Cultivation: I Can Solidify Equipment Attributes

Li Yuan sat cross-legged in the Teleportation Array’s stone chamber. He maintained his Dark Evil Insight’s passive sensory net at its maximum range, locking onto the five moving auras within the diversion system.

The Dark Abyss Association squad’s advance was slow. The diversion system’s passages were a complex maze with numerous forks. They were clearly unfamiliar with the internal layout, pausing at every junction to determine their direction. The squad leader, a Late-stage Foundation Establishment Demon Cultivator, would occasionally release a probing pulse of Demonic Qi, using the echo to map the path ahead.

Li Yuan followed them for about four hours.

During this time, the squad stopped for an extended period at a wide intersection. The leader gathered the four Mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators and communicated with them via voice transmission.

Voice transmissions are nearly impossible to intercept between cultivators of the same rank. But Li Yuan was at the Early-stage Golden Core, and his Dark Evil Insight had doubled its precision in capturing Demonic Qi fluctuations. Although the contents of the transmission were compressed and encrypted, his Golden Core Level Divine Sense brutally dismantled it, restoring most of the information word for word.

The first part of the message was the leader’s address to the squad.

"The higher-ups said this thing is extremely important. They didn’t tell me what it is specifically, but their exact words were, ’If the mission to retrieve the treasure fails, a Golden Core will be dispatched personally.’ You can figure out the weight of that yourselves."

’A Golden Core dispatched personally. The Dark Abyss Association is willing to let a Golden Core Cultivator risk entering a remote, dead place like Mozhou. That means their assessment of the Demon Qi Pill Platform’s core value has reached the highest level.’

The second part of the message was the leader giving instructions to one of the Mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivators about a rendezvous.

"After you head back, take the northern route. Use this code to make contact at the third node." The leader handed over a jade slip. "The code changes every seven days. The new code for the next cycle is in here too. Destroy it once you’ve memorized it."

The rendezvous code.

The third part was a discussion about the supply route.

"The supplies for the northern route come by detouring around the outside of the Ghost Mist Forest, passing through three transit points." The leader used Demonic Qi to draw a rough map on the ground. "This is the safest path for the return trip. It’s all our people along the way."

Li Yuan committed the three pieces of intelligence to memory, not missing a single word.

The rendezvous code and the map of the northern supply route were extremely valuable. The former could be used to impersonate someone and infiltrate the Dark Abyss Association’s communication network, while the latter directly exposed their logistical chokepoint outside the Ghost Mist Forest.

After resting for a moment at the intersection, the squad set out again.

Another two hours passed before they finally found their target.

Li Yuan was all too familiar with the location of that stone cave. He had cracked the three nested layers of the Restriction and then sealed them back up, making it look identical from the outside to how it had for hundreds of years.

The leader stood before the cave and released a fine pulse of Demonic Qi for probing. The pulse bounced back upon touching the Restriction’s surface, and the leader cursed under his breath.

He turned to a short Mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator in the squad. "You’re up."

The short Demon Cultivator stepped forward and took a specialized set of tools for breaking restrictions from his storage bag. There were metal probes, Spirit Copper wires, and a few black stone slabs engraved with special Array Patterns.

The process of breaking the restriction was excruciatingly slow. The short Demon Cultivator’s technique wasn’t crude, but compared to Li Yuan’s Tier Three Array mastery, it was more than a single grade inferior. He spent nearly an hour dismantling the first layer of the Restriction, and another incense stick’s worth of time on the second.

The third layer, the destructive counter-attack layer, made him hesitate for a long time. Finally, urged on by his leader, he gritted his teeth and pressed forward, cautiously peeling the Array Patterns from the stone wall.

CRACK.

The cave entrance opened.

The five of them filed inside.

The cave’s interior was exactly as it had been when Li Yuan left. A twenty-foot-square space, a stone platform in the center, and on it, a black box made of a material that was neither metal nor wood.

The leader strode to the stone platform and flung open the box’s lid.

Empty.

There was nothing inside the box.

The silence lasted for three breaths.

"How is this possible?" The leader’s voice shifted from restrained to furious. He turned the empty box over and slammed it down on the stone platform, then crouched to check the platform’s base before turning to scan every corner of the cave.

Nothing.

"Someone beat us to it," the short Demon Cultivator said in a low voice. "The Restriction was broken and then resealed. The technique is far more sophisticated than mine."

The leader’s expression was utterly grim. He clenched his fists, his knuckles cracking.

"Who was it? There’s no way someone from the Primordial Yang Sect could know about this place. And the Celestial Peak Sect is even less likely."

No one could answer that question.

The leader took a deep breath, forcibly suppressing his rage.

"We’re pulling out. Let’s go back and report. The higher-ups will make other arrangements once they know. Move!"

The five of them turned and started to walk out of the cave.

They didn’t make it out.

At the entrance of the cave, a gray spatial rift opened without a sound.

There was no Spiritual Power fluctuation, no leakage of aura, not even the slightest disturbance in the cave’s air. The leader, walking at the very front, was still thinking about how he would report back. He had barely taken half a step when the rift sliced into the back of his neck, emerging smoothly from the front of his throat.

A Void-Shattering Slash powered by Golden Core Stage Spiritual Power was sharp to an unreasonable degree.

His auto-activated protective demonic glow couldn’t even slow it for an instant. Like a fragile sheet of paper, it was nonchalantly sliced in two.

His head hit the floor before he even realized an attack had been made.

The headless body lurched forward two more steps before blood gushed from the neck stump, splattering the cave’s ceiling and painting the walls crimson.

Only then did the other four truly realize what had just happened.

As the leader’s corpse fell, a second and third Void-Shattering Slash cut in from different angles. The moment his stealth broke, Li Yuan’s figure appeared at the cave entrance. His right index and middle fingers were held together, and before their tips, gray rifts opened one after another—quiet, precise, and lethal, like wounds carved open by an invisible hand.