My Journey to Immortality Begins with Hunting

"But every ancestral seal is born with exactly three seeds. No more, no less. Shadow blood answers to the ancestral seal alone; outside spiritual forces can't enter the circuit. I only lucked into an ancestral seal with no seed limit by sheer accident."0

Whydidhe receive an ancestral without a ceiling? Was it because he'd used poems from his previous life as the inspiration of his paintings?0

Li Yuan caught the thread. Where ordinary eyes saw impossibility, great secrets often lurked. Faced with the vast, mysterious tapestry of worlds and time, he chose humility over certainty, never assuming his first answer had to be the right one.0

A thought struck him, wild yet plausible.0

"Poetry changed everything. The verses I wrote came from another world. That cross-world spiritual energy warped the paintings and gave me an ancestral seal with no ceiling. Everyone else saw the paintings but never the poems behind them. That's why they went mad. But what if they'd read the poems first and contemplated the paintings through that lens?"0

Curiosity flared. He would run a field test in Cloudpeak Province. A dozen years, give or take, would be enough to watch a crop of sixth rank disciples ripen or crumble. He decided to copy every poem he'd woven into those three paintings and seal them up as his sect'ssupreme heart scripture. With luck, a fifth rank prodigy might spawn in 15 years or so, and then he'd know.0

Plans made, Li Yuan tucked them away for his next visit.0

Now he sat cross-legged in the deepest sanctum of the Holy Tree Temple, blood essence from the fourth rank meat fields surging up through the floor. Once, this place would have made him delirious with joy; he'd have barricaded himself here for years. But he was a walking fifth rank meat field now. Blood energy was not the bottleneck; the strength of his will, his spiritual power, and need for more ancestral seal seeds were.0

The room itself was a cultivator's dream. Desk, shelves, bed, and teacups…everything radiated calm and clarity. These were treasures Qing Hancheng had hunted down over centuries. Even so, it had taken the man nearly two hundred years to crawl from early to late fourth rank.0

"So fourth rank is a bottomless pit for time," Li Yuan murmured.0

He wandered the chamber, leafing through Qing's Hangcheng's personal belongings. The man was a pure-bred cultivation fanatic. The other two deputy temple masters of the Holy Tree Temple still maintained clans; Qing had severed every tie. He had no wife, no heirs, and no recent relatives alive.0

Li Yuan sighed, then shivered, remembering Qing Hancheng's final fate. He glanced out the wooden lattice window. From inside he could see out, but no one could spy in. Beyond sat a triple layered aerial garden containing exotic spiritual flowers and herbs that bloomed even in the deep winter.0

Above the garden in the sky, dusk was settling in. Heavy iron-gray clouds stretched across the sky, their outlines resembling hulking figures lurking in shadow, devils grinning down at the land.0

A chill crept up Li Yuan's spine.0

He pulled his focus back to the business at hand. How best to digest Qing Hancheng's legacy and turn it into growth?0

His haul consisted of the following—0

The core chamber of the White Bamboo Hanging Bell Tower. The formal title of Temple Master of the Holy Tree Temple. The three original visualization aids. A trove of cultivation notes. Stacks of rare books. Countless Holy Tree Temple secrets, political and otherwise. A web of personal connections and hidden leverage. And last but not least, the persona of Qing Hancheng.0

"Hold on," Li Yuan muttered. "I already have the Return-Willow Technique shadow blood in my body. Could I keep training that cultivation technique and graft it onto me like a side branch? If I pile up enough ancestral seal seeds I could patch the flaws. Then the Holy Tree Temple's lineage would become another trump card inside me."0

His old obstacle had been the mismatch. His shadow-bones were replaced, the shadow blood too thin to meet sixth rank requirements. But now he wielded Mortal World Transformation, an ability that in theory let him command every drop of his flesh and even his bones.0

And Mortal World Transformation was, after all, a divine ability…0

"So could I use Mortal World Transformation to reshape my flesh and bones, reset my shadow bones to normal, stash all my real power someplace safe, and then practice the rest of the Holy Tree Temple's techniques in disguise?0

"Sixth rank and fifth rank both hinged on the heart. Why not grow asecondheart with Mortal World Transformation? Just keep both ticking.6

"My own ancestral seal sits outside the heart. The moment I activate it, I can superimpose it over the Holy Tree Temple's defective three-seed ancestral seal. Then maybe balance will be restored?0

"No, plenty of problems there. I'll only know once I get the experiment rolling. Still, if it works, that's another ace up my sleeve."0

Li Yuan jotted the idea into his pocket notebook, then turned to matters he had to verify with his own eyes. Walking around as Qing Hancheng was nerve-racking; the Holy Tree Temple's halls crawled with seasoned schemers. One slip and he'd be cooked.0

He changed into a fresh azure robe patterned with ink-black plum blossoms and stepped outside.0

A man in flawless white, Jing Baikou, was already waiting. He dropped to one knee.0

"Congratulations, Temple Master! A resounding victory!"0

The figure wrapped in light yet steeped in shadow didn't reply. He simply reached out, ruffled Jing Baikou's hair the way one pets a house dog, and drifted off. A flat, emotionless chuckle lingered in the air.0

Jing Jing Baikou swallowed hard, wiping sweat from his brow.The temple master is even scarier now. That searing aura is far stronger than before. Best for the Jing Clan to stay in his shadow forever.0

Li Yuan flew to a hidden corner beyond the third gate. A fifth rank elder on duty leapt up and bowed. He strode past and descended a stairway into an underground vault. According to Qing Hancheng, the site was one of the Holy Tree Temple's three great arrays.0

The first was called the Transit Array. Legend told that if a transcendent power ever visited, they would step out of this very circle.0

Li Yuan soon found it. Before him were stone dais about six meters across and half a meter high, carved with deep grooves clearly meant to be filled with something before the array would activate.0

Qing Hancheng had secretly tried every exotic metal and crystal he knew, blood gold, soul iron, blood crystal…. Nothing worked.0

The second was the Sect Guarding Array, an invisible barrier set up by either the Holy Tree Temple's founders or by that mysterious higher power. No one knew where the actual nodes of the formation were located; what survived was only the activation method, which was a combination of a mind skill, chant, and hand-seals. Anyone of fifth rank or higher with Holy Tree Temple shadow blood could trigger it from anywhere inside the third gate. Once active, the entire compound was sealed under a defense no outside enemy could breach.0

The third array was the Phantom Screen. It didn't muddle senses so much as hide reality beneath a false panorama. At first Qing Hancehng had reeled in awe. Was the array folding one stretch of spacetime over another? But once he merged his two personalities and drew on the Wither Growth Sword, he realized the trick. It was one thought birthing a scene. The array simply draped that conjured scenery over reality. Outside the array, only the veil was visible. Step in, and the true world would step into view0

However, knowing how the array worked and passing through it were two completely different things.0

Qing Hancheng had long suspected the lock required either a specific incantation or a special tool. That tool turned out to be a jade key, an heirloom passed down with the temple master's mantle.0