Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation
When Chu Chen arrived at the spring, he subconsciously looked at his own reflection in the water and laughed helplessly.
‘Is my face really that handsome? Am I that easily mistaken as a gigolo?’
Shaking his head, he tossed those nonsensical thoughts out of his mind. He started to carefully collect the water with the jade bucket and water the plants just like how Senior Brother Tang had taught him the day before.
After an entire day’s work, Chu Chen took a long stretch. To his surprise, the spiritual energy in his body had grown substantially. After reaching the great perfection stage of the Spiritual Mist Stage, he had only been one step away from breaking the major cultivation stage barrier of the Spiritual Mist Stage to condense spiritual droplets. This step had been much harder than achieving the tenth level of the Spiritual Mist Stage. It required a large amount of elixirs and luck. At the moment, Chu Chen had not planned on rushing things.
The spiritual energy in the herb garden had truly been concentrated, and that had caused his cultivation stage to rise every second. Although the rate of growth had been rather slow, it was still growth. It had still been a pleasant surprise.
Just like that, Chu Chen temporarily made his stay in the herb garden. Upon paying closer attention, he realized that the boring cultivation of spiritual herbs had a lot of things he could have learned. Chu Chen felt like a scholar who floated in a sea of books, having absorbed every drop of knowledge to his heart’s content. Each day, he continued to grow.
When the first ray of sunlight from the horizon shone through the lush leaves on Chu Chen’s body, he had let out a deep breath and woke up from his meditation.
Due to the heavy workload in the herb garden and to have avoided the trouble of traveling back and forth, Chu Chen decided to rest directly on the tall tree in the herb field.
The rich spiritual energy in the herb field aided him significantly in his cultivation. For each day of his cultivation, he felt the purity of the spiritual energy within his body increasing.
What came next for his cultivation path was to have condensed the spiritual energy in his body, to have shrunk the volume of his Qi ocean down to 10 percent, one percent, and finally to have condensed into a single drop of spiritual droplet.
He leaped down from the tree, cutting straight through the herb field and headed straight to the limestone where the blood orchid was located.
Counting the days, it had already been his third day in the herb garden. The blood orchid should have been showing some changes.
As he had expected, the blood orchid stood proudly in the brightly lit area. Its leaves were filled with vigor as its entire body had been covered with a thin layer of flowing red glow. The air that surrounded emanated a mysterious aura.
A strong fiery aura!
Spreading out his spiritual consciousness, Chu Chen was slightly taken aback. In his senses, the blood orchid had been like a sun hanging in the sky. Its body contained an endless amount of rolling heat energy. The energy it contained had been terrifying. Meanwhile, the location of that sun-like energy had been on the top of the blood orchid, trapped within that small little flower bud.
One could have imagined if that flower bud fully blossomed, the heat energy in the air would have increased by tenfold, or even a hundredfold!
This ancient spiritual herb had truly been unique.
“You really revived the blood orchid!”
A nearby astonished shout could be heard, disrupting Chu Chen’s thoughts. Having turned around, he saw Senior Sister Qing Yue who came some time ago standing right behind him. She stared at the blood orchid in amazement, dropping the herb garden’s token on the ground.
Senior Sister Qing Yue’s exclamation attracted the attention of all the other disciples working in the garden. The issue of the inevitable wilting of the blood orchid had been something all the disciples in the herb garden knew of.
Some were even plotting to use the wilting blood orchid to have kicked Chu Chen, the newcomer, out of the garden. Unexpectedly, the blood orchid had somehow been revitalized!
The disciples in the herb garden who ran over were all dumbfounded. How did the dying blood orchid suddenly have regained its vitality and emanated such a strong blood Qi, having turned the air around it scorching hot.
“Even the spiritual herbalist they hired announced the blood orchid to be beyond saving, yet it’s saved by a gigolo?!”
“Impossible. Something’s definitely amiss.”
“He managed to save the blood orchid that was deemed beyond saving. Is this kid so heaven defying?”
Under the envious gaze of those around them, Senior Sister Qing Yue placed several restriction spells on the ancient blood orchid in order to suppress the scorching heat it emanated.
After the crowd had dispersed, Senior Sister Qing Yue said with a big smile on her face, “I’ll immediately deliver this good news to Elder Xing Lin. She’ll go nuts for sure.”
Although Senior Sister Qing Yue appeared gentle and delicate, she had been bold in her actions, jumping to the task immediately. In about an hour, she had already been back.
Senior Sister Qing Yue took out an elegant little box with a smile on her face. “Junior Brother, Elder Ling Xin said that you’re the lucky star of our Hidden Frost Valley! Here, this is for you.”
“What’s this?” Chu Chen opened the box. Looking inside, it had been a blood red elixir that caught him by surprise. Ordinary elixirs would have been placed in porcelain bottles as they were best for maintaining its medicinal strength. However, this elixir was placed in a wooden box.
“This is the blood pact elixir. If you meet a powerful spiritual beast, all you have to do is place a drop of blood on this elixir and feed it to the spiritual beast. After that, the spiritual beast will be absolutely loyal to you, becoming a powerful companion of yours. This elixir is given to you by Elder Ling Xin as a gift for saving the blood orchid. It’s your reward.”
“Thank you.”
Although the blood pact elixir had just been a level-2 elixir, it was said to have had an extremely low success rate in refining, less than one in a thousand, which had made it extremely rare. Rumor had it that even Elder Ling Xin herself had only one of it. A lot of people had tried to ask for this elixir by ingratiating themselves to Elder Ling Xin, but were all rejected.
Chu Chen never expected her to have given such a precious elixir to him for saving the blood orchid. It seemed that she placed great importance in the blood orchid.
Chu Chen was not moved by it. There had been plenty of spiritual herbs in the Black Fog Valley that had been better than the ancient blood orchid.
Seeing Chu Chen accepting the blood pact elixir, Senior Sister Qing Xue smiled brightly. “This ancient blood orchid is extraordinary. It can be refined into high grade elixirs after it blooms. Elder Ling Xin said that after those elixirs are successfully refined, she will reward you once more. Junior Brother Chu, your luck is really enviable. You can continue looking after the garden. I’ll be back in a few days.”
After Senior Sister Qing Yue left, Chu Chen’s life as a newcomer in the herb garden continued. As he got better, he had started noticing more mysteries of the herb garden.
Every day he watered, fertilized, trimmed, and loosened the dirt for the herbs. After he had been accustomed to the work, in the process of having nurtured the spiritual herbs, he discovered something by chance. Through his spiritual consciousness, he realized that each individual spiritual herb had its own cultivation process.
When humans cultivated, they absorbed the spiritual energy in the air and sent it to various parts of the body, having circulated through the meridians and continually strengthening it. Meanwhile, the spiritual herbs would also have absorbed the spiritual energy from the air around them as it grew. After that, they would have circulated the spiritual energy following a set path before having stored it in its flowers or fruits. Somehow, it managed to achieve the same results as human’s cultivation using a different path.
This discovery was the one that had surprised Chu Chen the most. Everything had a spirit. The growth process of a spiritual herb had essentially been a cultivation process!
With that discovery, Chu Chen started to pay attention to the spiritual energy circulation path for each spiritual herb and compared it to his Spiritual Genesis Mantra. Each spiritual herb had a different way of circulating its spiritual energy based on their own medicinal properties. That had been an eye-opener for Chu Chen.
It helped his understanding of cultivation to have reached another level and his spiritual consciousness grew stronger than before.