Chapter Eighty-Nine: Preparing to Break Through

As soon as the first crystal of primal essence was mined, the days that followed yielded two or three each day.

As for these priceless crystals, Yi Zhen did not dare make any arbitrary decision. He gathered them all together and turned them over to the tribe before any division was made.

Yi Tian and the others had no objections to this.

An ordinary small essence vein might produce only a handful of such crystals.

Yet the large vein before them kept yielding more and more. After half a month, it was producing twenty or thirty a day. There were now hundreds of these extraordinarily rare heavenly treasures in their possession, and the number was still rising.

It took Yi Tian and the others three and a half months of hard labor to exhaust the core of the mine.

Vice Chief Yi Zhen’s storage pouch was already full of these crystals, no fewer than 3,513 in all.

This was a treasure of staggering value, an unimaginably vast fortune.

Even the entire treasury of the royal house of the Skywind Kingdom might not equal half of it.

Once every last crystal had been extracted, Yi Zhen and Yi Tian returned together to the tribe. The other tribal warriors remained behind to continue mining primal stones, though with all the essence crystals gone, the value of the vein had fallen sharply, and the warriors who had been stationed there no longer needed to remain in the mine.

Yi Zhen’s return was also to discuss sending another group of warriors to rotate in their place.

His arrival sent the chieftain, the clan elders, and Grand Chief Yi Ke into wild delight.

“Hahaha…”

On the ancestral shrine, the chieftain and the elders were all grinning from ear to ear.

Even Yi Ke, who was usually stern and seldom smiled, showed a long-missed look of joy.

They had actually mined more than three thousand crystals from that essence vein. This was an earth-shaking fortune, enough to let the Yi Clan truly rise again.

But Yi Tian soon struck the chieftain and the elders with a blow to the head.

He and the other members of the Reincarnation Squad had divided twenty percent of that enormous haul among themselves, more than seven hundred crystals in all, with Yi Tian alone taking over four hundred.

This made the chieftain and the others feel as though they were bleeding, filled with regret.

“You lot won’t have much use for so many crystals. Better let us keep them for safekeeping, so they won’t be lost. If you need them, you can make a request to the tribe. What do you think?”

The chieftain still had his eye on the crystals in Yi Tian’s hands.

“No need.”

Yi Tian refused without the slightest hesitation. “I still think I don’t have enough. If you, old sir, want to support me a little, I certainly won’t turn it down. The more, the better!”

“Haha…”

Chief Yi Du laughed and let the matter pass.

The chieftain and the elders hid those more than two thousand crystals in an underground chamber, offering them beneath the statue of their ancestor, the divine Yi.

Besides the Seal of the Dragon, that underground chamber had layers upon layers of mechanisms, and only when the keys held by the chieftain and the elders were brought together could it be opened. It was utterly secure.

Faced with such precious crystals, the chieftain and the elders were no longer as generous as before.

After lengthy discussion, they finally decided that only warriors of the ninth rank or above would be allotted a crystal, and upon breaking through to the human rank, they would receive another.

Otherwise, even with more crystals than they could count, they still would not be enough for the thousands of warriors in the tribe.

As treasures that would allow the Yi Clan to rise again, the crystals could not be squandered lightly. They had to be strictly controlled. Those two thousand-odd crystals were enough to sustain the glory of the Yi Clan for hundreds or even thousands of years.

Yi Tian paid no mind to the chieftain’s grand designs for the future. After receiving more than four hundred crystals, he returned home.

His mother, Su Yue’e, Yi Xiaolong, and Yi Xiaoting were overjoyed. He had been gone for nearly half a year, and they had worried and missed him terribly. Once Yi Tian returned, his mother immediately prepared a lavish feast, and the family gathered happily together.

After lunch, Yi Tian finally found a rare moment of leisure.

At that time, he took three crystals from his storage pouch and gave one each to his mother, Xiaolong, and Xiaoting.

He repeatedly instructed them not to reveal the existence of the crystals lightly.

With these crystals, Yi Tian no longer needed to worry about his mother’s cultivation. At the very least, she could advance smoothly to the human rank.

As for Xiaolong and Xiaoting, so long as they carried the crystals with them at all times, wisps of the crystal essence would slowly seep through their skin and into their bodies, tempering bones and sinews, organs and blood, purifying their flesh from all impurity and protecting them from illness, while also improving the quality of their foundation.

Of course, Xiaolong and the others were only twelve this year, and they still had two more years before cultivation could begin.

If they started too early, it could cause abnormalities in their growth and development, leaving them with a childlike appearance and build. Their meridians would also be far too tender to withstand great strain, which carried many drawbacks.

Otherwise, Yi Tian would not have minded letting Xiaolong and the others cultivate in advance.

“Woof! Woof! Woof!”

Nearby, Little Black immediately came over, wearing an ingratiating look. Its eyes shone as it stared at the crystals in Yi Tian and Xiaoting’s hands, clearly longing for them.

Yi Tian took out a crystal from his storage pouch and tossed it over.

Little Black became a streak of black shadow in an instant and swallowed the crystal in one gulp.

To put it no exaggeration, the energy contained in a single crystal was enough to carry an ordinary person with no cultivation all the way to the peak of the ninth rank and still have plenty left over. Yet after Little Black swallowed it, there was not the slightest sign of discomfort.

After swallowing a crystal, Little Black lay down on the ground and began to absorb it, a faint luster rising through the fur on its body.

In the days that followed, Yi Tian cultivated solely with the crystals, driving the Great Sun Heavenly Art to its utmost limit.

Every day, he could feel vast quantities of supreme yang true qi being born within his dantian, expanding outward at astonishing speed.

By the third day, his dantian space had been completely filled with supreme yang true qi.

By the fourth day, that true qi was further compressed and refined.

By the fifth day, the supreme yang true qi had grown unimaginably dense, condensing into a sun dozens of miles across that occupied more than half of his dantian space, until the entire region blazed with fire.

By the sixth day, that sun of true qi was refined even further.

By the seventh day, the supreme yang true qi had been honed to the extreme, and not a single thread of true qi could be accommodated in the dantian space any longer.

Within just seven short days, Yi Tian had soared from the early ninth rank all the way to the peak of the ninth rank. Such was the terrifying speed of cultivation with crystals—nothing short of shocking.

Such fearsome speed came at an equally astonishing cost.

In those seven days, Yi Tian had consumed a single crystal. It was truly astonishing, revealing just how vast and condensed his true qi had become. This was the power of a heavenly art: a foundation far stronger than that of those at the same level, and the confidence to press down all rivals in battle.

At present, facing the peak ninth-rank experts of the eight great families, Yi Tian feared he could slaughter them in just a few moves.

His strength was now beyond comparison to what it had once been.

He even possessed the confidence to contend with human-rank powerhouses, of course referring to those at the essence-qi realm.

Having broken through to the peak of the ninth rank, the next step was to temper his apertures, transform them into spirit apertures, condense true essence, and in one leap step into the human rank.

Tempering spirit apertures was a long and painstaking process.

Moreover, every spirit aperture tempered at this stage would consume a great deal of true qi. This depended on the quality of the qi: the more condensed, pure, and powerful it was, the faster the tempering proceeded.

Among the few surviving ancient texts passed down by the Yi Clan, there were records concerning the breakthrough into the human rank.

Yi Tian recalled the contents of that ancient volume.

It gave a detailed account of the many subtleties of the human-rank breakthrough. In ancient times, martial practitioners would temper all the apertures throughout the body one by one, transforming them into spirit apertures.

This differed from the methods used today by most sects and top powers.

The common method now had already abandoned the step of tempering every aperture in the body, and instead only tempered those apertures involved in the cultivation technique one had learned.

This saved more than half the time.

However, such a breakthrough greatly restricted the cultivator’s future potential. It was to chase immediate gain while neglecting the root.

Yi Tian decided to open every aperture in his body, transforming them all into spirit apertures, and truly, perfectly step into the human rank without leaving the slightest regret. Only in this way could he walk higher and farther.