The inscriptions on the Spirit Testing Stele continued to materialize.
[Metal: 1]
[Wood: 1]
[Water: 1]
[Fire: 1]
[Earth: 1]
[Light: 1]
[Darkness: 1]
[Ice: 1]
[Wind: 1]
[Thunder: 1]
[Void: 1]
[Time: 1]
[Sacred Body: None]
[Special Physique: None]
The gatekeeping elder said nothing.
Sweat poured down the old man's face as his mind went completely blank. His legs gave out, and he slumped back against the door, staring at the stele as if it had personally insulted his ancestors.
He'd forgotten why he was even here. What his job was. Possibly his own name.
Meanwhile, Alexei was having his own crisis.
He could count. Numbers were something he had learned back in primary school, and despite years of neglect, that particular skill had stuck with him. He had expected his talent to be poor and had prepared himself for disappointing results. Maybe a few mediocre Yellow-grade aptitudes. A couple of Mystic-tier elements if he was lucky.
But this was a catastrophe.
Yan had explained that spiritual roots were universal on the Profound Sky Continent, and that they rarely fell below five points per element. Cultivation required an aptitude of at least twenty in one element.
He stared at the string of ones.
Twelve elements. Every single one showed an aptitude of exactly one. Added together, they didn't even reach twenty.
He had a sneaking suspicion that his supposed cheat ability had just taken pity on him and forcibly assigned one point to each attribute just to fill out the form. Like a teacher giving participation points to the kid who showed up but didn't do the homework.
He turned to look at the old man.
The elder was still staring blankly at the stone stele, completely unresponsive. His soul had clearly left his body and was probably filing a complaint with whatever cosmic bureaucracy handled cultivation world bullshit.
Something inside that old man had broken. He could tell.
He waited a bit longer, but the elder showed no signs of recovering anytime soon.
"Okay, fuck this. I'm leaving."
Alexei opened the door and walked out on his own.
Immediately, countless pairs of eyes locked onto him. He covered his face with one hand and speed-walked toward the Aureate Summit Sect group, trying to project an aura of "please don't look at me, I don't exist, this is not happening."
He'd been standing in line for half a day. In all that time, he'd heard aptitude values below ten points maybe five times. Most people were sitting comfortably in the 20-50 range. The kid before him had gotten mid-Mystic tier results.
And now he had single-handedly dragged the minimum recorded value down to one, twelve times over.
The onlookers were still waiting expectantly for the elder inside to announce his results.
"Well?" Qingxue asked anxiously the moment he reached them. "What happened?"
"Uh..." Alexei scratched the back of his head, unsure how to explain this disaster. "So..."
He gave an awkward smile.
"That guy said I have an Innate Twelve-Element Spiritual Root. Hahaha..."
Everyone from the Aureate Summit Sect froze.
What?
Innate what?
They had heard of innate single-element roots, and dual-element roots, and triple roots too. Quadruple, even five-element spiritual roots were recorded in ancient texts.
But an innate twelve-element root?
What kind of nonsense was that? It was not even a thing. It could not be a thing.
Why had they never heard of such a classification?
Then again, when they thought about the kid's absurd abilities, the claim felt less impossible. Maybe it was strangely reasonable that his spiritual root configuration was unprecedented.
Cultivation logic was weird like that.
"What's the aptitude value?" Yan immediately zeroed in on the critical detail.
The others snapped back to attention. Forget whether innate twelve-element was real or not, the aptitude numbers were what mattered.
If it really was an innate spiritual root, and one with twelve elements, then even ten points per element would place it at legendary Saint-grade level.
Alexei covered his face more tightly with both hands.
He raised one finger.
Yan knew Alexei had been struggling to sense qi during his meditation attempts, so she immediately ruled out the possibility of a hundred points. That left the 10-19 range. She guessed what seemed most reasonable.
"Ten points per element?"
After all, very few people tested below ten points in any single attribute. It'd be a solid result.
Everyone's eyes lit up with hope.
"One point," Alexei said quietly. "Per element. Twelve points total... haha..."
Everyone stood there in stunned silence.
The atmosphere could best be described as "collective brain malfunction."
---
Outside, the crowd continued waiting for the elder to announce the white-haired young man's aptitude.
But even after a long time, no sound came from within the Spirit Testing Hall.
"What's going on?"
"Could it be that his spiritual root is too heaven-defying to announce publicly?" someone speculated.
"It's possible he has an exceptionally powerful Sacred Body or Special Physique," another voice chimed in. "Didn't someone with a special Sacred Body appear ten years ago? Their results weren't announced either, yet they still entered a first-rank sect."
"But why doesn't that guy have a jade token in his hand?" someone questioned. "Everyone who tests gets a token with their results."
"How do you know he doesn't have one? What if he's carrying it inside his robes?"
The discussions swirled around them.
Alexei tugged on Qingxue's sleeve. "Can we please go back to the inn now?"
Once that old man recovered from whatever breakdown he was having, his terrible results would be announced to the entire crowd, and he'd never live it down.
But if he left quickly enough, it would be almost as if it had never happened. A kind of Schrödinger's failure. Until the results were officially announced, he had not failed.
The departure of Alexei and his group caused a brief stir among the crowd, but it quickly settled. Everyone's attention shifted from "why weren't the results announced" to "when will the next test begin."
A full fifteen minutes passed.
Finally, the Spirit Testing Hall echoed with an aged, somewhat shocked voice.
"Next!"
"Li Xiaomei!"
---
Yan'er and Feng had been quietly observing from a distance.
When news spread that Alexei's spiritual root aptitude hadn't been made public, both their eyes flickered slightly.
Yan'er speculated that for the Immortal Alliance to help conceal someone's aptitude, it had to be at least Immortal-grade talent. Probably higher.
She'd heard that Mengyao had received similar treatment in the original timeline. Her aptitude had only been disclosed to second-rank sects and above.
Now that Alexei already belonged to a sect, it was unlikely anyone would ever know his exact spiritual measurements.
---
The various sects' recruitment period lasted a full month.
Alexei spent most of that time at the inn, attempting to cultivate and sense qi. He rarely went out, and he did not attend the final two weeks of Aureate Summit Sect's recruitment efforts.
Somewhat unexpectedly, the sect did recruit another disciple during that period.
Quan brought the boy back himself, though his expression upon returning was rather strange.
The new disciple's name was Li Changgui.
It was the chubby rich kid who had tested right before Alexei.
After that, no more new disciples joined before recruitment finally ended.
---
In front of the spirit boat that would carry them back to the sect, two very different farewell scenes were playing out.
On one side, Mengyao stood quietly. Hongyan held her hand and spoke to her in a low voice, offering repeated advice. The scene was restrained, emotional, and dignified.
On the other side, Changgui's departure was a production.
More than a dozen family members, young and old, along with a small army of servants, hauled boxes and crates onto the Aureate Summit Sect's spirit boat. The rear section was already a third full, and they were still loading more.
The rear section was already filled by a third. And they were still loading.
"Changgui," his father said seriously. He was a wealthy-looking man in his thirties, dressed in expensive silk robes. "Once you enter this immortal sect, you must build a good relationship with your senior brother."
Oh god, he's talking about me, Alexei realized.
"My experience tells me this: following the right person is more important than generations of hard work. More important than decades or even centuries of independent effort."
Please stop.
"As for the family estate, don't worry about it. It'll go to your brother. Your share of the inheritance has all been converted to spirit stones and cultivation materials." He gestured at the mountain of supplies being loaded. "It's all on the spirit boat now."
Changgui nodded repeatedly, his expression determined. "Father, rest assured. From now on, I will follow him in all things!"
No. No no no. I don't want a follower. I don't want a...
"Yes, yes! Hahaha, exactly right!" Changgui's father laughed happily, clapping his son on the shoulder. "If you think this way, I can finally be at ease!"
The Aureate Summit Sect members stood nearby in varying states of shock.
They'd recruited one disciple and somehow ended up with the heir to the Li family, the wealthiest mortal clan in Verdantree City?
And looking at the servants still queuing up with more boxes... could their small spirit boat even hold all this?
Reality proved their concerns were well-founded.
Within half an hour, the entire spirit boat was completely packed. Several crates remained on the dock with nowhere to be placed. The servants stood around awkwardly, unsure what to do with the overflow.
"Immortal Masters... this..."
"Alexei."
"What?"
"I'm not an Immortal Master. Just Alexei is fine"
"Alexei..." The thirty-something Li family head looked uncomfortable. "We may have... overprepared?"
The Aureate Summit Sect members, who'd been utterly stunned by the Li family's wealth, finally snapped out of their daze.
"I can handle it," Alexei said, stepping forward.
He had seen the ledger the family head had given Quan earlier. It was an inventory list.
There was very little gold or silver. Most of the value lay in low-grade and mid-grade spirit stones, along with various spiritual plants and rare crafting materials.
All things considered, it was not as much as it appeared. The real problem was storage. Spiritual medicines had to be kept in jade boxes, and jade boxes took up an absurd amount of space.
The boxes were twenty to thirty centimeters across, each one holding herbs no larger than his thumb. The inefficiency was almost impressive. Apparently, this was simply how the cultivation world worked. Everything had to be preserved in jade containers, or it would lose its spiritual properties.
"Do you have a solution?" Changgui's father expression suggested he'd expected this all along.
From the very first moment he'd laid eyes on this white-haired young man, he'd felt a sense of destiny. Like he was looking at someone chosen by fate itself.
To put it simply: the kid looked exactly like a protagonist from the storybooks.
He had always trusted his intuition. It was how he'd risen from ninth among Verdantree City's mortal families to first place in just over a decade. That kind of success didn't come from luck alone.
Following Alexei's instructions, he had his servants pour the spirit stones from their chests into a massive pile in front of the spirit boat.
Under everyone's curious gazes, Alexei pulled out an iron pickaxe.
That's right. His solution to the storage problem was simply to mine the spirit stones straight into his inventory. Most of his inventory slots were currently empty anyway. Aside from what he'd brought with him initially, he had three stacks of coal blocks purchased in the city, a bucket of live fish, half a stack of raw copper, a pile of various clothes, one container holding leftover Brightglow Fruit pits, two jade boxes filled with seeds...
Oh, and the dozen or so low-grade spirit stones leftover from this trip's expenses.
Though apparently the quantity wasn't enough to meet the MC system's threshold for recognition, because they were still bundled together in a cloth pouch rather than converting into proper MC items.
Right now, he had thirteen full inventory slots completely empty.
CLINK. CLINK. CLINK.
Everyone's eyes fixed on Alexei as he started swinging the pickaxe.
That's when they saw it.
With each strike, cracks spread through the pile of spirit stones. Even the air itself seemed to fracture around them.
They were utterly dumbfounded.
Truly, this was the mighty power of an immortal.
Mengyao felt her breath catch.
Shattering space was an ability said to belong only to experts of the legendary Near-Immortal Realm, the stage just one step below true immortality. In her previous life, even at the moment of her death, she had only reached the peak of the Nascent Soul stage. According to everything she knew, among the countless billions of living beings across the entire Profound Sky Continent, Near-Immortal experts could be counted on one hand.
In the Eastern Territories specifically? There should be none.
And yet here was this young man, fracturing space with a mining tool.
BOOM.
After more than thirty seconds of mining, the cracked area suddenly contracted and fused together. The fractured space collapsed inward, compressing.
Three perfectly shaped spirit stones, each about palm-sized, fell to the ground.
At the same time, a shower of yellow-green glassy orbs appeared, experience orbs that only Alexei could see.
[Level 1 → Level 8]
Alexei froze mid-swing.
Mining spirit stones gives this much experience?
That was almost as much XP as he'd gotten from killing that giant spider.
The mined spirit stones automatically absorbed into his body, flowing into his inventory.
[Low-Grade Spirit Stone]
According to what Yan had told him, a standard spirit stone on the Profound Sky Continent weighed about fifty grams.
The pile he'd just mined had contained at least twenty thousand individual stones. And after mining them all, he'd gotten three.
Three MC-recognized spirit stones.
He held one of the converted stones up to examine it. Aside from being larger and more transparent than normal spirit stones, he didn't notice any other changes.
They definitely had weight, though.
He'd tested this before with other materials. When he held MC-converted items, no matter how many he stacked together, they only counted as the weight of a single unit. But if he threw a stack of blocks, they'd bounce off obstacles harmlessly, yet would have the combined weight of the entire stack.
The strange thing was that even dropping a full stack of gold blocks from a hundred meters caused no environmental damage at all. The blocks simply bounced.
No one besides him could pick them up afterward, unless they possessed the strength to carry the total combined weight.
It was Schrödinger's weight in action. Quantum physics had nothing on Minecraft mechanics.
He stopped mining for the moment. He needed to use up the experience he'd just gained.
Yan had gone to the Alchemy Alliance to collect seeds from previously posted missions and wouldn't be back for a bit. But he still had quite a few spiritual plant seeds that needed assimilating, and now he had the XP to burn.
According to the ledger from the Li family, this batch contained three hundred thousand low-grade spirit stones and three thousand mid-grade stones.
After mining everything, he'd obtained forty-five MC-converted low-grade stones total.
As for the mid-grade stones, since there weren't enough to trigger conversion into proper MC items, he packed them back into chests and placed them on the spirit boat.
While he was at it, he tried assimilating one of his newly obtained low-grade spirit stones.
[Assimilation Cost: Level 3 Experience]
He converted three of them, figuring he'd see what they unlocked later. Once the bulk of the spirit stones were collected, a vast area had already been cleared.
He then stored several of the large, space-consuming chests directly into his inventory as well.
He wanted to craft a chest to place permanently on the spirit boat. That way, everything could just be piled into it for future trips.
Unfortunately, he hadn't brought any wood with him.
He'd set it up once they got back to the sect. The spirit boat was the Aureate Summit Sect's primary means of transporting procurement materials anyway, it'd get plenty of use.
"About done," he said once everything had been loaded.
The watching crowd stood there with their mouths hanging open.
Even Mengyao, who in her previous life had lived over a hundred years and been dead for more than two hundred, was momentarily stunned.
What kind of absurd storage space is this? So ridiculously huge?
Then again... this was a hidden sect. When she thought about it that way, it suddenly seemed reasonable.
Everything about this sect is ridiculous. Why should their storage methods be any different?
Just then, Yan returned from the city.
Her face was covered by a veil, so her expression couldn't be seen. But based on her light footsteps, the mission postings had apparently yielded good results this time.
---
"Mengyao, go on." Hongyan's eyes glistened as she pressed a pendant into Mengyao's hand. "If you have time, you can always come down the mountain to visit me."
Actually, Hongyan should have taken her leave that morning. But seeing how dearly she cherished the child, Quan had brought them both to the Li family residence so they could spend a bit more time together.
As for Hongyan's return journey, there was no need for concern, the carriages from Xu Trading Company had been waiting outside the Li residence for a while now.
In the end, Hongyan did not formally acknowledge Mengyao as her adopted daughter. She didn't even bring it up.
After all, Mengyao possessed a single-element spiritual root. At minimum, she had Earth-grade talent or higher. That guaranteed her the ability to reach Core Formation realm, which meant seven hundred years of lifespan.
Between them lay an unbridgeable gulf. Too many worldly attachments would only add shackles to Mengyao's cultivation path.
Better to let her go cleanly.
Mengyao glanced toward the spirit boat, then back at Hongyan. She looked like she wanted to say something but couldn't find the words.
"All right, I won't delay you any longer. Go on." Hongyan gently pushed Mengyao toward Alexei. "In the future, make sure you get along well with your senior brothers and sisters."
---
Compared to the tearful atmosphere on Mengyao's side, Changgui's farewell was all cheer and laughter.
This was the first cultivation seed of the Li family.
"Go on, Changgui." Changgui's mother held the boy's hand. "At the latest, you'll see us again at the next recruitment ceremony. Don't worry about home. In cultivation, you must be diligent. Share with your senior brothers and sisters. Don't be stingy."
Changgui looked helpless. He'd heard this speech dozens of times over the past few days.
His father leaned closer to his ear and added in a low voice: "In ten years, that girl from the Liu family will probably return from her immortal sect to visit. If you haven't achieved anything in your cultivation by then, find an excuse and don't come back. Don't embarrass the Li family name..."
Yep. Definitely my real dad, Changgui thought drily.
After all the reminders were finished, his parents escorted him to the Aureate Summit Sect members. "We'll entrust our son to you, then. With you watching over him, we can finally rest easy."
Quan nodded. "Please rest assured. Though the Aureate Summit Sect isn't a famous great sect, the safety of our disciples is guaranteed."
Changgui's father and mother nodded repeatedly, looking relieved.
Yan lifted Mengyao onto the spirit boat. Changgui was handed over to Quan, who helped the boy aboard.
As the spirit boat activated, runes lit up all across its surface. The vessel slowly rose into the air.
Changgui and Mengyao leaned over the railing, waving goodbye to the people below.
The Li family had beaten drums and held banquets for several days to celebrate. Though the spectacle was grand, it didn't cause much of a stir in the broader cultivation community.
The Li family might be wealthy, but the word "mortal" came before that wealth.
In the eyes of true Verdantree City cultivation families, their fortune still wasn't worth mentioning.
One only needed to look at pill prices to understand the gap. Even the lowest-grade Rejuvenation Pill, the most commonly used by cultivators, cost seven or eight low-grade spirit stones per pill.
A single fifth-grade Foundation Establishment Pill? At least a thousand low-grade spirit stones. Tens of thousands wasn't particularly rare.
The mortals and cultivators below watched until the Aureate Summit Sect's spirit boat completely disappeared into the horizon.
Only then did they withdraw their gazes.
---
Mengyao sat quietly beside Alexei, lost in thought.
Changgui was still leaning against the railing, staring down at Verdantree City as it grew smaller below, looking a little dejected. Seeing the two of them so dispirited, Alexei scratched his head.
He pulled a Brightglow Fruit from his inventory and held it out to Mengyao, who was closest. "Have a fruit."
Mengyao accepted it instinctively.
But then something strange happened.
After she took the fruit from Alexei's hand, another fruit still existed in his palm. As if it had never been taken at all. If it weren't for the one now in her own hand, she might have believed it was an illusion.
"This one's yours." Reaching past Mengyao, he handed one to Changgui as well. "If it's not enough, I've got more."
He still had quite a few Brightglow Fruits left in his inventory.
He'd force-ripened two full batches back at the sect, obtaining nearly three complete stacks. After consuming them over the past several days, only about thirty fruits remained.
Naturally, he didn't forget about the other Aureate Summit Sect members present on the spirit boat.
They didn't refuse when offered.
Mainly because within the sect, Brightglow Fruit had already become somewhat abundant before they'd left for Verdantree City. It was nothing unusual anymore, just another Monday.
Since the first time he had successfully grown Brightglow Fruit using his Minecraft farming mechanics, he'd force-ripened it a total of six times. Each harvest yielded around eighty fruits, sometimes over a hundred. In other words, the sect had produced at least five hundred Brightglow Fruits total.
But the thing about the fruit was, each additional one you consumed caused the effect to drop dramatically. After eating four or five, the spiritual root improvement became negligible, basically meaningless.
He'd even sent quite a few to the spiritual monkeys on the eastern side of the sect grounds. After personally witnessing his straightforward method of just eating the damn things raw, they'd realized those monkeys had gotten beat up for nothing. The fruits were compensation for that misunderstanding.
Changgui had never seen such a beautiful fruit before. But since it came from a fellow sect member, there was no way it could harm him. He stuffed it straight into his mouth and started chewing.
"So good!"
Mengyao, on the other hand, was not nearly as easygoing. She hesitated, studying the fruit in her hand.
Something nagged at her.
It seemed... familiar. Like she had seen it somewhere before.
It looked almost exactly like the Brightglow Fruit she had seen at an auction house in her previous life. Her sect had spent eighty thousand mid-grade spirit stones to obtain it. At the time, it had been one of their most expensive acquisitions of the year.
And the fruit in her hand was clearly much plumper and more vibrant than that one had been.
Then she noticed how the Aureate Summit Sect members treated the fruits as completely ordinary items, as though they were handing out apples.
I'm probably overthinking this, she thought.
At the time of the auction, she'd only observed it from afar. She hadn't examined it closely. Brightglow Fruit was something she couldn't afford even if she sold herself. How could there possibly be a situation where everyone had one?
The fruit in her hand now was probably just a similar-looking spiritual fruit. It had to be.
She took a bite.
It was indeed delicious.
"Want another?" Alexei asked, holding out another fruit.
Mengyao nodded and accepted it, trying not to think about the impossible math of what she was eating.
"Changgui. This one's yours."
---
The rest of the journey was spent with Yan explaining basic knowledge of the cultivation world to the two newly joined disciples.
Alexei heard many familiar lines, the same warnings and advice that Qingxue had once given him. Naturally, he had no intention of listening to them all over again.
Instead, he focused his attention on the crafting menu.
This time, quite a few new things had unlocked. But they were all spirit stone-related.
[Low-Grade Spirit Stone Block]
[Mid-Grade Spirit Stone]
[Low-Grade Spirit Stone Torch]
[Spirit Stone Lamp]
The synthesis recipes for low-grade spirit stone blocks and mid-grade spirit stones were identical. Both required nine low-grade spirit stones to create one. And low-grade spirit stone blocks and mid-grade spirit stones could be freely converted into each other through the crafting interface.
Wait a second.
He felt something wasn't quite right.
On the Profound Sky Continent, a mid-grade spirit stone was worth a hundred low-grade ones. That was the standard exchange rate everyone used.
Yet in the Minecraft system, it had shrunk to a nine-to-one ratio?
He still had three thousand mid-grade spirit stones in his inventory. That meant three hundred thousand low-grade spirit stones in total value.
When converted through the Minecraft system, however, that total became forty-five MC low-grade spirit stones.
Which, in turn, could be synthesized into five MC mid-grade spirit stones using the system's nine-to-one rate.
The economics were completely broken. Unfortunately, they had been traveling for too long to test it properly.
Besides, those spirit stones technically weren't his to begin with. They were Changgui's family's contribution to the sect.
Abandoning these brain-burning thoughts about exchange rate arbitrage, Alexei shifted his focus to the Low-Grade Spirit Stone Torch.
Its crafting recipe was just like a redstone torch: one MC spirit stone could only make a single torch.
Since he didn't have any sticks at the moment, he deconstructed his iron pickaxe into two sticks and three iron ingots.
A moment later, a blocky torch with a tip of grey-white crystal appeared in his hand. He tested its weight, but he could not really tell. It felt slightly heavy, like holding a wooden stick that was just a bit heavier than expected.
THUNK.
The instant he planted the torch into the ground, everyone aboard the spirit boat turned to look.
The Aureate Summit Sect members felt the surrounding spiritual energy suddenly surge to two or three times its normal concentration.
Mengyao and Changgui, on the other hand, were simply drawn by the sound.
"Huh? Why isn't it glowing?" Alexei asked in confusion.
He waved his hand through the air a few times, knocking the torch over. It was absorbed back into his body and reappeared in his hand.
The Aureate Summit Sect members immediately felt the dense spiritual energy around them vanish the exact moment the torch disappeared.
Normally, even if concentrated spiritual energy were to dissipate, it should slowly spread outward into the environment. There was no way it should just vanish into thin air like this. That violated basic principles of qi dynamics.
THUNK.
Alexei planted the torch back beside his feet. He even leaned in close to examine it carefully.
At the top of the torch, a transparent white flame occasionally flickered, but it was extremely subtle. If you weren't paying attention, it was impossible to see.
"Probably just too dim to show up in daylight," he muttered.
He put the torch back into his inventory, planning to test it again at night.
"Alexei, what was that just now...?" Yan asked.
"Huh?" Alexei pulled out the spirit stone torch again. "This is called a Spirit Stone Torch. It's made using Changgui's spirit stones, but I'm not entirely sure what it does yet."
Changgui pounded his chest enthusiastically. "My spirit stones belong to the sect! If you need them, just take them!"
The kid really knows how to read the room, Alexei thought. If he ever ran into a scam sect, he'd probably get fleeced out of everything including his underwear.
Still, he gave the kid an approving nod. He loved making friends with generous people who had resources to share.
Yan extended her hand. Alexei placed the spirit stone torch onto her palm.
Her hand immediately sank under the weight.
This thing definitely weighs at least four hundred kilograms!
She sensed it carefully but felt nothing unusual from the torch itself. Not even the slightest trace of spiritual energy emanating from it directly.
She tried planting the torch into the ground. Sure enough, the rich spiritual energy appeared once again, flooding the area around them. However, when she tried to pull the torch back out of the ground, she awkwardly discovered that she couldn't budge it at all.
"Ahem..." She ignored the torch stuck in the ground and changed the subject. "I wonder how long a single spirit stone torch can be used before it runs out?"
Alexei didn't suspect anything was wrong. With a wave of his hand, he retrieved the torch back into his own inventory and said, "As long as it isn't knocked over or broken, this torch should be like the regular lighting torches I crafted before. Infinite durability."
The Aureate Summit Sect members all froze.
Infinite use?
Their first reaction was skepticism. That couldn't possibly be true. Nothing had infinite durability in cultivation. Everything wore down eventually. That was a fundamental law.
Then they remembered Alexei's ability to force-ripen a three-hundred-year-old spiritual plant in seven minutes flat. And then make it bear fruit once every four minutes afterward.
Compared to that broken ability, an infinitely usable spirit stone torch that concentrated ambient spiritual energy...
Maybe it was not impossible?
Verifying it would be simple enough. They just needed to test it over time.
---
The spirit stone torch planted near Quan made piloting the spirit boat considerably easier. He didn't have to constantly draw on his own reserves to maintain their speed, he could just pull from the dense spiritual energy the torch provided.
Which meant less exhaustion, better fuel efficiency, and one less grumpy elder complaining about his aching meridians.
When Yan had explained the torch's full effects to Alexei, he'd been impressed for about five seconds before his brain started doing the math.
He held up the torch, examining it.
"That's insane." He planted the torch back down. "In any normal economic system, this would cause immediate hyperinflation of cultivation resources..."
Yan blinked at him. "Hyper... what?"
"Never mind." He waved it off. Economics probably worked differently here anyway. Or didn't work at all, given some of the things he'd seen.
Still, unlimited cultivation boost for a one-time investment? Even he had to admit that was pretty good value.
----------
[POV: Yi Mengyao]
While the members of the Aureate Summit Sect treated the spirit stone torch as just another bizarre miracle, Mengyao was experiencing what could only be described as an existential crisis.
She remained quiet during the initial explanations, choosing to listen and observe as the elders tested the torch's properties. She watched them absorb spiritual energy from it continuously for hours, only to find that neither the quality nor the quantity of the energy diminished in the slightest.
The more she learned, the less sense it made.
Effect radius: three meters, with spiritual energy concentration increasing up to three times normal levels. The closer to the torch, the denser the qi. Even at the edge of its range, the concentration was still doubled.
Duration: apparently infinite, based on the overnight testing.
Interference: multiple torches could be placed near each other without competing for spiritual energy. They just coexisted peacefully, like that was a normal thing for cultivation resources to do.
Capacity: no matter how many people drew from a torch simultaneously, the spiritual energy never thinned. It was like trying to drink an ocean dry with a teaspoon, theoretically impossible, practically pointless.
Every single one of those properties violated fundamental principles she'd learned in her previous life.
Spirit Gathering Arrays, the normal method for concentrating ambient qi, had to be spaced kilometers apart or they'd steal energy from each other. Large-scale formations could drain spiritual energy from dozens of kilometers in every direction, creating dead zones where cultivation became nearly impossible.
And even then, if multiple cultivators used the same array, the gathered qi would run out quickly. It was basic supply and demand.
This torch just ignored all of that.
The only limit seemed to be the three-times maximum concentration cap, which admittedly made it slightly less reality-breaking. If you could stack torches infinitely, she might have genuinely questioned whether she'd gone insane.
But even without infinite stacking, this was absurd.
In her previous life, as the personal disciple of the Celestial Path Sect's master, she'd received a monthly stipend of one hundred low-grade spirit stones. After expenses, she'd have maybe sixty stones left for cultivation.
Sixty stones per month was considered generous by sect standards.
Inner disciples received thirty. Outer disciples got ten. Menial disciples were lucky to see three stones a month.
And direct absorption of spirit stone energy was considered wasteful, the proper method was using them to power Spirit Gathering Arrays. One low-grade stone could maintain a triple-concentration array for about half an hour. Which meant her sixty monthly stones translated to roughly thirty hours of accelerated cultivation. One hour per day, basically.
She'd been one of the wealthiest disciples in the sect.
This torch was equivalent to a portable, infinite-duration, unlimited-capacity Spirit Gathering Array that never needed refueling.
It was like being told a village blacksmith had picked up a random stick, tied a knife to it, and accidentally forged a legendary immortal weapon.
Actually, no. It was exactly like that, considering what she'd seen her sect brother do with an iron pickaxe.
She glanced over at Changgui, who had his face pressed against the torch, staring at it with fascination.
The boy had no idea what he was looking at. To him, it was just another mystical cultivation thing. Impressive, sure, but he had no frame of reference.
Ignorance is bliss, she thought with a slight grimace.
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A p@treon reader correctly guessed why all of his aptitudes show as 1.