Bachelor [EN]: Chapter 650

The rumors twisted strangely. The story that Ice Phoenix had killed a Nascent Soul cultivator in an instant later spread as news that Old Devil Hun had been severely injured, wandered around, and died in a joint attack by two cultivators.

This news alone caused a stir in the nearby sea area, but some cultivators recognized Han Li’s identity just from the fact that he had come out of the Illusory Sky Palace and wielded a giant cauldron. Quite a few Nascent Soul cultivators became greedy, and their eyes turned bloodshot.

Unaware of any of this, Han Li transformed into a streak of blue light and flew towards Heavenly Star City. On his way, he passed by several islands, and each time he stopped at the market to buy high-grade spirit stones or exchange rare materials for treasures.

When he had about twenty high-grade spirit stones, Han Li was greatly satisfied and decided to visit a spirit stone mine.

After flying for about a month, a black dot appeared over the distant sea. After a few more hours, Han Li smiled as he saw the towering sacred mountain of Heavenly Star City. Just then, suddenly, a group of about a dozen lights flew towards him from the front.

Han Li scanned the group with his spiritual sense and paused.

There were four or five Core Formation stage cultivators in the group, and even one early-stage Nascent Soul cultivator, who felt strangely familiar. After hesitating for a moment, he finally stood still and hid his aura.

Since Han Li had been flying without concealing his presence, the Heavenly Star City cultivators already knew of his existence.

However, because Han Li hid his aura and thoroughly concealed his cultivation, even when the Foundation Establishment and Core Formation stage cultivators scanned him with their spiritual sense, they could not accurately determine his cultivation level, as if he were shrouded in fog.

Then, someone shouted, and when they looked, it was a cultivator wearing a white bamboo hat. They were wearing a large cloak, making it impossible to distinguish their gender, and the face inside the hat could not be seen either.

‘Hmm?’

However, the aura of the only Nascent Soul cultivator was very familiar. When he tried to use his Brightsight Spirit Eyes [a technique to see through illusions] to look inside the hat, the other person smiled first, revealing a face as white as jade.

“It’s Fellow Cultivator Han! It’s been a long time since we last met. How have you been?”

“Ling Yuling!”

Han Li muttered as he recognized the woman’s face. She was a steward of Heavenly Star City whom he had rescued outside Heavenly Star City before.

“It’s been quite a while, but I’m honored that Brother Han recognized me at a glance. I must also congratulate you on reaching the Nascent Soul stage!”

Ling Yuling smiled, folding her slender hands. Although she could not accurately assess his cultivation, she sensed that he was stronger than her, so she treated him even more warmly.

“Miss Ling has also condensed her Nascent Soul.”

When Han Li said this, she was about to answer, but then turned her head and coldly ordered the other cultivators.

“You go ahead first. I’ll catch up after talking for a while.”

“Yes! Elder Ling!”

The Core Formation and Foundation Establishment stage cultivators immediately bowed and accepted the order. Han Li watched them, feeling a little strange, as the late-stage Core Formation elder led the group and disappeared into the distance.

“It’s a pity. I’m on my way to support an island under attack by the Rebel Alliance, so I can’t talk for long,” Ling Yuling said, turning to him with a sigh.

“I’ve heard about the conflict between your palace and the Rebel Alliance.”

At those words, Ling Yuling responded with a bitter smile, then looked at Han Li, her expression becoming strange.

“Brother Han, you’re not at the early stage anymore, are you?”

“I’m just a little ahead of Miss Ling. With your talent as a cultivator, you’ll catch up soon enough,” Han Li replied vaguely with a smile. At those words, Ling Yuling was greatly surprised. It had not even been two hundred years since she had last seen him, yet he had advanced from the Core Formation stage to the mid-Nascent Soul stage. It was an incredible leap.

Her expression changed from moment to moment, but she eventually regained her composure, though she could not hide her envy.

“You truly are a genius that appears only once in ten thousand years. To have advanced so many stages in such a short time, I can only admire you!”

“I’m not a genius, I just had some luck.”

“By the way, do you have any business here? If there’s anything I can help you with, I’d be happy to.”

“It’s nothing special. I’m just going to the outer sea. I think I’ll need to use your palace’s teleportation array.”

“Then that’s fortunate. Recently, we’ve closed most of the outer sea teleportation arrays due to concerns about the Rebel Alliance’s incursions. Only two are left, and if you take this spirit token, you can use them freely.” Ling Yuling smiled, her eyes shining like stars. Even without her help, he was not afraid of the restrictions or guards and could have infiltrated Heavenly Star City, but since she offered him an easy path, there was no reason to refuse.

Thus, Han Li smiled and accepted the spirit token she handed over. Then, they exchanged a few more words before Han Li transformed into a streak of blue light and flew towards the distant island.

As he disappeared from view, the smile on Ling Yuling’s face vanished, and after a moment, she took out a silver voice transmission talisman from her sleeve. After saying a few words, she stretched out her hand, and the talisman turned into a ball of fire and disappeared.

Only then did she sigh as if she had no choice, adjust her bamboo hat, and turn into a streak of light, flying in a different direction. As Ling Yuling’s light streak moved away, a silver flash appeared nearby, and a blue figure appeared in the direction the voice transmission talisman had flown.

After a short while, a man stood motionless in the air tens of miles away. It was Han Li. He stood with his hands behind his back, expressionless, waiting for something.

A figure flashed in front of him, and a humanoid puppet appeared, extending its hand. A flame like a fire snake was trapped in a silver light, unable to escape.

*Hoo!*

Han Li narrowed his eyes and grabbed the air, causing the fire snake to be sucked in, explode, and burst into flames. After quickly scanning the contents with his spiritual sense, his expression darkened.

With a wavering gaze, he extinguished the ball of fire and frowned as he looked towards Heavenly Star City.

“…There’s no one in the Chaotic Star Sea who doesn’t know I have the Illusory Sky Cauldron. I’ll have to change my appearance and move around!”

*Thump! Crack!*

His face was enveloped in a blue light, and at the same time, the sound of bones resetting and flesh tearing could be heard from all over his body. After a moment, he transformed into a sturdy man with a dark blue face, retrieved the puppet, and flew towards Heavenly Star City.

“… !”

However, at that moment, a figure sitting cross-legged in an underground cave on the sacred mountain of Heavenly Star City stirred. He held a ball of fire in one hand, which was unexpectedly the voice transmission talisman that Han Li had destroyed.

The figure silently checked the message in the ball of fire and then immediately extinguished the talisman.

“What happened? Yuling used a sound transmission talisman. She wouldn’t use such a precious thing for no reason. She hasn’t even left Heavenly Star City yet, so nothing bad could have happened, right?”

Suddenly, a young woman’s voice came from the other side of the cave.

“It’s not that. She said she met an interesting person nearby. She wants to introduce them to us and hopes we can bring them into the palace!” The man who received the talisman replied slowly, his voice hoarse as if he had not spoken for a long time.

“Oh, an interesting person?” The woman was relieved to hear that Ling Yuling was safe and showed curiosity.

“Do you remember the Illusory Sky Cauldron from over a hundred years ago?”

“I do. Could this be related to the Illusory Sky Cauldron?”

“It seems that the person who took the treasure from under the noses of ten thousand people and the person who saved Yuling are actually the same person. Today, he was about to use Heavenly Star City’s teleportation array to go to the outer sea when he happened to meet Yuling.”

“If I remember correctly, he was just a Core Formation stage cultivator. I don’t know if he’s worth recruiting.”

“You might not believe it, but Yuling suspects that he has already reached the mid-Nascent Soul stage! If that’s true, he’s made incredible progress in less than two hundred years, so he’s not someone to be taken lightly.”

“Mid-Nascent Soul stage… Back then, after the Illusory Sky Cauldron disappeared from the Illusory Sky Palace, we sent cultivators to investigate separately. I thought he was unlikely to be from the Chaotic Star Sea. Could he have been a cultivator from a large sect in Great Jin [a powerful cultivation region]? No matter how talented he is, it would have been difficult to reach the mid-Nascent Soul stage so quickly without someone supporting him from behind.”

The woman seemed to know a lot about Great Jin, surprisingly.

“Whether he’s a Great Jin cultivator or not, he was lucky from the moment he took the Illusory Sky Cauldron. If our Yuan Magnetic Divine Light [a powerful technique] hadn’t repelled treasures with the five elements and if the Illusory Sky Cauldron hadn’t been useless to late-stage cultivators, this person wouldn’t have had a chance to run away with the Illusory Sky Cauldron.”

The man’s tone was filled with regret.

“If we had mastered the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light, we could have used the power of the five elements and controlled treasures with the five elements… But we can’t master it, so what can we do?”

“If I had known earlier, I would never have asked you to cultivate the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light with me. In a way, I’m sorry to you.”

“It’s okay. Even if I had chosen a different path, I wouldn’t have reached the Transformation stage in this life. If there hadn’t been a problem at the end, we both would have reached the Transformation stage at the same time. Then we could have lived for at least another thousand years.”

The woman shook her head as if it were nothing.

“Who would have imagined that you need to have the five elemental roots [a cultivator’s innate affinity to the five elements] to learn the final stage of the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light! If someone had such mixed elemental roots, it would have been difficult for them to reach the Foundation Establishment or Core Formation stage, let alone qualify to learn the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light.

No wonder no one has ever mastered the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light, which was created a long time ago. It turns out there was such a secret hidden… Even I, Ling Tianlei, who has a natural talent that surpasses even the past masters of Heavenly Star City, overcame three difficult obstacles of the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light, but who would have known I would end up like this?

I even think that the ancient cultivator who created the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light deliberately set a trap to trick later generations. How can anyone master it with such perfectly contradictory conditions!”

The man became enraged as he spoke, revealing his resentment towards the ancient cultivator who created the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light. The woman just sighed deeply and comforted him.

“It’s okay. I don’t know what the ancient cultivator was thinking when he created this technique, but it’s already done. It’s fortunate that we found out about this early and stopped cultivating the Yuan Magnetic Mountain [a cultivation technique].

Otherwise, the five elements in our bodies would have gone berserk and killed us. In that sense, Liu Dao and Wan Gu San helped us. They made us break out of seclusion and realize that there was a problem with the technique.”

“Hmph, Liu Dao and Wan Gu San were already defeated by me a long time ago, so they’re not worth mentioning. If it weren’t for the limitations of the Yuan Magnetic Mountain, I would have stormed their lairs and finished them off long ago. In fact, this problem isn’t completely unsolvable, so it’s a pity.”

“What do you mean? Have you found a way to completely change our elemental roots?”

“I’ve been searching through ancient scriptures and related records for over a hundred years since the problem occurred. I finally found one of the ancient secret techniques. It doesn’t change the elemental roots themselves, but it’s a technique that refines treasures with pure attributes to supplement the lacking elemental roots.”

“There’s such a simple solution?”

“Of course, the refining method is difficult, and finding suitable treasures is also difficult, but it’s not impossible for us. The key is that the secret technique can only be used once. If we try to refine a second treasure, our Nascent Soul won’t be able to withstand it, and our bodies will collapse due to the backlash of the secret technique. If we hadn’t had four elemental roots from the beginning, we wouldn’t be able to use this method.”

“I see. It’s definitely a useless technique for cultivators like us who have heavenly spirit roots [a rare and powerful type of elemental affinity].”

The woman’s excited heart sank.

“It’s okay! Let’s just give up on the hope of mastering the Yuan Magnetic Divine Light. Even if we find another solution, we only have a hundred years left to live… Instead, we should focus on helping Yuling. She’s already succeeded in reaching the Nascent Soul stage, so if we use the empowerment method for a few decades, we can force her to break through her cultivation. Then she can manage the palace. Of course, we must eliminate Liu Dao and Wan Gu San first to remove any future threats!”

The woman suddenly revealed a murderous aura with an icy voice.

“If we are prepared to sacrifice our lives, it won’t be difficult to eliminate them both.”

“Then what should we do with that Han fellow? He’s a mid-Nascent Soul cultivator with the Illusory Sky Cauldron. If such a person tries to control the Chaotic Star Sea when we’re not around, it would be a disaster. Of course, Yuling seems to have a good impression of him.”

“A mid-Nascent Soul cultivator with such natural talent is worth recruiting. Let’s see if he’s willing to join the palace. We can control him with restrictions and take the Illusory Sky Cauldron to let Yuling use it. Then we can give him enough compensation with other treasures. Who would say anything? However, if he doesn’t want to, we’ll have to eliminate him to prevent future problems.”

The man’s tone also became cold.

“That’s a good idea.”

“However, since the voice transmission talisman has already been destroyed, it seems that the other party has noticed something, so it’s not something we can just send an elder to handle. Let’s go ourselves.”

“Even if he has a Heaven-Reaching Treasure [an extremely powerful treasure], do we really need both of us to deal with a mid-stage cultivator? I’ll go. Within the influence of the Yuan Magnetic Mountain, even a late-stage cultivator won’t be my match.”

“Then do that! But don’t underestimate him too much. He’s a famous person in the Chaotic Star Sea with the Illusory Sky Cauldron,” the man said, not really objecting but worrying about the woman.

“No matter how powerful a treasure with the five elements is, it can’t exert its full power within the influence of the Yuan Magnetic Mountain. Don’t worry.”

The woman laughed it off lightly.

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