Chapter 163
More than a couple of months had passed since she reached 10-star.
During that time, Baek Cheong had clung to qi absorption and filled a little over twenty percent of the doubled dantian.
Now that her dantian had doubled upon reaching 10-star, filling it was slow going.
That was because the pull that drew in spiritual energy grew sluggishly along with her cultivation realm.
Still, she steadily built it up, inhaling spiritual energy every single day without missing one.
She had also grown used to the method of compressing the incoming spiritual energy while absorbing it.
‘My height still hasn't changed this year either.’
Before she knew it, one year had ended, a new year had begun, and she was now fourteen.
But the body reflected in the mirror was no different from last year.
Her height and her small chest were both frozen at around eleven years old.
Normally, she'd have looked down at her chest and pouted.
But now it no longer even felt worth bringing up, so she just let it go.
‘What's a bit of growth to a cultivator, anyway?’
She had already figured out the reason her body wasn't growing.
She would fix it someday; for now, filling her dantian came first.
Baek Cheong turned away from the mirror without hesitation.
What truly held her attention was the information posts she had stacked up in the Nameless Forum.
‘Is this the hundredth one now?’
The information posts explaining glyphs had now reached one hundred.
It was the fruit of diligently writing over the course of several months.
She had carefully written explanations ranging from basic glyphs to difficult ones.
Yet the Merit was still nowhere to be seen.
[Merit 0 / Karma 0]
Even after posting a hundred of them, the amount of Merit she had received was zero.
But it wasn't as though there were no replies at all.
[Dao friend(33.3): Huuuh!]
This time even the huuuh was shortened, reduced to a single cry.
‘What on earth is that guy even huuuh-ing about.’
Besides that, there were also a few Dao friends here and there, scarce as beans sprouting in a drought, who found it praiseworthy.
[Dao friend(118.9): Ooh, you explained this one too?]
Only Dao friend(33.3), who popped up every time, and the occasional admiring Dao friend replied.
But none of the Dao friends actually pressed Merit.
‘Well, by now I've laid enough groundwork.’
Baek Cheong skimmed the replies and calmly soothed herself.
The Nameless Forum was full of scammers posing as good Dao friends for years.
Compared to that, a few months was absurdly short.
Still, there was no reason to rush.
If others tried to brute-force things with time, she would win with the quality of her posts.
By now, she had laid plenty of groundwork for the image of being a good Dao friend.
‘If the bait's laid, now I need one big hit.’
It seemed a little insufficient to shake the Dao friends' hearts with glyph explanations alone.
It would be nice if she could add a single heart-stirring line of wisdom.
Just as she was turning the idea over, a memory from her past life suddenly surfaced.
It was none other than a figure called Jesus.
‘When I casually mentioned it before, nobody knew what it was.’
Once, she had quietly tossed the name Jesus into the Nameless Forum.
But not a single Dao friend understood it.
Thinking about it, that was only natural.
Because this was a cultivation world far removed from her past life.
‘It was the biggest religion in my past life, though.’
The teachings of Jesus were followed by billions.
He was also someone who had poured out good sayings in abundance.
So she planned to borrow Jesus's teachings a little and present them as if they were her own enlightenment.
Because there wouldn't be a single Dao friend who would notice.
‘The more good words, the better.’
Baek Cheong lifted the corners of her mouth slightly and wrote the post.
She mixed the borrowed sayings together so they sounded like the principles of a cultivator.
『Dao friend(913.14): On the Mindset Needed to Cultivate the Dao.』
[Today I'll try to explain the principles of mind cultivation.
One. If you want something from a Dao friend, give to the Dao friend first. If you want Merit, press Merit first; if you want help, first extend a hand. This is the first knot that untangles ten thousand affinities.
Two. If a Dao friend has pinned Karma to your post, repay them with Merit instead. If you repay resentment with resentment, only Karma grows, and the loop of favor and resentment never breaks. Only one who first cherishes even the Dao friend they dislike truly walks the Great Dao (大道).
Three. Those who pile spirit stones in a storehouse like mountains lose sleep worrying about thieves and worms. But those who pile up Dao heart have nothing to lose and can sleep with their legs stretched out. No matter how many spirit stones you have, if they turn to ash in a single heavenly tribulation, that's the end of it. Store Dao in an imperishable granary.
Four. Look at the spirit herbs blooming in the fields. They are neither planted nor harvested, yet heaven and earth feed them on their own. The harder you struggle to clutch them by force, the farther the Dao drifts away. Heaven and earth will fill the hands of those who open them and leave things to the natural course.
The more you empty yourself, the more you receive; the lower you stoop, the higher you rise—that is the Dao's principle. Blessed are the Dao friends who are poor in spirit.]
[Merit 0 / Karma 0]
It was a post that clearly showed effort, but it was still something that borrowed someone else's words.
Yet as soon as she posted it, replies started coming one after another.
Just then, the war bait from the Spirit Realm that had been heating up the Nameless Forum had finally cooled off a bit.
Her post had slipped into the opening and landed in the Dao friends' eyes.
[Dao friend(76.2): I came in thinking this was some weird post, but I came away enlightened.]
[Dao friend(118.9): Cherish the Dao friend you dislike first... The more I chew on it, the more it hits home.]
[Dao friend(341.8): The part about how emptying yourself lets things fill you up cleared up the blockage in my chest. Thank you, Dao friend.]
The reaction was better than to any of the glyph explanations she had posted so far.
The Dao friends swarmed in one after another, praising it as good words of wisdom.
‘As expected, good words go over well.’
Just then, one Dao friend left a reply.
[Dao friend(417.3): But what sect's mental method is this, exactly? I've never heard of such a teaching.]
└Dao friend(913.14): Jesus.
Baek Cheong blandly posted just the word Jesus.
Then the Dao friends started making up interpretations about the characters as they pleased.
└Dao friend(417.3): Jesus (豫修)... so it means to cultivate in advance? How profound.
└Dao friend(118.9): Even the characters themselves are steeped in the Dao. It seems like a secret art that drifted down from the Upper Realm.
As she read through the replies, she nearly burst out laughing.
They were revering Jesus as if it meant cultivating in advance or some Upper Realm secret art.
‘Nobody knows, so they'll believe anything I tack onto it.’
She had only borrowed someone else's teaching a little, yet the Dao friends added depth to it on their own.
At this point, it seemed like they'd press Merit all on their own.
‘At this point, one Dao friend should press it, right?’
Baek Cheong looked at the Merit count with satisfaction and waited for replies.
But even after a day and then two, the number remained unchanged.
[Merit 0 / Karma 0]
Even after waiting several more days, the zero stayed as firm as ever.
‘The reactions are this good, so why isn't Merit getting pressed?’
Baek Cheong glared back and forth between the replies and the Merit count.
‘Are they still in the middle of enlightenment?’
In the end, she had to admit it.
Merit wasn't something that got pressed just because there were good reactions.
Moving a Dao friend's heart and drawing out Merit were separate matters.
‘If even good words won't do, then what am I supposed to do?’
Baek Cheong felt regretful, but she quietly let go of her lingering attachment to Merit.
She couldn't keep fretting forever while staring only at Merit.
It was better to devote herself to cultivation; that would pay off more.
‘Set Merit aside for now and fill the dantian first.’
She crossed her legs again and focused her mind on qi absorption.
***
And so, another three months passed.
After clinging to qi absorption without rest, she had filled her dantian to fifty percent.
Because she had filled it while compressing the qi, the spiritual energy inside her dantian was densely packed.
In the meantime, she diligently kept posting information and spreading good words in the Nameless Forum.
[Dao friend(55.19): Uncharacteristically, a Dao friend's post is worth keeping in mind.]
[Dao friend(118.9): Learned another thing before I go.]
One reply after another piled up, each saying they had been moved.
But the Merit count was still nailed to zero.
‘There are this many replies, but Merit isn't even peeking out.’
She was burning to check whether any Dao Traces had accumulated.
If her posts had influenced the Dao friends, Dao Traces should have increased.
She had heard that Dao Traces accumulated when you influenced others.
But there was no proper way to tell whether Dao Traces had increased.
To gauge Dao Traces, the only way was to press Merit or Karma on another Dao friend's post.
But if she recklessly pressed them like last time, who knew what sort of commotion would break out.
‘If I go making a fuss and stirring the wound for no reason, it'll turn into a headache again.’
Hadn't it already been exposed that she'd pressed Karma, and hadn't a renowned Dao friend retaliated against her?
She couldn't bring herself to recklessly press anything again just because she was curious about Dao Traces.
In the end, whether Dao Traces had piled up or not remained shrouded in mystery.
That didn't mean the calamity glyph she was preparing to face the heavenly tribulation had made any progress, either.
She still couldn't even make out where the strokes flowed or where they split.
‘Merit, Dao Traces, and the tribulation glyph—all blocked.’
None of the cards she had in hand were working.
Having reached a dead end, Baek Cheong decided to change her mindset.
‘To hell with it.’
She decided to cleanly let go of her greed to shave off Karma with Merit.
The more she struggled to hold on, the more it slipped through her fingers.
Once she emptied her heart like this, she actually felt relieved.
The fear and impatience crouching in a corner of her small chest faded away as if washed clean.
‘If Karma piles on, I'll just strike back as it comes.’
With her dantian already half full, qi condensation was also an urgent matter.
She had to prepare both to face the heavenly tribulation and to enter qi condensation.
Baek Cheong began preparing for qi condensation with a much calmer heart.
‘It'd be better to take the Purification Pill before entering qi condensation.’
The Purification Pill was a medicinal pill that cleanly washed away pill poison accumulated in the dantian and meridians.
If it were any ordinary pill, she would have agonized over when to take it.
But there was no downside to swallowing the Purification Pill early.
Because she had no need to worry about pill poison building up in her.
Even the pill she would use for qi condensation was a pill-patterned qi-condensation pill.
Pill-patterned pills left no pill poison behind, so there would be nothing new to dirty her body.
‘I'll just wash away all the accumulated pill poison and enter qi condensation with a clean body.’
Once she made up her mind, she immediately looked into the instructions for taking the Purification Pill.
The instructions were, if anything, rather exacting.
It said she had to rest in recuperation for half a month before swallowing the Purification Pill.
She even had to refrain from eating a Bigu Pill and endure with her stomach completely empty.
It seemed that if any impurities remained in the body, they would disturb the pill's cleansing power.
‘You're telling me to starve for half a month?’
Baek Cheong clicked her tongue and stashed even the Bigu Pills back in her storage pouch.
Starting that day, she began her recovery while enduring hunger.
She could bear it for a day or two, but by the third and fourth day her stomach started to ache.
Still, if she wanted to receive the Purification Pill's medicinal power in full, she had no choice but to endure.
She clutched her growling stomach and endured the full half month.
‘Finally, half a month. Now I just have to swallow it.’
She took a jade bottle from her storage pouch and placed the Purification Pill in her palm.
The pale, cloudy pill, as if molded and hardened from a cloud, held a faint glow in her hand.
She swallowed hard and tossed the Purification Pill into her mouth.
The pill melted the instant it touched her tongue and slid down her throat.
Then something like clouds bloomed billowingly in her stomach.
The milky energy spread through every corner of her body along her meridians.
‘Oh, it's really getting washed away?’
Wherever the cloudlike energy passed, the pill poison she hadn't even realized was there vanished.
The pill poison that had clung to her meridians floated up like waste and was washed away.
Even the dregs at the bottom of her dantian were swept away without a trace.
The process was so simple it felt almost anticlimactic.
There was no real pain or discomfort, just a smooth stream of pill poison flowing out.
Before long, the expelled pill poison squeezed out through her skin like black sweat.
‘So this is what it feels like for pill poison to come out.’
Baek Cheong observed every step in sharp detail with the compressed divine sense she had prepared.
She memorized exactly how the cloudlike energy wrapped the pill poison and how it unraveled it.
As she mulled over the process, her eyes suddenly gleamed.
‘Wait a second... if I apply this well?’
The ingredient used to refine the Purification Pill was none other than Cloud Spirit Fruit.
The Cloud Spirit Fruit, grown in a sea of clouds, washed away pill poison with cloudlike medicinal power.
Come to think of it, she still had three Cloud Spirit Fruits left untouched.
On top of that, the fake tribulation clouds she had woven to prepare for the heavenly tribulation were also a formation made of clouds.
Cloud and cloud clicked together in her head.
‘Could I refine a pill from Cloud Spirit Fruit to prepare for the heavenly tribulation?’