When Xu Ziyan saw the jade slip, an inexplicable excitement surged through him. He had assumed that, if the story followed its original course, he would have to enter the Flowing Light Sect before obtaining more powerful techniques. He had never imagined finding something this promising here.
Yes, he was quite certain the jade slip contained at least a high-grade lightning cultivation technique, perhaps even a supreme-grade one. And the reason was simple: he recognized the type of jade used to record it.
The slip’s dull color might make it look cheap, but it was actually made of Darkglow Jade, an extremely rare material in the Xuanyu Domain, worth a fortune.
This type of jade had an extraordinary capacity to contain energy. High-grade cultivation methods invariably carried tremendous power, and Darkglow Jade was an ideal medium for preserving it.
In other words, not every high-grade technique was recorded on Darkglow Jade, but any technique recorded on Darkglow Jade had to be high-grade or above.
Holding the jade slip, Xu Ziyan could scarcely contain his excitement. He had understood even when running a company in the modern world that strength provided the foundation for security. But only after coming to the cultivation world did he truly grasp that without enough power, even his life could not be guaranteed… _(：з」∠)_
Killing people to seize treasures, killing to silence a witness, killing for revenge… In short, taking another person’s life was frighteningly easy here.
Xu Ziyan did not want to die, nor did he want to follow the former owner’s life exactly. He might survive that path, but sharing a lover with other men and abusing a child were things he simply could not accept.
Naturally, anyone who did not want to die wanted to live. The safest way to live was to become stronger than everyone else. For that reason, Xu Ziyan cultivated even harder than the original owner. Many of the original Xu Ziyan’s opportunities had come through Bai Hua, and several narrow escapes from death had depended on Bai Hua’s good luck. Since Xu Ziyan now intended to avoid that man entirely, he could rely only on himself.
While touching the jade slip, Xu Ziyan felt none of the stinging pain Xu Zirong had experienced. He wiped away the dust and sent a thin strand of his divine sense into it.
Xu Zirong’s divine sense had been shattered when he tried this before, but Xu Ziyan had no such problem. The slip contained a world of violently surging lightning, yet his divine sense could detect a strangely welcoming intention within it.
“So that’s how it is…” Xu Ziyan opened his eyes and looked at the slip with a complicated expression.
The jade slip had been left by a cultivator with a lightning spiritual root from an earlier Xu family. He had not belonged to the present Xu clan but to its main ancestral branch in another, greater domain several thousand years ago.
That main Xu clan was a vast cultivation family. It had once produced ancestors at the Mahayana stage and had numerous Nascent Soul cultivators, making it one of the most powerful families in its domain.
As families grew, they naturally produced more and more collateral branches. Weaker branches that received insufficient support from the main clan often had no choice but to separate and seek opportunities in other domains.
The present Xu family of the Xuanyu Domain had been founded by one such cultivator. After falling out with a member of the main branch, he had left in anger and eventually settled in the Xuanyu Domain, where he established the clan that existed today.
The jade slip had been a gift from one of that founder’s friends. Somehow, it had ended up in the repository, where it was mistaken for an insignificant wood-element cultivation technique.
Xu Ziyan searched the former owner’s memories. Apparently, the original Xu Ziyan had never contacted the main Xu clan. That was hardly surprising. The novel took place entirely in the Xuanyu Domain, after all. Its real purpose was to describe how a man called Bai Hua dazzled everyone with his beauty and charm, captivated the three most powerful men in the domain through his extraordinarily ‘generous’ approach to love, and ultimately destroyed the one villainous boss who remained unmoved by him, all in the service of a tawdry erotic romance!
That was Xu Ziyan’s verdict on the novel. As far as he was concerned, its plot and characters were practically irrelevant. Everything existed to serve Bai Hua. Every rare treasure and heavenly material was there only to enhance Bai Hua’s charms and help him ensnare more men.
Ah, and he had almost forgotten: apart from Bai Hua’s three regular love interests, countless male supporting characters were madly in love with him, some even willing to die for him. Toward the end, when they attacked the Blood Demon’s palace, even one of the Blood Demon’s generals was moved by Bai Hua’s supposed ‘purity and kindness’. He freed Bai Hua from prison and worked with Lin Xiaotian’s forces from within, without which they could never have entered the Blood Demon’s stronghold so easily.
During the process of ‘winning over’ that subordinate, Bai Hua had even slept with him in the prison cell. Had the man not been killed by the Blood Demon later, he might well have become Bai Hua’s fourth lover.
Xu Ziyan had nothing to say about such melodrama but a dry laugh. Still, the jade slip reminded him of something important. If he could no longer make a living in the Xuanyu Domain, why not go somewhere else?
At the end of the novel, Bai Hua and the others had been powerful, but only within the Xuanyu Domain. Xu Ziyan now intended to stay away from them. Whether those three could still achieve everything they had in the novel was anyone’s guess.
Put simply, if he could not win a fight, surely he could run? If the world really was based on that novel, then by taking Xu Zirong outside its original setting, he refused to believe Bai Hua would still be able to kill the boy.
With the jade slip in his hand, Xu Ziyan hesitated. If he simply carried it out, the Xu family would surely discover it. He did not particularly mind sharing the technique with the clan, but something of this quality would never be left in his hands. Even without another lightning spiritual root among them, the family would probably lock the original in its treasure vault and make him use a copied version.
He did not want to cultivate from a copy. The written circulation of energy might be identical, but a copy could never reproduce everything the Darkglow Jade held: not just the method, but the lingering intention of its original master.
That intention was weak, but within the Darkglow Jade slip Xu Ziyan could spar with a figure formed from it. This would be invaluable in mastering the Nine Transformations of the Purple Firmament.
Moreover, faint threads of lightning energy were seeping out of the jade and entering his body. Once he noticed this, he became even less willing to part with it.
The energy within the slip would slowly transform his body. He was still a growing twelve-year-old, and over time it could allow him to contain more power each time he broke through. More spiritual power than others at the same cultivation level… the advantages were obvious.
Xu Ziyan fondled the slip reluctantly, his brow furrowing. He might be the Xu family’s most talented disciple, but that did not mean he could claim such a treasure. He would have liked to steal it away, but Elder Luo at the entrance was no ordinary gatekeeper. Xu Ziyan would never believe the elder was sitting there merely to watch the door.
“What should I do…?” He rubbed his right thumb against his index finger, an unconscious habit whenever he faced a difficult problem.
Time passed, and his permitted stay in the repository was not unlimited. With his departure drawing closer, he still had not found a way to take the slip without Elder Luo noticing.
His storage bag was out of the question. At his cultivation level, Elder Luo would find the jade slip if he searched the bag, no matter how carefully Xu Ziyan concealed it.
Trying to hide the slip on his person was equally laughable. Before a Golden Core cultivator, a child at the sixth level of Qi Refining had virtually no ability to keep secrets.
His brow furrowed deeper and deeper. Xu Ziyan almost wanted to howl at the sky. Wasn’t a transmigrator supposed to receive some miraculous advantage? Why did he have nothing?
Wait… a miraculous advantage?
His eyes suddenly brightened, and he stared at the square that had been floating in front of him all along, continually trying to make its presence known while he steadfastly ignored it.
Ahem… Xu Ziyan felt rather ashamed. He had always thought his miraculous square was useless. It floated before his eyes all the time. At first he had found it strange, but eventually he learned to filter it out completely and had almost forgotten it existed.
He silently placed the jade slip into the square and apologized to it in his mind. Sorry, my miraculous little friend. Your presence is too faint. You’ll have to work on that!
(Square: …)
He felt reasonably confident about the square. He had been here for quite some time, and no one had ever noticed the floating square in front of him.
At present it held only a novel so outrageous it could blind a dog and a dull jade slip. Still…
Xu Ziyan rubbed his chin. Was it his imagination? Because he usually ignored the square, he had not looked at it carefully until today, but somehow it seemed… larger?
Forget it. Even if the little square had grown, how much could it hold? Once his strength improved, he could buy something like a Void-Containing Ring. At that point, the square would probably be obsolete.
He took an ordinary jade slip from his storage bag and put it in the original’s place, carefully blowing a layer of dust over it. Nobody had noticed the precious slip in all this time, showing how little attention this corner of the repository received. If someone later found the empty replacement, they would probably assume something had gone wrong when its contents were copied.
After carefully erasing all traces of his actions, Xu Ziyan chose a wood-element technique from another jade slip. It described a method of extracting the essence of plants for healing. Used together with Rain Moistens Without a Sound, it could further improve Xu Zirong’s healing abilities.