Immortality Starts With Generosity

When the rain finally stopped and the clouds dissipated he wasted no time packing up Phelps and rushing off into the now clear horizon. The cavern was dyed a sapphire blue under the light of the newly exposed glowing moss. With no obstructive weather and qi enhancing his vision Chen Haoran tore across the flooded cavern floor, Phelps squealing all the while on his back.

As if by some cue the cavern came to life with the ceasing of the rain. Across in the distance, he could see packs of sloths floating from the water back to the ceiling; their distant squeals echoing out to him. Phelps did his best to answer those calls with his own. Naturally, they attracted predators. The monster crickets crawled out of their hiding places in force with tens quickly becoming hundreds in short order. Their chalk-like chirping destroyed the brief harmony of the cavern and they quickly made a menace of themselves.

Chen Haoran whipped out the Swiftwind Scimitars and cut to pieces any cricket that got near. He kept moving all while he did so, every second of clear vision was precious and he could ill afford to waste his time on fighting. Unfortunately, the crickets had other ideas and it wasn’t long before he was pursued by thirty jumping freaks of nature. Every so often one would have a strong enough jump to catch up to him and he would kill it and leave the corpse to be devoured by its brethren, giving him time to increase the gap.

After Chen Haoran killed yet another cricket and watched five more stop to fight over it he had to wonder who they were really hunting, him or themselves. Not that he was complaining. If the crickets had any sense of teamwork he would be having a much rougher time. That they were so individualistic and prone to hunting each other just as much as they did anything else meant he wasn’t in too much danger despite being heavily outnumbered.

He twisted and slashed another cricket in half.

That didn’t mean they weren’t annoying. In one breath he cycled his qi in the Canyon Carving Swords pattern and in the same breath he released it. It was tantalizing to see what sort of power he could bring to bear now with the Canyon Carving Sword but it would be an incredible waste to use it on the crickets. The effects of his enhanced qi were far too valuable to carelessly spend it, especially when he didn’t know if he’d have another opportunity to replenish it. As it stood he was already losing the lightning-refined qi through the augmentation of his body and his cultivation practice. It was a minor but steady trickle that he would scarcely notice before with his regular qi but was now painfully aware of.

More crickets closed in ahead of him in an attempt to cut him off. He channeled qi to the Crouching Tiger Earrings and the ambushing crickets scattered at the sound of a tiger’s roar. It wasn’t just the crickets, off to the side a mass of water rose out of a large pool. Chen Haoran did a double take at the tank-sized sloth that floated out. He stretched out his sense, Ninth-Layer. He split in the opposite direction while the majority of the crickets jumped after the sloth instead. He didn’t look back when he heard the giant sloth and crickets fighting but he could feel Phelps twist on his back.

“You better not grow that big,” he said.

He had left the last pursuing crickets and moved on to bigger problems. Literally bigger. The further he went into the cavern the grander everything became, from the stalactites to the pools to the height of the cavern itself. It did not bode well for how long it would take him to find the source of the cold snap and even now he was forced to go around when a lake or hill-sized stalagmite sat in his way.

The temperature sat at a comfortable warmth, as if he had returned to a heated house after stepping out into the middle of winter. The air was getting more and more humid with each breath he took and some of the hotter pools were billowing steam. Soon he would lose his vision and his traveling speed would be cut drastically in a place that even at his full speed would take a long time to clear.

“How does something this big exist under all these fucking mountains?”

Phelps looked up from the pile of moss he was working through and squealed at him.

They sat on the shore of a warm lake. Chen Haoran stripped out of his excess layers and was tending a roaring blue fire. He picked up a piece of glowing moss and channeled his qi into it, where his qi went water was wrung out of the moss like a squeezed sponge. He shook the now dry and dim moss and tossed it into the flames before picking up a cricket leg. Using his scimitar as a skewer he roasted the leg over the fire and then cautiously took a bite.

“Tastes like chicken,” he mumbled. It was a comforting lie, although he had to admit it didn’t taste as bad as he thought. The leg had a nutty, slightly smoky bitterness to it. Not his favorite by any means but it was palatable. He pulled out a small pouch of salt from his storage bag and sprinkled it on the leg. While he had prepared rations on the off chance he got stuck in Lan Fen’s pocket space he had a feeling he’d run out before he got anywhere near an exit.

He tore another strip from the cricket leg when he saw Phelps bouncing away out of the corner of his eye. Chen Haoran sighed and trudged after him. The sloths of this cave were always a curiosity to him. How they lived, how they acted, what part qi played in their lives. Normal sloths were slow because they were burdened by a low metabolic rate. How would a sloth with access to far more energy move then? As it turned out, not so much different at all. Unless he had a reason to be quick Phelps was content to move as little as possible. When he did decide to move on the ground he used his floating power to bounce across the ground much like an astronaut would do.

“Maybe I should have named you Neil,” Chen Haoran said.

That being said it wasn’t often that Phelps decided to move of his own volition like this. Chen Haoran followed him along the shore and saw him stop and paw at something at the edge of the water. He knelt next to Phelps and gently thumbed the soft petals of the flowery vine that grew across the ground and into the water. Naturally, it was also blue. The blue light given off by the moss had camouflaged it enough that he overlooked it when they set up camp.

Gently he ripped a fat-petaled flower off the vine and held it towards Phelps who happily ate it. Chen Haoran held up a hand to his snout to stop him from eating the rest and read the words that burned in his vision.

Received Hundred-Fold: Pure Water Monk Flower

Chen Haoran frowned in thought. He reached over and cupped some water in his hands and held it out to Phelps. The sloth cocked his head but lapped at the pool water.

Received Hundred-Fold: Pure Spirit Spring Water

Pure. When he first discovered his gifting power after giving Lan Fen a drink the reward at the time was called Pure Spirit Water as well. He picked another flower off the vine and ate it. The flower melted in his mouth and he felt its energy drip down into his core before moving through his meridians. He immediately summoned the rewarded monk flower and the rush of energy was much greater than before. He felt his qi rise.

He found his cultivation supplement.

“You better be hungry Phelps.” Chen Haoran ripped off the rest of the flowers from the vine and dropped them in front of Phelps then he dug around looking for the vine’s roots. If Phelps could eat the whole vine then that would be so much better. He could finally have his own cultivation supplements without having to rely so much on merchants. Would they even sell something as good as these monk flowers? The cultivation supplements he had used before certainly didn’t compare to them. Across his eyes burned golden words as Phelps devoured the flowers.

He found the roots.

There was a burst of qi next to him. Phelps’s fur bristled then flattened in one smooth flowing motion, he spat out a pure white breath. Chen Haoran reached out with his sense, Fifth-Layer.

He smiled. “Congrats on advancing bud.”

Then the other Fifth-Layer he sensed in the water attacked.