When he saw Qingming in the distance, Wei Yuan finally let out a breath of relief.
The moment he returned to Qingming, he locked the woman and child into the dungeon alongside the other women and children. Yet looking at the dungeon, Wei Yuan suddenly felt a strong sense of insecurity.
Qingming's current dungeon was built in the mountains, excavated directly into the cliffside and utilizing natural rock strata to form cells. A dungeon like this was enough to hold ordinary Dao Foundation cultivators, but it could not contain anyone with potent divine abilities. Forget an ordinary rocky mountain—even Nether Iron Mountain had failed to hold Wei Yuan.
Wei Yuan immediately had someone fetch Yu Zhizhuo to figure out a way to reinforce the cells, after which he began inspecting the captured women and children one by one.
They all had Shaman features. Wei Yuan summoned Sun Yu and had him pick a woman at random, slice open her belly, and take a look inside. Her internal anatomy was that of a Shaman as well, not human. After examining her, Sun Yu healed the shamaness's wound with a Daoist art; under the powerful innate Dao technique of his dharma idol, what would have been a severe injury would now completely heal in two days.
Wei Yuan watched the whole process, finally understanding just how terrifying a research-oriented talent could be. Falling into Sun Yu's hands meant having one's body opened up and tinkered with every two or three days, and far from dying, it wouldn't even impair one's health. For an ordinary human or Shaman, their body would surely be fine after a while, but their mind would almost certainly collapse.
Next, Sun Yu picked a child at random and cut him open to look inside. The child was likewise a Shaman, not human.
Now Wei Yuan could not be sure whether he had actually captured Hongye's woman and child. Hearing Wei Yuan's dilemma, Sun Yu simply said, "Then let's cut them all open and look. It won't take long."
Wei Yuan nodded slowly, though his intuition told him that even if all of them were examined, it would likely yield no results.
Afterward, Wei Yuan returned to his quarters, ingested medicinal pills, and sat quietly adjusting his breathing to accelerate the recovery of his Dao force.
Two hours later, Sun Yu arrived before Wei Yuan and shook his head.
Wei Yuan then took a leaf from the celestial laurel tree, using it as a catalyst to boost his karmic luck and cast a divination. The resulting hexagram indicated that the people Wei Yuan had captured were neither useless nor entirely useful; they fell somewhere between useful and useless.
Wei Yuan was helpless. The Dao of karmic luck and feng shui had this exact flaw: it was often ambiguous and specious. A result like this worked great on other people; many feng shui masters made their living off it, phrasing heavenly secrets so they could be interpreted however one pleased. But when used on oneself, it was utterly exasperating—amounting to the celestial laurel tree losing a leaf for nothing.
At this thought, Wei Yuan's heart stirred. Why a leaf from the celestial laurel tree? Why was it always the celestial laurel tree? What about the other immortal plants? What about the Bingli Divine Wood?
Thinking of this, Wei Yuan remembered that back during his escape, he had sensed an unusual disturbance in the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World. At the time, it had felt as if one of the immortal plants was about to advance. But in the rush of fleeing, and with the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World falling completely silent upon his return to Qingming, Wei Yuan had nearly overlooked it.
He immediately entered the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World and located the Bingli Divine Wood. Her domain lay in a corner of Central City, far removed from the various research institutes Wei Yuan frequented and the Battle Saint Hall, and diagonally opposite across the city from the Creation of Heaven and Earth Research Institute, where cultivators currently gathered to handle tasks and hone their spirituality.
The Bingli Divine Wood had few believers—fewer than ten thousand, which was the fewest among all the immortal plants, with only the seagrass having even fewer. But that was only because the seagrass was situated deep in the ocean, and mortals had not yet built submarines, leaving them temporarily unable to travel there to worship.
When Wei Yuan found her location, he was momentarily at a loss for words. The Bingli Divine Wood was situated in a small courtyard—the most ordinary sort, the kind with several breaches in its walls. Inside the yard stood a mud-brick house, utterly dilapidated, with multiple holes through its door planks.
The Bingli Divine Wood was hiding inside this house.
Wei Yuan stepped into the courtyard. In an instant, thousands of mortals in the surrounding area turned their gazes toward him, an indefinable something lurking deep within their eyes. For a moment, they actually reminded Wei Yuan of Dream Eater's puppet dolls.
Wei Yuan swept them with his divine sense, instantly checking the condition of these mortals. He found nothing particularly outrageous. These mortals remained under his control; they simply had not recognized Wei Yuan and assumed he was a follower of another immortal plant.
In the eyes of these mortals, anyone who was not a believer in the Bingli Divine Wood was a heretic and an evil cultist—even believers in the Creation Immortal Venerable were not spared.
Finding this out, Wei Yuan was stunned, and then anger surged. A mere little immortal plant dared show disrespect toward him? Striding up to the house, he yanked the door open. Immediately, a wave of azure treasure light rippled out, the scene inside nearly dazzling Wei Yuan blind.
Inside lay a world of its own. The floor was a deep, frigid pool, within which grew an ice-blue jade tree. The trunk rose from a corner of the water, while its canopy spread along the roof, replacing it entirely and draping over the pool like an umbrella.
Though the humble room held no light, the divine wood shone of its own accord.
Every single leaf emitted flecks of blue luminescence, like starlight, like frozen jade, illuminating the chamber like an immortal realm.
In the frigid pool sat an incomparable beauty, currently bathing. Startled by the sound of the opening door, she turned her head abruptly. Seeing it was Wei Yuan, her lips parted in shock, and she nearly gasped aloud.
She first instinctively covered her chest, shielding eighty percent of that delicate swell, yet inadvertently leaving half of the most crucial tenth exposed. Only then did she realize her mistake, hastily covering her face before her figure blurred, vanishing into the tree trunk.
Completely pointless... Wei Yuan remarked silently. With his eidetic memory, anything shown before his eyes would naturally be remembered with pristine clarity. If she hadn't shielded it the entire time, it was no different from not shielding it at all.
After his mental jab, Wei Yuan suddenly realized: she had done it on purpose!
She really knows what she's doing... Wei Yuan marveled inwardly, feeling that his position as Creation Immortal Venerable did have its perks after all. No wonder so many immortals spent day and night tending to their mindscape worlds with tireless enthusiasm—there truly was endless fun in it.
After his musings, Wei Yuan had yet another realization: the Bingli Divine Wood had actually advanced! She had reached the stage of manifested spirituality, formally stepping into maturity—a step ahead of all the other immortal plants.
The Bingli Divine Wood's inherent growth period and requirements were by no means shorter than those of the other immortal plants. Among all the immortal plants, only the few immortal orchids naturally grew faster, while the slowest was the Red Lotus Bodhi. The Bingli Divine Wood, the celestial laurel, and the Langya tree were roughly on par, while the seagrass remained an unknown.
Yet this Bingli Divine Wood had grown at an extraordinary rate, and her spirituality was terrifyingly high. Wei Yuan hadn't paid much attention to her before because she was an immortal plant sent over by the Xu family to pay off a debt. Wei Yuan had assumed that given the Xu family's character, they would never gift him an immortal plant of such superb quality.
Aside from absorbing spiritual qi, the immortal plants primarily survived by intercepting the Creation Immortal Venerable's bestowals of heaven and earth. During this period, Wei Yuan had slain a large number of dharma idols, and all of it had gone to feed these bottomless pits.
At this point, another question occurred to Wei Yuan: since all of them lived on the bestowals of heaven and earth, why had the celestial laurel shown no sign of advancing, while the Bingli Divine Wood, who had arrived later, managed to take the lead?
Wei Yuan suspected there was something wrong with the celestial laurel tree's digestion. How else could one explain eating so much without gaining an ounce of fat?
Chapter 588