Chapter Fifteen: Building the Cave Abode (Part 2)
The third layer of the cave was quite large, but there were only a few things inside. On the outermost layer, Yu Feng had planted thousands of bamboo seeds, hoping to use the yin energy of this extremely yin place to see if he could cultivate the legendary Jiuyou Ghost Bamboo from the underworld. Although it was uncertain whether even one would grow out of the thousands of seeds, these bamboo shoots could still grow again every year.
In this place, the unceasing absorption of yin energy has been going on, and under the cultivation of this dead energy. If it continues like this, one day, a Nine-You Ghost Bamboo will be born. And in the innermost part, there are layers and layers of dark and gloomy corpses, with an unknown number of corpses stored inside, only remembering that during the period when I was collecting corpses everywhere, my nerves were on the verge of collapse, and several times, some animal corpses were even collected without knowing it.
Due to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom incident, there were small knife societies and God-worshipping societies everywhere, with frequent wars. During that time, I could find about 50-60 corpses on average every day. I searched for nearly nine years and added almost 10,000 foreign corpses. Thinking about it, there must be countless skeletons here. Roughly calculated, there are nearly 200,000. For this reason, I refined three super-large Qiankun rings, which made me almost vomit blood at the time of refinement.
It's fortunate that the efforts of these years have not been in vain. After more than a decade, the corpse here has already produced the Yellow Spring water that only exists in the underworld, and numerous Yellow Spring ghost mushrooms have grown out. Even several drops of Xuan Yin water have been born. This Yellow Spring water is a precious treasure for refining ghost dao artifacts, while the Yellow Spring ghost mushrooms can repair the soul of cultivators, and when refined into a pill, they can increase spiritual awareness and cultivation, making them a rare treasure for those who cultivate the Dao.
The Xuan Yin water is even more difficult to find in the world, because it can change the innate qualities of ordinary people and cultivators. Ordinary people who receive it will have a significant increase in physical strength and will be free from illness for life. Cultivators who use it not only can increase their magical powers but also can make their innate qualities even more extraordinary.
In the center of these corpses is a circular altar over 50 feet in diameter, which is also the hub of the entire cave mansion. The array eye is located here, and the surface is filled with countless arrays and restrictions. Once someone forcibly breaks in, the three-layered array restriction will blast the intruder into powder, becoming the nutrient for this cave mansion. On this altar, there is only one meditation cushion, and beside it are some materials for refining equipment collected over many years.
The second layer of the cave is where he usually lives, and there isn't a hint of yin energy leaking out from above. Yu Feng had already set up a seal array below to prevent yin energy from overflowing and causing others to spy on him. The first layer was simply transformed into a garden, with various medicinal herbs planted inside for his future use in refining pills. However, so far, Yu Feng only understood the most basic pill-refining techniques, and it's likely that Ling Songzi is the same, focusing solely on array formations and restrictive methods. But who knows if he'll obtain the pill-refining technique? In any case, making preparations beforehand is never wrong.
Standing outside the mountain, Yu Feng stepped on the flying sword and circled around the small mountain a few times. At this time, the top of the small mountain was already covered with tall trees. Due to the extreme yin supplementing the seal, there were many living creatures on the mountain that were not found in other places, because the spiritual energy of this mountain was better than others. After all, under the ground here, there was a gigantic array of gathering spirits, and no matter what, some spiritual energy surrounded the mountain.
The cave was finally completed in his own hands. It took only five or six years to build, but the remaining time was spent collecting various materials, and in total, it took more than 40 years. Although he didn't deliberately practice meditation and internal alchemy during these years, the constant hard work of building the cave allowed him to reach the peak of the later stage of internal alchemy from the middle stage of internal alchemy. After the completion of this cave, he was about to close himself off to break through to the realm of spiritual transformation.
Because he had been using his divine sense to search for available objects every day for decades, his divine sense was no less than that of a middle-stage cultivator in the Nascent Soul stage, only his true yuan's magical power was slightly inferior, but compared to an ordinary Qi Refining cultivator at the peak, it was nearly twice as much.
Yu Fenghua spent over a decade in the Qing dynasty searching for materials to refine equipment, almost visiting every mine. First, he would observe whether the officials were greedy or not; if they weren't, that was fine, but if they were extremely corrupt, Yu Fenghua wouldn't be polite either - perhaps the next day, the corrupt official would find himself dead. After many years, Yu Fenghua obtained tens of millions of catties of various materials, but after purifying and refining them, there wasn't much left; on a sacrificial altar with an area of 50 zhang square, it only occupied less than one percent of the space.
However, he didn't just go around the Qing dynasty "taking some copper and iron" things. Think about it, in more than 20 years, he killed nearly ten thousand foreigners who were committing crimes in the Qing dynasty, including foreign officials, soldiers, and merchants. There was even one time when he directly annihilated nearly a hundred bandits who were burning, looting, and killing. However, each time he would destroy the bodies and leave no trace, putting the corpses into the dark caves, not even sparing their souls, which were all collected in the soul-catching bottle.
That soul-collecting vase had long been refined by him, and after being nourished by the aura of extreme yin for over a decade, it had also refined nearly ten thousand souls, reaching the rank of top-grade spiritual artifact. Calculating that even a foreigner would be worth several dozen kilograms of copper and iron, he felt slightly more at ease in his heart, no longer feeling guilty about this.
Recalling the deeds of those foreign devils on Chinese soil, a fierce and sinister look flashed across his face. He was no longer the young man who had just come out of the mountains, with the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands, exuding an aura of majesty without anger. But he also had no choice, the Qing imperial court had grown old and decrepit, always living under the feet of foreigners, making the lives of farmers at the bottom even more unbearable.
But he had no choice, as a cultivator, his hands were already stained with the lives of tens of thousands of people, although it was to eliminate evil, these ordinary people's karma would inevitably entangle his cultivation for life. Although he gained a lot of merit from this, karma is still karma and cannot be offset by merit. Having merit on one's body is naturally a good thing, but the karma of tens of thousands of people gathered on him is an unchangeable fact.
Merit and karma are the most elusive things in the cultivation world, with many different opinions, but there is one saying that everyone recognizes: no matter what other effects they have, having too much karma will affect a person's cultivation progress, making it impossible for them to make further breakthroughs. There are only two solutions: one is to accumulate great merit, and the other is to break through with great determination and wisdom. However, the possibility of the second option is very small. Throughout history, there have been countless cultivators, but those who had great karma without great merit were rarely seen to successfully ascend.
In the Taoist school, those who want to ascend to heaven must first cultivate 100 million merits. However, karma has another influence on a practitioner's cultivation, which is during the most critical moment of their practice - crossing the tribulation. To ascend to heaven, one must cross the tribulation, including three nine-thunder tribulations, six nine-thunder tribulations, and finally, the last 99 heavy tribulations. Karma will cause the person crossing the tribulation to have a demonic heart during the final 99 heavy tribulations. Many talented Taoist practitioners throughout history have been reduced to nothing in these 99 heavy tribulations, losing both body and spirit. During the heavy tribulation, those who died at the hands of the practitioner will be reborn in their heart demon and seek revenge against the practitioner. If the practitioner's mind is unstable due to extreme shock, they will surely die during the heavy tribulation.
However, merits had little effect during the tribulation, or it can be said that people have never discovered the role of merits during the tribulation. There was once an elder from Shu Mountain who killed countless people and had a massive amount of karma surrounding him, making it impossible for him to further his cultivation. Later, he made a great vow to cultivate millions of merits, finally reaching the pinnacle of human cultivation. He also possessed precious treasures that everyone thought would guarantee his ascension to immortality. However, during his tribulation, he was struck by a bolt of lightning from the ninth heaven and had an outburst of heart demons, causing him to be annihilated into nothingness, shocking all those who were bound by karma.
At this point, Yu Feng was too lazy to care about this matter. Anyway, the karma had already been formed, and things would happen as they should. It's just that he had such a large amount of karma on him since the later stages of Qi Refining, and in the future, during the stages of Refining Qi into Spirit, or even the legendary stage of Refining Spirit to Return to Void, he didn't know how much more karma would accumulate. The breakthrough at that time wouldn't be something that could be achieved in a few years or decades, but rather in hundreds or thousands of years. And yet, Yu Feng still didn't know how many people he would have to kill. However, Yu Feng was open-minded about it. He was still in the Qi Refining stage, so why worry about those things? For now, he couldn't even think about transcending tribulations and ascending to immortality. The Return to Void stage was still just a dream, so let's first focus on reaching the Spirit Refining stage.
Yu Feng named this cave mansion the Yīn Shān Fǔ, and designated the third layer of the cave as a forbidden area, taking only one name, Yīn Shān Dòng. Perhaps others wouldn't understand how the name Yīn Shān came to be, but he knew that beneath their feet was an authentic Yīn Shān. After entering the Yīn Shān Fǔ, Yu Feng opened all the array formations and restrictions inside the cave, causing a surge of spiritual energy fluctuations in the mountains and forests, but it vanished instantly without a trace.
He came alone to the altar inside the Yīn Shān cave and began his formal closed-door meditation, aiming to attain the realm of spiritual transformation.
In the Li Mansion of Nanping, a middle-aged man named Li Xiang was sitting in the main hall, his face, which was normally stern and imposing without being angry, now showed a worried expression, astonishing the several people standing below him, who had never seen their master look like this before.
Li Xiang had already entered the initial stage of Daoist Qigong, and it wasn't that his cultivation was slow, but rather 38 years ago when Li Xiang first entered the prenatal realm, he was just about to start practicing Daoist techniques. Suddenly, his master appeared and told him that if he wanted a more solid foundation, it would be best to break through the prenatal great perfection realm and naturally enter the Daoist Qigong state.
So Li Xiang suppressed his strong desire to practice Taoism for more than 20 years, not for anything else, just because his master had instructed him, and he had always trusted his master unconditionally, because he knew that his master would never harm him.
After he entered the Qi Refining stage, he finally knew the benefits of entering the Dao through martial arts. His magical power was almost one and a half times that of an initial-stage character. Don't underestimate this half multiple; in a battle of magic, this half multiple of magical power could save himself countless times.
He knew that his master was building a cave at the time, and one person had been busy day and night for seven or eight years. He still remembered that he might enter the pre-heavenly stage and specially took out time to run to Nanping to remind himself. He also sent a space-sized two-zhang Qiankun ring, which contained a large pile of materials, several law instruments, and even a flying sword belonging to the spirit instrument. From those memories, he knew that many small schools and sects would use a single spirit instrument as a treasure to guard their gates. At that time, he couldn't even use the peach wood sword given by his master before.
He was deeply grateful to his master in his heart, but it's hard to express. It's just that for nearly forty years, the master never came out again, and he didn't know how he was doing either.
