Chapter 275 - Supreme Arts and the Devouring Maw

Chapter 275: Chapter 275 - Supreme Arts and the Devouring Maw

By the time Su Bai finally stopped, a considerable amount of time had passed.

The Dao-Shattering Jade dimmed as he released it, and the unnatural clarity surrounding his thoughts gradually faded with it. A considerable portion of his Qi had also disappeared after keeping the jade active for so long.

Su Bai exhaled and looked at the jade slips arranged before him.

There were far more than when he started.

Each contained something he had rewritten, reorganized, or simplified enough for cultivators of the current era to understand without first spending several decades learning concepts that no longer existed in common use.

Simplified did not mean easy.

Some of these methods would still take years to comprehend properly, and mastering them was another matter entirely.

Su Bai picked up one of the jade slips and turned it between his fingers.

Cultivation manuals and techniques had always possessed their own grading system. He had simply never cared much about it before.

His own cultivation had stopped behaving normally so long ago that judging a method by its grade rarely helped him.

For everyone else, however, those grades mattered.

The cultivation world generally divided manuals and techniques into:

Common, Spirit, Profound, and Supreme grades.

The same names were used for both, although what they measured was slightly different.

A cultivation manual was judged by the foundation it could build, the sophistication of its circulation method, and how far that path could carry its practitioner. A Supreme-grade manual, provided the cultivator was suited to it, was considered capable of supporting cultivation all the way to the Void-Shattering Realm.

Techniques were judged more by their complexity, requirements, potential, and the heights their effects could reach.

The cultivation world had never needed another category before.

Now it did.

He glanced toward the original Immortal inheritances.

Calling those methods Supreme-grade felt ridiculous.

They had been created and practiced by Immortals. Some of their principles already assumed bodies, souls, and forms of power that Su Bai could barely understand even with the Dao-Shattering Jade assisting him.

So he had quietly added another grade for his own convenience.

Immortal-grade.

Whether anyone else in the Human Realm would agree with the name hardly mattered. As far as Su Bai was concerned, anything requiring an Immortal body to perform properly had already earned the distinction.

The jade slips he had just created were different.

Su Bai had stripped away the portions that depended on Immortal-level physiques, power, or concepts that current cultivators could not reproduce. What remained had been reconstructed around the limits of the present cultivation world.

As a result, the versions before him could no longer be called Immortal-grade.

They had fallen to Supreme-grade.

Still, Su Bai was perfectly satisfied with that.

A Supreme-grade inheritance was already enough to make major forces fight over it.

He currently had enough newly prepared jade slips to give Radiant Sky Sect a headache for entirely different reasons.

His gaze moved across them.

The Immortal inheritances were only part of what he had worked on.

Su Bai had also drawn from the cultivation methods obtained through the Soul-Bloom Seeds and the remnant souls within Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

The Dao-Devouring Blank Stele had preserved far more methods than he could ever practice himself.

For the sect, he had copied the original versions.

He deliberately avoided the forms the Stele had altered to suit his own constitution.

Those versions belonged to him alone.

His Dantian, meridians, Reversal Body, and increasingly strange foundation had distorted the meaning of the word compatible long ago. Giving a normal disciple a method rebuilt around Su Bai’s body would probably qualify less as inheritance and more as attempted murder.

Su Bai had no intention of testing which disciple survived first.

There were also methods belonging to the young cultivators who had died inside Fallen-Star Sanctuary.

Su Bai’s expression slowly changed as he recognized where many of them had come from.

A large number belonged to factions that Yue Cangyu had already warned him about. They were righteous forces whose members had later been exposed for cooperating with the demonic side.

That made those methods far more valuable than ordinary inheritances.

He did not place those jade slips with the others.

Learning them directly was one possibility, but that was not what interested him most.

Methods revealed habits.

They revealed how Qi was circulated, where power gathered before an attack, which meridians bore the greatest burden, and what weaknesses had been accepted in exchange for strength.

If Radiant Sky Sect understood those methods thoroughly enough, fighting their practitioners would become much easier.

Su Bai separated the jade slips and placed them aside.

Those would go to Lu Canghai first.

Whether they eventually entered the Grand Archive was something his master could decide after seeing them.

For now, Su Bai had done enough.

He leaned back and allowed himself to relax.

The new jade slips rested quietly around him, each one representing days, years, or even lifetimes of cultivation knowledge from people who had died long before he was born.

It was an absurd amount of inheritance for one courtyard.

Su Bai looked at them for a while before a different thought surfaced.

His hand rose.

Qi moved.

A familiar force gathered around him.

The Starving Wraith’s Devouring Maw activated.

Su Bai watched it quietly.

He had used the technique before without thinking much about its grade.

Now that he had spent so long sorting methods according to their complexity and structure, the question naturally returned.

What grade was this thing supposed to be?

Su Bai studied the way the technique operated.

It did not resemble the human cultivation arts he had just spent hours simplifying.

That itself was not particularly surprising.

What bothered him was how easily he had learned it.

A complicated human technique usually demanded precise Qi circulation. Energy had to follow particular meridians, gather at specific points, change direction, and sometimes pass through several routes before the technique could properly form.

Su Bai had become accustomed to doing that almost without thinking.

As he examined himself now, he noticed something he had overlooked.

The Qi routes were no longer being forced into place.

His Myriad-Path Meridian Web was doing the work for him.

Su Bai’s attention sharpened.

He activated the Devouring Maw again.

The pathways throughout his body shifted almost immediately.

Instead of Su Bai manually rerouting Qi through the required meridians, the web altered which routes became active, linking the necessary pathways together before the technique fully formed.

It felt so natural that he had nearly overlooked it.

Su Bai tried another technique.

The same thing happened.

The active routes changed again.

Qi moved through the correct path with almost no delay.

Su Bai stared inward for several breaths.

His meridians had apparently decided that rerouting Qi manually was an unnecessary inconvenience.

It was another benefit that had come with the Myriad-Path Meridian Web, one Su Bai had only just noticed.

Still, he was not going to complain.

For ordinary cultivators, part of activating a technique involved guiding Qi through the proper circulation route. The more complicated the technique, the easier it was to make a mistake and the longer that process could take.

Su Bai’s Myriad-Path Meridian Web simply reorganized the available pathways around what he wanted to use.

The technique still required Qi. It still required control. He still needed to actually understand what he was doing.

But the delay caused by constructing the circulation path had almost disappeared.

Su Bai smiled.

That was a far more pleasant discovery than another mystery concerning the Six Realms.

His gaze returned to the Starving Wraith’s Devouring Maw.

The smile slowly faded.

Something about it had bothered him ever since Lu Canghai described the Pretas.

He activated the technique once more and felt the familiar pull gathering around the Maw.

Devouring.

Su Bai’s eyes narrowed slightly.

A Hungry Ghost outside a city had once opened its mouth and consumed spiritual energy from miles away.

The stronger Pretas had developed techniques around the very hunger that defined their existence.

And the technique Su Bai possessed was called the Starving Wraith’s Devouring Maw.

He had learned it far too naturally.

Su Bai remained motionless for a moment as the devouring force gradually dispersed.

A thought that had first appeared while listening to Lu Canghai finally returned.

’Is this technique connected to the Preta Realm?’

The courtyard remained quiet.

Su Bai looked down at his palm.

Until recently, the name had simply sounded appropriately unpleasant.

Now it sounded like a clue.