Vessel of Worlds

Andy picked up the green jade ruler and stroked it lightly. Its surface was smooth and fine, warm and moist to the touch. Looking closely, beneath the near-solid spiritual light flickered subtle, natural runes of intricate design, lending the ruler an air of deep antiquity.

He tried feeding a thread of spiritual power into it—but the power vanished instantly, like a clay ox sinking into the sea, and the ruler showed no response whatsoever.

Andy hastily stopped the flow, then tried instead to lift the ruler with his spiritual sense and hold it in the air.

To his astonishment, the ruler—so light in his hand—became impossibly heavy. His spiritual sense could easily lift the most cumbersome of artifacts, yet it could not move the jade ruler a hair's breadth.

"Truly a dharma treasure—usable only by Core Formation cultivators and above." Andy nodded. With his early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivation, neither his spiritual power nor his spiritual sense could sustain the cost of wielding one.

Unwilling to give up, he tested the golden bell as well—with precisely the same result.

Which confirmed both items' status as dharma treasures.

He returned the two treasures to their jade boxes and stored them in his pouch, then looked the chamber over once more. Nothing else turned up.

Wasn't Recluse Ximen seeking a fated one at Foundation Establishment or below? Why leave two dharma treasures the finder can't even use—and not a single artifact? Andy grumbled inwardly. But the answer came quickly: a "fated one" strong enough to slay a rank-five beast—would such a person care about a peak-grade artifact or two?

On the slim chance it might work, he tried passing through the purple curtain at the chamber's far end—and found it like walking into a stone wall. He could not enter by even a fraction.

The secret behind that curtain, it seemed, would have to wait until he had cultivated the Primal Unity Technique to Core Formation.

The island was remote and desolate, and the dwelling deeply hidden. Andy decided to simply remain here—disperse his cultivation entirely and begin the Primal Unity Technique from nothing, venturing back out to hunt beasts once he had regained strength enough to protect himself.

His earlier alchemy practice had left him a rich stock of pills beneficial to Qi Condensation cultivation—now they would serve their purpose.

Decision made, Andy first sealed the hidden cave's entrance with great slabs of stone, then returned to the dwelling.

As a precaution, he deployed several formation sets in both the great hall and the quiet chamber, and posted his puppets to guard the chamber's entrance.

With these thorough preparations complete, Andy began the dispersal.

Anyone who imagined that dispersing one's cultivation meant simply letting the power drain away was badly mistaken. The agony of the process cut bone-deep—worse by a measure than the purging of impurities under a Foundation Establishment Pill.

The experience of forcibly extracting spiritual power drop by drop from every limb and meridian taught him, in the fullest sense, what it meant to wish for death over life.

It took an entire month of inhuman torment before Andy at last dispersed every wisp of spiritual power in his body and became a "mortal." Had any cultivator broken into the chamber then, he could not have raised a finger in resistance.

After a day of rest and half a day of quiet sitting—settling his heart to windless stillness—Andy began the first layer of the Primal Unity Technique.

The technique as recorded ran nine layers in all: the first three for Qi Condensation; the middle three corresponding to early-, mid-, and late-stage Foundation Establishment; the final three for Core Formation.

Each layer completed raised one's cultivation a corresponding level.

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With the help of dozens of peak-grade Qi-Gathering Powder pills, Andy completed the first layer within a few short months, broke into the second, and raised his strength to the equivalent of a fourth- or fifth-layer Qi Condensation cultivator.

Then he began taking peak-grade Spirit-Clearing Pills and pressed on with the second layer...

In cultivation there are no years.

Ten of them passed in a blink.

Through that decade, sustained by vast quantities of peak-grade pills and high-grade spirit stones of all five attributes, Andy's cultivation climbed with extraordinary speed.

Better still, rebuilding after dispersal required only the steady absorption and refinement of spiritual energy—none of the bottlenecks, Foundation Establishment included, had to be faced a second time. Within a mere six years, he finished the first three layers of the Primal Unity Technique, restoring his cultivation to early-stage Foundation Establishment.

Then, taking the ordinary and peak-grade Foundation-Nurturing Pills refined from rank-three cores and enhanced by the small bowl, he brought the fourth layer to completion four years later—breaking through the early-stage bottleneck to become a mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator.

Equally gratifying: his spirit beast, the Ice-Wind Snake, had spent those ten years growing rapidly on a steady diet of peak-grade medicines. It now stood at the very peak of rank one, a hairsbreadth from breaking through to rank two—the equivalent of a human early-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator.

The beast kept its green back and snow-white belly, but its body had grown greatly—thick as a bowl's mouth now, and over a zhang long. It could instantly cast two attack spells, the Ice Spike Technique and the Wind Blade Technique. Against ordinary Qi Condensation cultivators it would have no trouble at all—but to Andy its help remained slight.

Most likely the unique inborn gifts of a mutated beast would only reveal themselves once it advanced past rank two.

But for the Ice-Wind Snake to keep advancing, the common medicines sold in the markets were now far beneath its needs. A spirit beast of flood dragon blood could only continue its ascent on medicine refined from flood dragon cores—the Dragon Transformation Pill. Without it, the beast might need centuries of self-cultivation to advance on its own.

Beasts generally lived far longer than humans—but their cultivation likewise advanced far more slowly. A cultivator who failed to feed his spirit beast quantities of potent medicine would likely exhaust his own lifespan before the beast ever came into its strength.

Yet flood dragons were scarce in the waters around Island Five and rarely showed themselves. Andy possessed not a single flood dragon core, and so could refine no Dragon Transformation Pills for the Ice-Wind Snake.

At the same time, considering that he would quite possibly cultivate more than one cycle of the Primal Unity Technique—multiplying his need for beast cores several times over—he set the technique aside for now and resolved to put to sea and hunt again.

Andy flung out a dozen-odd Fire Serpent Talismans, which merged in midair into a fire python thick as a bowl's mouth. Then he pointed his right forefinger, and a streak of purple qi shot forth, pouncing on the python.

The python's massive body and that chi-long wisp of purple stood in no proportion at all—yet the moment the python's flames touched the purple qi, they guttered and died as though meeting their natural bane.

The python gaped wide and swallowed the purple whole—then began thrashing in evident agony, its body shrinking steadily until more than two-thirds of it was gone.

Seeing such power in a casually loosed streak of purple qi, Andy nodded in deep satisfaction, then flicked his finger and dissolved the shrunken python into scattered red light.

This purple qi was a power he had comprehended upon reaching the technique's fourth layer—a divine ability called Primal Unity Qi. At first, deploying it had cost considerable spiritual power and time; but once Andy reached the fifth layer and mid-stage Foundation Establishment, he could cast it in an instant.

The purple qi served attack and defense alike—and against pure five-element spiritual power, it exerted a natural suppression that effectively multiplied its potency by several tenths. On that strength alone, facing an ordinary mid-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator, Andy had real confidence of victory without touching his puppets or the Blazing Heaven Blade. Beyond that, cultivating all five attributes at once had given him spiritual power far deeper than his peers': though his cultivation stood at mid-stage Foundation Establishment, in spiritual sense and raw power he yielded nothing to an ordinary late-stage cultivator.

Compared to the Raging Sea Technique he had practiced before, the difference was heaven and earth. The Raging Sea Technique, beyond its quick cultivation speed, had carried only a single ability—the Water Transformation Escape: in a crisis one could slip into water and flee, swift and nearly undetectable, one's spiritual light merging with the current. A serviceable life-saving art, nothing more.

Nor was that surprising. Water-attribute techniques traded away offense and defense for speed of cultivation; their practitioners usually lost to peers of equal rank, which made an escape ability the most useful gift such a method could offer.

The Primal Unity Technique, refining five attributes at once, cultivated far more slowly than the Raging Sea Technique—though with mountains of peak-grade pills behind him, Andy's pace had been respectable. And in the attempt at Core Formation and everything beyond it, the Primal Unity Technique stood immeasurably higher. Such was the power of a supreme technique that ten thousand gold could not buy.

Which was exactly why, the moment the Primal Unity Technique came into his hands, Andy had wasted not a day before casting away every shred of his power.