Night.
Jiang Ning sat cross-legged on the bed, spiritual power continuously surged through his spirit vein pathways, accompanying a breakthrough of a bottleneck, making the circulation of spiritual power increasingly smooth.
"Not ten days since I achieved the Qi Cultivation First Layer."
"With my Heavenly Spirit Root aptitude and the stimulated body cultivation combined, I was able to break through in this scarce nature's spiritual energy environment; the speed is already quite acceptable," Jiang Ning thought.
Cultivation became slower the further one progressed, and he estimated that to fully complete the Qi Cultivation Stage, his entire high school career might not be enough.
However, if he could use elixir pills as a supplement, the pace would be much faster.
Resources were essential for cultivation. In his former life, with the support of the Luoyun Sect, he seldom worried about resources below the Golden Core Stage. The sect's best alchemist was always ready for him, providing whatever he requested.
Now that he had started over, without the support of a sect, he had to gather resources himself.
And the Golden Jar buried beneath Xue Yuantong's house was the first step towards his financial gain.
Even though he had only had a meal at Xue Yuantong's house during the day, he was now set to dig under someone else's house at night…
But Jiang Ning was still very decisive.
He remembered Aunt Gu's kindness and Xue Yuantong's lively appearance and silently said,
"Sorry, Xue Yuantong, Aunt Gu, I'll make it up to you later!"
He activated his Divine Sense. After entering the Qi Cultivation First Layer, his Divine Sense had also increased slightly, barely able to perform short-range unobstructed scanning.
Divine Sense stretched out like an invisible giant hand, reaching toward the ground, treating soil as if it were nothing, directly penetrating it.
Moving the Divine Sense through the soil was extremely obscure, like sinking into mud. With every inch deeper, it took a great deal of energy. If it weren't for Jiang Ning's concurrent cultivation of a secret method to strengthen the Divine Sense, which was exceptionally robust, he likely would have been unable to bear such consumption.
When Jiang Ning reached a depth of about one meter, sweat began to seep out.
"It's still too forceful!"
Jiang Ning sighed but did not give up. Instead, he endured the mental fatigue and continued to scan below.
A minute later, he showed a puzzled expression; his Divine Sense had not detected any foreign objects below.
After brief consideration, he pushed his Divine Sense towards the adjacent room, the kitchen. As the Divine Sense extended further, Jiang Ning finally found an anomaly.
Then he circled around with his Divine Sense for a week, determining the shape of the foreign object, an oval jar.
If all was as expected, it should be the jar filled with gold.
After marking the jar's specific location, Jiang Ning rose from the bed, pushed open the door, and went to the kitchen.
He reached out to move aside a clutter cabinet; the position of the jar was right beneath it.
In the darkness, Jiang Ning looked at the cement floor and frowned slightly. With his current level of spiritual power, cutting through the cement floor was not difficult, but the challenge was doing so silently.
It was late at night; if the noise was too loud, it could disturb the neighbors and cause unnecessary trouble.
After pondering, he decided to use his spiritual power to resolve the issue.
Jiang Ning drew a blue light circle in the void; the circle trembled lightly, seemingly very unstable.
With a flick of his finger, the blue light circle slowly landed on the cement floor, cutting through it silently and effortlessly, like a hot knife through tofu.
This was Jiang Ning's use of Sword Qi from his past life, compressing Spiritual Power to make it extremely sharp, even capable of cutting through Magical Treasures if cultivated to a profound extent.
However, with Jiang Ning's current Qi Cultivation First Layer cultivation level, the power was minimal, just barely able to cut through cement.
Even so, this move also consumed seventy percent of the mana within his body.
A blue light circle branched out into a line that gently plowed through the soil beneath the cement. Jiang Ning motioned with an empty gesture, and a cement disc, the size of a basin, separated intact.
The reason for such precision was also to avoid causing too much damage to the floor of Xue Yuantong's house. After retrieving the jar, he could simply fit the cement piece back in place.
Looking at the black and yellow soil exposed beneath the cement, Jiang Ning, as a cultivator at the Qi Cultivation First Layer, naturally wouldn't resort to digging with his hands. Though his mana was meager, he still had some methods to extract jars from the soil.
He only needed to employ the "Earth Attraction Skill" to extract the jar. However, Jiang Ning's weak mana couldn't support the spellcasting.
Therefore, he needed to make a preparation beforehand.
The kitchen bucket was filled with water, which Jiang Ning picked up and poured onto the soil. The flow of the water was as if under control, soaking into the earth. Guided by Jiang Ning's "Water Drawing Skill," the water streamed straight downward, towards the jar's location.
The slightly hard soil softened with the water.
With this, it would be much easier to cast the "Earth Attraction Skill."
Jiang Ning pinched a magic formation with his right hand and pressed his palm down onto the mud, mobilizing all his Spiritual Power. The jar beneath seemed to be pulled by a chain, trembling softly and then slowly moving upwards.
After a dozen seconds, Jiang Ning gently lifted his hand, and a black jar emerged from the mud.
The jar weighed about twenty catties. Jiang Ning did not open it; at this moment, he just felt mentally exhausted, with his Spiritual Power and Divine Sense having been drained too much. His head felt heavy and drowsy.
Barely managing to fit the cement back in place, he moved the cluttered cabinet to its original spot, then cleaned the jar and placed it under the bed before collapsing into sleep.
The next day when Jiang Ning woke up, the sunlight from outside was shining through the window, warming his body comfortably.
Facing the sunlight, he felt his body's filled Spiritual Power and the fullness of his Divine Sense, his mood slightly uplifted.
He released his Divine Sense and took out the jar from under the bed. The jar was not large, just slightly bigger than the mouth of a bowl.
After studying it for a moment, Jiang Ning opened the jar, and his eyes fell upon several thick hemp cloths.
Using his mana, he drew out the hemp cloths from a distance, and a pile of items fell to the ground—gold bars and Gold Beans were heaped on the floor.
There were twelve gold bars, thick as thumbs, and twenty-three Gold Beans the size of silkworms.
Beyond that, there were no other items in the jar.
Jiang Ning weighed them in his hand; a gold bar was approximately 300g, and the Gold Beans were about 20g each.
With gold prices hovering around three hundred per gram, this pile of gold was worth over a million. In 2013, when housing prices hadn't skyrocketed yet, this amount of money could buy a house of over a hundred square meters even in a provincial city.
For Jiang Ning, it was enough for a lengthy period of cultivation use.
Jiang Ning was in high spirits. With this gold, he could eat whatever he wanted and buy any desired herbs in abundance to concoct various Elixir Pills and Body Refining Spiritual Liquids to accelerate his progress.
Over a million— in the past, after working for years, his savings hadn't reached half this amount. If he hadn't been a cultivator exposed to greater parts of the world, he would be ecstatic now. Unfortunately, having seen a broader world, his pursuit was not merely for money but for personal strength.
Be it money or power, they are all like passing clouds against the absolute force capable of crushing everything.
The few standing at the pinnacle of the Real World are still of mortal flesh; a single bullet could claim their lives.
Cultivation, however, could change the essence of life.
What Jiang Ning sought was the eternal path, and moreover, the joy in exploring the journey toward eternity.