Wei Yuan immediately reached out to Qingming and swept his divine sense across the domain, identifying the source of spiritual qi: the newly cleared five hundred mu of Liang rice fields.
He leapt into the air, landing beside the fields a moment later.
Before Wei Yuan's eyes, specks of spiritual light emerged across the fields, drifting slowly upward before fading into the night sky. The light was faint but vast in number; at a glance, it looked as though the starry sky had fallen into the mortal realm.
Wei Yuan crouched down slowly. Tiny green sprouts were already visible in the soil, their tips just beginning to show.
The Liang rice they had planted had sprouted; in a little over a month, it would mature, yielding their first harvest of spirit rice. Though Liang rice was only the most basic of spiritual plants, it was still far from ordinary grass and trees.
Wei Yuan felt a jolt of excitement. It turned out that growing spiritual plants could also enhance the boundary stone's nourishment and accelerate cultivation.
With a great sum of heavenly merits in hand, Wei Yuan had previously not known how to spend them, but now he knew what to exchange for: spiritual plants.
Wei Yuan opened his Merit Booklet to check. His heavenly merits currently stood at one thousand eight hundred and eighty, ranking him one hundred and first.
Slaying Blood Eye had yielded eight hundred heavenly merits in total. Wei Yuan had received a bit over seven hundred, while the remaining ninety had been leeched away by the young masters and mistresses. Of course, they had not leeched for nothing—they had still contributed a net total of eight strands of azure qi, without even knowing it themselves.
With this much heavenly merit to his name, Wei Yuan felt confident and headed straight for the Hall of Merits to see what he could exchange for.
Reaching the Hall of Merits, Wei Yuan pushed the door open and stepped inside, only to find the world shifting around him. He stood within an expanse of void, with a gateway set before him.
Wei Yuan hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. In his haste, he had momentarily forgotten about the defensive formation.
This formation had successfully trapped and doomed the Fourth Elder of the Xu family, which showed just how formidable it was. However, Wei Yuan had long known the problem required to open the door, as well as the orientation of the entrance; he had no need to worry about veering off course and could fly right through. Not wishing to disturb Eldest Senior Sister, he reached out directly to push the door.
The formation activated, severing heaven and earth from view, while a passage of text surfaced on the door.
Wei Yuan swept his divine sense over it and froze on the spot.
"There is an iron sphere of a certain weight. A person throws it upward with all their might, and the iron sphere ascends one hundred zhang before falling back. If this person throws it forward with the same full strength, what is the maximum distance in zhang the iron sphere can reach?"
A torrent of rather uncharitable words instantly surged through Wei Yuan's mind.
Fortunately, his lessons in the Theory of Heaven and Earth had not been in vain. Remembering what he had learned back then, he finally arrived at the answer a moment later, opening the gateway to enter the void.
Within the void, a direction had already been marked for Wei Yuan. Flying along the trajectory of the forward-thrown iron sphere in that direction would bring him to Qingming, but this time he had to follow the trajectory strictly, with a deviation of no more than one degree.
Cursing in his heart while flying with utmost care, Wei Yuan sweated profusely before finally entering the stone chamber housing Qingming. Ascending one level further brought him into the Hall of Merits.
Wei Yuan could not help grumbling inwardly. Eldest Senior Sister was far too cautious—the formation's questions could actually change!
Wei Yuan pondered the details of his entry into the formation, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized what was happening.
Several parts of the formation had not been there before; Eldest Senior Sister must have added them recently. One of them was likely a question bank, the second was a timer that triggered a third component at set intervals, and upon activation, this third component would randomly draw a question from the question bank and reset the formation.
At this, Wei Yuan was completely speechless. Only now did he remember that Ji Liuli had once been an instructor for centralized instruction. He never expected that after all these years, he would fall into her hands once more. Did this mean that whenever he wanted to exchange merit points in the future, he would have to review his old coursework first?
Still, there was at least one silver lining: he no longer needed to worry about the safety of the domain's core. Even if another old-school formation master like the Fourth Elder of the Xu family—one who knew only ancestral methods—were to come, they could spend decades without hoping to crack it. If you didn't know how to solve these problems, you simply didn't know; trying to guess on your own was useless.
Inside the Hall of Merits, another new fruit had formed on the laurel tree.
Wei Yuan picked up the jade tablet and connected to the Hall of Merits. A moment later, a directory appeared on the tablet. Wei Yuan flipped to the section on spiritual plants, bypassing all Dao Foundation spiritual plants entirely to focus on those at the dharma idol level.
The Merit Booklet listed dozens of Dharma Idol realm spiritual plants. As Wei Yuan read through them one by one, he found it to be truly eye-opening.
For instance, there was a Dragon Weep Tree that gathered the spiritual qi of heaven and earth into itself; once mature, its core wood could be extracted as a ready-made immortal sword at the magic treasure rank, ready for sword cultivators like Zhang Sheng and Xiaoyu to wield once they reached the Dharma Idol realm.
The longer this sword was nurtured, the greater its resonance with its wielder and the greater its power, capable of being used all the way to Scenery Command without needing replacement. However, the tree grew thirty zhang tall and required eight hundred years to mature. It could not be transported, nor could Wei Yuan afford to wait that long.
In short order, Wei Yuan combed through all the dharma idol spiritual plants, weeding out those that were too large or took too long to grow, ultimately narrowing his choices down to three.
The first was the Thunder Crystal Wood. Once planted, this tree would draw lightning from the firmament; the longer it grew, the stronger the lightning it summoned. If special ores were laid across the ground surrounding its trunk, the lightning strikes would slowly transform them into rare spiritual minerals. It was said this tree could grow for ten thousand years, with a slim chance of breaking through its limits to advance to an even higher rank.
However, once transplanted, lightning could strike anywhere within a ten-li radius at any moment, making it uninhabitable for people and impossible for vegetation to grow.
The Hall of Merits had a single Thunder Crystal Wood sapling, which cost one thousand two hundred heavenly merits to exchange for.
The second was the Spirit Immortal Grass. Typically maturing in fifty years, this grass served as an auxiliary ingredient for many dharma idol grade pills, giving it a remarkably stable value. At the same time, it could slowly improve the surrounding environment of heaven and earth. A single grass seed cost fifty heavenly merits.
The third was the Jade Nectar Immortal Apricot. A rare immortal tree, it generally began bearing fruit after fifty years. The immortal apricots it produced could bolster the cultivation of Dharma Idol cultivators and were a common primary ingredient for Dharma Idol realm cultivation pills. The tree's utility was steady and reliable—practical, though without surprises.
The Hall of Merits had a ten-year-old sapling available for five hundred heavenly merits.
Wei Yuan wavered between the three spiritual plants, but in the end, he chose the Thunder Crystal Wood. Once his choice was made, the fruit on the laurel tree swelled slowly and split open, dropping a small sapling into Wei Yuan's hand. At the same time, his available heavenly merits dropped to just six hundred and seventy.
The sapling was about the size of a palm, its trunk translucent and crystalline, like deep blue crystal. Look at it as he might, it hardly resembled a tree at all.
Accompanying the sapling was a sheet of jade paper detailing the method for planting the thunder wood, the matching formation, and several types of ores that could undergo metamorphosis under lightning strikes.
Scanning it with his divine sense, Wei Yuan found that those minerals were quite rare, most of which he had never even heard of. To make full use of the Thunder Crystal Wood, these ores were indispensable, yet they could only be obtained through exchange with the palace. Once refined by lightning, they would all become exceptionally rare immortal materials.
Immortal materials of this caliber were beyond the processing capacity of ordinary small sects, let alone rogue artifact refiners. Only a colossus like the Hall of Heavenly Craft had any use for them, and they would buy up as much as was available.
Precisely because so few could make use of them, the purchase price for these mineral materials was not particularly high. Wei Yuan estimated an average annual return of only about ten percent.
In fact, if one thought about it carefully, the raw stones cost two to three times more when exchanging for them, while the buyback price was knocked down by at least half. Through all this buying and selling, the Palace of Grand Beginning made at least six or seven times the profit. Furthermore, once one exchanged for the Thunder Crystal Wood, one would have to constantly buy raw stones and sell refined minerals, steadily contributing immortal silver to the palace.
Yet this was precisely what Wei Yuan valued about the Thunder Crystal Wood.
The northeastern region of the domain was mostly undulating hills, where Wei Yuan planned to plant the Thunder Crystal Wood. When the time came, raw materials would have a steady supply, the palace would purchase the refined minerals, and Wei Yuan would hardly need to worry about a thing—all he would have to do each year was pick up stones and trade them for silver.
With this Thunder Crystal Wood, which counted as mid-grade even among dharma idol spiritual plants, Wei Yuan's cultivation speed would also increase significantly. All in all, it was no loss.
After the laurel fruit dropped, a new bud sprouted on the branch and began nurturing another fruit. If one wished to exchange for more, one could accelerate the process using Jia Wood Life-Mystic, speeding up the fruit's growth considerably so that one would form in half a day.
In truth, the immortal plant Wei Yuan had genuinely fancied was another kind: the Frost Gold Laurel Tree. This variety was considered a mortal-realm relative of the celestial laurel tree, reputed to possess a sliver of the celestial laurel tree's lineage, with an exchange price of ten thousand heavenly merits.
Having obtained the Thunder Crystal Wood, Wei Yuan took the sapling and went to find Eldest Senior Sister. The Thunder Crystal Wood could not simply be stuck into the ground; it had to be planted within a specific formation. When it came to setting up formations, naturally no one could compare to Eldest Senior Sister.
Chapter 164