Chapter 166
The last Cloud Spirit had finally been refined into a pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill.
After having refined a top-grade pill, a pill-pattern one didn’t seem all that remarkable.
Removing impurities was a skill that had long since become second nature.
The Primordial Formation she had personally deployed supported the Tai Chi orbit, so the heat control stayed perfectly on track as well.
‘This is easy again.’
The pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill in the jade bottle shone clearly, as if it held a tuft of milky-white cloud inside.
Unlike the top-grade one, not even a speck of turbid energy could be seen in it.
At this point, it looked like nothing would be lacking when it came to withstanding heavenly tribulation.
If the Five-Elements Tribulation Formation wrapped a fake tribulation cloud around the outside and the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill also raised tribulation clouds inside the body.
Then even if lightning tribulation fell, it could be split apart and taken on however much was needed.
‘With this, preparation for heavenly tribulation is done.’
She was looking at the pill with satisfaction, feeling pleased with herself, when...
An unsettling aura began to creep in again from outside the Eastern Quarters.
She cautiously extended her divine sense beyond the Eastern Quarters.
The clear sky had somehow turned pitch-black, as though ink had been poured over it.
Like a typhoon, slowly swirling black clouds pressed down over the Eastern Quarters.
Then a terrifying rumble of thunder rolled out from within the black clouds.
It growled as if it would unleash a lightning tribulation at any moment.
‘So it has come.’
Baek Cheong let her delighted expression fade and closed her mouth.
She had already guessed that making a pill-pattern pill would draw in heavenly tribulation clouds.
Because an artificially made pill-pattern pill was precisely the sort of heaven-defying pill that would startle heaven and earth.
So it was hardly surprising that the Heavenly Dao would get on edge and show up with dark clouds first.
On top of that, the karmic debt she’d picked up in the Nameless Forum hung over her head.
There were more than enough reasons for the Heavenly Dao to react more sharply than usual.
‘If you want to drop it, then go ahead and try.’
Baek Cheong gripped the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill in her hand.
She made full preparations so she could toss it into her mouth at any moment.
She also gathered qi into the hand that was holding the Five-Elements Banner.
If it showed signs that heavenly tribulation was about to strike, she planned to quickly take out the Cloud Spirit Pearl and unfold a fake tribulation cloud with the Five-Elements Tribulation Formation.
Disperse the lightning tribulation with the fake tribulation cloud, then take in the rest with the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill.
She meant to face the heavenly tribulation exactly as she had pictured it in her head.
Even if these were methods for the Foundation Establishment tribulation, she had plenty of cards, so she wasn’t afraid of heavenly tribulation.
‘Come on, then. Let’s see what you’ve got.’
She faced it head-on, standing firm within the aura she sensed through divine sense.
She kept facing it off like that, waiting for the lightning tribulation to fall.
But as time passed, something strange happened.
The black clouds, which had seemed ready to hurl down lightning at any instant, wouldn’t budge.
The growling thunder also gradually quieted.
Then the pitch-black mass of clouds began slowly to disperse.
‘Huh? It’s not coming down?’
Baek Cheong looked up, taken aback.
The heavenly tribulation simply hung perilously in the sky, as if it would fall one moment and not the next.
It was like filling a bowl with water until it lapped at the rim.
It looked like one more drop would make it overflow, yet in the end it never crossed the line.
It was as if it were threatening to drop the lightning tribulation but, when it came down to it, couldn’t actually do it.
As she stood there holding out for quite a while, the dark clouds slowly thinned out.
Before long, even that unsettling aura quietly vanished.
‘Tch. In the end, you didn’t drop it after all.’
She put the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill she was holding into a jade bottle and stowed it away in the storage pouch.
She had been ready and waiting, thinking the heavenly tribulation would surely fall once she’d refined a pill-pattern pill.
The Heavenly Dao had only put on a big show of threats and not struck even a single bolt of lightning.
Come to think of it, that made sense.
Because she hadn’t refined any more pill-pattern pills and had quietly backed off.
Even the Heavenly Dao seemed to have no proper excuse to pick a fight.
‘Ugh, it’s all because of this damn karma.’
Baek Cheong shot a glance upward and puckered her lips.
If she thought about it, it all came down to the karmic debt she’d stumbled into on the Nameless Forum.
If it weren’t for that karma, there’d have been no reason for the Heavenly Dao to react so sensitively.
Still, it had been worth enduring that whole barrage of threats.
Even though the tribulation clouds had come all the way out to greet her, they still never crossed the line in the end.
She could faintly sense the Heavenly Dao’s intent.
‘Maybe the Heavenly Dao is a tsundere.’
Anyway, now that preparations for heavenly tribulation were done, all that was left was to devote herself to cultivation without worry.
With Qi Refining Great Perfection right before her, Foundation Establishment wasn’t far off either.
However, there was one thing to sort out before she started cultivating in earnest.
When she rummaged through the storage pouch, two jade bottles came into her hands side by side.
One was the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill she had just refined.
The other was the top-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill she had refined a few days earlier.
‘Now the top-grade one has no use.’
When it came to preparing for heavenly tribulation, the pill-pattern Cloud Tribulation Pill was clearly the undisputed best.
There was no need to add the top-grade one; one pill-pattern pill was more than enough.
The beautifully refined top-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill had become scrap overnight.
Still, it was a shame to let a perfectly good pill with almost no pill poison go to waste.
If anything, it would be more worthwhile to exchange it for spirit stones.
‘This is another job for the Nameless Forum.’
As always, the answer pointed to one place.
Baek Cheong lay down on the black jade bed and moved her divine sense.
She logged into the Nameless Forum in one practiced motion and headed to the market board.
Since she had only just sold a low-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill a few days earlier, things were much easier.
Because the review that the Ghost Dao cultivator had survived heavenly tribulation was sitting there plain as day too.
There was no need to explain the pill in painstaking detail again.
She wrote up a short auction post.
『도우(913.14) Auction: Top-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill. Starting bid: 1 high-grade spirit stone.』
[It’s the top-grade version of the pill that let the Ghost Dao cultivator survive heavenly tribulation last time. If the low-grade one was enough, a top-grade one says it all.]
She entered a generous auction period and posted it.
Even if it was top-grade, to her it was just a pill-pattern pill, so she wouldn’t mind letting it go cheap.
If fortune was on her side, she seemed like she could net a dozen or so high-grade spirit stones.
‘I wonder how much it’ll sell for. Well, as long as it sells.’
Baek Cheong posted the auction and left the Nameless Forum without lingering.
From here on, she planned to set forum browsing aside for a while and focus only on cultivation.
She brushed herself off, stood up, and headed to a cultivation room in one corner of the Eastern Quarters.
It was a cultivation room where the Spirit Gathering Formation had gathered up a wealth of spiritual energy.
The final qi-absorption session before Foundation Establishment awaited her.
---
At the time Baek Cheong was heading to the cultivation room.
The quiet Nameless Forum stirred once again from the small pebble Baek Cheong had tossed in.
That was because the auction post for the top-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill had been pushed to the very top of the market board.
Forum users who remembered the Ghost Dao cultivator’s review from a few days ago flocked in one after another.
『Do-woo(899.91): Does that thing really let someone endure a lightning tribulation?』
[There was a perfectly good review saying the Ghost Dao cultivator had survived heavenly tribulation with a low-grade one.]
[Do-woo(76.2): From the review, it doesn’t seem fake. But top-grade...]
[Do-woo(45.88): Does it even make sense for a pill to take on lightning tribulation in the first place?]
The forum users alternated between the auction post and the review, half believing and half doubting.
When it came to heavenly tribulation, they were the type to flinch at the mere thought of it, so telling them to brace for it head-on could hardly sound pleasant.
And yet, in front of the review claiming the Ghost Dao cultivator had surpassed heavenly tribulation, they couldn’t easily close the page.
Then one forum user pointed out something odd.
『Do-woo(412.8): But how does Do-woo(913.14) have so many precious pills like that?』
[She’s pulling out and selling pills that seem like they’d only be found in the spirit realm, as if from a bottomless treasure chest.]
[Do-woo(331.5): Now that you mention it, yeah. And it’s not just one or two.]
[Do-woo(76.2): This is definitely the lower-realm Nameless Forum, isn’t it?]
[Do-woo(412.8): There’s not even a realm marker showing, so she’s not some user who came down from the spirit realm either.]
As questions sprang up one by one, the spark spread through the Nameless Forum.
The long-standing topic surrounding Do-woo(913.14)’s identity raised its head again.
『Do-woo(11.23): The more I think about it, the more I can’t figure out what sort of place Do-woo(913.14)’s lower realm is supposed to be.』
[If you break it down one by one, they say there’s a realm barrier inside the lower realm, they say there are only nine Divine Transformation cultivators, and now she has two kinds of spirit-realm-level pills, with one of them even up for sale. What sort of lower realm could a greenhorn Qi Refining cultivator possibly be living in for that to be possible?]
Do-woo(11.23) laid out, one by one, the clues that had surfaced so far.
Taken apart one by one, each of them could be dismissed as boasting.
But when gathered together in one place, they became impossible to make sense of.
Each forum user clutched their head and sank deeper into confusion.
After all that back-and-forth argument, one forum user wrote a serious post.
『Do-woo(55.19): If my guess is right, Do-woo(913.14) is definitely a fallen True Immortal’s memory-lost avatar.』
[She keeps claiming she’s a Qi Refining cultivator, but there are too many realizations that don’t fit her realm. She freely mastered character forms that even the cleverest would struggle to understand, spread teachings far and wide, and even possessed the profound cultivation dao known as Pre-Cultivation. A mere lower-realm native couldn’t possibly have all that. If you think of her as a True Immortal avatar that lost something in the spirit realm and fell down to roam the lower realm while piecing together her memories, everything falls into place.]
The Nameless Forum buzzed at Do-woo(55.19)’s analysis.
Once realizations far beyond the Qi Refining stage and spirit-realm-grade pills were tied together,
the opinion that Do-woo(913.14) couldn’t possibly be an ordinary lower-realm cultivator grew stronger.
The forum users were swept along en masse by the plausible theory that she was a True Immortal avatar.
└Do-woo(208.4): Now that I hear it, it’s creepy. So if she’s a True Immortal avatar, that means she also grasped that cultivation path called Pre-Cultivation.
└Do-woo(331.5): Then if I get onto this Pre-Cultivation path too, could I make it all the way to True Immortal as well?
└Do-woo(451.0): I knew it, so I got on the Pre-Cultivation path ages ago. As the great senior’s teachings say, when I empty my mind, it feels like my dao heart grows on its own!
└Do-woo(208.4): The True Immortal avatar personally opened the path for us, so there’s no reason not to follow it.
Wild speculation piled on wild speculation in a whole string of excited hype.
It became a scene where everyone was jumping aboard the Pre-Cultivation path, calling it a cultivation path left behind by a True Immortal avatar.
Of course, some scoffed and others clicked their tongues, calling it nonsense.
But regardless of the debate, there was something far more important.
That was the fact that the bidding on the top-grade Cloud Tribulation Pill was skyrocketing exponentially.
[Do-woo(217.6) has placed a bid. Bid: 1 high-grade spirit stone]
[Do-woo(661.11) has placed a bid. Bid: 3 high-grade spirit stones]
[Do-woo(237.309) has placed a bid. Bid: 8 high-grade spirit stones]
[Do-woo(451.0) has placed a bid. Bid: 15 high-grade spirit stones]
The bids surged and kept updating at a crazed pace.
It was an auxiliary pill for heavenly tribulation, needed only around the time of Foundation Establishment, so there were few occasions to use it.
Even so, the forum users all rushed to open their wallets.
Some bid desperately, afraid of the heavenly tribulation that would soon be upon them.
Some were seized by the collector’s urge to get their hands on a spirit-realm pill.
Some raised the price out of curiosity, wanting to analyze the pill.
Some were tempted by the story that it was a pill refined by a True Immortal avatar and hurried to line up.
Each person’s different motives tangled together, and the bids shot up fearfully.
Before long, even the milestone of 50 high-grade spirit stones was steeply surpassed.
The frenzy that one low-grade pill had once sparked was now being replayed on the stage of a top-grade pill.
Meanwhile, the source of the frenzy was holed up in the cultivation room, knowing nothing at all.