Life as a Rogue Cultivator

Chapter 278: The Process of Elimination

Looking at the formation disk now, there's no need to study it any further. Back when he was slogging through it with Liu Daoran, hammering out the disk key, he already had a decent picture of how the thing was built. Now that he’d got it in his hands, it’s crystal clear. Really, with just five Sect Leader tokens, he could fuse it in no time. And he could do it anytime, anywhere.There was no need to put extra thought into how to set it up either. After getting a look at the feng shui of Miao Feng Mountain’s two peaks, he already knew exactly where the disk should go.

Now that I know the secret of the Sect Leader tokens, there’s almost no way Lord He would just let me walk away alive. Once he’d got the formation set up, the man would definitely make his move.

He couldn’t help but mutter to himself. From the Ghost Banyan, to the Wans, to the Zhus, and now Lord He and his nephew... it was one disaster after another, never-ending. This trip to the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains was turning into a real trial by fire.

So the real thing he needed to think about was how to make it through this ordeal alive.

A night passed just like that. Peak Lord He checked Liu Xiaolou’s meridians, then said, “Your injuries don’t seem too serious. You’ve recovered most of the way. We can begin now, right?”

Liu Xiaolou nodded. “I’ve thought it through carefully. If the formation disk isn’t working, the reason can only fall into one of three categories. First, the disk was made incorrectly. Second, the person activating it doesn’t have enough cultivation. Third, the formation was set up wrong. So I plan to rule them out one by one, starting with the disk’s refinement.”

Peak Lord He paused to think. “The disk itself should be fine. Could the problem be with the disk key? But if the key were wrong, why would it let me control the disk at all?”

Liu Xiaolou said, “There are a lot of technical details involved. I need to take the key apart, inspect it, and then refine it again.”

Peak Lord He disagreed. “If you take it apart and can’t put it back together, won’t you ruin my formation disk?”

“Senior He,” replied Liu Xiaolou, “my life is my own. If I weren’t confident I could restore it, how would I dare try? And if I fail to fix it, you can execute me on the spot. I won’t argue.”

Seeing Peak Lord He hesitate, Liu Xiaolou pressed the point. “Senior He... I helped refine the grand formations of Jinting Mountain and Luofu Mountain. A small disk key like this is nothing to me.”

Peak Lord He finally agreed, though his face was dark. He warned, “If you mess it up, I’ll send you to the Third Peak as a furnace slave.”

Liu Xiaolou smiled. “Senior He, you can relax. I’m not cut out to be anyone’s furnace slave. If you would, please take me to the mouth of the earth-fire pit. I’ll also need two jade pendants and the materials used to refine the disk key. I’ll know exactly which ones once I take this key apart.”

From the tests earlier, this young formation master was clearly far more skilled than he was. Peak Lord He had nothing left to say and followed his instructions without argument.

The Second Peak of Miao Feng Mountain did indeed have an earth-fire vent, located inside a cave halfway up the mountain. The cave was stocked with all kinds of spiritual jade and materials, neatly arranged and looking quite tidy.

But Liu Xiaolou knew that a real formation master would never organize things this cleanly. Back at Chicheng Mountain’s market, when he refined a formation disk with Diao Daoyi and the others, the area around the earth-fire vent had been a total mess. Materials were piled everywhere with no order at all. Yet every formation master knew exactly where each item was. It looked chaotic, but everything was placed where it could be grabbed at a moment’s notice.

Liu Xiaolou lifted the lid and tested the flame. “The quality isn’t quite there,” he said.

Lord He’s eyelids twitch. All of a sudden Liu Xiaolou seemed a lot more mysterious than before.

Then Liu Xiaolou said, “Senior He, please remove the Eightfold Restriction Cord from me.”

At this point, if he wanted the young man to work, he couldn’t keep blocking his meridians. Lord He checked Liu Xiaolou’s cultivation, saw that it was only around the tenth layer of Qi Refinement, and stopped hesitating. He went ahead and took off the Eightfold Restriction Cord.

Liu Xiaolou immediately felt his meridians open up. His true qi started flowing again, pushing out the turbid qi that had been stuck inside him for a whole month.

Hic… hic… Pff… pff…

His qi flowed freely from top to bottom, and his cultivation returned to what it had been.

Once Liu Xiaolou finished clearing his qi, Master He sat cross-legged off to the side, watching as Liu Xiaolou used the earth-fire to take the disk key apart piece by piece. His movements were smooth and precise. And every component he removed was perfectly intact. Lord He found himself thinking:

If only he could win over a formation master of this caliber. Just look at those hands. You’d think he was the one who refined the key in the first place.

Shame, though. He knew far too much…

The disk key might’ve looked like nothing more than a slim jade hairpin, but when it was crafted it had been made from nine separate parts. The main body was a piece of jade shaped into a pin, and the other components included the inner chamber, the metal socket, a carved pendant, the pointed tip, and so on. Taking it apart was no simple task.

By the time he had, Liu Xiaolou wasn’t looking so good. Fat beads of sweat were dripping off his brow one by one.

“Senior He, I need spirit stones. I can’t keep going without them.”

Lord He wasn’t much good at formation work himself, but he had studied it for two years. He knew that formation masters often needed spirit stones when crafting disks, so he didn’t doubt him. He had prepared some in advance, and he handed over three stones right away.

Liu Xiaolou held a spirit stone and spent the whole day absorbing and converting its energy. Once he felt better, he went back to examining each part of the key, sometimes turning a piece in circles to study it, sometimes using his true qi to sense the talismans on it, and sometimes borrowing the earth-fire to burn away the fused spiritual materials.

As he studied the pieces, he kept a spirit stone in hand to replenish his qi, quietly cultivating right under Lord He’s nose. This time he noticed that cultivating the Foot Greater Yang Meridian was far easier than when he had been trapped under the Ghost Banyan tree. It felt as if the gates of the acupoints were only lightly shut and would open with just a gentle push.

The major acupoints Yuzhen and Tianzhu each took only a single day. Dazhu, Fengmen, Feishu, Jueyinshu, Xinshu, Dushu, Geshu, Ganshu, Danshu, Pishu, and Weishu each took anywhere from half a day to a day. The three spirit stones in his hands were converted at an astonishing pace, and he absorbed all of them within nine days.

With the rice cakes He Taichang sent from time to time to keep him nourished, these nine days were the most comfortable Liu Xiaolou had lived in the two years since he entered the Ten-Thousand Great Mountains.

He knew very well why all this was happening. It was tied to Lord Zhu's forceful meridian opening and the 'wandering around' of the two Ghost Banyan seeds. His Foot Greater Yang Meridian had already been opened. What he was doing now was simply the final step of confirming it on his own.

Nine days to study the disk key wasn’t that long, really. But Lord He was clearly getting impatient. Liu Xiaolou, who was always quick to read the room, decided to stop. He wrapped up that step and moved on to the next.

“Lord He, I need to re-refine the key.”

“Is there something wrong with it?”

“It’s hard to say right now. I need to refine it again and see how it turns out. I’ll need you to prepare some more spirit stones.”

Counting what he had already paid to purchase Liu Xiaolou, Lord He had already forked out fifteen spirit stones. He obviously couldn’t afford to quit halfway, so he forced himself to ignore the pain in his heart and handed over more spirit stones.

Liu Xiaolou got another three spirit stones. Each time he finished a round of refining, he spent a full day meditating to recover. After eighteen days of doing this, he finally restored the disk key.

Nine of those days were spent cultivating, during which he also cleared twelve acupoints, from Sanjiaoyu down to Xialiao. That meant he had completed half of the Foot Greater Yang Meridian.

“Let’s test the key,” Liu Xiaolou said.

So Lord He returned to the mountaintop to try the disk again, but the result was exactly the same as before. Nothing changed, and his expression darkened.

Liu Xiaolou hurried on. “Looks like the key isn’t the issue. That means we’ve ruled out the first possibility. Next is the second one...”

Lord He’s eyes went cold. “The second possibility? Are you saying my cultivation level isn’t high enough?”