The Undying Immortal System

Our first five years in Mortal City quickly passed us by as we stayed hidden away in our remote corner of the city’s outer ring.

In the sect, little of note occurred.

While a few of our people offended Lord-level powers on their short jaunts to their peaks, none of these incidents produced anywhere near the level of the fallout that XuJian’s initial trip to the Fire Peak had. Somehow, several of the PangBo Association’s slaves had gained access to an endless supply of Rank 4 talismans that were capable of cleansing people of soul gu, and they had been spreading them about freely, causing havoc. This had absolutely nothing to do with us, though, so I made sure that none of my people got involved in the mess, and we certainly didn’t help anyone who was being chased escape to Mortal City.

Of more importance was ShouLi’s study of body cultivation. Based on the knowledge she gained from her enlightenment, ShouLi claimed that while it might have looked impressive, the initial breakthrough that she had made was only the equivalent of advancing to Martial Disciple 2. However, since this breakthrough had only used up a fraction of the energy in her body, ShouLi was able to continue advancing without delay, further refining and enhancing her skin with each step.

Over the course of only a few years, she had made a total of nine such advancements, climbing all the way to the equivalent of Peak Disciple, but this was where she got stuck. Without an understanding of what came next, she had made no progress in breaking through to ‘Body Master.’ So instead, she had shifted her focus to trying to help others make breakthroughs of their own.

This, as it turned out, was a bit more complicated than we had initially expected.

ShouLi’s blessing had given her a significant advantage. She hadn’t thought in terms of fire wu or wood wu. She had just cultivated ‘wu.’ She used Strengthening and Feasting Pills to pull in as much energy as possible, from any sources available, and incorporated it into her skin. When others tried to replicate this process, it resulted in a chaotic mix of energies that caused people’s skin to burst into flames, rot away, or worse. Whenever this happened, we needed to cut away these infected areas and regrow them using a combination of a few different types of healing pills.

My people hadn’t given up, though, especially not Liang and NiangBa. They wanted to become stronger, and they were willing to endure the suffering that came with these early experiments in body cultivation if that was what it took to do so.

At first, they tried to simply get around the issue of elemental purity by only consuming beasts with wu of a single element. Unfortunately, since the technique ShouLi had created also pulled a modicum of wu from the environment, this didn’t work. So, they turned their focus to figuring out how to create ‘wu filters,’ similar to the qi filters in regular cultivation techniques. Having attempted to purchase such a thing from the System in the past, I suspected that no such filter designs existed in this world, so I could only wish them the best of luck.