Li Nanzhu woke up.
Li Nanzhu closed her eyes.
Li Nanzhu wanted to roll over and go back to sleep.
There was no other reason; she just wanted to slack off.
But it didn't matter. She would convince herself to get up in a little while.
For now, she could quietly play dead for a bit. After all, nothing was more peaceful than being a corpse.
Fifteen minutes later, Li Nanzhu catapulted herself upright.
Fine, she just wasn't the type of person suited for slacking off.
She headed toward Feng Yi's place again. Not wanting to trouble Mu Wenyan further, Li Nanzhu slowly climbed the mountain herself this time.
One hour later.
Feng Yi and Li Nanzhu stood staring at each other.
"...Did you go raiding a chicken coop?"
"Master, our Five Elements Dao Sect doesn't raise chickens."
Feng Yi readily adapted.
"Oh, then did you go raiding a bird's nest?"
Li Nanzhu: "..."
Just destroy the world already; she was exhausted.
Looking at the deadpan Feng Yi, she momentarily couldn't tell if he was being serious or just joking.
She cast a Dust-Cleansing Art, and only after feeling clean again did she look back at Feng Yi.
"Master, I tried practicing mental power. Although my talisman crafting consumes half as much as before, why can't I produce double the amount of talismans?"
"You succeeded?"
"Yes, Master. The talismans I drew are all here."
Li Nanzhu pulled out the talismans she had drawn the day before and the day before that from her storage bag.
"The day before yesterday, I drew eight. After learning some methods for using mental power, my consumption decreased by half. However, when I drew talismans again yesterday, I fainted directly after the thirteenth one."
Feng Yi merely examined the talismans closely. After a while, he spoke.
"You probably haven't looked carefully at the talismans you drew yesterday, have you?"
As he spoke, he pulled two of them out and placed them on the table.
Li Nanzhu reached out to take a look. One was a Fireball Talisman, and the other was a Haste Talisman. She suddenly realized the issue.
"The more functional a talisman is, the more mental power and spiritual energy it requires. I forgot about that and just drew them one after another."
"Your progress is significant."
Feng Yi didn't press her further on how she had suddenly succeeded with so many talismans.
Since he didn't bring it up, Li Nanzhu naturally wouldn't say more.
After a moment's thought, Li Nanzhu pulled out the book on mental power cultivation she had taken from the Library Pavilion yesterday.
"Master, I have one more matter to ask for guidance on."
Feng Yi glanced at the book, seemingly remembering something. Li Nanzhu felt his expression was a bit strange.
"The last page of this technique mentions that attacking one's own sea of consciousness can also help cultivate mental power. I wanted to know if that is true."
Feng Yi: "..."
Li Nanzhu: ?
It was actually true?
Feng Yi's mouth twitched slightly as he flipped the book to the last page. With a gentle tap of his finger, the page detached itself automatically.
"Don't learn this nonsense. Why look for suffering when there are proper cultivation methods? Don't tell me you actually practiced this?"
Li Nanzhu immediately shook her head like a rattle.
She might enjoy flirting with death, but she didn't enjoy being a masochist. She wasn't playing some kind of weird alphabet game.
It was just that she felt... Feng Yi's expression was far too strange.
She asked tentatively, "Has Master ever seen a senior who used this method to cultivate?"
"...No. All right, hurry back and practice. If there's anything you don't understand about mental power, you can come and ask me at any time."
Then, his figure vanished once again.
Li Nanzhu: "...Okay."
Spending another half hour descending the mountain, Li Nanzhu wondered when she would reach Foundation Establishment. Once she could fly on a sword, she wouldn't have to look so disheveled every time.
After returning to her residence, Li Nanzhu continued to practice her mental power according to the technique. Cultivating mental power wasn't actually difficult, but generally, only cultivators like artifact refiners or alchemists would pursue it. Moreover, almost no one used mental attacks; condensing mental power for an attack was not easily achieved.
Even if one learned it, if the target's mental power was stronger than one's own, they would suffer a direct backlash. Mental power was linked to the sea of consciousness; one wrong move and you could become an idiot. Therefore, even alchemists only used mental power as a supplementary tool for their refinement.
The technique described two general methods. One was the method of visualization, but this required the cultivator to possess a sea of consciousness. A few exceptionally talented cultivators would possess a sea of consciousness during the Foundation Establishment stage, though it was generally referred to as a "pseudo-sea of consciousness."
Under normal circumstances, the sea of consciousness would only truly form after breaking through to the Golden Core stage.
With no other choice, Li Nanzhu abandoned that and turned to the second method.
However, this method wasn't much better than the one on the final page of the book. It required drawing the spiritual energy of heaven and earth directly into the Ancestral Aperture between the brows. Generally, before being converted by a cultivator's body, raw spiritual energy was somewhat chaotic because of the various attributes mixed within. Cultivators would automatically guide the spiritual energy suited to their own attributes into their bodies, which was the standard way to cultivate.
But if one drew raw spiritual energy directly into the Ancestral Aperture, under the impact of unfiltered energy, the place where mental power was stored would automatically absorb and convert it. It would then filter out the spiritual energy suitable for the cultivator's body and send it into the dantian.
This was a disguised form of training mental power, though it also came with pain. After all, this conversion was passive rather than active. It was similar to how a cultivator's meridians would swell and burst if they absorbed too much energy at once, though these risks were controllable.
Therefore, once this method of cultivation was maintained, after mental power grew to a certain level, it was highly likely that a pseudo-sea of consciousness would be born during the Foundation Establishment stage.
Thus, Li Nanzhu spent the next half month constantly drawing talismans and cultivating her mental power.
Naturally, Li Nanzhu would still faint from time to time during this period. Fortunately, as she drew talismans and practiced, her mental power grew steadily, and she began to get a feel for controlling it. The number of times she fainted gradually decreased, though she would occasionally suffer an uncontrollable nosebleed from overusing her mental power.
By the end of these two weeks, Li Nanzhu was already able to draw tier 1 high-grade talismans, maintaining a success rate of around seventy percent.
Generally, a talisman master's success rate was between forty to fifty percent. Her seventy percent success rate could already be considered extremely high.
Li Nanzhu felt she only had such a high success rate because she was using the Eight Principles of Yong and the Wanxiang Brush, which naturally gave her several advantages over other talisman masters. It wasn't because she was some kind of genius; she had a fair amount of self-awareness regarding that.
In these two weeks, she had drawn a total of 169 tier 1 talismans. Of those, 146 were mid-grade and 23 were high-grade. She was still far from tier 2, but Li Nanzhu felt that once she broke through to Foundation Establishment and her mental power improved further, tier 2 would no longer be an issue.
After all, she was only able to produce high-grade talismans later on once her mental power had improved, and she had wasted quite a few materials in the process.
It was fortunate that the talisman paper and talisman ink Feng Yi had given her were plentiful—he had practically handed her a full storage bag—otherwise, they might not have lasted at her rate of production.
With these talismans currently in hand, she would have many more means of fighting if she went out for experience again. This time, she could produce all sorts of offensive talismans.
As for her safety, she wasn't worried. The storage bag Feng Yi gave her when she became his disciple contained many life-saving magic tools.
Now that she could basically manipulate her mental power, Li Nanzhu felt she could try the offensive application of the Eight Principles of Yong that had failed in her previous research.
Rate on N.U.
