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After dealing with the three thieves without any harm, Li Zhirui, not having time to clean up the battlefield, hastily took their storage bags and the magic artifacts lying aside, and then summoned his paper crane, vanishing into the vast sea.
Initially, Li Zhirui's heartbeat thundered, his entire body tense, as it was his first time killing someone in his past and present life. How could he not be nervous?
But as the sea breeze blew in waves, as if taking away the uneasiness in Li Zhirui's heart, he gradually calmed down, and his state of mind began to change.
By the time he returned to Da Rong Island, Li Zhirui had completely shaken off the influence of those negative emotions and, looking as usual, handed back the token before heading to his own courtyard.
Upon closing the gate, the very first thing Li Zhirui did was to open those three storage bags!
"What are all these things?!" Looking at the colorful clothes scattered on the ground, Li Zhirui's mouth twitched with disgust.
The three seemingly penniless men had filled their storage bags with things, most of which were women's undergarments that still emitted a fishy smell. Li Zhirui felt his stomach churn violently, nearly vomiting.
Li Zhirui quickly gathered these items into one storage bag and decided never to use that storage bag again!
After putting away those disgusting items, Li Zhirui was finally in the mood to inspect the wealth of those three cultivators.
The useful items were not many, totaling four to five hundred Spirit Stones, three mid-grade first-tier magic artifacts, several jade vials containing unknown pills, and nine Jade Slips.
The first thing Li Zhirui checked were the Jade Slips, starting with the Blue Wave Spell, Sharp Gold Skill, and Thick Earth Spell—three widely spread basic cultivation techniques—as well as the cultivators' understanding and insights into their practices.
Then there was the Minor Compendium of the Five Elements Spells, a text that recorded the first-tier spells of the five elements.
The value of these Jade Slips wasn't high, as the family's Scripture Pavilion had them in collection, and they merely saved Li Zhirui some Spirit Stones that he would've spent learning these spells from the Scripture Pavilion.
As for the three pieces of insight, Li Zhirui read them too, and after finishing, he felt they were mediocre and unremarkable, which was a common drawback among Loose Cultivators.
Most importantly, they were drastically different from the cultivation technique he practiced, so there wasn't much worth referencing.
Inside the remaining two Jade Slips, however, Li Zhirui found a pleasant surprise; one contained an incomplete yet useful spell.
The Cicada Breathing Skill, as the name suggests, allowed a cultivator to retract their aura, similar to cicadas underground, making them difficult to detect.
Moreover, the Cicada Breathing Skill in the Jade Slip even included methodologies for the Foundation Establishment Stage and briefly mentioned the Golden Core Stage, indicating the exceptional origin of the skill, even though the latter parts of the text had been forcibly erased.
As for the last Jade Slip, Li Zhirui only glanced at it before quickly withdrawing his Divine Sense. It was an evil cultivation technique, an Evil Cultivation Skill for absorbing yin to supplement yang!
In fact, there were similar methods within the righteous cultivator's repertoire, but those were about the harmonious union of yin and yang within orthodox dual cultivation.
However, such methods as absorbing yin to supplement yang were researched and spread by Demon Cultivators with insidious motives.
Apart from the absorbing technique Li Zhirui encountered today, other methods such as refining ghosts and corpses had also been twisted into malevolence by Demon Cultivators.
And because these techniques were based on righteousness, they were highly concealed, unlike Demon Cultivators who leaked killing aura that betrayed their identities at a glance.
But there were major drawbacks; the longer they cultivated and the higher their realm, the more unstable the emotions of the evil cultivators became. Eventually, their moral compass was corrupted, turning them into skin-wearing demons that knew only slaughter and satisfying their vile desires.
"No wonder they had so many women's undergarments in their possession, and although they were at the late stage of Qi Cultivation, their strength was so poor. It turns out they had practiced such evil techniques!"
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Li Zhirui realized during the fight that their spells were not as powerful as he had imagined, and now he finally understood the reason.
Mana instability, leading to insufficient spell power, was the second major drawback of being an evil cultivator.
Despite such obvious dangers, why were so many cultivators flocking to practice these banned methods? The answer was that evil cultivation techniques offered a benefit neither the righteous nor the demonic paths possessed: extremely fast cultivation speed!
Moreover, this cultivation speed did not depend on one's talent! If you practiced cultivation techniques that absorbed from others, the more you took, the faster your cultivation speed would be.
Therefore, the practice of evil cultivation was repeatedly banned but never eradicated, no matter how much the righteous forces suppressed these cultivators, they always managed to rise from the ashes.
Li Zhirui looked at the jade slip in his hand and summoned mana to his palm, directly destroying the jade slip, to prevent the accidental dissemination of its contents that could harm others.
Especially since Li Zhirui now spent most of his time on Da Rong Island, if he ended up harming one of the clansmen, how could he face the other tribe members?
However, today's ambush served as a wake-up call for Li Zhirui. He had been too ostentatious while selling Spirit Rice on the street stalls today, which led to him being targeted. If he did not find a way to change this, he would surely encounter similar problems in the future.
But the issue was that the shops in the marketplace offered too low a purchase price! Li Zhirui was not yet wealthy enough to disregard those few Spirit Stones.
"Forget it, let's take it one step at a time." After racking his brains to no avail, Li Zhirui could only set aside the problem for now and reconsider it after the next batch of Spirit Rice was ready for harvest.
Time passed by, and before he knew it, more than a month had gone by.
One day, Li Zhirui sat cross-legged on a cushion. As he practiced his cultivation technique, he refined a Jade Spirit Pill, which turned into specks of mana and integrated into his Dantian.
Thanks to a large supply of Jade Spirit Pills aiding his cultivation, even though he had only recently advanced to the seventh level of Qi Cultivation, the mana in his Dantian had increased significantly. Judging by his current cultivation speed, it would not take more than a year before he could attempt to break through to the eighth level.
As the effects of the Jade Spirit Pill were completely absorbed, Li Zhirui slowly opened his eyes, still craving more, "It's a pity that I can only refine three Jade Spirit Pills a day. It would be great if I could refine more Spirit Pills."
One must admit, the heart of man is greedy. Li Zhirui's cultivation speed was already on par with dual spiritual roots cultivators of high spiritual root purity, yet he was still not satisfied.
Even if Jade Spirit Pills were crafted through water methods and had less pill toxin, that didn't mean they were completely without pill toxin.
Three Jade Spirit Pills a day was the limit for refining and assimilation. The accumulated pill toxin would naturally be expelled from the body, but going beyond this limit would require cultivators to find a way to actively expel the pill toxin themselves.
And this was a very troublesome matter. If done, it would consume a lot of time and energy, and the results wouldn't be worth the effort.
After reflecting for a while, Li Zhirui stood up and headed to the storeroom to submit this month's five hundred Jade Spirit Pills and three hundred Spirit-Replenishing Pills.
Passing by the small pond in the courtyard, he saw Da Qing sleeping soundly and couldn't help but sigh.
After feeding it Jade Spirit Pills for months, it was impossible for Da Qing to show no progress at all, but to say it had improved by leaps and bounds was also untrue.
Apart from the inherently difficult cultivation of a Spirit Beast, another reason was Da Qing's Turtle Clan heritage!
Besides long lifespans, the trademarks of the Turtle Clan were slowness and laziness.