Scales

After leaving Hidden Valley, Ying Wuchou realized he urgently needed to figure out how many years he had actually been asleep. Cultivators have lifespans different from ordinary people, and ancient deities often experienced dreams lasting a thousand years.

Although Ying Wuchou didn’t sleep for that long, it could still be several decades or even a century. The bamboo, grass, fish, and insects in the valley had gone through several generations, and the broken eggshell of the Teng Jiao had weathered and petrified, turning to dust at the slightest touch.

A juvenile Teng Jiao takes at least a dozen years to hatch. Thinking of this, Ying Wuchou felt a bit heartbroken. Although he preferred larger and sturdier scales, he also longed for the joy of nurturing a scale from small to large.

Reflecting on the petrified eggshells and the bamboo shoots that had been gnawed clean, Ying Wuchou felt he had missed out on a lot of fun.

Fortunately, the Teng Jiao has a long lifespan, with a juvenile period lasting a hundred years. As long as it hasn’t exceeded a century, everything is still salvageable.

Ying Wuchou perked up, remembering a small town a hundred miles away from Hidden Valley. To confirm the year, he needed to ask someone.

Cultivators often choose to practice in sparsely populated places full of spiritual energy, but death is different. After years of cultivation, their bodies are full of spiritual energy. 

Unless they die from demonic possession, their corpses can slowly transform back into spiritual energy, nourishing the land.

Ying Wuchou deliberately chose to sleep near this small town, hoping that his presence would bring prosperity to the area. The soil would become fertile, and birds and beasts would thrive, allowing both humans and other creatures to develop to their fullest potential.

Unfortunately, since he didn’t die, the town probably remained just a small town.

The transparent scale had been separated from the young Jiao’s body for too long, and the lingering aura could only vaguely point in the direction of the young Jiao, without determining its exact location.

Even if he encountered the young Jiao itself, without some blood, he couldn’t ascertain the relationship between the scale and the body.

The direction indicated by the scale coincided with the town, making it convenient to search for the young Jiao and inquire about the year, killing two birds with one stone.

Ying Wuchou used the wind control technique to fly, taking more than two hours to reach the vicinity of the small town, nearly depleting his spiritual energy. At his peak, this distance would have been covered in an instant. The slow pace was due to some important items he had placed elsewhere.

Ying Wuchou was a child born with congenital deficiencies, weak and sickly. According to the doctor, he wouldn’t live past 18, and would gradually weaken from age 10. 

First, he would lose his sight, then his hearing and speech. After his five senses deteriorated, his limbs would become powerless. In the end, he would become someone who couldn’t see, hear, or move, with only his brain still capable of thought.

The loss of all five senses would make Ying Wuchou unable to feel the passage of time. The final year of his life might feel longer than a hundred years.

When Ying Wuchou entered the Dao, he had already lost his sight and hearing, relying on touch to perceive the world. Although he was born into a scholarly family, well-read and extraordinarily intelligent, if he had been healthy, he could have become a renowned scholar even if he didn’t enter the court as an official.

Unfortunately, his health was poor, and while his family wasn’t impoverished, they weren’t wealthy enough to support a child who had lost all five senses.

A wandering Daoist passed by Ying Wuchou’s home and saw the ten-year-old child sitting quietly on a stone bench in the courtyard, unresponsive to the servants’ scolding. 

After learning the situation, the Daoist promised Ying Wuchou’s parents he could cure the child and demonstrated some magical abilities. 

The parents allowed Ying Wuchou to become the Daoist’s disciple and entrusted the child to him.

The wandering Daoist was just a rogue cultivator, not a good person, but not particularly bad either. He was a Jindan stage cultivator without a heart technique for further cultivation.

He had obtained an ancient body refining heart technique but feared it had issues. By chance, he encountered Ying Wuchou, a literate child whose physical condition was suitable for the body refining heart technique, so the Daoist took him away.

The ancient heart technique was inscribed on pieces of scales. The wandering Daoist gave the scales to Ying Wuchou, allowing him to explore and discern the inscriptions through touch, cultivating on his own.

The body refining heart technique was peculiar, teaching people to refine external objects for personal use, strengthening the body to an extremely formidable level. 

Ying Wuchou later realized how strange this ancient heart technique was compared to the traditional heart techniques of the cultivation world.

The cultivation world emphasizes the unity of heaven and man, using various cultivation techniques to absorb spiritual energy from the heavens and earth into the dantian. 

First, one establishes a foundation in the dantian, then continuously absorbs and condenses spiritual energy, progressing to the Jindan, Yuanying stages, and so on, until reaching the spirit separation, virtual realm, and great ascension stages. 

After reaching the Yuanying stage, the soul can detach from the body along with the Yuanying. In the great ascension stage, one can transcend mortality and completely shed the physical body, reshaping it entirely with spiritual energy and the soul.

The cultivation process requires the body’s innate aptitude to be strong enough to absorb and transform spiritual energy. After reaching the great ascension stage, one can do without the physical body. 

However, Ying Wuchou’s heart technique was completely different; he cultivated external objects.

The body refining heart technique taught him to inject the painstakingly absorbed spiritual energy into stones. 

It seemed like a futile effort, but once the stones were filled with spiritual energy, he could use the heart technique to connect the stones to his body through secret methods, granting his body the strength of stone.

Ying Wuchou, somewhat bewildered, refined many stones. He didn’t know what this heart technique would bring him, nor how many years he had left to live. He simply wanted to give himself a goal to strive for and a reason to live in his remaining days.

When he first connected a stone to himself using the secret method, Ying Wuchou heard the melodious song of an oriole. It was the long-lost sense of hearing. 

Unlike ordinary people, his hearing range wasn’t limited by normal auditory limits. The farther the connected stones were placed, the broader his hearing range; the more stones connected, the more he could hear.

Later, Ying Wuchou refined his vision. He placed the stone representing his eyes in a field of blooming flowers, cast a spell to connect his eyes to the stone, and upon opening them, he saw a vibrant array of colors, the land teeming with the brilliance of life.

As his magical power grew, Ying Wuchou refined materials from ordinary rocks to heavenly treasures. His health improved, and the range he could see and hear expanded. 

As long as he chose the best material as the carrier for his senses and connected other items, he could continuously expand his perception range. As long as the material wasn’t destroyed, it wouldn’t affect his body.

Later, Ying Wuchou experienced different technological worlds, likening his situation to a host and surveillance cameras. As long as the host continued to function, losing a camera or two would only mean losing control over that area, without affecting the host.

At his peak, Ying Wuchou’s senses spanned the cultivation world, and everything under heaven and earth was within his grasp. He could instantly know if a red-scaled little snake crawled by the feet of the sect leader and elder of a major sect during an argument.

He vaguely sensed that if he cultivated this heart technique to its extreme, all inanimate objects in the world would become part of his body. Mountains, rivers, breezes, clouds… nothing was him, yet everything was him.

In contrast to the ancient Pangu deity transforming into all things, the Dao gave birth to all things, while he was all things returning to the Dao.

The wandering Daoist saw Ying Wuchou’s successful cultivation, proving the heart technique on the scales was indeed a divine method. He began cultivating it himself. 

However, having already practiced orthodox cultivation heart techniques, the body refining heart technique conflicted with the wandering Daoist’s learning. Not long after starting, he died from internal qi disruption.

The wandering Daoist wasn’t particularly good to Ying Wuchou, merely taking him as a disciple to test the heart technique. But he wasn’t particularly bad either, as he inadvertently saved Ying Wuchou’s life.

Ying Wuchou buried the wandering Daoist, using the seven incompatible scales as the foundation of his body refining, connecting the seven senses of sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, body, and spirit to the scales. 

The scales, from some unknown ancient spiritual beast, were incredibly hard, even a great ascension stage cultivator couldn’t destroy them.

With them, Ying Wuchou’s body was indestructible, and his power was unfathomable.

Before his death, Ying Wuchou severed the connection between the seven scales and his body, hiding them in different places, waiting for someone with fate to discover them. 

If no one found them, the true essence within the scales would slowly transform into spiritual energy, returning to the heavens and earth. 

Thousands of years later, these seven places hiding the scales would become places of concentrated spiritual veins, turning into prosperous towns or spiritual mountains and rivers.

Having lost the seven scales, Ying Wuchou’s strength was less than a tenth of what it once was. At the time, he thought, being someone about to die, holding onto such power was pointless.

Now, after taking so long to reach a small town only a hundred miles away, Ying Wuchou felt somewhat uncomfortable. Since he was alive again, it was better to retrieve the scales one by one. Fortunately, there was a scale near this town.

Ying Wuchou had severed his connection with the scales, unable to determine their exact location through sensation, relying only on his memory of where he hid them. After so many years, he wondered if the scales were still there.

To gather information, one naturally goes to places like taverns and tea houses. Ying Wuchou naturally walked into a tavern, ordered a pot of wine and a dish of peanuts, and sat down to slowly savor the wine.

He appeared calm and unperturbed, but was secretly listening to the conversations of others in the tavern. Although he had cultivated a superior heart technique, it didn’t cure his illness, only allowed him to continuously absorb external objects for his use.

His vision and hearing, destroyed by illness, didn’t recover. If he dispersed his cultivation, his eyes and ears would be useless. Fortunately, the cultivation technique halted his deterioration, and apart from sight and hearing, his other senses remained intact.

After severing his connection with the scales, Ying Wuchou refined a small red gemstone, fashioned it into an earring, and pinned it to his left earlobe to listen to sounds. 

The gemstone was rich in spiritual energy, an excellent material for crafting magical treasures, and its listening range was broader than a normal human ear. 

However, its position was slightly off, causing Ying Wuchou to tilt his head slightly when listening.

As for his eyes, he refined the resin of a millennium-old spiritual tree into a pair of soft, thin gels, adhering them to his pupils to see the world. 

In several worlds Ying Wuchou experienced, people wore similar items, called contact lenses, to enhance vision or change pupil color. 

Of course, the mundane world’s contact lenses couldn’t compare to Ying Wuchou’s magical gels, which allowed a blind person to see again.

Ying Wuchou’s eyes were originally deep black and lifeless. With the gels, his pupils turned amber, giving a mysterious and profound look when gazing at people.

He gently sipped the town’s poor-quality yellow wine, picked a slightly burnt, bitter-tasting peanut, and listened to the tavern’s conversations.

“Someone actually went out wearing only inner clothes, with their collar not fully closed, how indecent!”

“Oh my, he’s not even wearing shoes. My dear, don’t look, let me shield you.”

“A grown man wearing such flamboyant earrings, he’s definitely not a decent person, stay away from him.”

Ying Wuchou, having heard all sorts of sounds for years, had long learned to block out noise. The tavern’s idle gossip only briefly made him wonder, “Who are they talking about? There’s no one improperly dressed in the tavern,” before he blocked out such noise, focusing on finding the information he needed.

“I vaguely remember my father saying that someone like that, a dissolute person, once came to our town. He had a demonic aura, and when his amber eyes swept over someone, they seemed to lose their soul, forgetting what they were doing. He only appeared in the town once, yet left many young ladies and scholars in the town yearning for him.”

“I’ve heard elders in my family mention it too. The town elders considered him a demon and hired people to perform rituals several times, but spent a lot of money with no effect.”

“Yes, yes, later the town mayor brought in a three-meter-tall whole jade stone from the outskirts, carved it into a statue, and built a temple to house it, finally suppressing the evil.”

“Now that you mention the statue and temple, I remember. It’s been fifty years, hasn’t it? The temple has no incense now and has fallen into disrepair.”

Hearing this, Ying Wuchou slowly put down his wine cup. It was this temple. The temple was built not long before he entered turtle breathing sleep. It turns out fifty years have passed in the blink of an eye.

Author’s Note:

Ying Wuchou: Who are these people talking about, not dressing properly? If it were my disciple, I’d definitely educate them.

Everyone: They’re talking about you!