Chapter 584 – The Five Steles, Temptation, and the Lotus Throne - Part 2

The first to appear before Li Yuan was the stele for creating Wolfmothers.

He gave it a cursory glance.

The skill could only be crafted by someone who had once reached the peak of Earth Soul cultivation. It required the element of

earth aqua

to forge. Once completed, it would forcibly bestow the power of a jade husk upon an ordinary person.

What made it truly fascinating was that the power didn’t come out of nowhere, it was extracted from the stele itself.

In this process, the stele acted like a mold.

The soul of the target was pulled from their body, pressed into the mold of the secret stele, then returned to its body. As long as the person survived the process, the transformation was complete.

But just like how only a master chef knew when to pull a dish from the fire, only someone who had once stood atop the fifth stage of the Earth Soul Realm could perform the procedure correctly.

𝓯𝙧𝓮𝓮𝒘𝓮𝙗𝙣𝒐𝒗𝒆𝓵.𝓬𝓸𝒎

Beyond that, the skill also placed strict requirements on the target.

For example, to create a

Wolfmother

, the subject had to be a pure-hearted maiden. The more innocent and kind she was, the higher the success rate.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. Li Yuan had heard Lu Xuanxian mention something called a Dragon Vein secret infusion before. This was essentially the same idea. soul compatibility.

If the soul was a match, the ritual would succeed.

If not, death. That was why his father-in-law, Zhu Ban, had survived the ritual back then, while all the other weaponsmiths had perished.

That same father-in-law now taught at the Myriad Lineages Academy. Li Yuan had quietly observed a few of his lectures from a distance, never once disturbing him.

The second stele for creating jade servants functioned much like the first. It, too, acted as a mold. It, too, required a master at the fifth stage of the Earth Soul Realm. And it, too, demanded soul compatibility with the target.

The only difference? This time, the ideal subject was not a sweet, innocent girl but a cold-blooded, violent, emotionally detached man who reveled in slaughter.

The third stele, inscribed with the secret art for creating a nine-headed direwolf, shared the same foundational principles as the previous two. It was a mold and required a master who had once reached the fifth stage of the Earth Soul Realm. It had to be used in specific conditions. But unlike the others, the target was no longer a person.

It was flesh. High-rank flesh, whether from a powerful beast or a human cultivator.

Granted, it was hard to find such flesh in the desolate Western Extremes. But then again, the frozen lands were littered with corpses, weren’t they?

And it wasn’t as if the powerhouses buried in the Deathless Tomb hadn’t come prepared. Before entombment, they had made arrangements, gathered resources, hidden stashes. This wasn’t some haphazard scheme. It was planned.

The fourth stele recorded the full cultivation technique for the Earth Soul Realm.

And unlike the fragment Li Yuan had previously seen, where one could only cultivate up to the second stage, this was the complete set.

From the first stage all the way to the fifth, every step was detailed.

Even more, it offered an alternative path. Cultivation no longer had to begin by destroying a ghost domain and rebuilding atop it. Instead, it could be done in places of extreme Yin, near large bodies of

aqua

, for instance.

In such places, a unique trait of the cultivator would be drawn out and enhanced. The ghost domain, after all, was simply an obsession infused with Yin energy. Aqua played a similar role. It amplified Yin energy and allowed one to climb the stages of the Earth Soul Realm.

But there was a catch. To survive this amplification, one also needed special spirit stones imbued with Yang energy.

Li Yuan knew the type. They were called Heavenly Fire Spirit Stones.

These stones bolstered a cultivator’s Yang energy, preventing them from being overwhelmed by the deepening Yin. Otherwise, they’d literally cultivate themselves to death before even reaching success.

Even with both Yin and Yang in play, cultivating near aqua only got a person to the third stage.

To go further, one needed something more, abundant spiritual energy.

Spiritual energy acted as the great equalizer. A lubricant. Whatever the body lacked, it helped make up for. It stabilized everything.

That was why martial artists in the Central Plains who had reached fourth rank could enter third rank only after reaching the Eastern Sea. Their broken souls were slowly nourished and mended by the region’s dense spiritual energy.

Of course, that was easier said than done. Countless people flocked to the Eastern Sea in hopes of a breakthrough. Yet so far, only one had truly succeeded, Ping’an.

But then, Ping’an was no ordinary cultivator. He was a freak born with flesh, blood, and a soul in perfect harmony.

Li Yuan already knew all this. Sheng’er had long since filled him in on the Eastern Sea’s situation.

In fact, even there, Earth Soul cultivation was rare. Only one sect among the Five Spirit Institute practiced it, the Earth Soul Faculty.

It was likely the only place where someone could push Earth Soul cultivation all the way to the fifth stage.

The fifth and final stele contained a Heaven Soul cultivation technique, from the first through fifth stages of the third rank.

Heaven Soul cultivation was similar to Earth Soul.

It, too, required proximity to elemental forces. But this time, the element was fire, either through Yang flames or meat fields steeped in powerful Yang energy, or vast reserves of Heavenly Fire Spirit Stones.

These sources would push the Heaven Soul forward.

But the Yang energy was intense, overwhelming, even. That’s where Earth Fog Spirit Stones came in. Their job was to temper the heat, to help the body withstand the excessive Yang energy during cultivation.

Beyond the third stage, spiritual energy once again became essential for the same balancing reason.

And as far as Li Yuan knew, there was only one place that could support Heaven Soul cultivation to the fifth stage, the Heaven Soul Faculty, which was also part of the Five Spirits Institute.

After studying the steles thoroughly, and with the help of two top experts who had once reached the peak of the Earth Soul Realm, Li Yuan finally pieced together his own situation.

Turns out, for him, the usual requirement of cultivating beside a strong Yang flame...didn’t even apply.

Because Li Yuan himself was a flame, or more precisely, a higher level kind, the withered flame.

A vast, inexhaustible mass of blazing Yang energy churned within him. Not only was it enough to sustain his own cultivation, but it could even serve as a resource for those who trained near him.

His problem, however, lay in Yin energy, in his lack of a proper channel for it.

At first, he had thought all those ancestral seal seeds within him must count as Yin energy.

But that wasn’t the case. The fundamental structure of power was much simpler. From the inside out, it went like this.

Yin → Soul → Yang

Beyond that came the body.

Yin and Yang were like a house, a container that held the soul.

If the house existed, the soul could instantly return to it. But in ordinary people, the Yin and Yang energies were so weak they were practically negligible. That’s why, once they died, their spirits scattered immediately, no house left to return to.

A fourth rank cultivator could be reborn from a drop of blood because even their blood held Yin and Yang strong enough to preserve the soul.

But strip that outer shell of Yin and Yang, and there was no path to resurrection. Just death.

As for Li Yuan, those countless ancestral seal seeds had merely forged an extremely powerful soul.

And yet his soul could withstand the withered flame.

Either his soul was absurdly strong...or it was imbued with an extraordinary amount of Yin energy.

He thought back. The first time he absorbed the Yang flame was by Yan Yu’s side.

And during those days...well, there wasn’t much they

didn’t

do.

So perhaps it hadn’t been his soul that held up against the fire at all.

Perhaps it was her.

Li Yuan shook his head, brushing the thought aside.

Whatever the cause, one thing was clear. He was overflowing with Yang energy, but severely lacking in Yin.

If he had both Yin and Yang, he wouldn’t need any external resources. Just going to the Eastern Sea would be enough to push both his Earth Soul and Heaven Soul cultivation to the fifth stage.

The great upheaval, 30 years in the making, was nearly here.

Most people would probably scoff and think what was the point of cultivating techniques would eventually go obsolete in the future?

But Li Yuan saw it differently. This might be the

last

chance to push his Heaven Soul, Earth Soul, and Human Soul cultivation all the way to peak third rank.

The door was about to close.

And once it shut, there would be no returning.

Whatever the new world looked like, Li Yuan believed he had to seize this final opportunity. He had to elevate his strength to the highest it could be, so that when he stepped into that new world, he would do so as the strongest from the old.