Opening the jade box, a thin, jade-white book lay quietly inside. On the title page, the familiar Chinese characters for “Five Elements Ascension Scripture” gave him an overwhelming sense of kinship.

Holding this heavy, cool book in his hands, Ye Kong’s heart surged with excitement. He knew this book was like a key that would open the door to the immortal world for him.

Taking out the scripture, he closed the jade box and locked it back as it was. Ye Kong looked around again, grinned, pumped his fist with an excited “Yes!”, and scurried back to the prayer cushion in the corner of the ancestral hall.

To prevent anyone from noticing anything unusual, Ye Kong tucked the Five Elements Ascension Scripture inside the Spirit Object Records, just like when he used to read novels hidden inside textbooks during class back in school.

His fingertip flicked, and the cicada-wing thin pages gently opened…

Ye Kong had never read a book so obsessively before. He started in the afternoon and kept reading straight through. In the evening, he hastily wolfed down a few bites of food with the guards, then came back and continued reading.

Finally, he set down the book and closed his eyes in deep thought.

According to this fellow Earth transmigrator who called himself Five Elements Wanderer, all transmigrators from Earth should have Five Spiritual Roots. According to Cangnan Continent’s conventional wisdom, this was the worst aptitude possible. But Five Elements Wanderer didn’t agree with that view.

He believed that Five Spiritual Roots were actually the most stable and natural spiritual roots. Think about it – this world was composed of metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The human body was also a small universe, and couldn’t escape these five elements either. Therefore, cultivating with Five Spiritual Roots must be more powerful than any other spiritual root type.

Five Elements Wanderer’s viewpoint was essentially the opposite of Cangnan Continent’s prevailing opinion. By his logic, wouldn’t Heavenly Spiritual Roots be the most inferior and unstable aptitude?

However, Ye Kong felt there was some logic to it. The world was originally composed of these five basic elements. Cultivating all of them together should naturally be more powerful than cultivating just one. Moreover, these five elements generated and overcame each other. In future battles, he could freely deploy whichever element was most suitable to completely suppress his opponent.

For example, if the opponent cultivated fire attribute, he could use water attribute – water overcomes fire. If the opponent was water attribute, he’d use earth attribute – earth overcomes water.

Ye Kong felt this earlier fellow was truly talented. If it were him, he definitely couldn’t create a cultivation technique. Yet this “Five Elements Ascension Scripture” was a cultivation method Five Elements Wanderer had created specifically for Five Spiritual Roots aptitude.

According to Five Elements Wanderer, this cultivation method’s advantages were its great power and strong spiritual consciousness. The storage capacity of spiritual energy in the body was several times higher than other cultivators at the same stage. The second advantage was that this technique’s bottleneck phenomenon wasn’t too severe. Perhaps because Five Spiritual Roots were more stable, or perhaps because this cultivation method built a solid foundation – in any case, the bottlenecks that troubled other techniques at each level weren’t too headache-inducing in the Five Elements Ascension Scripture.

Five Elements True Man could confidently say that whether for Foundation Establishment, Golden Core formation, or Nascent Soul formation, as long as you had one pill, you were guaranteed success on the first try. There would absolutely never be situations where you’d eat seven or eight Foundation Establishment Pills and still fail to establish your foundation.

Someone might ask – since this technique was custom-made for Five Spiritual Roots and solved the major bottleneck problem, why doesn’t Ye Kong just hurry up and start cultivating? What’s he wasting time for?

The key issue was that this technique also had drawbacks. First, cultivation was slow. Why were Heavenly Spiritual Roots so good? Because cultivation was fast – twice the results with half the effort. The Five Elements Ascension Scripture, however, amplified the slow cultivation characteristic of Five Spiritual Roots. Slow on top of slow, slow beyond imagination. Of course, it was precisely because cultivation was slow that you could build a solid foundation and weaken bottlenecks. And it was precisely because cultivation took longer that your power could far exceed other cultivators at the same stage.

The second drawback – metal attribute spiritual energy was scarce. According to Five Elements Wanderer, the Five Elements Ascension Scripture absorbed the five elements’ spiritual energy from heaven and earth to achieve balance and stability. The five attribute spiritual energies cooperated with each other while also checking and balancing each other. So after reaching Foundation Establishment, you had to ensure the five elements of metal, visit our site wood, water, fire, and earth were balanced in your body. Everything else was fine, but the most troublesome part was that metal attribute spiritual energy didn’t exist in the air and wasn’t available in most places.

Five Elements Wanderer gave a suggestion – absorb the spiritual energy from metal attribute spirit stones. Ye Kong smiled bitterly. He hadn’t even seen what a spirit stone looked like yet. If he cultivated by absorbing metal attribute spirit stones, how many would he need? It would definitely be an astronomical number.

Five Elements Wanderer also knew that obtaining so many metal attribute spirit stones was indeed difficult. He gave a second suggestion – refine and absorb an entire vein of a metal attribute spirit stone mine. Then you’d have an endless supply of metal attribute spiritual energy.

Ye Kong shook his head even harder. If you dug up someone’s spirit stone mine vein and cut off their income source, wouldn’t that be asking for death? It would be better to figure out a way to get spirit stones.

“Cultivate or not? Advantages are great power and no bottlenecks. Disadvantages are slow speed and spending lots of spirit stones.” Ye Kong pondered with his head down.

However, he quickly made a decision. “Cultivate! What other choice do I have right now? According to Wanxuan True Man, with my aptitude I’d be stuck in early Qi Refinement my whole life. But the Five Elements Ascension Scripture guarantees I can successfully establish my foundation. If it’s a bit slower, then it’s a bit slower.”

Having made his decision, Ye Kong didn’t delay any further. He immediately sat cross-legged, silently recited the cultivation method once more, stuffed the book inside his shirt, closed his eyes, placed his palms flat, and began cultivating.

A cultivator’s realms were divided into lower, middle, and upper. The lower realms were Qi Refinement, Foundation Establishment, Golden Core, Nascent Soul, and Spirit Transformation – five realms in total. The middle realms were Void Refinement, Body Integration, and Great Ascension – three realms. And the final upper realm had just one stage – Tribulation Transcendence. If you successfully survived the heavenly tribulation, you could ascend to the immortal realm and live as long as heaven and earth.

One more thing to explain – within each realm, there were ten layers. Layers one through three were called early stage, layers four through six were middle stage, layers seven through nine were late stage, and layer ten was great perfection.

At this moment, Ye Kong didn’t think too much. For now, he just had to work hard toward his first goal… Foundation Establishment. Like a marathon runner, it was a long journey of ten thousand li, but he had finally taken the first step. He didn’t ​unauthorized copy​know what kind of roads lay ahead. He only knew that since he’d gotten on this path, he had to keep his head down, grit his teeth, charge forward, and never look back.

Cultivation and meditation weren’t the same thing, but they were related.

Last time when Ye Kong randomly tried cultivating on his own, he’d expended tremendous effort just to enter a meditative state. But today was different. As soon as he started cultivating, he could feel spiritual energy from the air gathering toward him. The chilling wind and cold sensations immediately disappeared, as if he were wrapped in warm flowing water. It was extremely comfortable, and he quickly and naturally entered a meditative state.

What was unbelievable was that the first part of his body to begin absorbing and inhaling spiritual energy was… his palms! Ye Kong had assumed it would be through breathing – inhaling spiritual energy, then circulating it through his limbs and body.

But who knew it would be through his palms? Though when he thought about it, it made sense. The palms were incredibly sensitive and flexible organs. The palms were where the body’s acupoints were most densely concentrated, and in the future when he had immortal power, it would be released from his palms too.

Ye Kong could clearly feel wisps and threads of water attribute and wood attribute spiritual energy penetrating through his palms. He felt like the skin and flesh of his palms had become sieves, filled with countless fine, orderly holes. Then the spiritual energy flowed like water through these small holes into his body, slowly transported through the meridians in his arms into his body.

Fortunately, the first realm of cultivation – Qi Refinement – didn’t require balance in the spiritual energy absorbed. As long as it was spiritual energy, it was fine. Ye Kong was like a greedy infant, continuously working hard to absorb spiritual energy from the air.

However, not all the spiritual energy absorbed stayed stored in his Qi Sea. In fact, as spiritual energy entered his body and circulated through the Eight Extraordinary Meridians for eight cycles, the amount of spiritual energy that ultimately settled in his Qi Sea was pitifully small.

Part of the spiritual energy was used to nourish various parts of his body and meridians. Another part escaped back out through his skin from inside his body. Yet another part was impurities. These impurities remained in his muscles, gradually pushed out of his body along with cultivation.

Many cultivators, after long periods of meditative seclusion, would ​noodles​leave behind a ring of black and gray dust around them. The black was bad substances from inside the human body, while the gray was impurities mixed in with the spiritual energy.

So in later stages, the dust expelled by cultivators’ bodies would only be gray with no black.

Ye Kong didn’t dare slack off. He cultivated for an entire night before he felt a faint, barely-there wisp of spiritual energy in his Qi Sea.

This already made Ye Kong ecstatic. He knew he’d already stepped through the door. From now on, he could be considered a cultivator too. Though his level was still extremely low – Ye Haoran could still slap him dizzy with one palm.

But he’d already entered the door. Could improving his abilities be far behind?

What made Ye Kong even happier was that his spirit had improved considerably. It seemed that absorbing spiritual energy was indeed beneficial for his soul. Before long, his damaged soul would recover completely.

Once his soul grew stronger in the future, opening the Complete Collection of Talismans wouldn’t just be a dream. He wondered what surprises that talisman book he’d brought from Earth would have in store for him.

“Eighth Young Master, time for breakfast.” Centurion Liu’s call sounded from outside.

“Ah, coming.” Ye Kong got up, patted his clothes, and walked out.

“Eighth Young Master, you meditated all night. Aren’t your legs numb?” [visit our site]Centurion Liu asked as he handed over breakfast steamed buns.

Keep a low profile, still need to keep a low profile! People’s eyes were sharp – as soon as there was any change, others would notice.

“Numb, how could they not be numb? But there’s no bed here, so I can only sleep while meditating.” Ye Kong sighed, then laughed. “Centurion Liu, how about we trade places?”

“Haha.” Centurion Liu chuckled. “I do feel for Eighth Young Master and want you to sleep more comfortably, but if the General finds out, this lowly one can’t bear the consequences.”

From that day on, Ye Kong moved his prayer cushion to the back room of the ancestral hall. It was better to be cautious in all things. Centurion Liu wasn’t a bad person though, and harbored intentions of currying favor. Ye Kong was straightforward too, so everyone got along well. Days passed one by one. In the blink of an eye, Ye Kong had been reflecting on his actions before the Ye family ancestors for a full year.