Jiang Chengyun’s reaction made Jiang Qiulan immediately realize the ambiguity in what she’d said. She pressed her lips together slightly, about to add a clarification.
Shen Yi took the dark blade from his waist and set it on the table.
“This belongs to someone you knew?”
He thought of how You Longtao had looked at this blade for a long time, that first meeting. And in the ruined temple, the way this woman had let her gaze pass over his waist with studied casualness. There had also been those occasional looks she’d sent him — the ones that seemed to reach back toward something remembered.
Shen Yi kept alert out of habit. None of these things had escaped him. He’d simply had no reason to bring them up. Now that she had, he wasn’t a petty person about it.
“…”
Jiang Qiulan blinked, then gave a quiet nod.
“Yes.”
She also understood, in that moment, why she’d been treating the young man as something like the old friend she’d lost. Beyond the blade, there was another important reason — he simply grasped what she meant without needing it spelled out.
Even that remark full of possible misreadings — he’d seen through to what she actually wanted to say.
“If you don’t need it urgently, I’ll give it to you once I have the new one.”
He hung the dark blade back at his waist. Even with a new weapon, there was no guarantee it would feel natural immediately. She only wanted it as a memento — she wouldn’t be in a hurry.
“Thank you.” Jiang Qiulan seemed genuinely to prefer this kind of exchange — nothing excessive said, nothing unnecessary expressed. She was honestly not very good at dealing with people.
Jiang Chengyun felt roughly the same as he had while listening to the technical explanation a moment ago. Everything going over his head.
How did you determine it belonged to someone she knew? You worked it out in two or three sentences?
You’re not even considering whether I can follow any of this, are you?
These two were supposed to become Qingzhou’s next generation of leadership together. Why did he have the persistent feeling of being entirely unable to enter the conversation?
“Get the War Temple refinement arranged as soon as possible. Don’t worry about anything else.” Jiang Qiulan walked toward the door.
When she had gone into the adjacent room—
Shen Yi looked at Jiang Chengyun. “What is the War Temple refinement?”
The straightforward middle-aged man finally found a foothold.
He was also somewhat puzzled by why this question had come up now, but set that aside.
“The golden dharma forms you saw today — the ones left behind after the divine spirits of those Spirit-Transformation stage practitioners passed on. You can think of it as — taking a tiny portion of their golden form like a medicine, and absorbing it into yourself.”
“Only a very small fraction, of course. And it only passes through the body for about ten breaths. A practitioner with excellent aptitude can retain around sixty percent. Someone like me, average — roughly forty to fifty percent.”
He thought back to his own Condensate stage. “I used two refinements to condense a rough core. Then six more after that — now I’m only one step from Condensate Perfection. But we’ve trained different Condensate methods, so take that only as a rough reference.”
At that, Shen Yi felt a faint, retrospective relief.
Good thing Jiang Qiulan had interrupted him. Otherwise he’d already been planning to just push the realm with demon lifespan directly.
When he’d needed to fill the qi sea for Jade Liquid Perfection back then — he’d had to devour mountains of beast cores on top of spending nearly six hundred years’ worth of time.
Heaven and earth were stingy. Cultivation meant taking.
The War Temple refinement was just changing the target of that taking — from demons and heavenly medicines to practitioners who had already passed on.
“Right — a moment ago, General Jiang said to arrange the refinement—”
Jiang Chengyun cleaned up the ceramic shards with a sweep of qi, then looked sideways, a complexity in his eyes he couldn’t quite cover.
“So you actually understood everything she explained? You’re not pretending? And you don’t need more time to get familiar with it?”
Shen Yi closed the panel and shook his head. “Should be fine.”
Six hundred and seventy-nine years. At the same pace as the Twin-Harmony True Intent, that was nearly Major Mastery territory. However difficult the Heaven-Devouring Art was, it was still just a Condensate method.
He had the entire process clear in his mind. The only thing missing was actually accumulating the cultivation base.
He closed his eyes and let the vast new knowledge that had entered settle.
This technique, supposedly the first Condensate method in all of Great Qian — certified Rare by the panel — only had one real advantage over ordinary Condensate methods when you examined it clearly.
It was fast.
It produced a Heaven-Devouring core-infant of extraordinary greed as quickly as possible. Compared to the core-infants nurtured through other core-nurturing stage methods — which required careful tending — this one had no preferences whatsoever. It took everything. It didn’t care about qi being mixed or impure, or about whether any given source of nourishment was technically appropriate.
Now Shen Yi finally understood why Jiang Qiulan had recommended it.
Only the inner core condensed by the Heaven-Devouring method could actually hold demonic force.
But a core-infant this voracious would necessarily be more volatile, more difficult to keep in check.
Which was why the Solar-Fusion Furnace was needed to suppress it — and then, ultimately, the divine spirit would displace its consciousness, completing the core-shattering process, and proving the Mixed Origin Grandmaster realm.
Having a clearer picture of the Condensate stage now—
Shen Yi also lost any remaining interest in acquiring a golden dharma form for himself.
If the divine spirit was given to the core-infant, it couldn’t also be given to a dharma spirit. This wasn’t controlling two treasured implements simultaneously — it meant entrusting the consciousness entirely to something. One soul didn’t divide in two. That path led somewhere he had no interest in going.
He stepped outside and looked at the War Temple rising ahead. Faint disappointment, briefly.
Then his fingertip gave a small involuntary movement, and something came back to him.
He opened the panel. A line he’d passed over earlier came quickly into view.
【Demon Origin: Can be used to reshape a demon soul, to serve at your side, enslaved for eternity, never to transcend, suffering all manner of worldly torment, to protect its master with supreme methods.】
To protect its master with supreme methods.
He said it inwardly once. Drew a slow breath. A bold idea moved through his mind.
The following day.
Jiang Chengyun got the arrangements sorted with the demon-hunter office quickly.
Faced with a Demon Suppression General who needed ten refinements, even the pace of things had increased considerably.
Four figures in pale blue robes appeared quietly at the front of the War Temple — all ancient-faced, looking as though half of them had already been reclaimed by the earth. They walked slowly into the main hall.
In the center, below all thirteen golden forms, a black-armored young man had already taken his position.
The four raised their hands lightly. Dense white mist surged at the temple entrance, cutting the interior off from everything outside.
“Sit cross-legged. Still the breath, still the mind.”
Shen Yi settled onto the cushion. The position was a particular one — exactly where the gazes of all the great golden forms converged.
Ferocious yaksha expressions. A lion-bear coiled in rest. The beast-headed, human-bodied forms, each holding a golden mace in both hands—
But compared to those twelve figures of savage power, the six-zhang golden form at the center — which looked more ordinary than the rest — was the one making Shen Yi’s eyes narrow slightly on instinct.
In the dead stillness of the War Temple, the eyes of the arhat golden form had moved.
“…”
He steadied himself.
He hadn’t been wrong that day.
Of all the forms here, only the arhat was alive.
(End of Chapter)