For the rest of the morning, Jun filled out a bamboo scroll with the bloodline cultivation method, doing his best to recall every detail. When he was done, a heavy sigh resounded through the house.
‘It’s like the heavens want poor, innocent animals to fail.’
Moon Rabbit’s Elixir of Life was an incredible technique, capable of extending one’s lifespan for thousands of years when properly cultivated. To do so, one had to follow these extremely simple tasks.
First, the rabbit has to sow the seeds and water the fields. Then, with a sickle, he must harvest herb after herb until he has enough for a pill. Using a jade mortar and pestle, the rabbit pounds and grinds until the ingredients turn into the finest powder possible. After that, he must form the powder into the pill and temper it with flame. Finally, the pill will turn into the sweetest elixir, which will propel the rabbit’s cultivation even further. If that wasn’t hard enough, the rabbit had to circulate qi during the entirety of the process and have no outside help.
Jun put down the slip, staring out across the garden at Guan Yu, who was happily munching on weeds in the same spot where his brothers died. Then, for some strange reason, he started headbutting the fence.
‘Hopeless. Maybe I should replace him with a smarter rabbit. Chen Hao will never know.’ Jun mused to himself.
Images of rabbit training courses flashed through his mind—using carrots as bait, he could get Guan Yu to solve puzzles for entertainment. Then, he would record it all and get millions of views on every platform.
“CultivationTube is just one step away. They’ve got all the technology already here.”
He shook his head at the silly notion.
“Anyways, Guan Yu is too stupid to cultivate it right now. There has to be a way to make him smarter…”
Putting the matter aside for now, Jun sneakily wandered off to the disciple’s quarters, collecting the various seeds in a box. Wang Lei had taken his instructions very literally and purchased one of each herb and flower until he ran out of money. Unfortunately, he didn’t label them, and Jun had no clue which seed was which.
Returning home, he made sure that Chen Hao was still peacefully meditating. Then, he didn’t waste any more time and directly buried a strange-looking seed under the soil.
“From Life, Death,” Jun said, and immediately felt embarrassed despite no one else hearing his words. Silently, he flipped the switch in his mind, and instead of the qi just vanishing like last time, it ejected itself out of his paws and into the soil, rapidly making its way towards the corpses.
The qi burrowed deep, changing from its formless state into something dark and twisted. Like a snake, it swept through the ground before unleashing its assault on the seed, enveloping it in a cocoon. Jun watched on with awe as the seed rapidly germinated, spreading its roots in the earth and its leaves in the air. But it didn’t stop there. Mere minutes from using the technique, a beautiful pink flower bloomed, resembling an orchid of sorts.
“This is… amazing,” he said, watching as he performed his first real act of magic. Charging at a stone wall was a lot different than making plants bloom instantaneously.
Better yet, the qi wasn’t completely gone yet. The plant kept on growing, and growing, and growing.
‘Hold on. Wait just a damn minute.’
Jun watched with horror as the pink petals turned a deep violet, growing fuzzy hair at the edges. The petals spread further apart as if making more space for something in the middle.
Seconds later, a huge, toothy mouth appeared on the orchid! It let out a horrific screech, launching itself through the air and latching onto Jun’s face. It began to viciously bite him.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. GET IT OFF! GET IT OFF!”
Jun shrieked, thrashing around the place as a wet and slimy sensation enveloped his nose. Then, it began to burn like nothing before. His fur and skin started melting.
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Ignoring any consequences, Jun drew in the stone qi around him. Completely blind, he picked a direction and charged, sticking out his face as he did. No matter if his nose broke—he just had to get it off of him! He ran like nothing before, and for once in his life, he was glad to crash into a wall. Seconds later, formations began to flash on the stone building.
Surprisingly, the facehugger was still alive, though it was twitching and shaking on the ground. However, before anything else could happen, Jun’s body froze in place as an almighty presence swept throughout the area. So intense was the pressure that not even shivers could form on his body—his mind was screaming, yet everything else refused to obey. Every inch of him was being scrutinised and judged.
The sensation faded after what felt like a lifetime, instead focusing on the strange plant in front of Jun. Then, a strange, humanoid creature made from plants and vines arose from the earth, its eyes glowing an ominous red. Ignoring Jun, it picked up the orchid and promptly marched away.
‘Holy shit. Was that the elder?’ Jun thought, not daring to voice his thoughts. Instead, he meekly but rapidly made his way back to the garden, where a concerned Chen Hao was examining the orchid stem.
“What happened? Why did you howl so much?” the boy said, running over to the dog. He promptly put on his sad puppy eyes, wagged his tail, and shifted all the blame to the strange stem.
“Shit’s crazy, boy. I was just minding my own business and lounging in the area when a huge stalk emerged from the ground. Must have been some mad druid.”
For the next few minutes, the duo curiously examined the leaves, the roots, and the stem. Chen Hao was not knowledgeable enough on the subject, so he naturally consulted Li Xia, who correctly identified it as the Blooming Spirit Orchid, though not even she knew what had happened. The matter should’ve ended there, but no, Li Xia was curious enough to visit a few pill-making experts, who very proudly announced that it was a rare variant of the flower, capable of storing extraordinary amounts of qi until it instantly bloomed.
Of course, they could not be further away from the truth—the dog was doing witchcraft. For the next few days, he laid quiet until the coast was clear, and then the experimentations began anew. Employing dozens of different safety protocols, he made sure to cover his traces, and even if he did mess up, Chen Hao just blamed it on the previous disciple having buried some seeds.
As it turned out, nine rabbits produced too much death qi for low-level spiritual herbs, which mutated upon being injected with that much negative energy. Despite that, Jun continued his mass murdering sprees, testing out the aptly named “evil plants.” Most withered and died from this procedure, but those that didn’t produced something extraordinary.
The first was the alien orchid creature. He recreated the experiment using more innocent rabbits, testing out the plant's destructiveness, habits,behaviour, and movement options. The acid was incredibly deadly, but the thing got sleepy after devouring only three rabbits. Just like a proper alien, it violently launched itself through the air using its petals, giving its victims no time to react.
The second plant—the Swaying Wind Fern—was typically known for its numbing properties. After absorbing enough death qi, the whole thing disappeared into the shadows, causing Jun unable to find it until hours later when creepy high-pitched whispers almost drove him crazy. Apparently, it had hidden on the roof and “recorded” every sound throughout the day, repeating it when the sun set. He named the strange and definitely illegal bugging device “Whisper.”
Finally, there was a plant named the Hundred Day Datura, but Jun came to call it the Psycho Bastard instead. He had heard horror stories about it on Earth, but it was so much worse when it mutated. The moment it appeared, it spread pollen through the air, instantly dropping every test rabbit. Even with Jun’s miraculous body cultivation and him holding his breath in time, he immediately started to see the weirdest hallucinations known to man. After safely putting it away in his storage pouch, he began to melt into an alternate universe, experiencing the birth of a quintillion planets while thousands of snakes murmured dark secrets into his brain. It took hours to come off the trip, and the test rabbits never recovered.
“Holy shit. Never again. Well… maybe as a last resort against an unbeatable enemy.”
And with that, he stopped all experiments until he got proper safety measures. This was the closest he had been to death in a long time, and it was just some damn plant. Fortunately, the evilest plant of them all, the mafia boss himself, kept the smaller underlings reigned in. They all trembled before the blood flower. In a way, it made sense. The orchid was the hired goon who broke kneecaps, the fern was the secret spy, infiltrating other gangs and reporting back to the boss, and the datura was the plug that distributed cocaine to kids.
‘Not cool, datura.’
Having settled his experiments, Jun began using lower quantities of rabbits to properly grow herbs, only limited by the amount of qi in his body and the cost of rabbits. He was pretty sure some horrific monstrosity would be born from the hundreds of corpses underneath the garden, but that was a future problem for a future dog.
Time slowly passed as Jun constantly tried to figure out the most valuable herbs to grow. Wang Lei would get them appraised and receive contribution points if they met the criteria. Everything from the first week was a dud, but as he learned more and more about gardening, he started accumulating points. Only a few days later, Wang Lei delivered to him the first book. With this, he would be able to begin mastering Earthquake Stomp.
“Elemental Qi and the Cultivation World.”
He excitedly flipped over the first page.