Chapter 137: The Great Sage and I Share the Same Roots, Nuclear Cultivation Yields Boundless Magical Power (Part 1)

Whether there is a breeze or not, immortals who sleep under the stars and brave the wind always need to take a puff or two. That is simply how they are.

A leopard-skin hat, hair hanging down like willow branches, sleepy eyes, a greasy face, a hemp rope tied around his neck with a yellowish talisman paper dangling from the end right over his chest, swaying with every breath. He held a steel spear in his hand, wore beast-scale armor molded tightly against his robust physique, straw sandals bound together by talisman scripts on his feet, and leopard-skin trousers on his legs.

The entire fashion sense of a "Peking Man" was embodied in this young fellow.

"Ironhead."

Suddenly, a voice drifted into the ears of this imposing fashionista.

Ironhead, who had been feeling listless, hurriedly opened his eyes.

"What is it? What is it?!" he panicked, looking around in all directions.

Then, with wide-open eyes, he woke up the rest of the resting group.

"What is it? What is it?" All nine of them gripped their steel spears tightly, instantly forming a drill-formation they had practiced countless times, and scanned their surroundings.

The day before, they had encountered that terrifying battle between immortals. Their nerves had been stretched taut for an entire day, and unable to endure it any longer yet afraid to run about blindly, they had remained in the same spot, taking turns keeping watch and resting. Even so, none of them could sleep soundly; at the slightest rustle, they would spring straight up, clutch their steel spears, pinch spell incantations, and ready themselves to face an enemy at any moment.

"It's me." A figure dropped into their view, accompanied by a voice.

It was none of their tribal chieftain, Luozu.

During that great battle earlier, Luozu had bestowed upon them the spell of the Pot-In-World, which prevented them from being ground into fine powder and having their very essence completely sucked dry by that catastrophic, earth-scouring human calamity.

Afterward, Luozu had left to pursue enemies and attend a feast, failing to look after them in time. However, he had not pulled them back into the Pot-In-World either, leaving them stranded here in a state of panic, which could also serve as a trial to temper their minds.

Aside from this detachment, three hundred other "Peking Men" had been dispatched, all of whom had now been recalled by Luozu.

"Chieftain...? It's the chieftain! It's the chieftain! The chieftain is here, we're saved..."

The group wailed incessantly, clearly deeply frightened by the immortal battle that had taken place right above their heads.

Helpless, Luozu grabbed them all up in one go. Amidst the howling wind whistling past their ears, they were whisked straight back to Luoxiang.

***

Upon returning to Luoxiang, Luozu first pacified the group and then instructed everyone to return to their respective posts. They were to resume whatever they were doing, as certain construction works could not be allowed to stall for too long.

Following that, Luozu returned to his cave. Without announcing any period of seclusion, he simply took out the harvested Yellow Sand Precious Pearl from the Pot-In-World and began to inspect and refine it first.

Refining a demon clan's magical treasure is no easy task. Within such a treasure lies the natural rhythm of heaven and earth, inscribed using the spiritual energy of the cosmos and dyed with demonic aura. Therefore, if one wishes to wield this treasure, they must practice the cultivation methods of the demon clan and temporarily become a demon themselves.

Perhaps this was the encryption method of the demon clan, but it posed no difficulty for Luozu. After all, he had a captive right in his hands, from whom he had already extracted the secrets of this Yellow Sand Precious Pearl.

The pearl was not nurtured by heaven and earth itself; rather, Yellow Sixth-Son had harvested a pearl from a ten-thousand-year-old river clam, tempered it with gentle and fierce fires for three hundred years to purge the aquatic aura of the clam clan, and then smelted in the golden sands of the Doudui Star. Finally, he had refined it with his own demonic Qi for three thousand and six hundred years until it finally took shape, rising to the rank of a magical treasure defined by Luozu—referred to as an immortal artifact among the demon clan.

From then on, it required day-and-night refinement without a moment of slack, all in the hope that one day the treasure would develop a complete sentience and transform into a spiritual treasure.

Little did he expect to run into Luozu, who beat him to death and seized the treasure. Though he harbored deep resentment, he was utterly helpless and had no choice but to reveal the pearl's incantation under Luozu's torture and interrogation, not daring to conceal even the slightest detail, knowing Luozu could perceive whether he was lying.

Speaking of which, that Doudui Star was the ancestral home of Yellow Sixth-Son. Among his tribe, there was a Golden Immortal who had been recruited by the Heavenly Court to serve as the demonic god of a certain star—which happened to be this very star.

To be fair, the demon clan was quite cunning. While stars emit light to illuminate the earth, they also quietly inhale the chaos of the outer heavens and absorb the terrestrial topography, projecting them onto those various stars to create millions of grotto-heavens and countless realms of creation. In this way, they could conceal the demon clan and eventually give the terrestrial Wu clan a massive surprise—a piece of intelligence Yellow Sixth-Son had leaked to Luozu.

It remained unknown whether the Wu clan was aware of this.

Aside from this matter, there was also the unfinished tale of the Three Sovereigns and One Emperor. The so-called Three Sovereigns and One Emperor referred to the Eastern Sovereign, Sovereign Fu, Sovereign Nü, and the Heavenly Emperor.

He dared not discuss their specific names any further, but they were largely similar to those in the primordial floods within Luozu's memories from his past life.

However, rumors had it that Sovereign Fu and Sovereign Nü had not manifested in the world for a very long time, nor did they attend deliberations at the Hall of Supreme Brilliance, seemingly harboring conflicts with the Eastern Sovereign and the Heavenly Emperor...

These were merely rumors, not to be taken too seriously, and Luozu dared not dwell on them excessively.

One thing, however, surprised Luozu: these demons truly had no idea that the human race had been created by Goddess Nüwa.

They simply assumed the human race, much like mountain sprites, had grown out of the soil or popped out from stone crevices...

Goodness, they really were of the same family as Sun Wukong, weren't they?

Let us set these matters aside for now and return to the Yellow Sand Precious Pearl.

***

He washed and refined the Yellow Sand Precious Pearl over and over again, determined to replace the demon clan's refining method within it with his own Dharma barriers.

This was also a formidable task that demanded a great deal of mental focus, for those demonic refining methods had to be analyzed piece by piece, transformed into his own spells, and ultimately forged into Daoist techniques and immortal arts. Only then could they be refined into the pearl and manifest as Dharma barriers.

Difficult as it was, Luozu still had some simpler tasks to attend to—namely, re-condensing the immortal Qi he used to cast his immortal arts.

He had already practiced all of this immortal Qi, and the rules for operating and channeling the immortal arts within it were already clear to him. Consequently, he did not need to waste effort re-deducing them; he merely needed to gather the essence of the sun and moon or draw in spiritual energy, run the immortal arts, and convert them into immortal Qi.

He was currently at the second rank of True Immortals, having refined three thousand six hundred and five wisps of immortal Qi. Earlier, during his battle with Yellow Sixth-Son, he had consumed one thousand and nine wisps, and now it would take him only three days to re-condense them.

Of course, this also owed much to the essence of the sun and moon stored within his Pot-In-World; otherwise, he would have been like the members of the Wu clan, forced to harvest terrestrial baleful Qi and refine cinnabar pills of gold and mercury to make up for the deficits of battle.

However, since Luozu was a True Immortal, the essences he harvested were mostly those of the sun, moon, and stars. Gathering terrestrial turbid Qi for cultivation would require much more effort, and using it directly would even sully his own Daoist cultivation.

Luozu possessed a "cheat," so he did not need to worry about such things. Instead, he found himself somewhat coveting the Wu clan's pill-refining techniques.

During that feast, he had seen a Wu clan elder named Hai take out a celadon porcelain dish carrying over a hundred radiant pills that breathed out intense radiation. He knew at a glance that these were the Wu clan elixirs Elder Gu had spoken of.

According to Elder Hai, these pills were known as Top-Grade Terrestrial Baleful Pills. Originally concocted for cultivation, it was later discovered that they had a miraculous effect on the Wu clan in terms of restoring magical power, and thus they were specifically distributed to front-line Wu commoners and Wu priests as combat supplies. A ninth-rank Wu commoner could consume a single pill to recover all their magical power within a day and replenish their vitality, a first-rank Wu priest needed to consume three, while a ninth-rank Wu priest required three hundred.

He had expected the Wu clan's pill-refining techniques to be crude, but he never imagined they had genuinely refined nuclear bombs—except that their nuclear bombs were not meant for blasting the ground, but for eating.

The Wu clan were true practitioners of the nuclear path.

Luozu had no interest in the pills themselves, but he was immensely intrigued by Elder Hai's pill-refining methods. After conversing with him for a while, he became hopelessly dizzy from terms like "three-cycle cultural fire" and "nine-cycle earthly fire." Clearly, the fellow was also a slippery Wu veteran who spoke in circles and stubbornly refused to explain anything clearly.

Yet that was only natural; after all, this was how they made their living—how could they casually reveal it?

Even so, Luozu had grown keen on alchemy ever since and immediately began deducing it within his seventy-two spiritual brains.

Starting from the first chapter released today, a minimum of four chapters will be published to begin paying off the backlog.