One divination a day, a trainee celestial master

Early morning at Cuiwei Mountain.

The air was filled with the unique freshness and earthy fragrance of rain.

Jiang Shou stood under the old locust tree in the courtyard, faithfully completing a full set of the "Guardian of Oneness" morning breathing exercises. Although the "millet grain" in his dantian remained aloof and unresponsive to his commands, the feeling of mental clarity and heightened senses after the exercises was undeniably real.

He walked to the main hall and respectfully offered three sticks of incense to the Three Pure Ones and the grandfather in the side hall.

"Grandmaster, please bless me! Although I complained in my heart yesterday about how stingy the rewards were, you are magnanimous and won't hold it against me. Please don't send me any more life-threatening emergency cases today. I'm exhausted and desperately need to rest and recuperate. A relaxing mission where I can dig up gold ingots just by walking a few steps would be best..."

Jiang Shou kept muttering to himself without any restraint.

"Ugh—"

Inside the pocket of the inner garment, the wooden plaque, symbolizing the enduring cold, radiated warmth.

Jiang Shou suddenly opened his eyes, his face lighting up with joy. "Oh ho! They've arrived? The ancestral master has indeed appeared!"

He reached into his pocket with anticipation and pulled out the faintly warm Suihan Token.

Looking down, the two ancient seal characters "岁寒" on the surface of the wooden sign were shimmering with a faint blue light.

Jiang Shou lightly rubbed the card surface with his thumb.

Accompanied by a subtle "rustling" sound, like a carving knife cutting through wood, four lines of brand-new small regular script, radiating a lustrous glow, slowly emerged.

Jiang Shou read it aloud word by word with great anticipation:

[The Xun Hexagram, Line 93] [Old wood conceals truth; breaking free from the cocoon, life is born; hidden secrets lead to a path to longevity.]

[The old plaque in the temple holds hidden secrets.] [It is auspicious to break the wood to retrieve the object, thus obtaining an unparalleled opportunity.]

After reading it the first time, Jiang Shou hadn't quite grasped it yet, only thinking that these few sentences in classical Chinese were quite sophisticated.

"An old plaque in the temple? It holds a hidden secret?!"

Jiang Shou stared at these lines of text, his eyes suddenly bulging out as if struck by lightning, frozen in place.

"Breaking through wood to obtain something... a supreme opportunity?! A path to immortality?!"

!!!

Does this mean a chance encounter for cultivating immortality? An elixir of immortality? A cultivation technique?

After a brief moment of shock, a cold sweat of lingering fear instantly soaked Jiang Shou's back!

Previously, outside the Taoist temple gate, he found the old wooden plaque that Da Long had replaced in the way, and he almost, just a little bit, was about to swing his arm and throw it into the deep ditch behind the mountain like trash!

"Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit!"

Jiang Shoulian swore three times, his heart pounding wildly.

"If I really threw it off the cliff, wouldn't I be throwing away my own 'path to immortality' with my own hands?!"

Jiang Shou swallowed hard, his gaze suddenly shifting to the threshold of the main hall.

In the morning sunlight, the plump orange cat, Fat Tiger, was lazily lying on the doorstep, yawning, its tail swaying idly behind it.

It was this chubby little cat that silently placed the old plaque, weighing over twenty pounds, across the steps at the front door, causing him to trip over it. It was also because of the look in Fat Tiger's eyes that he inexplicably changed his mind and put the plaque into the storage room.

"I shouldn't have kept thinking about it to myself. This fat cat only knows how to freeload. But it can still be useful when it matters," Jiang Shou said with some guilt.

But he didn't have time to thank Fat Tiger. He turned around abruptly, took off running, and headed straight for the storage shed and woodshed in the backyard.

"Bang!" Jiang Shou kicked open the woodshed door and spotted the old plaque with faded characters in the corner of a pile of broken brooms and cardboard boxes.

He took a deep breath, stepped forward, and lifted the extremely heavy solid wood plaque with one hand, placing it flat on the bluestone slab in the courtyard.

"Breaking wood to retrieve something..."

Jiang Shou crouched down and carefully examined the old piece of wood that had weathered many storms. Sure enough, he found a tiny, almost imperceptible crack along the edge of the side of the plaque.

Go find an axe and a saw? Absolutely not!

Jiang Shou's current physical body has been reshaped by the baptism of a large amount of cold and blue light!

He gripped both sides of the crack with his hands, his ten fingers like iron clamps.

"Drink!" Jiang Shou shouted, his arm muscles bulging instantly, and a terrifying brute force burst forth from his arms!

"Crack—!" Accompanied by a tooth-grinding sound of wood tearing.

Jiang Shou actually tore this heavy and sturdy solid wood plaque in half with just his bare hands, along the hidden seam!

Amidst the flying sawdust, the hidden compartment in the center of the plaque, completely hollowed out, was starkly exposed to the air.

Jiang Shou held his breath and peered over.

Hidden in that concealed compartment was a square object wrapped in bright yellow brocade.

"There really is something!" Jiang Shou's hands trembled slightly with excitement. He carefully took out the brocade package, brushed off the wood chips, and unwrapped it layer by layer.

The brocade unfurled. Inside was an ancient, thread-bound book, even older than the "Introduction to the Three Arts," its paper gleaming with a strange bluish hue!

On the cover of the ancient book, there was also a peculiar blue round plaque.

Jiang Shouxian picked up the cyan round plaque. The plaque was cool to the touch, its material neither gold nor jade, neither wood nor stone, and it felt heavy. The surface of the plaque was carved with intricate, even dizzying, strange patterns. Along the edges of the patterns were evenly distributed small grooves, resembling clock markings.

It looks like a miniature ancient stardial, or a complex mechanical key.

"What kind of treasure is this? What is this thing used for?" Jiang Shou looked at it over and over for a long time, but apart from feeling that it was ancient and mysterious, he couldn't figure it out.

"Never mind, since it's wrapped together with a cultivation manual and hidden inside the plaque, it must be an extraordinary, top-grade item. Let's keep it for now!"

Jiang Shou tucked the mysterious cyan round plaque into his pocket, then turned his gaze to the ancient book with cyan paper.

On the cover of the ancient book are seven large characters, written in a vigorous and simple style, conveying a sense of mystery.

【Supreme Oneness: Inner Landscape】!

Jiang Shou swallowed hard and turned to look at the torn old plaque on the ground. Judging from the degree of decay in the hidden compartments inside the plaque and the oxidation of the bright yellow brocade, this was definitely not something left behind by the old man!

This has a history of at least a hundred years! It is unknown whether it was the previous masters or the founding patriarch who established this Shouyi Temple, who secretly sealed the core heritage in this gate plaque when they encountered some kind of calamity!

"I'm rich! This is the real cultivation technique!"

Jiang Shou eagerly opened the book, "The Supreme Lord of Oneness: Inner Landscape Chapter".

The first page is a grand and magnificent opening statement:

[Stealing Yin and Yang, seizing the power of creation. Cultivating this inner realm allows one to condense true energy, control all techniques, and attain immortality!]

"One can achieve immortality!" Upon seeing these four words, Jiang Shou's eyes instantly turned red, and he almost roared to the sky in excitement!

"The Great Dao is formless, yet it gives birth to Heaven and Earth; the Great Dao is without emotion, yet it governs the sun and moon. All things possess a spirit, but humanity is the most spiritual. One who guards the One guards the origin of all things, seizes the creation of Heaven and Earth, and uses the physical body as a furnace to condense all phenomena within the inner landscape..."

"Awesome! Absolutely awesome! There really is cultivation! This world really has immortality! I'm really going to take off now!" Jiang Shou was so excited that his eyes were shining.

Jiang Shou eagerly flipped through the pages, greedily reading this core cultivation technique that pointed directly to the Great Dao.

However, as he looked down, the expression of ecstasy on his face gradually froze.

"To cultivate inner vision, one needs a guide. A teacher's cultivation must reach a state of perfection before they can impart their skills."

"When transmitting skills, one must choose a place where extreme yin and yang meet. The master must expend his true energy to help the disciple circulate the Great Heavenly Cycle in reverse, forcibly opening the disciple's spiritual platform and nurturing the [Guardian of Oneness - Seed of the Dao]."

Below this passage, there is a line of small red text highlighted with cinnabar: "Note: This is an act against the will of Heaven, extremely dangerous! The disciple must have exceptional talent and aptitude; the slightest mistake could result in both master and disciple exploding and dying. This risk must be known in advance."

Further on, the pages were filled with diagrams explaining how to find the most dangerous places, how to reverse the flow of Qi, and how to endure the excruciating and demanding pain of being skinned alive.

Jiang Shou sat at the stone table, staring dumbfounded at the manual in his hand that seemed to teach people how to survive "nine deaths and one life".

Find a master at the highest level? Exhaust your true energy? Go to the extremes of Yin and Yang, a place of utter despair? Risk exploding and dying?

"The threshold for this cultivation technique must be welded shut onto the Southern Heavenly Gate with welding rods, right?!" Jiang Shou slammed the book shut, his lips twitching wildly. This wasn't a cultivation manual; it was clearly a guide to ensuring the mutual destruction of master and disciple!

In this degenerate age, where can he find a master of the Transcendent Realm who is willing to die for him?

Just as Jiang Shou was ranting and raving, a sudden thought flashed through his mind.

Wait a minute. Nurturing… [Guarding the One, Seed of the Dao]?

Jiang Shou's expression froze instantly.

He abruptly lowered his head, looking at his lower abdomen. He closed his eyes, his mind sinking like lightning, rushing straight to his dantian.

Deep within his dantian, in that most inconspicuous corner, the pale golden "millet grain" with a hint of green at its edges, which had made him beat his chest and curse wildly last night, was quietly floating there.

It's unresponsive and lukewarm. It's like a useless kidney stone.

Jiang Shou opened his eyes and gasped.

"This little thing...could it be that... [Guardian of Oneness - Seed of the Dao] mentioned in the book?!"

Jiang Shou was stunned. He recalled the exhilarating feeling of the Suihan Decree turning into a blue light and rushing into his brow after completing the soul-summoning mission yesterday.

Others who want to cultivate this technique need to find a peerless master as their teacher, find an extremely auspicious location, risk their bodies to explode and die, and endure the pain of being skinned and having their tendons pulled out, in order to plant this seed in their dantian.

And he... just because he completed a quest to dispel evil spirits and summon souls, the system skipped the cutscene and directly stuffed the [Dao Seed], coveted by countless cultivators, into his dantian as a quest reward?!

"So..." Jiang Shou looked at the book "Inner Landscape Chapter" on the table, then touched his stomach, his Adam's apple bobbing with difficulty.

"I spent half yesterday cursing those worthless 'kidney stones'..."

"Actually, it's the [First Recharge Gift Pack for Immortal Cultivation]? A supreme VIP pass to the path of immortality through cultivation?!"