Chapter 93: Secluded Cultivation 1

The three of them returned to their villa, and only then did Wu Nitian, who had long been distraught with anxiety, finally breathe easy. After hearing how everything had unfolded, his reverence for Le Kai only deepened.

Le Kai had long been prepared for injuries. His wristwatch contained a vast store of low-grade elixirs. Though they could not increase his inner power or alter his constitution, they were astonishingly effective for healing wounds and restoring strength. Wu Nitian was the living proof. In just a little over an hour, he was already able to walk. Aside from a somewhat pale face, there was nothing left to suggest that he had been a critically wounded invalid only moments before.

Pack up. We leave for the municipal government at once. That is our stronghold, and absolutely safe, Lan Bo said, showing a rare decisiveness as he directly ordered the maid and the cook.

Naturally, no one objected to his suggestion. To the Wu siblings, that aristocratic academy had felt like the center of a wolf pack, while they themselves were little lambs with scarcely any power to resist. Remaining there for even another moment had been a kind of torment. This incident also dealt Wu Nitian a tremendous shock. The instant he had nearly been slain by a martial artist, it seemed as though something within him had awakened. He now needed a place to retreat and study in peace. Once he broke through that final barrier, he would become a martial artist himself.

Seeing one person after another injured or crippled, the driver, Lan Wu, turned pale with alarm. Only after confirming that none of them were in mortal danger did he finally relax, though his face remained full of worry.

Le Kai patted his shoulder with a faint smile. Do not worry. The principal has already spoken. For the time being, no one will dare come looking for trouble.

Lan Wu nodded and said, The enemy is sinister and shameless. To achieve their ends, they will stop at nothing. Even if Principal Lan Kai’s words can hold down the Xi and Hua families, it is not impossible that some people will take desperate risks. Even if they cannot kill you, Kai, they may still make life impossible for you, or even ruin you outright.

Le Kai said, There is no need to worry about that. The principal’s words are effectively a formal declaration that I am one of the Lan family’s chosen candidates. Even if the Xi and Hua families want to meddle, only Xi Bao and Hua Wu can step forward. After all, they have the same worries we do.

Lan Bo said, Of course. If they were to tear off all pretense and use despicable methods to assassinate our boss, then the two candidates in their own families would probably not live long either.

When the group returned to the municipal government, they naturally received another round of concern and care from Lan Sika. After that, Le Kai and Wu Nitian each announced that they would enter seclusion.

Upon hearing this, the happiest person by far was Lan Bo. The Wu siblings were inseparable, which had been an endless headache for him. Now that both Le Kai and Wu Nitian were going into seclusion, leaving only himself and Wu Meitian, it was practically the two-person life of his dreams.

Still, Lan Bo had already resolved to grow stronger and become a real man, and he had not forgotten, before Le Kai went into seclusion, to badger him relentlessly until he obtained the cultivation method.

Seeing that his resolve was firm and that he was not joking, Le Kai thought it over several times and ultimately passed on the first portion of the technique to him. As for whether he would succeed, that was no longer Le Kai’s concern. After two months of consuming all manner of spiritual medicines, even a fool would likely have opened his eyes and become clever. If Lan Bo could not overcome even this much difficulty, then he had best abandon all thoughts of becoming Wu Meitian’s dual-cultivation partner as soon as possible.

In the span of a single day, he had already fought three martial artists to the death, and each opponent had been far stronger than he was. It had been a case of slaying upward across levels. Any martial artist would have been proud beyond measure after such a feat, yet Le Kai felt little pride at all. Reviewing a battle afterward and reliving every moment had always been one of his favorite habits. In analysis, he drew out experience and refined himself.

His first battle, against the crazed bodyguard of a minor noble, had relied entirely on the profundity of Return-to-One Footwork, winning by surprise. Of course, what mattered most throughout that fight had been his own predictions, his precise grasp of the opponent’s every move. He had truly achieved the principle of knowing both himself and his enemy, and victory in a hundred battles. Though the opponent’s final mutation had exceeded all expectation, everything had remained within his control.

If he were to give that battle a score, Le Kai felt it deserved ninety points.

His fight with Zhang Hai had likewise depended on those two advantages, along with full use of the wristwatch’s miraculous capabilities. By drawing his curved blade at the perfect moment, he had achieved a decisive kill by surprise.

Clean and efficient, with the situation entirely in hand. That battle could be called nearly perfect.

But his duel with Zhang Lang was only worth sixty points in Le Kai’s view, just barely a pass.

His deliberate provocation at the beginning had not thrown the other man into disarray or robbed him of his composure. Instead, it had produced the opposite effect, driving the man to a breakthrough in strength and creating a tremendous threat. At the end of the battle, Le Kai had believed the situation was already fully under control, only to be nearly sent to his grave by the opponent’s final desperate strike. That was a mistake he could not ignore.

When striking a snake, one must crush it dead. One must never grow careless simply because the enemy has lost the ability to fight. So long as an opponent still has breath in him, he remains a threat. Countless heroes have already paid for underestimating their enemies with their own lives.

Yet Le Kai also felt that his battle with Zhang Lang had been the one from which he had gained the most. It could even be called exhilarating to the point of intoxication. Almost every attack had been made with his full strength. Every defense had been like dancing on the edge of a blade. Not a single moment of the battle had been truly safe. It was precisely this constant struggle at the brink of death that had given Le Kai a profounder understanding of how to use his inner power and the essence of his techniques. Such advancement was absolutely not something that could be obtained merely by daily meditation and cultivation.

Just as Wu Nitian, standing at death’s edge, had also sensed a faint chance of breakthrough. The greater the danger, the more a person’s potential is often awakened.

Of course, one must have potential in the first place. For an ordinary mediocrity, doing this would be no different from courting death.

As for Return-to-One Footwork, Le Kai could now be considered thoroughly masterful in it. But the cipher-like combinations within Return-to-One Footwork were endlessly variable. Every time he thought he had fully comprehended it, he discovered that he had only just begun. What he had taken for the summit was in fact merely the foot of the true mountain peak.

As his spiritual power increased, Le Kai could now also read some of the later sections of the Return-to-One Manual.

Each level of the Return-to-One Manual had three minor realms: entry, subtle understanding, and mastery.

First level: Three Spirits in One, Condensing the Life Core. Le Kai had already reached this stage. Without the unification of essence, qi, and spirit, he would never have been able to refine inner power in the first place. At present, he had already reached the mastery realm of the first level. His body now nurtured and stored inner power, and once the inner power within him was continuously refined and upgraded into spiritual energy, he would have entered the second level.

Second level: Taiji Returning to One, the Intermingling of Yin and Yang. At this realm, inner power transforms into spiritual energy. Whether in the ancestral aperture between the brows or in the dantian and niwan palace, the two virtual points are replaced by inner power.

The first step of the Return-to-One mental method was named Three Spirits in One. It meant gathering essence, qi, and spirit, and comprehensively elevating one’s own condition.

When this step was perfected, essence, qi, and spirit would fuse with the power of heaven and earth, turning the unreal into the real, constructing substantial points within the ancestral aperture and the dantian. These could also be called cores. These two cores were the source of power, and also the most important and fundamental vital gates.

At present, the two points within Le Kai had already changed from illusion to inner power, and that inner power was growing denser and denser, like vapor condensing until it would finally become droplets of water. Once the inner power within those two points was fully refined, passing from the unreal into the real, that would count as true entry into the second level.