Chapter 172 – Choice
In the northern part of Jianzhou, on a certain barren mountain on the border between Yue and Yuanwu countries, there stood dozens of tall and short yellow-shirted people, their clothes fluttering in the wind, and their ages were still different. Bigger gray hair, a face of wrinkles, has reached the age of life, small skin tender flesh, red lips and white teeth, childishness has not yet moulted, but all silent, orderly standing in line.
The most front is a not angry from the authority of the old man, this old man backward hands, leisurely looking at the sky motionless, is out of mind. Behind him were four men and one woman, several people with solemn demeanors, and one of them, the one who introduced Han Li to the door, Master Wang, who also had a solemn look on his face at this moment.
Behind the five people, there are two rows of yellow-shirted disciples standing neatly, these people have different looks, some look nervous and uneasy, some are full of concern, looking left and right, and some smile and don’t show any emotion.
And in the last row of the corner, there is a dark-faced, ordinary-looking youth eyes and face lowered, always looking at their own toes, gaze dare not squint the slightest, seems to be very coy iodine.
But anyone does not know, this looks like a brat guy, is in the heart of the slander, a stomach of resentment.
This young man is not someone else, is Han Li, and this line of yellow shirts, is to participate in the “Scarlet Trial” of the Yellow Maple Valley disciples.
Han Li finally, or joined the death trip, but also in the possession of two Foundation Establishment Dan, this can not be said to be a ridiculous and helpless thing.
More than a month ago, Han Li was devastated after learning about the method of taking the Foundation Establishment Dan from Wu Feng.
It turned out that after taking the Foundation Establishment Dan, the person who was going to carry out the Foundation Establishment had to be in seclusion for three months to dissolve the medicinal power before he could come out of seclusion, or else the medicinal power would be greatly dispersed and the efficacy would be greatly reduced. So whether or not the foundation building can be successful, at the very least, we have to wait for a few months before we can know.
But really have to wait such a long time, for Han Li, can be greatly bad.
According to his original idea of obtaining these two Foundation Establishment Pills, he would first take these two pills to see if he could succeed in building his foundation before deciding whether or not to participate in the trial. If he was lucky enough to succeed in building his foundation, he would definitely not go to such a dangerous place as the forbidden land, after all, a quarter of the chance of survival was too scary.
If it fails to work after taking it, then the trip to the forbidden land is still imperative. If one or two Foundation Establishment Dan doesn’t work, then he will refine three or four, or even more, he believes that even if his qualifications are poor, after taking enough Foundation Establishment Dan, he will still be able to enter the Foundation Establishment Stage.
However, the restriction of three months of closed-door seclusion after taking the pill had disrupted Han Li’s plans, leaving him with the awkward situation of not being able to have both the fish and the bear’s paw.
Now, he could either take the Foundation Establishment Pill and completely abandon the trip to the forbidden land; or he could temporarily put the Foundation Establishment Pill away and wait for the Scarlet Trial to pass before taking it again. There will no longer be the beauty of having both.
After nearly half a month of thinking left and right, Han Li felt that with such poor qualifications as his, even if he took two Foundation Establishment Dan in a row, the hope of success in building a foundation was still very slim, and the Scarlet Trial must not be given up.
In fact, Han Li did not think of waiting for the next five years to participate in the Scarlet Trial, at that time, even if he had not yet built the foundation, but the Changchun Gong will definitely be practiced to the top level, so that his ability to protect himself will be much greater.
However, shortly after Han Li’s idea came up, the upper echelons of the Yellow Maple Valley announced a major event that shocked the entire Vietnamese Immortal Cultivation World, causing his thoughts to dissipate.
The content was: the forbidden land of the Scarlet Trial would be temporarily closed for sixty years after five years, during which time, the seven major sects would jointly send people to supervise it, and no one would be permitted to go in to harvest medicines.
This practice of temporarily enclosing the forbidden land was not an uncommon thing, almost every three or four hundred years, the seven great sects would do this.
Because of the frequent opening of the forbidden land, it would cause a massive loss of spiritual qi within it, and the production and growth of spiritual medicines would slow down. This temporary closure will change the density of the spiritual qi, allowing it to return to its normal level again.
However, even after the seven great sects had taken this measure, the medicinal herbs in the forbidden land were still scarce year after year and became harder and harder to find, especially the finished medicinal herbs that met the requirements of alchemy, which were even fewer and fewer in number.
According to the deduction of some knowledgeable people in the seven great immortal sects, if they want to truly restore the normal amount of spirit medicine in the forbidden land, they must delay the time of closure for a full thousand years before they can do so. Otherwise, this temporary closure would only be delaying the depletion of some of the forbidden land’s spiritual medicines, after all, the origin and growth of spiritual medicines is not a matter of one day or two days.
Although this kind of reasoning combined with the actual situation within the forbidden land, so that no one could deny its correctness, but the person in charge of the seven sects was still unable to pain down this decision.
The number of Foundation Establishment Pills was closely related to the rise and fall of their seven sects.
If there was a lack of these pills in 50 or 60 years, the seven sects would only lose some skin, not their bones. But if really hundreds, thousands of years of time are no base-building Dan, then not to mention the seven schools, I am afraid that the entire Yuexiu world, are facing survival.
After all, a place that can no longer allow Immortal Cultivators to build their foundations, can it still be called the Immortal Cultivation World? I’m afraid that all the Immortal Cultivation clans and practitioners will leave the country and seek survival elsewhere. The seven great sects will not be an exception.
Therefore, knowing that this practice of frequently opening the forbidden land was a stupid thing to do, but the people of the seven great sects still had to go ahead and do it.
They only hoped that before the forbidden land’s spirit medicines truly became extinct, they could find other alternative places that produced spirit medicines.
This also allowed those old monsters of the major sects at the JieDan stage, or even the YuanYing stage, to start going out frequently in the recent centuries in an uncharacteristic manner, in order to search for other places of origin for spiritual medicines, or to find other ways out for their sects, and to never let their sects’ Taoist lineage decline in this way.
Han Li was naturally unable to know so clearly about the matters above. But once this news came out, Han Li would not dare to consider that Scarlet Trial five years from now even if he died.
Even the slowest of people would understand that the opening of the forbidden land five years later would definitely be extremely bloody, and all of the major sects would have their elite disciples out in full force in order to make one last big haul of elixirs before the circle was sealed, so for Han Li to join such a trial would not be asking for his own death!
Although after this news was announced, this trip to the forbidden land would likewise be twice as difficult and the killings would be even more grueling, but no matter what, it would definitely be much stronger than the next one.
As for this foolishness of participating in the Scarlet Trial again after fifty years, Han Li hadn’t even thought about it.
After the optimal age for Foundation Establishment, even if one barely entered the Foundation Establishment Stage in the future, one certainly wouldn’t be able to go far on the Immortal Cultivation Road, and this wasn’t the result Han Li wanted.
It was with this mindset that Han Li signed up for the forbidden land’s medicine gathering group. The one responsible for the enrollment was actually that Master Wang, which caused Han Li to be greatly surprised and somewhat regretful.
And Master Wang was even more stunned to see Han Li.
On one hand, he was greatly surprised that a newcomer like Han Li had come to participate in the Scarlet Trial; on the other hand, he was somewhat incredulous at Han Li’s sudden progress in cultivation. With a qualification like Han Li’s, to be able to have his technique so refined in such a short period of time, entering the eleventh layer from the ninth layer all at once, this was too astonishing.
If Han Li was some disciple with superior natural talent, it wouldn’t be unusual, and it wasn’t unheard of for his gong methods to improve faster than his. But Han Li’s pseudo-spiritual root status was something he had personally tested, so how could he also cultivate so quickly?
In the case of a pseudo-spiritual rooter, the ninth layer of Han Li’s gong method when he first entered the gate was already surprisingly high.
Usually, it was the elders who had imbued it with mana, or regularly consumed some spirit medicines, coupled with diligent and painstaking cultivation, that had led to such achievements. But today’s eleven-layer gongfu Han Li was standing in front of him alive, which surprised him beyond measure!
Since Master Wang had doubts in his mind, he nonchalantly pulled Han Li aside and tested his attributes some more. As a result, it was still the same conclusion as before, and didn’t produce any of the speculated spirit root mutations.
This made Master Wang even more puzzled.