Cultivation: Fortune by Lots

The sudden change caught Lei Jun completely off guard.

He did not even reach out right away to catch the piece of white paper, just letting it drift down to the ground.

Lei Jun looked all around and then inspected the True One Altar Cave Heaven carefully for a bit.

No other movements, no one else coming in.

Chu Yu's attempt to enter the True One Altar Cave Heaven had been interrupted and ruined by others… *Lei Jun began to understand.*

Through his comprehension of the cave heaven, he sensed that the white paper held no hidden traps or mechanisms, so he touched it willingly with his spiritual soul.

The moment he made contact, Lei Jun seemed to feel the former owner's mood and emotions lingering on the paper from just now.

Not much anger or resentment, mostly helplessness and acceptance.

Some vague images flickered before Lei Jun's eyes for a moment and were gone.

He seemed to see Chu Yu dressed in a hunter's outfit, trying to open the portal to the cave heaven with a piece of white paper marked by an impression of the Celestial Master Seal.

But in the end, a bolt of purple thunder struck down from the sky above.

Chu Yu herself was unscathed.

The white paper was unharmed.

But the connection between her and the paper was severed.

The moment hit as the paper had just completed a new "passage" to the cave heaven, the portal on the verge of opening.

Timing down to the tiniest fraction of a second.

A heartbeat later and it would have been Chu Yu opening the portal and stepping in herself.

Instead, as it turned out, the paper went in, but the passage immediately shut, leaving Chu Yu locked out beyond the gate.

Through the white paper, Lei Jun felt as if he could clearly see Chu Yu's face in that instant—equal parts angry and amused.

*Failure at the brink of success, just a hair's breadth away.*

There could be no better way to describe that phrase than this exact situation.

The images faded away like lantern slides.

Lei Jun's sight returned to the space of the cave heaven, seemingly both limited and infinitely vast.

This moment, different from before, inside the True One Altar Cave Heaven the dharma lamps kept flickering, now bright, now dim, while the great Daoist banners fluttered in the wind.

Lei Jun gazed at the white paper as flashes of spiritual insight sparked in his mind.

No one told him what he ought to do.

But by way of this cave heaven and the three impressions of the Celestial Master Seal he'd already acquired, Lei Jun, at this instant, enlightened himself without a teacher.

His spiritual soul trembled.

The two seal marks he had received—one from the belly of Qiantian Peak on Mount Tianxu and the other from the bone armor in the Yintuo Mountain of the Southern Wildernes—rose up on their own inside the cave heaven.

The third mark, from the white paper, floated over before Lei Jun as well.

With a thought, Lei Jun brought all three marks together, overlapping and merging them into one.

The three-in-one imprint fused together, then blazed with brilliant light.

The cave heaven, previously dim like the starry universe, was illuminated for an instant by this radiance.

In that same moment, Lei Jun suddenly felt his spiritual soul become unsteady, unable to linger in the cave heaven any longer.

His spirit-body was flung backward, thrown out of the "passage" he had entered by, and returned once more to his physical body.

But this time, it was not just his soul returning.

That elegant cave heaven began to contort and shrink, as if folding down from a realm beyond into a single thread.

Then, it joined itself to Lei Jun's own soul, yanked back in together, flooding directly into the crown of his physical head.

Lei Jun's entire being trembled, soul returning to body, and opened his eyes.

He seemed to see something new in front of him.

An ancient, dignified jade seal with a squared knob.

The seal appeared thin rather than heavy, square but not massive, pure white throughout, shimmering with violet, blue, and gold light.

But the jade seal was illusory, vanishing from Lei Jun's sight in an instant.

As if what he had seen before had been only an illusion.

However, the jade seal then manifested in Lei Jun's mind, sharply defined and perfectly clear.

[Celestial Master Seal]

At the appearance of this name in his mind, Lei Jun drew in a deep breath.

He first steadied his mind, controlling his impulse to examine the jade seal.

Lei Jun's attention then shifted back to the real world.

Everything in his line of sight was unchanged from before.

The ancestral tomb forbidden area behind the mountain remained serenely tranquil.

In the distance, Elder Xin was still performing the Star-stepping Spell and managing the talisman array.

The other fellow disciples were spaced apart, all seated in silent meditation as before.

The dharma lamp before Lei Jun shined just as brightly as earlier, with the incense smoke curling steadily upward from the incense burner.

If there had been any change, it was that Lei Jun himself sensed that the statues and spirit tablets of all the forebears in the ancestral Taoist temple flickered for just an instant, as if illuminated.

But only Lei Jun took notice of this.

No one else, not Elder Xin nor Wang Guiyuan or the other senior brothers, were aware of anything out of the ordinary.

But Lei Jun was sure it had not been his imagination.

He exhaled a long breath, then properly saluted the statues of the ancestral Celestial Masters within the hall.

No matter how things would unfold from here—

The Celestial Master Seal.

Today it returned at last to Dragon Tiger Mountain.

At this moment, Lei Jun could sense the jade seal buried deep within his soul, now faintly trembling.

It seemed as if some external force still tugged at it, trying to stir the seal into motion.

But at that moment, even without Lei Jun's intervention, brilliant light of violet, blue, and gold shimmered once more across the seal's surface.

As if something had been set ablaze.

Again, strange visions swept before Lei Jun's eyes like spinning lantern slides.

He seemed to see at once both Senior Brother Li Zhengxuan and the face of an old monk from the Esoteric School.

It must have been that Grand Elder of the Vajra Temple, Master Longjia.

In Li Zhengxuan's own hands was a jade seal as well.

On the surface, it looked identical to the Celestial Master Seal now inside Lei Jun's spiritual soul.

But that was only an imitation, not the true Celestial Master Seal.

In Master Longjia's hands, meanwhile, was a piece of tree bark that looked immeasurably ordinary.

Yet the withered bark clearly bore a Celestial Master Seal impression, too.

No one knew where Master Longjia had found it, but the spiritual potency of that scorched bark's seal was in no way inferior to Li Zhengxuan's imitation or to the white paper Chu Yu had held before.

But, in that instant, a look of shock sprang onto Master Longjia's aged face.

The withered tree bark in his hand suddenly burst into flame by itself.

On the other side, Li Zhengxuan felt no hint of schadenfreude whatsoever.

Because the imitation jade seal he held suddenly fractured bit by bit, crumbling into ash.

All happened so fast and unexpectedly that, with all their strength and cultivation, neither Master Longjia nor Li Zhengxuan could do anything to stop the magical objects engraved with the Celestial Master Seal from being destroyed right in their hands.

The final image before Lei Jun's eyes lingered on their faces, filled with regret, confusion, rage, resentment, and bewilderment all at once.

The vision faded, Lei Jun snapped out of it, and a realization arose in his heart.

He had succeeded in gathering all three clues tied to the Celestial Master Seal, corresponding to heaven, earth, and man—finally breaching the limit and bringing forth the Celestial Master Seal itself.

Even though the Young Celestial Master, Li Zhengxuan, held the Celestial Master's Sword, he had failed to intervene. Lei Jun guessed it might be because he was presently in the forbidden ancestral tomb of Dragon Tiger Mountain Celestial Master Mansion.

*Even though Lei Jun sensed that the Celestial Master Seal's current state might be unstable, at the moment it had shaken off its masterless condition.*

Therefore, any further attempts to contact it using other seal imprints triggered a reaction from the Celestial Master Seal itself.

But this reaction severed the seal's bond with all others.

The ultimate outcome: after a fierce contest among all the top experts, it was some unknown little Taoist who had not even gone to Qingtian Peak that ended up reaping the reward.

*I really did just wait beside the tree and have the rabbit crash into me this time…* Lei Jun felt both joy and absurdity inside.

Just as the moderately good lot had foretold: by quietly guarding the forbidden ancestral tomb behind Celestial Master Mansion, waiting for the proper moment alone, one could gain a second-grade opportunity.

He owed his thanks to the solid groundwork laid by the two previous seal imprints he had collected.

Everything had flowed together naturally.

But Lei Jun quickly suppressed his excitement.

He quietly calmed his mind, letting his thoughts sink into the depths of his spiritual soul.

Once the jade seal erased all its residual marks from the outer world, it returned to complete stillness and silence.

*Just as I thought, the Celestial Master Seal's current condition is indeed odd…* Lei Jun mused inwardly.

He'd never handled the treasure directly before, but its reputation was long-standing and he knew the general idea.

The Celestial Master Seal, Celestial Master's Sword, and Celestial Master Robe could all switch between material and spiritual form—true.

But usually, when at rest, they existed as physical objects.

But the seal now had not become a proper Great Seal that Lei Jun could hold, and instead had turned into an immaterial spirit item, hidden inside Lei Jun's soul.

To be exact, Lei Jun even felt that the seal and his own soul had fused temporarily, and could not be separated for now.

Yet this extraordinary treasure seemed to have slipped into a state of hibernation or even deathly stillness.

Lei Jun could not call on it or control it at will for now, nor did he have any means to refine it further.

Oddly enough, the two were now linked, which Lei Jun could sense just as he had when first entering the cave heaven earlier.

The treasure remained sealed away in dormant solitude.

The cause most likely traced back to the third great internal strife at the Celestial Master Mansion years ago, that earth-shaking battle.

Back then, Li Cangting and his wife, the third Celestial Master Li, and many experts from the Celestial Master Mansion and the Southern Witch Sect all perished.

The Celestial Master Seal must have been affected as it was lost during that catastrophe.

Lei Jun steadied his mind.

Suddenly, light flashed before his eyes.

He—his consciousness, to be precise—successfully entered the True One Altar Cave Heaven once again!

This time, the cave heaven was ablaze with light.

The forty-nine lamps around the altar all shone together, illuminating every corner of the cave heaven.

The great treasure banner, nearly five zhang tall, flew and snapped high, and beneath its octagonal canopy, one large and eight small Daoist banners billowed in unison.

The whole cave heaven seemed saturated with talismanic Tao patterns, awing the observer.

But when Lei Jun tried to enter the heart of the altar at the center, the true altar itself, he still could find no entrance.

*As expected, the Celestial Master Seal's status remains abnormal…* Lei Jun nodded to himself.

But now that the treasure was his, he had no need to be impatient, withdrawing his mind from the cave heaven for now.

Outside, in the ancestral tomb forbidden area, everything remained pristinely calm.

Until—above Celestial Master Mansion, purple clouds of thunder once again gathered thickly.

An Upper Three Heavens-level High Merit Elder had returned to Dragon Tiger Mountain.

Only then did Elder Xin relax, putting away his constellation step array and talisman setup.

Lei Jun and Wang Guiyuan, along with the other disciples, brought their magical artifacts over to Elder Xin, who offered a few words of encouragement, "It turned out only a false alarm tonight, but you all conducted yourselves very well."

Overall, Elder Xin was in a good mood.

If only the Young Celestial Master and Elder Ziyang had succeeded in bringing the Celestial Master Seal home to Dragon Tiger Mountain, things would be perfect.

But unfortunately, Elder Xin soon sensed that something was amiss.

"Has Nephew Zhengxuan already returned to the mountain?"

Elder Xin wondered, "Is it just this old man's muddled senses, or did the Celestial Master's Sword not come back with him?"

Lei Jun and the others took a moment before anything clicked.

The Celestial Master's Sword had not returned to the mountain.

Hmm…

Ah?

?!