Chapter 89 – Cultivating the Separation Fire Technique, Exploring Great Xia’s Treasury (Requesting First Subscriptions, Third Update!)

Su Xing stared blankly at this, then slapped his thigh in excitement and murmured:

“That’s right! The success rate and quality of my pill refinement aren’t necessarily because my alchemy skills are lacking! Maybe the problem lies with the flame itself!”

“As the saying goes, a craftsman must first sharpen his tools before doing fine work. This Separation Fire is still at the Beginner level — the temperature probably isn’t even sufficient. No wonder trying to refine mid-grade pills is so difficult!”

Su Xing remembered clearly that when he first obtained the Separation Fire Alchemy Art, the ancient text had stated that it was divided into two parts: the Separation Fire and the Alchemy Art.

The Alchemy Art was the main body, while the Separation Fire was merely a type of flame suited for alchemy that could better facilitate pill refinement.

Ever since Su Xing had first obtained the Separation Fire Alchemy Art, he had been neglecting the improvement of the Separation Fire Technique itself. Now it was time to improve his mastery over the Separation Fire.

Su Xing already had a plan in mind, so he continued the simulation.

【You realize that your failure to refine the Mind-Condensing Pill stems from the flame itself — the Beginner-level Separation Fire Technique’s temperature is insufficient for refining mid-grade pills.】

【So you begin looking for ways to increase the power of the Separation Fire Technique. You take out the ancient text of the Separation Fire Alchemy Art and begin cultivating according to the Separation Fire chapter’s instructions.】

【According to the Separation Fire chapter, the cultivation of the Separation Fire Technique draws inspiration from one of the four divine fires — the Southern Illumination Separation Fire. Though its power cannot compare to the true Southern Illumination Separation Fire, it is still a top-tier immortal technique in the cultivation world.】

【Cultivating the Separation Fire requires a certain level of spiritual consciousness. After reaching the Beginner level, further advancement requires at least reaching the Five Senses Realm in spiritual consciousness and possessing a spiritual consciousness range of one hundred and sixty five meters.】

【You’re grateful that you happen to meet these requirements, and you begin diligently cultivating the Separation Fire Technique.】

【Year Five: The power of your Separation Fire Technique improves slightly, but it remains at the Beginner level.】

【Year Six: Day after day, you spend sixteen hours each day cultivating the Separation Fire Technique. Using the Separation Fire consumes enormous amounts of spiritual power and spiritual energy, but fortunately you are already a Nascent Soul stage cultivator and can sustain the Separation Fire for a full sixteen hours before needing to recover your internal spiritual power.】

【Year Seven: You notice that as you cultivate the Separation Fire Technique, the spiritual energy within the Blessed Spirit Field is gradually thinning — the amount of spiritual energy has already decreased by a third.】

【Fortunately, you planted Spirit-Gathering Flowers early on. The three Spirit-Gathering Flowers diligently replenish spiritual energy each day, slightly slowing the rate of consumption.】

【Year Eight: Your mastery of the Separation Fire Technique has reached a level of effortless control. Within a range of thirty three meters, you can summon the Separation Fire to any position with a single thought.】

【But you know this is not the limit of the Separation Fire Technique. According to the ancient text, when the Separation Fire Technique is cultivated to Major Mastery, it can be classified as a divine ability, with power capable of burning rivers and boiling seas.】

【There are three markers of successfully cultivating the Minor Mastery-level Separation Fire Technique. The first is effortless execution — a single thought is all it takes to conjure fire.】

【The second is vast range — within the coverage of one’s spiritual consciousness, everything within one hundred and sixty five meters falls within the Separation Fire Technique’s attack range.】

【The third is terrifying power — all mundane objects are incinerated upon contact.】

【Your years of cultivation have only brought the Separation Fire Technique to meet the first standard of Minor Mastery. So you now plan to focus on improving the technique’s range and power.】

【You spend half a year training for sixteen hours each day to expand the effective range of the Separation Fire Technique. Through your day-and-night toil and diligent cultivation, the maximum distance of the Separation Fire has reached fifteen zhang from your body.】

【Year Nine: You continue cultivating the Separation Fire Technique. Over the course of a year, the Separation Fire can now be released at a distance of twenty-five zhang from your body.】

【This year, Protector Shadow’s home world is attacked by giant beasts. Despite the many pills you previously provided to Protector Shadow, her world still fails to withstand the beasts’ assault.】

【You comfort Protector Shadow and tell her that she can consider Earth her home.】

【You and Protector Shadow begin discussing plans to defect from the Advent Cult and start devising ways to steal the spiritual medicines and treasures from the Cult treasury.】

【Year Ten: Your control range of the Separation Fire Technique has increased to thirty-five zhang.】

【That same year, you take Protector Shadow and defect from the Advent Cult. Before leaving, you don’t forget to take most of the spiritual medicines from the Advent Cult’s treasury.】

【You bring Protector Shadow and join the Great Xia Military, presenting the two hundred thousand pills you’ve accumulated over the years as a gift to the military.】

【With your help, Great Xia gains four thousand additional Grandmaster-stage powerhouses in just half a year. The main force at Demon-Sealing Pass multiplies several times over in a short period.】

【For this, you are granted First-Class treatment, with authority in the military equivalent to that of a Five-Star General. Great Xia’s soldiers all regard you as a national hero.】

【Drawing on your previous experience of being ambushed by Old Dog Zong, you select one Martial Emperor-stage powerhouse and three Heavenly King-stage powerhouses as personal bodyguards, which puts your mind at considerable ease.】

【After joining Great Xia, Luo Shuying proposes her own idea — she wishes to lead a force to exterminate the Advent Cult, as the Cult has been colluding with foreign races over the years and has caused tremendous losses to the human race.】

【You agree with Luo Shuying’s proposal and use your authority to dispatch three Martial Emperor-stage powerhouses, ten Heavenly King-stage powerhouses, and over a hundred Grandmaster-stage powerhouses, forming an army specifically dedicated to hunting down the Advent Cult.】

【Thanks to Luo Shuying’s inside knowledge, you have a clear picture of the Advent Cult’s strongholds and personnel deployments. In just one year, the Advent Cult suffers devastating losses — several Protector-level powerhouses, over a dozen Elders, and hundreds of followers are slain.】

【Your only regret is that Old Dog Zong has gone into hiding somewhere unknown. He is not among the slain Protectors.】

【As long as Old Dog Zong remains alive, you can never sleep soundly. After all, the disguise techniques of cultivators are mysterious and unpredictable — even top-tier Class Users might not be able to see through them.】

【Whenever an unfamiliar Class User passes by you, you instinctively retreat a great distance while staring at them so intently that they feel unsettled.】

Su Xing’s mouth twitched at this, and he couldn’t help but grumble internally, “Hey, hey, hey — are you serious? Am I really that cowardly in the simulation? Wait, no… I think I’m actually even more cowardly in the real world…”

Su Xing quickly came to terms with his true nature. Wasn’t the essence of humanity just following one’s heart?

Su Xing continued the simulation.

【Luo Shuying continues leading Great Xia’s powerhouses in exterminating the Advent Cult. It is only when the leader of the Zealot Faction within the Advent Cult personally intervenes that Luo Shuying abandons the pursuit.】

【Nevertheless, a year of hunting has left the Advent Cult devastated, with nearly half their strength destroyed.】

【Luo Shuying resigns from the mission to exterminate the Advent Cult and returns to your side. With Luo Shuying’s protection, you feel much more at ease and continue diligently cultivating the Separation Fire Technique.】

【Year Eleven: You continue cultivating the Separation Fire Technique. Over the course of the year, your control range has reached forty-five zhang — not far from the fifty-zhang standard.】

【This year, you expend considerable effort screening a batch of veteran Grandmaster-stage Class Users. You provide them with four thousand Dragon Spirit Pills and nearly three thousand Primordial Martial Pills.】

【These Grandmaster-stage Class Users do not disappoint — most successfully advance to the Heavenly King stage. In an instant, Great Xia gains over five hundred additional Heavenly King-stage Class Users.】

【This influx of combat power into Demon-Sealing Pass makes the human race’s strength there unprecedentedly formidable. You become the talk of the nation in Great Xia, hailed as the future hope of the human race.】

【Year Twelve: You devote yourself to cultivating the Separation Fire Technique. After a total of five years, the release range of your Separation Fire Technique finally reaches the Minor Mastery standard. You now prepare to enhance the technique’s destructive power.】

【Year Thirteen: Enhancing the Separation Fire Technique’s power proves far more difficult than you imagined. Increasing its power means consuming more spiritual energy, and the spiritual energy within the Blessed Spirit Field is growing increasingly thin. You have no choice but to place the thousand-odd Spirit stones you saved into the spirit-gathering formation to maintain the blessed land’s spiritual energy.】

【Even so, you can only cultivate the Separation Fire Technique for eight hours each day, as excessive training would deplete too much of the Blessed Spirit Field’s spiritual energy.】

【The power of your Separation Fire Technique improves slowly, but it is ultimately making steady progress. You calm your mind and continue your secluded cultivation.】

【The good news is that with fewer hours spent on daily cultivation, you begin devoting time to exploring Great Xia’s treasury, hoping to discover special spiritual plants similar to the Spirit-Gathering Flower.】

【Given your current status, you have unrestricted access to any treasury in Great Xia.】

【But Great Xia has numerous treasuries — seven in total across the entire nation, each hidden in one of the seven cities that house the nation’s top-tier academies.】

【You arrive at the Capital City treasury and spend an entire month exploring the vast majority of the tools and materials in this enormous vault. You discover that Great Xia’s treasury lacks detailed classifications for spiritual plants and similar items. The vast majority of its contents are equipment, tools, and potions commonly used by Class Users — you even find mountains of exotic metal piled high.】

【After a month of searching, you do manage to find a small quantity of spiritual medicines — a batch of Essence Nurturing Grass and a small amount of Yellow Immortal Essence. These were obtained from rare cultivation-type dungeons. You refine these materials into Essence Nurturing Pills and Organ Tempering Pills, and Great Xia gains several hundred more Grandmaster-stage Class Users.】

Su Xing frowned slightly at this, feeling somewhat puzzled.

Why did the entirety of Great Xia’s reserves seem weaker than the Advent Cult’s? Great Xia should clearly be far more powerful…

But then Su Xing understood and murmured:

“Great Xia is full of Class Users, so naturally they place greater emphasis on equipment, tools, and other special items produced in dungeons. Their exploration of materials needed by cultivators is very limited, because those things aren’t very useful to them. And the few dungeons that yield such materials have too little output, which explains the situation.”

“But the Advent Cult is different. With centuries of heritage, many of their followers are natives from other worlds — dungeons. They’re naturally more attuned to heavenly treasures that can increase one’s strength, which is why they’ve accumulated so many spiritual medicines and artifacts.”

“Plus the Advent Cult has that bastard Old Dog Zong. Perhaps he raided some sect within a dungeon, which is how they obtained so many materials?”

“And with their collusion with foreign races, the Advent Cult probably received quite a few benefits from that as well…”

Having figured this out, Su Xing continued the simulation.

【Over the next half year, you search through Great Xia’s other six treasuries but still fail to find Spirit-Gathering Flower seeds. However, you do discover a considerable amount of other spiritual medicines — among them, a one-zhang-long piece of Condensing Wood that fills you with pleasant surprise.】

【You refine the newly found materials into Essence Nurturing Pills, Dragon Spirit Pills, and other pills. Great Xia gains yet another batch of Grandmaster-stage and Heavenly King-stage powerhouses.】

【Year Fourteen: After a year of cultivation, the power of your Separation Fire Technique has clearly improved by a significant margin compared to before, but it is still far from the ancient text’s description of incinerating all mundane objects upon contact.】

【Year Fifteen: You continue cultivating the Separation Fire Technique day and night. In your spare time, you focus on gathering intelligence about the cultivation world.】

【You learn that over the course of Great Xia’s thousand-year history, a total of thirty-seven suspected cultivation-type dungeons have been explored. The vast majority of these have already disappeared, with only seven still remaining in the world — including several of the cultivation dungeons you previously learned about.】

【Though most of these cultivation dungeons have vanished, they left behind considerable documentation, including some accounts of the mysterious dissipation of spiritual energy in the cultivation world.】

【These accounts vary widely — some claim it was a great heavenly calamity, others say it was the severing of heaven from earth. What interests you most is that the Luotian Assembly appears to be connected to the dissipation of spiritual energy, and the Dharma-Ending Era dungeon also seems to contain descriptions of cultivators.】

Su Xing felt a surge of excitement. In this simulation run, he had finally leveraged the power of a nation to learn more about the rumors surrounding the disappearance of spiritual energy in the cultivation world.

“A great heavenly calamity, the severing of heaven from earth — whether these rumors are true or false, I have no way to verify them. But the Luotian Assembly dungeon… perhaps I can find time to explore it…”