking of which, Lu Ye had successfully constructed the complex Glyph already. However, his success rate wasn’t very good yet. He would have to keep practicing. There was no rushing this.
A few days later, Hua Ci entered Lu Ye’s room with a clay pot in her hands as usual. However, the young man was staring at her in shock. He examined her a few times to confirm that he wasn’t seeing things before asking, “You’re… Heaven Seven already?”
“Yep. I just ascended today,” Hua Ci replied while filling up his bowl.
Lu Ye could hardly believe it.
