Chapter 46: Spring Went, Autumn Came
Days and months didn’t matter when it came to cultivation. At some point, Wei Yuan finally met Zhang Sheng again. Half a month had passed since their last meeting.
He was incredibly excited to meet his master—at least, until he saw the coldness and impatience etched on the man’s face. He knew then that his shifu was still angry. But who or what on earth could infuriate the man for a month straight?
Wei Yuan didn’t dare to ask. He simply stood and waited for Zhang Sheng to check his homework and cultivation progress. Over fifty days had passed since he started developing his image; longer than even the longest time ever one had taken to develop an image. But forget using up the shadow on the moon, it hadn’t even budged an inch since making its appearance.
Every time Wei Yuan thought about his cultivation progress, he could not help but feel a little guilty and worried. It was because his image was only eight zhang long after all this time. Its size was barely passable, but the speed at which it was progressing was unsatisfactory to say the least. As if that wasn’t bad enough, his image was now completely devoid of extraordinary phenomena. That’s right. Somehow, the red line on the jade toad’s back had disappeared during one of his medicinal baths.
Generally speaking, there was only one explanation as to why this was happening—his insight was lacking. After all, it couldn’t possibly be that his jade toad was fake, and all the washing had caused it to fade in color, right?
Surprisingly, Zhang Sheng wasn’t surprised to hear that Wei Yuan was still developing his image. He then ordered him to manifest it.
Wei Yuan did as he said and channeled his method, manifesting the Jade Toad Full Moon Painting in his sea of consciousness.
The image was somewhat big, and… that was it. The ground was barren, the rock was devoid of any luster, and even the jade toad possessed a dismal complexion. The only unusual thing about his image was the shadow on the moon.
Everyone who could cultivate the Jade Toad Full Moon Painting was a bearer of great fortune, and one’s fortune was mainly reflected by the moon. Naturally, the extraordinary phenomena manifested by the various types of great fortunes were outstanding as well. For example, the images the previous generations had left behind included dragons, phoenixes, qilins, and other exotic beasts; ritual tripods for sacrificing to the heavens, greenish mountains of unfathomable heights, multi-storeyed immortal palaces, and more. To put it bluntly, every single one of these images could scare the life out of a person and leave them with nothing but envy—which was precisely the point. Why else would anyone bother to record their images in the books?