Elderly Martial Saint: Sixty Times the Cultivation Speed ​​at the Start

Yi Yang swam to the patch of black-scaled fruit and squatted down.

The fifteen fruits in this watery cave grew side by side on a cluster of dark roots. They varied in size, the smallest being about the size of an egg and the largest being as round and plump as a fist.

He reached out and pinched each one.

Most of the fruit had soft skin and appeared to have weak medicinal properties, suggesting they were at most three to five years old and far from being usable.

But three of them are different.

The peels of these three fruits are hard, and the scales on the surface are deep and dense. When you hold them in your hand, you can feel the medicinal power surging inside, rising and falling like a heartbeat.

The lowest grade of medicine is 15 years old.

This is what it means to be mature.

Yi Yang picked the three fruits, wrapped them in oilcloth, and stuffed them into a waterproof bag with nimble movements.

This substance, when taken with the heart's blood of the Golden-Veined Black Python, can help one enter the True Qi Realm. It is an extremely rare and priceless item.

It's of no use to him.

He has already reached the True Qi Realm.

But that doesn't stop him from taking the items; he can keep them to exchange for money or give as gifts later.

Immediately afterwards, Yi Yang's gaze shifted to the black-scaled fruit.

There are three precious medicinal herbs there.

The first plant was dark red all over, with three opposite leaves growing on its stem, and golden liquid could be faintly seen flowing in the veins of the leaves.

He recognized the substance as "Red Vein Ginseng," an aged product over fifteen years old, which could greatly enhance a martial artist's true qi and had a remarkable effect on consolidating their realm.

The second plant is short and sturdy, with a rootstock as thick as a wrist, and a dark purple flower bud at the top.

This is the "Mysterious Bone Flower," also an old medicine over fifteen years old. After ingestion, it can temper bones and meridians, making it a good thing for True Qi Realm martial artists to cultivate.

Both medicinal herbs were quite good, but Yi Yang's eyes didn't linger on them for long.

His gaze fell on the third plant.

It was a flower.

The flower stem is only two inches tall, and the whole thing is a translucent light blue. The petals are so thin that you can see the stone wall patterns behind it.

The six petals stretched outwards, with tiny water droplets clinging to their tips. These droplets, however, did not drip; they simply hung there, gleaming faintly in the dark cave.

The water temperature around this flower was two or three degrees lower than elsewhere, so cold it stung the skin.

Orchid by the water.

Yi Yang's breathing stopped for a moment.

He had found a record of this item in the old books of Youquansi.

The Water Orchid is a precious medicinal herb that grows only in deep, cold waters and has extremely demanding environmental requirements.

This has only appeared twice in the recorded history of Suining Prefecture, and both times it was taken away directly by experts at the True Qi Realm before it could even be priced.

This thing has a remarkable effect on techniques for cultivating spiritual power.

Yi Yang thought of his "Mind Monkey Guardian Technique," which only increased his progress by a few hundred points each day, and couldn't help but smile.

Looks like I'm lucky.

He originally got involved because of the possibility of spiritual elixirs, but he didn't expect there actually were.

Yi Yang carefully dug out the water orchid with its roots and soil intact, and wrapped it tightly with the innermost layer of oilcloth.

This thing is precious and cannot be handled carelessly in the slightest.

After doing all that, he glanced again at the snake egg half-buried in the mud in the corner of the cave.

Its shell is dark gold in color, about the size of a fist, and the life force inside is faint but stable.

Descendants of the golden-striped black boa.

If this thing can be hatched and raised to adulthood, it will become a mythical beast mount of the True Qi level.

Even if you don't raise them, they'll fetch an astronomical price when sold.

Yi Yang also packed up the snake eggs.

After collecting the precious medicine, he turned and swam towards the corpse of the golden-striped black python. The snake's body, over thirty feet long, was coiled at the bottom of the cave, and blood was still seeping from the three-foot-long gash on its abdomen.

Yi Yang drew Tiger Roar, located the snake's body seven inches below its scales, cut open the scales with a single stroke, and reached inside to explore.

My heart's blood is inside.

A fist-sized, blood-red crystal was embedded next to the snake's heart; it was warm, sticky, and slippery to the touch.

Yi Yang pried it out and put it in an empty porcelain bottle he had taken from Chen Tao's body.

Next up is snake gall.

It was dark green, a size larger than an egg, and felt heavy in my hand, with a strong, pungent medicinal smell.

Poisonous fangs.

Two, each a foot and a half long, with shriveled poison sacs attached to their roots, making them top-quality materials for forging weapons or producing poison.

He only cut off the thickest few scales from the back; the whole snakeskin was too long to carry, so he only took the valuable pieces.

After finishing all that, Yi Yang swam over to Chen Tao's two halves of corpse and examined the lining of his sharkskin armor.

Apart from a broken sword and the sharkskin armor itself, there was nothing else.

The leader of the Three Lakes Gang didn't bring any valuables with him when he went into the water.

Yi Yang pursed his lips.

It seems my gains will be somewhat lacking.

But it also led to a wave of sudden wealth.

Previously, Yi Yang had exhausted all his resources when he broke through to the True Qi Realm, but now his bag is full of precious medicines, snake materials, and spiritual items.

He roughly estimated that all these items together would probably be worth more than 150,000 taels of silver, not even counting the priceless and rare You Shui Orchid.

It seems that Bai Longze made the right choice in coming here.

We haven't found any clues about the Nine Evil Cults that we're looking for.

Yi Yang tied the waterproof bag around his waist and scanned the spherical nest.

The surroundings were clean and tidy, with no trace of human activity except for the precious medicine and the snake. This golden-striped black python was a purely wild beast and had nothing to do with the Nine Evil Cult.

What exactly was the reason for the disappearance of personnel in the Southern Region mentioned in Song Liangcheng's letter?

This snake alone cannot explain the disappearance of dozens of people.

Even with its enormous appetite, the golden-striped black python can only eat five or six people at most in a month.

Thirty-seven members of the Shallow Water Gang alone disappeared in three months, which doesn't add up.

Yi Yang frowned, about to turn around and swim out of the cave to see if there were any clues.

Suddenly he stopped.

Because there is a problem with the water flow around me.

I hadn't noticed it before because the presence of the golden-striped black boa overwhelmed everything when it was alive.

Now that the snake was dead and the cave was quiet, Yi Yang's True Qi Realm perception finally caught a detail.

The blood flowing from the corpse in the cave was moving in one direction.

The dark blood seeping from the wound of the golden-striped black python did not spread naturally in the water, but instead drifted slowly in a fixed direction.

The blood flowing from Chen Tao's two halves of his body was also blood.

They're all going in the same direction.

Deep inside the cave, slightly to the right, lies an inconspicuous crack. The crack is very narrow, only two fingers wide, but blood is being "sucked" through it.

It wasn't carried away by the water flow.

Water flows evenly, but blood flows in a specific direction.

This isn't right.

An alarm bell rang in Yi Yang's mind: was something sucking his blood?

He swam close to the cave wall to the edge of the crack and probed his senses inside.

Behind the crack was another passage, much narrower than the one leading to the snake's nest, but it wouldn't be a problem for someone of his size to squeeze through.

Without hesitation, Yi Yang activated the Hidden Breath Formless Technique to suppress his aura to the lowest level and squeezed into the crevice sideways.

The passageway was winding and dark, and the water temperature decreased the deeper one went. Yi Yang's senses were actually clearer in this narrow passage because there was no interference from the turbulent water flow.

He swam in the direction of the blood flow for about several hundred feet.

The passageway suddenly opens up into a bright and spacious area.

A vast expanse of water appeared before Yi Yang.

To be precise, this is not a cave.

It looks like a giant water eye.

A huge vortex, tens of meters in diameter, slowly rotated directly in front of him. At the center of the vortex was a deep pit like a black hole, and the water flowed towards the bottom of that pit.

The shape of the entire water eye resembles an inverted bowl, with gentle edges and a sharp drop in the center.

But it wasn't the vortex that stopped Yi Yang in his tracks.

It's a corpse.

The area around the water eye was piled with corpses.

There are at least hundreds of them.

Beasts and humans were mixed together. The human corpses were dressed in various clothes, some with weapons hanging on them, and some with gang insignia embroidered on their bodies.

Yi Yang then noticed the indigo patterns on the Shallow Water Gang's clothes.

Some of the bodies may be from the Green Snake Gang or the Three Lakes Gang.

There were even a few dressed as ordinary hunters, who were probably rogue martial artists.

All the corpses had one common characteristic.

Shriveled.

It was as if something had drained all the essence and blood from his body, leaving only a layer of skin covering his skeleton.

Muscle atrophy, collapsed blood vessels, facial skin clinging tightly to the skull, and deeply sunken eye sockets.

Some were already highly decomposed, with their bones crumbling, while others were still relatively fresh, having died no more than ten days ago.

Yi Yang counted the human corpses in his field of vision.

Fifty-odd people.

Including those scattered further away, there are probably seventy or eighty bodies.

Most of the missing martial artists from the Southern Region that Song Liangcheng mentioned in his letter to himself should be here.

Yi Yang's gaze returned to the center of the water eye, where the blood that had been flowing from the direction of the snake's nest was flowing into the vortex. The blood of the golden-striped black python and Chen Tao were mixed together and absorbed by the water eye.

With the addition of fresh blood, the color in the center of the water eye begins to change.

The once jet-black water is now rippling with dark red ripples.

It's getting thicker and thicker.

It resembles a pool of blood.

Upon seeing this, Yi Yang took two steps back and pressed himself against the rock wall at the entrance of the passageway.

His back tensed up.

It's not fear.

It is an instinctive bodily reaction when extreme danger is approaching.

Something was moving at the bottom of that "blood pool".

Yi Yang's senses were frantically alerting him.

Two streams of energy rose from the depths of the water eye, thick, intense, and far exceeding the density of the third level of internal energy.

True Qi Realm.

Two True Qi Realm auras!

Before Yi Yang could react.

"boom--"

"boom--"

Two attacks exploded from the center of the blood-red vortex.

A dark red column of air, carrying a corrosive, sweet-smelling odor, shot out directly from the vortex.

The other was a pure true qi compression wave, colorless and formless, but wherever it passed, the water was directly torn into a vacuum zone.

Two attacks, from two directions, erupted from the pool of water.