Chapter 53 – The Old Man of the Hill

After Yanxi and Wen Zaituo left, Qing Xiaozhou also said her goodbyes. Yun Xian stayed, but Lynn Naya dragged her into the house for an “interrogation.” She was still a little worried and wanted to know why Yanxi had suddenly shown up.

Yun Xian didn’t resist and came clean immediately. “Senior Brother Wen said you were the daughter of his father’s old friend and that their two families had a very good relationship in the past. He couldn’t stand to see you wandering around alone, so he used most of his accumulated contribution points to exchange for a spot for you to become a core disciple. He knew I knew you and was worried that coming alone would be too abrupt, so he brought me along. Qing Xiaozhou was there at the time and came with us.”

“Oh, what about Yanxi? Was he also invited just to tag along?”

“Yeah, we were actually surprised, too. We ran into Senior Brother Yanxi on the way down the mountain. Senior Brother Wen probably just casually asked him if he wanted to come down and take a look, and we didn’t expect him to say yes, but he actually did.”

Oh…

Lynn Naya became alert again. From Yanxi’s performance today, he didn’t seem like the type of person who liked to join in on the fun. Was he really just doing it on a whim?

She only had two possible weaknesses: one was that she could cultivate without a spiritual root, and the other was that she had killed an evil cultivator with a Five Thunder Talisman.

The latter was no big deal. The worst she would have to do was admit that she was a “genius” talisman master.

As for the former, with her current proficiency in the Breath-Concealing Technique, cultivators below the Core Formation stage, including those at Qi Condensation and Foundation Establishment, shouldn’t be able to see her true cultivation.

Yanxi seemed to be around the same age as them, so there was no way he was already at the Core Formation stage. But she was worried that geniuses were different from normal people, and what ordinary people couldn’t see, he could.

Wait a minute…

Lynn Naya suddenly had another idea.

She had always been worried that if her rootless cultivation were discovered, she would be taken away and used as a test subject. But on second thought, before the beast cores came out, rootless cultivation was indeed a special and dangerous existence. But now, the beast cores’ purpose was to allow people without spiritual roots to cultivate. Her uniqueness was no longer so unique. She was now just one of the masses.

If there had to be a difference, the biggest one between her rootless cultivation and beast core cultivation was the future limit.

It was said that the highest one could reach with beast cores was the great perfection of Qi Condensation. To break through to Foundation Establishment, one would need to have another fated opportunity.

It was already difficult for an ordinary cultivator with a spiritual root to reach Foundation Establishment, and many were stuck at the great perfection of Qi Condensation. This limitation of the beast cores wasn’t a surprise to anyone. As for her, her limit was unknown.

She put herself in Yanxi’s shoes. If she were him and she discovered such a unique person, she felt that she wouldn’t interfere with her growth. Instead, she would probably secretly observe her to see how far she could grow.

If her limit was also the great perfection of Qi Condensation, and the effect was similar to that of the beast cores, then it didn’t matter whether she had a spiritual root or not, because she wouldn’t have much value. It would be better to let her stay and kill a few more evil cultivators. If she could reach Foundation Establishment, then that would be another story.

But by the time she could reach Foundation Establishment… Lynn Naya calculated her cultivation speed, plus the time to break through the bottleneck. It would be at least ten years from now. By then, the evil cultivators on the outside would probably have been cleared out by the Dao Palace. At that time, if she didn’t want to stay in the Dao Palace, she could just run away.

After she had sorted all this out, Lynn Naya’s heart became clear.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of a difficult path, she was afraid of having no path at all.

But all of this was ultimately due to her low strength, which made her constrained everywhere. When she got to a point where anyone who wanted to mess with her would have to think twice, even if they had doubts, they could only keep them to themselves.

“Why are you frowning and then raising your eyebrows? What are you thinking about?” Yun Xian asked her, crossing her arms. “You still haven’t told me what’s going on between you and Senior Brother Wen. I feel like it’s more than just an old acquaintance.”

“We’re really not old acquaintances.” Lynn Naya collected her thoughts and repeated her excuse from earlier to Yun Xian. “That’s pretty much the gist of it. A favor without merit is a debt. Any goodwill from him would just be a burden for me.”

“I see.” Yun Xian also apologized to her. “I didn’t think about this when I came. I should have come to find you beforehand.”

“I guess no one expected me to refuse to become a Dao Palace disciple.”

“That’s true. Actually, if you wanted to go up the mountain, I could also help you,” Yun Xian said. “But I don’t think you want to. You hate trouble the most. The senior brothers and sisters on the mountain are very exclusive right now. They believe in the ‘Way of Heaven Is the Way of Strife.’ Even fellow disciples scheme against each other. As a low-level mortal cultivator, you would definitely be looked down upon and constantly get into trouble. Instead of living like that, it’s better to stay at the foot of the mountain and cultivate in peace.”

Yun Xian rarely spoke to her about things on the mountain. Lynn Naya believed what she said.

Zhou Feibai was constantly bullied at first. His change in character later on was partly due to himself, but it was hard to say that the environment didn’t also play a part.

“If fellow disciples are fighting, don’t the sect masters do anything about it?” Lynn Naya asked.

“It was chaotic for a while, and then the disciples they took in were mixed. It’s hard to control it now.” Yun Xian said, unwilling to talk about such unpleasant things. She changed the subject instead.

Seeing this, Lynn Naya didn’t ask any more questions. The two of them talked about other interesting things before going to the main house for dinner.

After that day, Yun Xian started to come to Lynn Naya’s place often again, but Lynn Naya didn’t see the others anymore.

Soon, spring passed, and Yanxi and the old lady from that night gradually became distant memories. It was as if they were just a sudden rainstorm in the spring: she had seen them once, and they were gone without a trace.

When summer arrived, Lynn Naya’s half-year leave from the medicinal forest ended. The manager of the medicinal forest had already come to ask her several times when she would be going back.

She definitely had to go back. The medicinal forest belonged to Pill Peak, and going this route was the most stable way for her to study medicine on Pill Peak in the future. But she also wanted to go to the wilderness. So, she made a deal with the steward. She would water the cold moon grass in the morning and evening, and the manager would find a replacement to take over at noon.

Since she was now a talisman master, the steward also wanted to have a good relationship with her. After she gave him some Spring Recovery Talismans, the steward readily agreed to her request.

Lynn Naya had to go to the foot of the mountain in the morning and evening, and her schedule didn’t match up with the rest of her team. So, she simply told the others to team up and go out on their own, and that she wouldn’t be joining them.

Actually, the team no longer needed her as much as they did at the beginning. Because of the appearance of the pills, almost all ten members were at the second layer of Qi Condensation. Qi Yaozu and Lin Qingwan had even started to push for the third layer.

These changes made Lynn Naya emotional. It was truly different to have cultivation resources. When she had broken through, she had nothing and had to spend a lot of time on her own.

Of course, there were also downsides to relying on pills for cultivation. Since the increase in spiritual energy wasn’t earned through true effort, it was a bit unstable. This was one of the reasons why Lynn Naya had been staying in the wilderness.

In the wilderness, her natural alertness made her involuntarily cover her entire body with spiritual energy to prevent sneak attacks. Doing this consumed a lot of spiritual energy, which helped her turn the spiritual energy she had absorbed into her dantian into pure spiritual energy. In addition, fighting against evil cultivators had a similar effect.

Everyone in the team had grown, and they no longer needed her to look after them as much. She was still “fishing” at her usual spot. Xue Yong and the others had gone to a more distant area, but some new cultivators who weren’t strong enough would still stay not far from her, ready to ask for her help.

She didn’t know where these new cultivators had gotten the news to take over, but later, for some reason, the people who were able to protect themselves would leave, and new people would take their place. This made Lynn Naya feel like she was being treated as a “newbie mentor.”

Oh well. A newbie mentor is a newbie mentor. She was content with it.

First, the area where she “fished” was gradually becoming a place that everyone assumed belonged to her. No one came to steal it, and even the patrol team would specifically go around it. This meant she had a decent harvest every day. Second, seeing one batch of mortal cultivators after another rapidly grow, her sense of accomplishment and security also grew.

As for crossing the river, that was impossible. For her, a high-level cultivator crushing a low-level one was the most powerful way of fighting.

When asked how to kill a Foundation Establishment cultivator in one move, Lynn Naya’s answer would be, “Become a Core Formation cultivator.” When asked, “What about fighting at the same level?” Lynn Naya would answer, “That’s something I leave to my good friend, the heavens.”

Time passed as Lynn Naya “fished” every day. When the surrounding rice fields went from lush green to having full ears of grain, Lynn Naya realized that a crisis was coming—she was running out of money.

Cultivating with pills was truly expensive. In the past two months, she had used up almost all of her pills and savings.

The storage bags were still valuable, but because the price was too high, they were hard to sell. Later, as more and more storage bags appeared on the market, their price had dropped from two hundred spirit stones to fifty spirit stones and was still falling.

The market was still charging for stalls, and the price was the same as when it first opened. The market’s profit was about one to two hundred spirit stones a day. Lynn Naya got two-tenths of that, which added up to a monthly income of eight hundred to one thousand spirit stones.

This profit, plus her income from the wilderness, was barely enough to cover her Qi absorption pill expenses.

Now, a new problem had arisen. She felt that the effect of the Qi absorption pills was gradually weakening. Although they still had some effect, she could tell that they would completely stop working soon. And the spirit absorption pills, which had a better effect, were double the price.

No wonder they said that you had to be rich to cultivate. Among wealth, companions, techniques, and land, wealth came first.

After she finished a round of cultivation, Lynn Naya looked at the nearly half-full experience bar on her status panel. She really didn’t want to go back to her snail-paced cultivation. So, she turned her attention to the Five Thunder Talisman.

It had been almost a year. The Talisman Academy should have some first-grade talisman masters by now. She wondered what kind of progress Qiao Guanyuan and Chen Yun had made.

Seeing that it was still early, Lynn Naya put her things away and went to the Talisman Academy.

The Talisman Academy still had classes at night, and there were a lot of people.

When Lynn Naya arrived, someone noticed her, but unlike a year ago, she hadn’t shown up in a long time, so many people didn’t recognize her. The person who noticed her only looked at her for a moment before turning back to listen to the lecture.

Lynn Naya, however, was heading to the classroom because Qiao Guanyuan happened to be giving a lecture tonight.

She went in through the back door of the classroom. The person who had just seen her was sitting in the back row. When they saw her, they assumed she was late and moved inward, making a spot for her. Lynn Naya accepted the kindness and sat down.