Two other months passed.
My physical and qi cultivation didn’t progress much during this time because of the lack of natural raw qi. But my mental cultivation has reached a turning point: finally, I have finished setting up a crystal mind lake.
[Clear Mind Lake Lv 10 → Crystal Mind Lake Lv1]
Now it’s time to expand it in largeness and width. By doing that I will be expanding the range of my Spirit Sense. Speaking of my spirit sense, thanks to the clearing of my mind lake it has become far more perceptive: if before it could only register vague forms I can now see even the color of what it’s inside its range. Speaking of Spirit sense the reason I didn’t particularly use it is because its range is now only 40 cm, hardly usable. But it will slowly become one of my trump cards.
The only other skill that improved is stealth, that’s because I’m trying to use it as much as possible by tailing and ambushing unsuspecting animals. Thanks to that it’s now at Lv 4 and I can now use it more comfortably.
And this is the situation because of which I trained so hard: I found a hunting team navigating the woods in search of prey. I have no intention to antagonize them, not because I am afraid, they would hardly be my match, but for two reasons. One: as a former human I don’t want to needlessly kill sentient creatures. And two: I need them to guide me to their village enter the human territory and search for information about lands rich in qi.
I followed from a distance, moving from shade to shade not be seen. After they killed a deer, and hung it upside down to drain the blood, I heard them talking.
(1st man) “Hey Li, when will your brat join us in one of our hunts?”
(Li) “You know the brat, Wong, he is still hell-bent on trying to find the hidden meridian in his body. Until he is 12 and loses the hope to enter the sect I don’t think we will see him coming out to help us.”
(3rd man) “How to blame him, that is an opportunity to form a dantian and to start working towards immortality elevating your whole family with it.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
(Wong) “You’re right, Zen. But searching for the hidden meridian is always the hardest thing to do, well after trying to sense qi.”
(Li) “Yeah, the big clans in the city have it easy. With their resources and their hidden methods, they can always send at least a couple of people to the sect when the envoys descend every 5 years.”
(Zen) “At least unless you are that Huang trash. Hahahaha!”
(Wong) “Yeah with broken meridians no matter how good he is at sensing qi he will never be able to join the sect.”
(Li) “I heard that the Huang patriarch has purchased at a hefty price a precious herb to heal him but all for naught”
(Wong) “We know, hell, all the region knows, with how big the backlash from his clan was. You are always the last to hear things Li, please don’t pretend to know some incredible secret because it’s quite pitiful to look at.”
(Zen)”Hahahaha”
Then they started to talk about other stuff”
‘Hmm, very interesting. It seems that I coincidentally heard some very interesting stuff.
‘First is that sensing qi is not so easy for others but that can be explained by my high mental cultivation.’
‘Secondly is that people don’t usually create their dantian using eight secret meridians, maybe it is a problem of rural areas but still given the level of the manual given by the system eight meridians should be a pretty decent number.’
‘Thirdly, I’m quite interested in this young master Huang that has crippled meridians. Maybe it’s like in those novels and he will find some lucky chance to cure his problems. It sounds far-fetched but so is reincarnating as a bear in a cultivator’s world.’
I continued to follow the trio until they arrived outside the forest and onto a road that led straight to a little village. It didn’t have walls or palisades around it and the houses were made of wood and mud.
Well now I am in human territory but I don’t think that I will find what I am searching for in a rural village such as this. Let’s take another road and see if it brings me to a bigger city.
And so I traveled for a couple of days on the road. The few people who saw me stayed at large or ran away, and then I saw it. A long, 5-meter-high, stone wall with impressive wooden gates. Few people were exiting and entering through this gate.
I decided to circle the wall searching for a more crowded gate, possibly one with carts going through it. And I found it. On the eastern part of the city, there was a gate with a lot of people entering and exiting and with a few carts in line to enter.
I waited a little further along the road and when a cart passed I swiftly entered its shadow and activated stealth. Moving slowly like this I moved along the line and an hour later I was inside.