Chapter 520: The Rules of the Central Continent
Master Xuanming glanced at Mingyue and replied:
"Who told you that cultivation has to rely on the spiritual energy freely floating in heaven and earth?"
Su Ming pondered and said, "Senior, could it be that cultivators in the Central Continent cultivate using spirit stones?"
Upon hearing this, Master Xuanming's wide sleeves quivered slightly, and a faint spark of spiritual light flickered.
A soft "crack" sounded.
A stone the size of a fingernail, emitting a faint white glow, arced through the air and landed precisely on the prow of the airship.
Su Ming narrowed his eyes slightly. Without using any spiritual energy, he relied purely on his physical strength to steadily extend his right hand and catch the stone in his palm.
It was a low-grade spirit stone. In the Cloud Hidden Sect, this was the most basic hard currency, and Su Ming had at least tens of thousands of them stashed in his storage pouch.
"Try it." Master Xuanming stood in place, his chin slightly raised, motioning for Su Ming to proceed.
Su Ming lowered his gaze to the spirit stone in his palm.
He didn't act immediately. Instead, he used his divine sense to scan the stone from the inside out three times, confirming that no tracking spells or toxins were attached to it.
Only then did Su Ming close his eyes, separating an extremely gentle strand of spiritual energy that flowed along the meridians in his palm and slowly seeped into the low-grade spirit stone.
In the Northern Frontier, cultivators absorbed spirit stones extremely simply. All they needed was spiritual energy as a lead, and like peeling silk from a cocoon, they could directly extract the spiritual energy inside the stone, guiding it along the meridians and into the Dantian.
But the moment Su Ming's spiritual energy touched the core of the spirit stone—
A faint luster lit up on the stone's surface.
Then, that spiritual energy drawn out by Su Ming, like snow exposed to the blazing sun, hadn't even had time to travel along his meridians before it disintegrated into the air at an inconceivable speed!
Su Ming's eyes snapped open.
He looked at the spirit stone in his palm, whose luster had once again dimmed, and a barely concealed shock flickered in his eyes.
"Disintegrated?" Qingfeng stood nearby, clearly also sensing the flash and fade of that spiritual energy.
"Correct. Disintegrated." Master Xuanming let out a dry chuckle. He paced slowly to the side of the airship, gazing down at the vast expanse of land below. "Now, do you understand the rules of the Central Continent?"
The air on the airship seemed to grow even heavier because of that spirit stone's disintegration.
Su Ming closed his fingers, clenching the low-grade spirit stone in his palm. He didn't attempt to extract its spiritual energy again. Instead, relying on his mid-stage Foundation Establishment realm's acute perception of energy aura, he quickly replayed the disintegration process from just a moment ago in his mind.
The spiritual energy hadn't entered his meridians. Instead, the moment it broke free from the stone's confinement, it was directly devoured by this extremely "thirsty" natural law of the surrounding environment.
"The environment here is like a massive, parched funnel," Su Ming recited in his heart, his brow deeply furrowed. "In such an environment, any unclaimed spiritual energy not completely locked down by a formation or meridians is instantly assimilated by heaven and earth."
"See it now?" Master Xuanming turned his head and asked.
Su Ming bowed slightly: "This junior is dull. It seems that heaven and earth here are rejecting the direct absorption of spiritual energy?"
"It's not rejection—it's plunder." Master Xuanming withdrew his gaze, his voice cold and hard without a trace of warmth. "The spiritual energy in the Central Continent is too thin. Even the natural law itself thirsts for spiritual power. Using the breathing techniques of the Northern Frontier to extract spirit stones, the energy you leak isn't even enough to fill heaven and earth's teeth."
His withered fingers tapped lightly on the wooden edge of the airship.
"So, in the Central Continent, every cultivator knows one basic principle." Master Xuanming paused for a breath. "The spiritual energy inside a spirit stone must never be absorbed directly. You must use a specialized conversion formation, place the spirit stone in the formation core, and rely on the formation lines' effects of locking and converting energy to channel the spiritual energy into the cultivator's body without a single trace leaking out."
Su Ming's heart leaped.
Back in the Cloud Hidden Sect, whether he was cultivating daily or recovering in battle, he always held a spirit stone directly in hand and absorbed it. While that method had some slight energy leakage, under the embrace of the Northern Frontier's dense spiritual energy, it was completely negligible.
Now it turned out that in the Central Continent, even the most basic cultivation had to rely on formations.
"Lock, convert, channel..." In Su Ming's Consciousness Sea, the seven hundred and fifty faintly glowing formation runes began to circulate unconsciously. In an extremely short time, he constructed three miniature formation frameworks in his mind that could achieve this effect.
But he said nothing, silently tucking the spirit stone into his sleeve.
Shadow seemed to sense the subtle fluctuations in Su Ming's mood. It poked its head out from his collar, its golden eyes swiveling as it warily scanned the gray sky around them, occasionally letting out an extremely faint chirp.
"Then... what if someone doesn't have spirit stones?" Qingfeng swallowed hard, a hint of fear for the unknown future creeping into his voice.
He had calculated the total wealth in his storage pouch—barely a few hundred low-grade spirit stones. At this rate of consumption, where you had to set up a formation just to cultivate, he probably couldn't last even a month.
Master Xuanming shot Qingfeng a glance, a look like he was regarding an unweaned child.
"No spirit stones?" Master Xuanming sneered, his hoarse voice echoing across the airship. "Then go earn them. The Myriad Treasures Pavilion, the Hundred Treasures Hall, the Wandering Cultivator Alliance, even those great clans offering positions as guest elders... The Central Continent is full of ways to earn spirit stones. As long as you have a skill—alchemy, talisman crafting, formation mastery, even just taming spirit beasts—there's a mountain of spirit stones waiting for you."
The old man leaned forward slightly, his eyes turning extremely sharp, like a knife's edge.
"And if you can't earn them?" He stared at Qingfeng's paling face, enunciating each word. "Then go take them. Head to the wilds outside the cities, to the edges of those unclaimed secret realms. Kill and rob, strip them clean. Take anything that lets you survive."
"And if you can't even win when you rob..." Master Xuanming straightened up, clasping his hands behind his back again, his tone returning to that dead-calm flatness. "Then resign yourself to fate. Become just another bleached skeleton on the soil of the Central Continent, one that even stray dogs would turn up their noses at."
Earn. Take. Resign.
These simple words laid bare the bloody rules of the cultivation world, without any concealment, before three young people who had grown up in the comfortable sects of the Northern Frontier.
A deathly silence fell over the airship.
Mingyue's face turned pale. Instinctively, she shrank behind Qingfeng. Qingfeng's hands and feet were ice-cold, his lower lip bitten hard.
Su Ming stood in place, not blinking an eye.
During those years he spent in the mundane world of Great Xing, crawling out of piles of corpses, he had long experienced malice far more direct than this. It was just that the Central Continent had quantified that malice to the extreme, using "spirit stones" as the absolute measure.
"The old man's words are harsh, but the reasoning is sound, even if crude."
Lin Yu's soul body let out a long sigh within the Xuantian ring. He had shed his usual playful demeanor, and for once, a trace of heaviness appeared on his gaunt face.