“Do you think, after she awakens, she’ll last three hours?”
[According to the background setting, after her physique awakens, she will be captured and imprisoned within the time it takes two incense sticks to burn. She will be used as a tool for Dual Cultivation. Originally, she wouldn’t even have had the chance to return to the sect.]
A female cultivator with average cultivation.
Beautiful.
Special physique—so special that she could increase the cultivation speed of those around her by thirty to fifty percent.
So special that Dual Cultivation with her could help others break through bottlenecks.
In the world of immortal cultivation, someone like that was a piece of living, walking ginseng fruit.
Who wouldn’t want a bite?
Those lofty Golden Core True Persons and Nascent Soul Ancestors—stuck at their bottlenecks for decades or centuries—what would they do when they suddenly heard about a little girl who could help them break through?
Would they come politely to ask?
Negotiate courteously?
No.
They would just take.
Snatch her away, lock her up, and use her as a cauldron.
When they were done and had broken through their bottleneck, they would pass her on to the next generation.
Generation after generation, until the last shred of her value was wrung out.
Xiao Han stared at the line on the system panel that read “Not Fully Awakened.”
A sudden realization dawned on him.
He had pulled her out of the river a few days ago.
He hadn’t let her nearly die.
Sure, he had elbowed her, but it hadn’t been enough to kill her.
So if he hadn’t pulled her out, she probably wouldn’t even have made it back to the sect.
Within hours of her physique awakening, someone would have snatched her away.
Xiao Han closed the system panel, leaned back against the tree trunk, and looked up at the starry sky above.
The nights in the Cangwu Mountain Range were quiet.
Only the sound of the river flowing and the occasional chirping of insects could be heard.
The moon peeked out from behind the clouds, casting cold light across the river’s shimmering surface.
‘Damn it… Was I supposed to let someone else run off with my own woman?’
Foundation Establishment?
He was going to build his Foundation today!
Huofei Lin cleared the parallel universe in seven days.
Broly whooped Goku, Vegeta, and the gold punching bag in two hours.
Duanmu Yan took down the Ox-killers in four or five days.
Why couldn’t he?
He was going to speedrun Foundation Establishment today!
Xiao Han suddenly stood up from the rock, slamming his right fist into his left palm with a sharp crack.
Alright.
The plan was set.
First, build Foundation.
Then, take the pills.
Keep cultivating until he reached the peak of the ninth layer of Foundation Establishment.
Xiao Han opened the System Store and scrolled to the pill section.
Spirit Gathering Pill—Common cultivation pill for Foundation Establishment cultivators.
Accelerates spiritual power accumulation.
Price: 20 Points/bottle (10 pills).
Cultivation Pill—Pill that can be directly converted into cultivation base.
Suitable for Foundation Establishment.
Each pill is equivalent to ten days of bitter cultivation.
Price: 50 Points/pill.
Foundation Stabilizing Pill—Auxiliary pill for stabilizing the foundation and expanding the dantian.
Essential for Foundation Establishment breakthroughs.
Price: 30 Points/pill.
Xiao Han looked at his point balance: 15 Points.
He couldn’t even afford the cheapest bottle of Spirit Gathering Pills.
He closed the store, stood up, walked to the riverbank, bent down, cupped some water, and splashed it on his face.
He cleared his head.
Then he sat back down and opened the task list.
Hunt a tier-2 demonic beast, Jade-eyed Golden Eagle.
Reward: 200 Points.
Harvest a century-old Cold Spirit Grass.
Reward: 80 Points.
Explore the Nameless Cave deep in Cangwu Mountain.
Reward: 150 Points.
He scanned them once and decided to do them all.
A tier-2 demonic beast was equivalent to a human cultivator at early Foundation Establishment.
He was at peak Qi Refining.
His chances of soloing a tier-2 demonic beast weren’t great.
But with the 15% true damage from Meteor Splitting Sky Elbow and the effect of Swift as Fire, his odds shot up to seventy percent.
Xiao Han stood up, tied his Outer Robe tight, and decided to build his Foundation first.
Deep inside the Cangwu Mountain Range’s northern foothills, in a natural cave hidden behind vines.
Xiao Han, now at Foundation Establishment, sat cross-legged, soaked in blood, in the deepest part of the cave.
A few of the cheapest Moonlight Stones were embedded in the surrounding rock walls, emitting a pale, grayish-white glow that barely illuminated the small space.
He had kicked the rubble on the ground flat and spread a layer of dry grass to sit on—it was barely tolerable.
Around him lay a dozen or so empty porcelain bottles, scattered haphazardly on the ground like the aftermath of a small-scale pill storm.
Spirit Gathering Pills, Foundation Stabilizing Pills, Root Consolidating Pills, Qi Condensing Powder, Bone Forging Medicine, Vajra Pills, Body Tempering Pills…
Everything.
He had exchanged all the points from his missions for pills, then poured them down his throat as if they cost nothing.
Ordinary cultivators cultivated step by step.
They would first circulate their techniques to absorb the world’s spiritual energy, guide it into their meridians, and after cycling through their circuits, converge it into their dantian.
The spiritual power in the dantian would slowly accumulate, changing from gaseous to liquid, from sparse to dense, like pouring water into a bucket, little by little, until it was full.
The size of the bucket was fixed.
Each cultivator’s dantian capacity had an upper limit for their current realm.
A Qi Refining dantian could only hold Qi Refining spiritual power.
Once it was full, that was Qi Refining perfection.
They couldn’t add any more.
They had to break through to the next realm, turning the “bucket” into a larger one, to continue filling it.
This was the iron law of cultivation.
Expanding the dantian required patience and time—a slow, daily process of warming, nourishing, and tempering.
It couldn’t be rushed.
It couldn’t be sped up.
Xiao Han didn’t want to follow this rule.
The pills melted in his stomach at the same time, the medicinal power charging through his body like runaway horses.
Spiritual energy surged from his stomach, flooding into his meridians, his dantian, his limbs, and his bones.
His meridians were stretched to the point of swelling, like a small river being filled with too much water, the water spilling over the banks, drowning the surrounding fields.
Those “fields” were his flesh, his blood, his tendons, his organs.
The spiritual power rampaged through those “fields” where it had no business being, like tiny knives cutting into his flesh.
It hurt.
It hurt like hell.
Xiao Han gritted his teeth.
Veins bulged on his forehead.
Sweat dripped down his cheeks, falling onto the dry grass, creating small, dark spots.
It hurt, but he had to endure.
He didn’t have the time to slowly expand his dantian.
Who knew when Luo Qingci would awaken?
If he followed the normal pace, those Golden Core, Nascent Soul, and Divine Transformation monsters would swarm in like sharks smelling blood.
What could he, a recently Foundation Establishment cultivator, do to stop them?
‘I’ve been isekai’d, and I’m still going to be a useless husband? Then wasn’t my transmigration a complete waste?’
He didn’t want power built step by step.
He wanted quick, explosive power.
Even if it came at the cost of damaging his foundation.
He wanted to force his growth.
He had the system anyway.
He could figure out how to fix his foundation later.
He poured a second Spirit Gathering Pill into his mouth.
A third.
A fourth.
The medicinal power of the Spirit Gathering Pills layered on top of each other inside his body.
Spiritual energy surged through his meridians like a great river, crashing against the walls of his dantian with a dull roar.
The dantian expanded by a circle.
Then another circle.
Like a balloon being relentlessly inflated.
But because he had taken the system’s secret medicine, as long as he maintained the spiritual power circulation, this balloon wouldn’t pop.
It was just unbearably painful.
It felt like taking off and soaring thirty times in one day.
Even though he knew it wouldn’t explode, his body kept screaming in agony.
He wanted to stop.
But if he stopped, he really would explode.
His body was like an overused furnace.
Cracks were beginning to appear in its walls.
Dense, thread-like fissures spread rapidly.
The rampaging spiritual energy seeped through the cracks, carrying his scorching hot blood, dyeing his clothes red.
When the pain reached its peak, it strangely became less painful.
Xiao Han’s consciousness flickered between blurred and clear in the midst of the intense agony, as if being pulled back and forth by an invisible thread.
He could feel his meridians splitting open, the spiritual energy leaking through the fine cracks into his flesh and blood, dragging out more impurities and blockages.
It should have hurt more, but his body seemed to have reached its limit, beginning to go numb.
The spiritual power vortex in his dantian spun wildly, compressed to its absolute limit.
A web of bloody lines emerged on the surface of his skin, spreading from his chest to his arms, from his arms to his neck, like some ancient curse script.
Ding—
A notification sound echoed in his mind.
[Warning: The host’s current body’s bearing capacity has reached a critical threshold. Probability of spiritual power loss of control: 67%. It is recommended to immediately stop cultivation and enter a resting state.]
67%?
A twisted, ugly smile curled at the corner of Xiao Han’s mouth.
Blood seeped from the corner of his lips, dripping onto the dry grass.
Didn’t that mean there was still a 33% success rate?
That was a better chance than some gacha games!
Besides…
Stop?
How was he supposed to stop?
He was like someone standing on a bomb about to explode.
Standing up meant death.
Staying still meant death.
The only way to live was to devour all the energy from that bomb, swallow it into his own stomach, and make it his own.
Either break through, or die.
There was no third path.