After binding with a genius, I became an immortal by exploiting loopholes.

Chapter 129 First Encounter with the Spirit Path

The first to mature is the golden orchid.

This batch of golden orchids took about two months from sowing to harvest, which is nearly 30% faster than the average cycle recorded by the Spirit Plant Hall.

The sign of maturity is the pale golden halo around the edge of the leaf—when the halo turns from pale gold to pure gold and the underside of the leaf can no longer be seen through it, it is the best time to harvest.

Lu Qingchen used his spiritual eye technique to check several times before taking out the jade box and knife he had prepared beforehand and began to pick the fruit.

When harvesting golden orchids, the principle is "leave three and take two" – at least three mature leaves should be left on each plant to maintain its vitality, and a maximum of two leaves should be taken away at a time.

If this ratio is exceeded, the plant will be severely damaged, and the growth cycle of the next batch of leaves will be greatly prolonged.

He squatted by the edge of the field, holding a leaf in one hand and a small knife in the other.

The knife tip should be used to make a diagonal cut from the base of the leaf stalk, with steady force, precise angle, and a smooth cut surface.

Cutting too deep will damage the main stem, while cutting too shallow will prevent the leaves from being removed. If you pull them off forcefully, it will leave wounds on the plant, making it susceptible to disease.

One piece, two pieces, three pieces...

The twelve golden orchid leaves fell one by one into the jade box.

Lu Qingchen closed the lid of the box and put the jade box into his storage bag.

Golden Leaf Orchid leaves are a superior material for making talisman ink, and can be sold for at least dozens of spirit stones in the market.

However, he doesn't plan to sell these golden orchids for the time being because they are growing too fast.

It matures in just over two months, nearly a month faster than the normal cycle of the Spirit Plant Hall. If you take out twelve high-quality Golden Leaf Orchid leaves at this time and sell them in the market, a discerning person will notice something is amiss after a little calculation.

He plans to wait until things make sense in terms of timing before gradually selling them out.

After harvesting, he cast a Spirit Nourishing Spell on the Golden Leaf Orchids, and pale green spiritual light seeped from his palm, enveloping each Golden Leaf Orchid.

The plant whose leaves had been picked trembled slightly, and the cut began to heal at a visible speed, with new leaf buds already beginning to emerge.

At this rate of growth, the next batch of leaves will be ready for harvesting in less than a month.

The next to mature is the chalcedony fungus.

It took nearly four months from sowing to harvesting this batch of chalcedony fungus.

For a first-grade superior spiritual plant, this speed is already considered extremely fast—according to the "Basic Treatise on Spiritual Plants," the normal growth cycle of Jade Marrow Fungus is about half a year.

A mature chalcedony mushroom has a fully expanded cap, forming a perfect hemisphere, with a surface covered in a warm, jade-like luster.

When you get close enough to smell it, the faint medicinal fragrance is several times stronger than when it was a seedling. Just a few breaths of it bring a cool and comfortable sensation through your meridians.

Following the method described in the ancient texts, Lu Qingchen used a small knife to cut the mature Jade Marrow Fungus from the root.

He kept the three largest caps so they could continue to grow and produce seeds—the seeds of Ganoderma lucidum are extremely small; a single cap can produce thousands of spores. With these seeds, he could expand the cultivation scale next season.

The remaining chalcedony mushrooms were sliced ​​thinly and spread out on a bamboo sieve to dry.

The dried chalcedony slices are translucent milky white, hard in texture, and make a crisp sound when touched lightly.

Lu Qingchen carefully placed them one by one into the jade box in his storage bag and sealed it.

Chalcedony Ganoderma lucidum can warm and nourish the meridians, and its effects are best when taken during the Qi-refining period.

That evening, he took a small piece and put it in his mouth.

The jade tablets melt in the mouth, and the medicinal power transforms into a cool, gentle stream that slowly permeates along the meridians.

The coolness was gentle and unhurried, like a pair of invisible hands gently massaging the walls of my meridians. My meridians, which had been sore from days of intense training, gradually felt relieved by this coolness.

After that, he would put one in his mouth every night after finishing his practice.

After taking it for half a month, changes began to appear in the meridians. The flow of spiritual energy was smoother than before, and the meridians did not ache as much as before when practicing for two consecutive hours.

The meridians of a low-grade Five Elemental Root are as narrow as streams and have extremely poor resilience. Although the nourishment of Jade Marrow Fungus cannot change the quality of the Elemental Root from the root, it at least allows him to unleash more potential on the existing basis.

"No wonder those disciples with powerful backgrounds in the sect can cultivate so much faster than ordinary people."

Lu Qingchen sighed inwardly.

This single ingredient, Jade Marrow Ganoderma, can increase cultivation efficiency by 20% to 30%.

If they are given other supplementary pills and spiritual items to aid their cultivation, the gap in talent will only widen further.

Fortunately, he now has these things too.

As for the Zhu fruit, its ripening cycle should be measured in years.

But he has a monument.

.

From the day the Vermilion Fruit seedlings were transplanted into the Spirit Protection Field, he allocated a considerable portion of his cultivation, which was deeply focused on spiritual energy, to one of the seedlings.

Under the dual stimulation of deep spiritual infusion and the spiritual energy of the earth's veins, this Vermilion Fruit traversed its normally long growth cycle at an almost heaven-defying speed.

Its branches grow to half a person's height within a few months, and its leaves change from light green to deep crimson, with a faint golden light flowing through the veins.

After the fruit set was successful, this single fruit became the focus of his daily attention.

The fruit changes from green to red, and then from red to deep red with a purplish hue. Underneath the skin, there are faint, fire-like patterns flowing, like miniature flames sealed inside the fruit, which light up and dim with the fruit's breath.

This process lasted for more than ten days, during which Lu Qingchen used his spiritual eye technique to observe the concentration of spiritual energy inside the fruit each day.

A single fruit encapsulates all the essence accumulated by this vermilion fruit over several months.

On the day of the harvest, he was more careful than ever before.

The sepals of the Vermilion Fruit are extremely fine and thin. When harvesting, one must wrap the sepals with spiritual power and simultaneously cut the fruit stem with a jade knife. The slightest mistake will damage the sepals, rendering the Vermilion Fruit plant unable to produce another fruit.

"Click."

The fruit stalk broke off.

The moment the fruit was placed in the box, the fire-like patterns on the peel suddenly lit up, brighter than ever before.

Like a sealed flame that roared in despair at the last moment, it slowly dimmed.

Lu Qingchen closed the lid of the box and sealed the jade box with his spiritual power.

That night, he sat cross-legged in the center of the protective field and took out the Vermilion Fruit.

The fruit peel is slightly hot.

Holding it in your hand feels like holding a piece of warm jade just taken out of the furnace.

He sat quietly and regulated his breathing for a while, waiting for the clear energy in his dantian to stabilize before slicing the vermilion fruit into thin slices according to the method recorded in the classic texts.

With one cut, the juice oozing from the fruit flesh had a faint reddish-gold luster.

He took a deep breath and put the first piece into his mouth.

As soon as the fruit entered my stomach, a burst of intense and pure spiritual energy exploded forth.

.

That was a completely different kind of power.

The spiritual power of Lingmi is gentle and subtle, like spring rain nourishing all things.

The medicinal properties of Chalcedony Ganoderma lucidum are cooling, like mountain spring water, soothing and gentle.

The spiritual power of the Vermilion Fruit, however, is scorching, domineering, and utterly unreasonable.

It was like a raging fire, rampaging through his meridians, burning them slightly wherever it went.

More than two hundred strands of pure energy were ignited simultaneously by this external force, as if a pot of boiling water had exploded in the dantian.

Lu Qingchen quickly activated the "Azure Wood Spiritual Energy Technique" to guide the violent spiritual energy into his meridians.

As the cultivation technique was activated, the intense spiritual energy gradually subsided under its guidance, no longer rushing around recklessly, but flowing orderly along the meridians.

The pure energy is carried by it and rotates faster. With each rotation, the purity of the pure energy becomes more solid.

But at the very moment his spiritual energy surged into his dantian, Lu Qingchen suddenly felt a strange sensation—a sensation that could not be described in any language.

A deeper, more sensory perception, beyond the five senses, suddenly ignited in the deepest recesses of his consciousness.

He "felt" the breath of the plants.

In the Spirit Protection Field, the life force of every spiritual plant—the remnants of the newly harvested spiritual rice, the growing seedlings of the Vermilion Fruit, the Jade Marrow Fungus with its caps unfolding, and the Golden Leaf Orchid with its edges gleaming with gold—was no longer a vague "aura" in his perception, but became incredibly clear and concrete.

He could "feel" the flow of life within each spiritual plant, like a net woven from countless fine threads, each thread trembling slightly, each tremor a breath.

His consciousness continued to extend downwards along this net.

It penetrated the soil layer of the protective spirit field, penetrated the bluestone slab of the cave, penetrated the root system of the earth vein spirit embryo, and penetrated the rock layer dozens of feet below the surface.

He "saw" the golden roots of the earth vein spirit embryo slowly extending deep into the soil, and the exchange of spiritual energy at the tip of each root was magnified to be clearly visible.

He "saw" the path through which the earth's energy seeped from the cracks in the rock strata. The originally invisible flow of spiritual energy now appeared to him like glowing streams, each with its own unique speed and temperature.

Then he touched on something "abstract".

What is that?

he does not know.

All he knew was that he had touched the edge of something extremely large.

It was a force, a law, a fundamental principle that supports the growth of all plants and trees in this world.

The tenacity of a seed breaking through the soil, the resilience of an old tree rooted for centuries, the vibrant energy of countless trees vying for spring's favor on an endless plain...

These things, which he could only read about in books and existed only in his imagination, now left a fleeting glimpse into the depths of his consciousness in an extremely abstract yet extremely real way.

Just a glimpse.

That feeling vanished in an instant, like a startled fish.

Lu Qingchen suddenly opened his eyes, panting heavily.

My forehead was covered in sweat, and my back was soaked.

What did he touch just now?

That is something that cultivators in the Qi Refining stage can neither understand nor touch.

He wasn't even sure if Foundation Establishment cultivators were qualified to access that level.

It was so large that it could not be described using any existing concepts.

When he tried to recapture that feeling, his mind was already empty.

There's nothing left.

But it's not like there's absolutely nothing there.

He calmed down and carefully sensed it, and finally found a very faint mark in the deepest part of his consciousness.

It was so small it was almost negligible, and its color was so pale it looked like a drop of ink falling into the ocean.

But it truly exists, like a seed, buried in the deepest soil of the sea of ​​consciousness.

He tentatively touched the mark with his consciousness, and the mark trembled slightly, giving him a very subtle sensation. The sensation was exactly the same as the lingering breath of the plants just now, only much smaller.

This is what remained from that brief moment.

He didn't know what this "seed" was, when it would sprout, or what it would grow into after sprouting.

But one thing he was certain of was that the perception he had just experienced had nothing to do with his divine sense or his cultivation level; it was a completely different way of "seeing."

It doesn't grasp the grand trends of heaven and earth from a macro perspective, but rather starts from the smallest details—the flow rate of vital energy in the veins of leaves, the expansion of the roots and the rise and fall of earth energy in the soil.

These details would not be noticed in normal cultivation perception, but in that instant, they were the clearest and most specific things he perceived.

He only had a vague feeling that these things were very important.

It was important enough to change his entire understanding of cultivation.

He sat in the protective field for a long time.

The night breeze dried the sweat on my forehead, and the calls of night birds drifted from afar.

Within his dantian, the pure qi increased by nearly twenty strands under the impact of the vermilion fruit's spiritual power, bringing him one step closer to the peak of the third level of Qi Refining.

But he couldn't care less about any of that at the moment.

What was that just now?

He desperately tried to recall every detail of the Zhu Guo's spiritual power flowing into his dantian—the temperature of the spiritual power, the speed of its flow, and the angle at which it entered his dantian.

Perhaps it wasn't the Vermilion Fruit's own spiritual power, but rather the Vermilion Fruit acting as a medium, bringing something he encountered daily but had never noticed into his perception.

Could it be a glimmer of hope?

He spends his days planting, watering, fertilizing, and performing spiritual cultivation techniques; he deals with life every day.

But precisely because it was so close, so close that he had become accustomed to it, he had never truly "seen" it.

The Vermilion Fruit, a spiritual plant with both fire and wood attributes, concentrates the life essence it has accumulated throughout its life at the last moment of fruit ripening.

The moment he consumed the fruit, the concentrated vitality struck his senses in its purest form, allowing him to briefly cross the boundary of the Qi Refining stage and touch the level that should only be accessible after Foundation Establishment.

Is that the correct logic?

But Lu Qingchen still didn't know.

This is just an intuition, a vague guess.

Lu Qingchen let out a long breath and stood up.

Perhaps the only way to get the answer is to consult Old Sun and his cheap master.