Immortality Cultivation: Fellow Daoists, please live for two more episodes!

Back to Shen Ye, he's been quite troubled lately.

His lawn was robbed.

The area in the back mountain hollow where he planted spiritual plants was surrounded by rocks on all sides and the sky overhead. The only shelter he got was from the array flags he bought with points.

As your business grows bigger and bigger, it's only a matter of time before someone takes notice.

Shen Ye knew this perfectly well.

Therefore, he never sold the medicine himself from the beginning; the elixirs were all sold through middlemen.

We earned less, but at least the buyers couldn't find out who planted it or where it was planted.

To achieve this, he split the points he earned in half, keeping half for cultivation and daily expenses, and spending the other half entirely on upgrading the array flags.

I changed it three times in the past two months, from the lowest-level Concealment Flag to the second-level Misdirection Flag, which cost me almost two hundred points, a considerable sum for a low-level outer sect disciple.

He originally thought it would be enough.

The second-tier tracking flag isn't bad for outer sect disciples. Ordinary disciples who have passed through the Yellow Court area can pass by without being detected unless they deliberately use their spiritual sense to conduct a thorough search.

But when he returned from the medicine warehouse mission today, he saw from afar that a battle flag at the entrance of the valley was crooked.

He personally straightened the flagpole before each departure, and he could spot even the slightest difference in angle.

It's crooked, which means someone has touched it.

He strode into the hollow, sweeping over the rows of spiritual herbs. The Spirit-Guiding Grass remained untouched, the Spirit Valley Root remained untouched, but the Healing Grass had diminished.

Three plants are missing.

They were all almost ripe and could have been harvested in two or three days, but someone yanked them up by the roots, leaving fresh scratch marks on the muddy ground.

Three healing herbs, based on his selling price, are only worth forty or fifty points. It's not a big loss.

But Shen Ye squatted in front of the empty pits, his face darkening.

Losing the grass isn't the problem. The problem is that the other side can sneak in.

If you can sneak in, you can see what's growing in this hollow.

Seeing what's being grown makes one curious about why these medicinal herbs are of better quality than those found outside.

If you keep being curious, you'll eventually end up touching that little green bottle.

Once the bottle is exposed, it's not just a matter of throwing away a few blades of grass.

That was the cause of murder and robbery.

Shen Ye filled the pits back with soil, straightened the array flags, and walked around the hollow, but found no further traces.

Who the other party is is currently unknown. But it's certain they're not a master; a master wouldn't just pluck three blades of grass and leave.

It's more like a disciple who happened to be passing by discovered this place and casually took a few trees.

I just grabbed it; I might come back next time.

They might also invite others to come along.

This place can no longer be used.

He needs a closed, locked place.

This matter needs to be handled as soon as possible.

……

Besides that, there was another thing that made him feel uneasy.

Liu Yinyin's recent condition seems off.

There was nothing unusual during dual cultivation. The energy was transferred as usual, and the resonance was maintained as usual.

However, her recovery became slower and slower after each dual cultivation session.

In the beginning, I could recover after resting for half a day.

We needed to rest for most of the day afterwards.

Then it took a whole day.

After the last dual cultivation, she lay in bed for a day and a night. When she woke up, her face was as white as paper and her lips were completely bloodless.

Shen Ye brought her a bowl of spirit grain porridge. She took it and drank two mouthfuls, her hands trembling.

Shen Ye didn't say anything, but he started to pay attention.

The next time he practiced dual cultivation, he didn't follow the normal rhythm.

When the spiritual energy was transferred out through the skin, he deliberately did so very slowly and delicately, like using the tip of a needle to pick up silk, sending it into Liu Yinyin's body strand by strand.

Let's try to find out what caused it.

After the spiritual energy entered her meridians, it mingled with her own spiritual energy and resonated with it.

He mingled in the resonant spiritual energy, following the flow of her meridians downwards.

I touched it.

At a certain point in her meridians, the flow of spiritual energy would pause briefly whenever it passed through that area.

In the blink of an eye, the spiritual energy dissipates, leaving a dent, then the surface returns to its smooth state.

Wait another 15 minutes, then do it again.

Shen Ye stared at it three times in a row, with a stable interval and the same position.

It wasn't a random fluctuation. Something was in that fixed position, slowly consuming her spiritual energy.

She was completely unaware of it.

After the dual cultivation ended, Liu Yinyin closed her eyes and breathed shallowly as usual. Shen Ye pulled the blanket up a little and did not wake her up.

He sat by the window and stared blankly out the window for a long time.

She was unaware that her spiritual energy was being consumed.

If it were an external force tampering with her from the side, she couldn't possibly be completely unaware; therefore, it wasn't an external force.

It was something within her that was eating her.

Cultivation techniques, or something else.

Shen Ye thought of the "Jade Dew Yin-Nourishing Skill".

He had explored this technique during dual cultivation. Its operation was gentle and continuous, and the spiritual energy followed a different path than ordinary techniques, with many twists and turns, and it was good at accumulating energy but not at releasing it.

But storing is about taking things in, while being eaten is about letting them leak out.

These two are not the same thing.

However, we can only see the phenomenon at present, but we can't figure out the reason.

If I tell Yin Yin rashly, she will panic and her cultivation technique will go awry, which might make things worse.

Shen Ye reduced the frequency of dual cultivation from once every two days to once every three days.

After slowing down, the emptiness lessened somewhat, but it didn't disappear.

This at least illustrates one thing: dual cultivation is not the root cause, but merely a catalyst.

The root cause has always been there; dual cultivation simply feeds it faster.

This matter is also a thorn in his side.

……

The medicine warehouse task, to put it bluntly, is to do half a day of hard labor in the outer sect's spirit medicine warehouse.

Registering entries and exits, verifying quantities, cleaning up moldy medicinal materials, and sorting newly arrived medicinal herbs onto shelves according to their grade.

The work isn't strenuous, but it's varied.

Most disciples who took on this task did it perfunctorily. Those who were quick and efficient could finish in half an hour and leave, while they wished they could spend the rest of the time cultivating.

Shen Ye did the same thing.

He quickly finished dealing with the matter, threw down the rag, and walked over to the medicine store manager.

The manager was a senior disciple at the fifth level of Qi Refining, who had been working there for seven or eight years. He was very slick and always smiled at everyone, especially when it came to points.

Shen Ye took out a few bamboo tokens from his sleeve, placed them on the table, and pushed them forward.

"I need to ask you something."

The steward glanced down at the number of bamboo tallies, and his smile immediately became more genuine.

"ask."

"Within the outer sect, if one wants to inquire about information or find someone influential, who should one seek out?"

The steward accepted the bamboo tokens, thought for a moment, wrote a few words on a piece of scrap paper, folded it up, and handed it over.

Shen Ye opened it and took a look.

Lü Ci, Manager Lü.

Shen Ye looked at the name and his expression was not good.

He didn't really want to go see this person.

He owes most of his current wealth to his previous trip to the secret realm.

But he sneaked away after he came out last time.

Asking him to actively seek out information now would be like sending a lamb to the slaughter.

But if we don't go, there's no solution to the grass problem, and it will only get more and more complicated if we keep putting it off.

Before he could come up with a solution, a cheerful voice rang out from behind him.

"Young friend Shen, it's been a long time."

Shen Ye's back stiffened for a moment.

He turned around and saw Lü Ci.