An Alchemist's Path to Eternity

In the quiet cultivation chamber, Luo Chen sat cross-legged after freshening up. His eyes burned with focus as a jade slip floated in front of his eyes, streams of characters cascading down like a waterfall. The words were so familiar that he could recite them backward.

After years of hesitation, he had finally made a decision.

A five-colored core is a core formed from all five elements of a spirit root. Although wood is the main attribute, fire also accounts for two-tenths. Technically, if I just consider how difficult it is to practice and master, and how much longevity it will give me, I should continue with wood as primary and cultivate using Flourishing Azure Unified Heart. But longevity is not immortality, and before I reach the realm of sharing heaven and earth’s lifespan, as they say, any number of extra years is entirely meaningless without the power to preserve my life.

After cultivating the Withering-Flourishing Fire that devoured his life force and caused his lifespan to plummet, Luo Chen’s understanding of lifespan was second to none. Thankfully, after forming his core, his lifespan leapt from two hundred to four hundred years in an instant. As vitality surged within him, his previously gray hair turned back to black, and this allowed him to see the truth of lifespan with even greater clarity. Namely... however high one’s maximum lifespan was, without the power to protect oneself, it was nearly impossible to live out that maximum lifespan. The wise and practical choice was to balance power and longevity; the target was not just expanding one’s possible lifespan, but actually surviving all those years.

Luo Chen had refined the Withering-Flourishing Fire and now had a primordial true fire, yet in practice, he made little use of it. He had desired it mostly for alchemy, after all. But the fact that it could seize the life force of living beings by incinerating them was an unexpected gain, and the fire’s potential clearly went far beyond that. If Luo Chen wished to draw out its full power, switching to a fire-element cultivation technique was only natural. At the same time, he could not just abandon his wood-element spirit power, which accounted for an even greater part of his core.

”Therefore... Wood Ignition, it shall be you.”

He had originally possessed three third-tier cultivation techniques, and after killing He Lianyun and two others in the Great Snowy Mountains, he had taken the time to unlock their storage pouches and retrieve the Nether Origin Pills inside.

Sadly, Yousha’s inheritance was lost. She had self-detonated in the Myriad Pythons Grotto, and her storage pouch had been ruined in the process. It was a pity for the Nether Origin Pill within. Thankfully, the inheritances of He Lianyun and Hermit Xiao brought Luo Chen a modest yet real surprise.

Hermit Xiao’s inheritance was not worth much. It totaled only a little over a hundred thousand spirit stones. Such was the fate of rogue cultivators—even if their cultivation seemed high, it often came at the cost of all their savings. To leave behind a hundred thousand spirit stones was already not easy.

What Luo Chen found of great value was an offensive divine soul spell named Immortal Ballad River. As the name suggested, it unleashed divine soul attacks through sound waves. The spell worked best with a zither and fairly well with other instruments, and it could also be used to some extent through the voice. During Luo Chen’s Core Formation, the sounds that echoed from within his body carried faint traces of this spell.

As for He Lianyun’s storage pouch, that one was a veritable treasure trove. As expected of the leader of the Lianyun Trade Alliance—the fortune produced during years of accumulation was quite considerable. Even though time was short and Luo Chen had no chance to count everything properly, he estimated that spirit stones alone accounted for a solid million, and some rare materials would surely add more to that value once carefully appraised.

After securing the Nether Origin Pills, what concerned him most was He Lianyun’s collection of third-tier cultivation techniques. He Lianyun had somehow managed to acquire two complete techniques on his own, a water-element one and an earth-element one. It seemed that he had prepared them as prospective core techniques once he broke through.

In this way, the Luo Tian Society benefited. The reason it benefited the society rather than Luo Chen was that he could hardly make use of them himself; he would instead reserve them as sect inheritances once the society rebuilt itself as a formal sect.

Thus, although he technically had five third-tier cultivation techniques, the ones he could truly use were still the original three: the Flame Alliance’s Flame Yang True Scripture, the Flourishing Azure Unified Heart bestowed by Ice Torrent, and an incomplete third-tier technique acquired by the Luo Tian Society, Wood Ignition.

Because he wanted to make full use of the Withering-Flourishing Fire, Flourishing Azure Unified Heart was naturally set aside. And after years of weighing the pros and cons of the remaining two, he had decided to go with Wood Ignition. That way, he could cultivate wood and fire elements together.

Though this technique was incomplete, it lacked only the late-stage Golden Core parts and the associated spells and secret techniques. He did not mind the latter, because with sufficient wealth, he could obtain powerful spells through proper channels. As for the former problem, it might have caused other people to instantly give up the technique, yet for Luo Chen it posed little issue.

So long as he practiced this to Perfected Mastery before he reached the late stage of Golden Core, he could use the system to complete it. Moreover, this technique originated from the Five Elements Divine Sect. They loved to research new and strange arts and techniques, and from time to time, they put some of them up for sale at the Spirit Source Pavilion. When the chance arose, Luo Chen could even purchase the complete Wood Ignition from them, though the price was likely to be steep.

From the present to the future, Luo Chen had considered everything in detail.

With his sea of qi now saturated with vast amounts of impure spirit energy, he urgently needed something capable of refining it. The Foundation Establishment chapter of the Eternal Youth Evergreen Sutra was sorely lacking at this point. Only a third-tier cultivation technique could swiftly absorb such energy and refine it into mana—an Adept’s exclusive energy, something far beyond ordinary spirit power.

Having decided, Luo Chen immediately began practicing Wood Ignition.

***

Luo Chen’s talent for spellcraft granted him remarkable insight when studying cultivation techniques as well. Combined with his years of accumulated research, it allowed him to quickly grasp Wood Ignition, and in just four or five days, he had successfully attained Beginner level. As a result, the vast spirit energy he had absorbed into his sea of qi during Core Formation began to be steadily refined. Throughout the process, his divine soul merged into the circulating flow, imprinting every trace of spirit power with the essence of his divine soul.

A year later, within the quiet of his cave residence, Luo Chen finally stopped cultivating. A thoughtful look crossed his face.

”No wonder there are countless Qi Refinement and Foundation Establishment cultivators in the cultivation world, yet so few Adepts. Breaking through is difficult enough, but the complexity of cultivation after forming the core is another matter entirely.”

During the Qi Refinement Realm, cultivation was simple: merely absorbing the spirit energy of heaven and earth. Yet upon reaching Foundation Establishment, every stage required continuous purification and refinement of spirit power to transform it into liquid form so the limited sea of qi could hold a great enough reserve of spirit power.

When a cultivator broke through to the Golden Core Realm, the process became more intricate still. One had to complete three distinct steps with spirit energy: absorption, refinement, and fusion. After absorbing the spirit energy, it had to be refined and purified, then enveloped in divine consciousness, which slowly fused into it. This was the only way to achieve complete transformation from spirit energy to spirit power and then to mana.

The process was complex; even with the aid of a specific cultivation technique, it still consumed an enormous amount of mental and spiritual focus. With that realization, Luo Chen finally understood why Golden Core cultivators depended so heavily on third-tier spirit lands. The effort required merely to refine and fuse was already so taxing that one could hardly spare energy for the absorption of external spirit energy. Without question, a third-tier spirit land was an essential resource for any Adept!

Once this truth sank in, Luo Chen could not help showing a trace of helplessness. Cave Residence Jia Three, which he currently occupied, was not a place he could keep forever. Whether the other Golden Core cultivators of Tianlan Immortal City would tolerate his being there for longer was one thing; the more important problem was that his finances would simply not allow him to continue.

Even before forming his core, he had already overstayed the original lease term. It had taken Gu Caiyi’s forceful collection of payments from the Luo Tian Society’s branch stores, combined with Sima Huiniang’s reallocation of the society’s liquid funds, to scrape together the additional three million spirit stones needed for those extra three years. Such measures had already cut deep into the society’s foundation and risked pushing its finances to the brink. It was a move that verged on self-destruction.

There had been no other choice. No matter how large the Luo Tian Society grew, it could never outweigh the significance of Luo Chen’s Core Formation. Now that he had succeeded and emerged as a Golden Core Adept, his power would at least ease the current tension for a time. Still, even his breakthrough could only solve immediate troubles; it held no guarantee for the future.