Chapter 307 Slaying an Immortal

Chapter 307: Slaying the Immortal

"So those legendary lost spiritual herbs never actually went extinct—it's just that the ones near the spirit stone veins were all harvested. Seeds still exist elsewhere, but without spiritual energy, they won't sprout. And I've discovered that not all spiritual plants need that much spiritual energy!"

"After we blew up the spirit stone veins, the fragments that scattered in the wind fell onto the wasteland. With just that tiny bit of spiritual power, it was enough to make all those dormant seeds sprout. It's only been five years, and look—they're already looking pretty decent."

Shang Yunduo placed the Xiaoshuang Tree he'd gathered and several other legendary extinct spiritual plants beside Pei Jie. "Look, I found so many!"

"I saw this one during my spirit travel—it grows into a massive bush. I've seen this one dried before and almost didn't recognize it. I've seen this one in books, and the description matches pretty well. And this one—look, doesn't the leaf look like a six-pointed star? They say it bears sapphire-blue fruit." He introduced each one to Pei Jie, burying the soil-laden roots into the sandy ground, then carefully spreading a layer of spirit stone fragments around them.

Actually, a lot of things never really went extinct. As long as the right environment for them to grow was restored and they could get nutrients again, they could come back to life.

By the same logic, Pei Jie was still unconscious—it must be because he'd burned through too much of himself before.

The Xiaoshuang Tree could dissolve rot and regenerate flesh, the Hongxin Vine could restore blood and qi, the Yanfei Fern could speed up feather growth—during his spirit travels, many winged demon clans loved eating it...

He had no idea which one would help Pei Jie recover faster.

Shang Yunduo sprawled beside Pei Jie, studying his face for a long while.

"No worries. If these don't work, I'll find new ones. I'll track down every herb that's useful, one by one."

In the seventh year of Pei Jie's slumber, Shang Yunduo scraped together the materials for several pill formulas and rented a ground fire to refine pills. Failure.

The pill furnace was too shoddy.

He asked around at the auction houses for a long time, trading three ancient pill recipes and the rare spiritual herbs he'd gathered for an old pill cauldron from a Nascent Soul alchemy cultivator. After a few failures, he finally got it right.

But Pei Jie still wouldn't wake.

Yet he seemed to be recovering faster than before.

The formula was fine—the problem was the spiritual herbs weren't aged enough.

Since the potency wasn't enough, he'd just crank up the dosage.

Shang Yunduo started showing up at all kinds of trade fairs and auction houses, and kept running off to the demon clans, scrounging up any spiritual herbs that might come in handy. No matter the age or how many, he'd buy them all, tweak the formulas himself, and do everything he could to refine them into pills.

Within two years, he went and improved over a hundred pill formulas. Though most of what he improved were low-grade pills, and over seventy percent were meant for mortals, his reputation quickly soared among low-level cultivators because the improved formulas were high-quality and cheap, used lots of auxiliary ingredients that weren't spiritual plants, had about the same potency, and left fewer impurities.

Plus, he didn't hoard his knowledge—he loved sharing. He even shelled out his own spirit stones to print a complete compendium of basic pill formulas, handing it out everywhere he went. He even taught mortal doctors how to make medicine pills, and quickly gained a large following.

Not just medicine-starved mortals and dirt-poor rogue cultivators—even some low-level sect disciples with barely any savings secretly hoarded his formulas.

At first, alchemy cultivators cursed his formulas as unorthodox heresy, claiming they were tricks only demonic cultivators would use—if you weren't scared of dying, go ahead and take them.

But by the tenth year of Pei Jie's slumber, not a single one of those poor, desperate users had died.

They'd even made mortal herbs all the rage. Impoverished rogue cultivators and mortal kids alike were out on the wild slopes, butts in the air, learning to identify herbs, and herbalists' stock had gone up.

As Shang Yunduo's theories—"You guys underestimate mortal herbs; use them right and even dirt can refine pills" and "Ordinary herbs can totally help balance medicinal properties"—started catching the attention of even high-level alchemy cultivators, Wentiang City, which hadn't seen a single cultivator in years, started seeing rogue cultivators showing up to peddle herbs. Some sect disciples even dressed up as rogue cultivators to come buy herbs in Wentiang City.

The mortals clustered around Wentiang City gradually sorted themselves into different trades.

Craftsmen flocked into the city, setting up all kinds of workshops, big and small.

Merchants who couldn't farm traded some herbs, scraped together a few spirit stones, and used the shops and warehouses still standing in Wentiang City to get their businesses going again.

Mortals from every corner of the land swapped news with each other, and the bolder merchants banded together to form new trade caravans, using Wentiang City as their base to trade everyday goods mortals needed in every direction.

The fallout from the Immortal-Mortal battle at Wentiang City gradually spread throughout the entire human cultivation world.

Those mortals who were so far away they only heard about it a full ten years later thought they were hearing some tall tale.

They asked around, gossiped about it, until local merchants solemnly swore they'd run into traders from Wentiang City. Only then did they finally believe that there really was a paradise out there—fertile land that belonged only to mortals.

The worldview they'd taken for granted since the day they were born began to wobble and collapse.

But not everyone could pack up their whole family and move to Wentiang City, way out there.

But that temptation was like a spark that had caught fire.

Someone would always ask, and the moment one person brought it up, everyone around couldn't help but perk up their ears.

The legend spread further and further, slowly getting twisted out of shape.

After being dressed up with layer after layer of artistic embellishment, mortals who didn't know the truth became dead certain that Wen Fei was a saint, a god. He hadn't died at all—he'd ascended to godhood as a saint.

The Golden Dragon that came down from the sky was a god he'd called down to save them.

Those cultivators holed up in their sects, calling themselves gods, were all fake immortals.

So people started shouting for the Golden Dragon to come down and destroy the fake immortal sects.

Those intense, unified wills stirred the Anger, and the unbroken stream of anger made the Kunze Lamp start flickering out of nowhere—and when it flickered too often, it even started making noise.

Shang Yunduo had never seen anything like it, and neither had Kong Yu, who'd been alive for thousands of years.

No one expected Wentiang City's influence to blow up after ten years and take this turn.

But in Shang Yunduo's eyes, those sects had it coming.

Ten years, and nobody had fixed the barrier at the Boundary Mountain yet.

He'd brought it up over and over, but the only Deity Transformation cultivator whose turf was near the Boundary Mountain was Pei Ke. Everyone else said "sure, sure" but never actually lifted a finger.

After all, the third barrier hadn't been breached, and they'd all agreed that Nascent Soul cultivators weren't allowed to cross over. As for low-level demon cultivators and human cultivators, well...

Couldn't they already sneak across whenever they wanted?

Too much was as bad as too little—both sides needed to trade.

Ten years went by, and only the Taiyuan Sect had patched up the barrier. But the Taiyuan Sect couldn't possibly finish the job alone—they'd only patched up part of the northern section and the biggest gaps in the third barrier.

As for the other sects, they knew demon cultivators were sneaking across, but they didn't really try to stop it.

After all, the ones coming over were all low-level demon cultivators—they couldn't break into cities or get into sects. If they wandered into their territory, they'd just hunt them down like demonic beasts.

But the mortals who didn't live in sect-run cities all took the hit. Even though the demon cultivators didn't go on killing sprees to keep from being spotted, the damage was nothing worth worrying about in the sects' eyes. They didn't just wash their hands of it either—if someone came to the sect to report it, they'd send disciples to check it out.

Wasn't that good enough?

But from the mortals' perspective, that wasn't the case at all.

Demon cultivators wouldn't kill wantonly to cover their tracks—but what about demonic beasts?

What caused even more damage than demon cultivators were the demonic beasts!

The original barrier, though it was set up to block cultivators on both sides, actually had a bigger job: keeping demonic beasts from coming down the mountains.

Cultivators at the Deity Transformation stage clashed all over the Boundary Mountain, from south to north, laying waste to vast stretches of the mountain ranges.

Beasts driven from their habitats had to fight for other beasts' territory.

The ones that couldn't win were killed or driven off; those that fled either grabbed new territory or pushed east into human lands or west into demon territory.

It wasn't just humans caught in the crossfire—demon clans along the Boundary Mountain's edge were just as plagued.

But demons were naturally more powerful than ordinary beasts; when they ran into a beast, they simply fought it. As long as children weren't left alone, they didn't have much to worry about.

For humans, though, it was a whole different ballgame.

The combined strength of an entire village of mortals couldn't defeat a single adult low-tier demon beast. All they could do was go beg cultivators for help.

But they couldn't fly, and they couldn't run fast either. When a demon cultivator or beast showed up in their village, by the time they'd run to a sect to beg for help, and then waited for cultivators to arrive, the village was already a graveyard.

Even if the cultivators caught up to it and killed the beast, what did it matter?

At best, you could say they avenged them.

At worst, the cultivators took the beast as their prize. Did turning its hide, bones, horns, and organs into pills and artifacts really count as avenging them?

How was that any different from using them as bait?

A mortal's life was short—back then, many lived only thirty to fifty years. Their whole life, plus their father's and even their grandfather's, didn't add up to a hundred years.

Across three or four generations, they had never seen demon cultivators and beasts cross into their lands like this before.

Every mortal who died, every village that vanished, sent a chill through the hearts of every mortal nearby.

When one lip goes, the teeth feel the cold—nobody knew if they'd be next.

They wanted to live in sect-owned cities, but they couldn't afford spirit stones, and they couldn't just abandon their fields.

So, with all these grievances stacking up, resentment against cultivators exploded.

What pushed this eruption to a new level was a teenage artifact refiner from Four Directions City.

This refiner came from mortal stock. His cultivation was nothing special—he had Four Spirit Roots—and he was shy and introverted, but hardworking and meticulous.

Influenced by Shang Yunduo, his childhood dream had been to become an alchemy cultivator, but he had more talent for artifact refining than for pill-making.

He never gave up, though—between refining artifacts, he studied alchemy, but his success rate was admittedly poor.

By a stroke of luck, he drew inspiration from the full elixir recipe manual Shang Yunduo had sent back. He never managed to make a pill, but a wild idea hit him. He secretly pried loose a few Spirit-Binding Stones, ground them into powder, mixed them with the dregs of his failed pills, and somehow forged hunting blades that let mortals kill beasts.

Then he made a batch of bows and arrows.

With these weapons in hand, mortals could finally defend themselves.

But even though he meant to help folks fight beasts, weapons that could kill beasts could obviously kill cultivators too.

Then came the first warrior. Fed up with the cultivation sects and out protesting, he drew his bow and loosed an arrow at a sect cultivator. Whether it was dead-on aim or pure luck, the arrow punched clean through a Qi Refining cultivator. From that moment, the war between immortals and mortals took an irreversible turn.

These arrows got a fearsome name: the God-Slaying Arrows.