I'll make you the furnace and the cauldron, so you can refine Yin and Yang and prove the Great

Li Hanshan spent another two hours.

The gray mist on the burial mound churned endlessly in the twilight. He and Xiao An carefully searched the hillside several times and found four wisps of lingering demonic remnants. They were hidden in different tombs, and they didn't need to search for them; as soon as they got close, these creatures would come out and attack Li Hanshan on their own.

"So troublesome." Although these lingering demonic spirits were not as good as the first one, they were all still very difficult to deal with.

Their former strength must have been extremely terrifying, otherwise their lingering resentment wouldn't be so powerful. The most troublesome were those that silently entered Li Hanshan's primordial spirit after being killed. Fortunately, Li Hanshan was prepared this time and even made a trap for them. After burning these guys, Li Hanshan gained quite a lot.

Li Hanshan could feel that with each wisp of lingering will he burned away, his perception of spatial travel became clearer. Those subtle, instinctive, almost intuitive spatial fluctuations, like a mirror being repeatedly wiped clean, were gradually reflecting the originally blurry outlines.

"Senior, there's nothing more." Xiao An stood up from the last tombstone, the eerie blue light on her soul slowly receding. She surveyed the cemetery, confirming that the chilling aura that had permeated the air had completely dissipated. "These fragments should be all. The rest vanished over the long years, leaving only these few wisps clinging to life."

Li Hanshan nodded. He stood on a relatively open stone platform halfway up the mountain, his gaze sweeping across the entire cemetery. Thousands upon thousands of tombstones stood quietly in the hazy light of the sky, like a silent forest of steles. They had once borne the lingering resentments of countless extraterrestrial demons, but now those resentments had all been burned away, leaving only empty tombstones and the remains of cultivators, long since reduced to ashes, buried beneath them.

"Let's go." He withdrew his gaze, turned, and walked towards the mountain path on the other side of the cemetery. "There's nothing left here."

The path down the mountain was much easier than the path up. The chilling aura that had once permeated the area around the cemetery had largely dissipated, receding like layers of receding tide, revealing the blue stone steps that had been soaked for thousands of years. As Li Hanshan descended the stone steps, passing through the barrier of light he had broken, he could feel the runes glowing slightly as he passed, as if confirming his identity, before slowly dimming again.

Once outside the cemetery, the view opened up dramatically. A vast valley unfolded in the twilight, filled with a pale golden mist, like crushed gold dust suspended in the air. In the center of the valley, clusters of architectural ruins were faintly visible—stone walls, pillars, and collapsed roofs, appearing and disappearing in the mist like an ancient painting repeatedly blurred. But what truly stirred Li Hanshan's heart was the rich, almost tangible, medicinal fragrance in the air—clear, mellow, and carrying the warm essence accumulated over thousands of years; each breath made his meridians feel slightly warm.

"Over there." He walked in the direction where the smell of medicine was strongest, and Xiao An followed silently behind him.

Inside the stone wall lay a medicinal field roughly a thousand feet square, its ridges neatly arranged, each planted with a different kind of spiritual herb. In the twilight, the leaves of these herbs shimmered with a delicate spiritual light; some gleamed like crushed jade, a warm, lustrous green, while others glowed with a rich, warm light, like solidified amber. Li Hanshan glanced at them briefly and immediately recognized several names he had only seen on Ye Shuanghua's list of spiritual herbs—Silver Moon Flower, Crimson Scale Vine, Concentrating Spirit Grass, Jade Marrow Ginseng…each plant was several thousand years old!

"It's out!"

Li Hanshan's eyes lit up.

These medicinal herbs are truly ancient; each one is priceless.

He crouched down, carefully examining the spiritual herb in the nearest row of medicinal fields, its entire body gleaming with a deep blue luster. Its leaves were thick as jade, with fine silver veins flowing along the edges; its rootstock was as thick as a baby's arm, and the medicinal fragrance it emitted was intoxicating. Li Hanshan reached out and gently touched the edge of the leaf, feeling a warm and lingering spiritual energy return to his fingertips, as if he were immersing his palm in a pool of sun-warmed spring water—it was a deep blue spiritual mushroom several thousand years old, a rare treasure that would cause cultivators to fight tooth and nail in any auction house in the Central Continent.

Let alone the Transformation of Spirit, even the Refinement of Emptiness and the Union with the Dao require the cultivation of the mind and the Dao.

"These medicinal herbs..." Xiao An's voice held a suppressed gasp of amazement, "They must have been growing for several thousand years. This herb garden is protected by a restriction and has not suffered any damage."

Li Hanshan stood up, his gaze sweeping across the entire medicinal field before looking up into the depths of the garden. On the other side of the garden, a half-collapsed stone hall stood in the twilight. A layer of flowing silver-white light could be vaguely seen at the archway of the stone hall—the patterns of that light were exactly the same as the restrictions on the burial mound, but more intricate and complex, like a painting that had been repeatedly refined.

He walked through the herb garden and arrived at the stone hall. The hall's entrance was about ten feet wide, carved from a single piece of bluish-white stone, its surface covered with dense silver runes. The arrangement of those runes was unlike any of the variations he had learned from Luo Li; it seemed as if it were a meticulously designed combination, each rune's position subtly echoing the adjacent runes. He stood before the entrance, observing carefully for a moment, and gradually realized that the arrangement of those runes contained a certain pattern—they were not blindly defending, but cooperating with each other in a predetermined order, like chess pieces on a chessboard, each with its specific placement.

"This is... a chess formation," Li Hanshan said in a low voice.

He crouched down and traced a few lines on the stone slab in front of the door with his fingertips, mentally rehearsing the arrangement of the core runes. The combination of those runes was remarkably similar to the ancient chess game he had played with Luo Li in his dream; the order of the moves, the shifts between offense and defense, and the unique "jumping out" technique at crucial moments all matched the rules of that ancient chess game. His fingers paused on the stone slab for a moment, then he began to trace the trajectory of the first move on the stone slab with his spiritual power, following the rules of that ancient chess game.

The moment the spiritual energy flowed into the rune array along the path he had drawn, the silvery-white light on the stone palace door flickered slightly, like ripples spreading across water after a pebble has been thrown in. Several faint marks appeared on the surface of the light barrier, slowly rotating before him, as if awaiting the next move. Without hesitation, Li Hanshan began to draw continuously on the stone slab according to the rules of that ancient game, each stroke landing on those seemingly empty, yet actually connecting, points in the array.

With the first stroke, the rune array lit up with a silver light; with the second stroke, the markings on the light screen rotated half a circle; the third, fourth, and fifth strokes—each stroke caused the silver runes to light up sequentially, like awakened lamps, connecting along a specific path, like a string of lit fuses extending forward along a predetermined trajectory. When the trajectory of the last piece was completed, the rune array on the stone hall door lit up completely, silvery-white light seeped from the cracks in the door, the door emitted a muffled hum, and then slowly slid open inward.

The space behind the door was small, roughly the size of an ordinary stone chamber. The chamber was empty except for one thing placed on a stone platform in the center—a palm-sized, emerald-green jade pot. The pot's body was smooth and round, its surface shimmering with fine spiritual patterns, like a spring of water solidified within jade. Li Hanshan stepped forward, picked up the jade pot, and felt its warm, slightly heavy texture. He could sense an extremely pure spatial fluctuation within it. The moment he probed the pot with his divine sense, the entire aura of the herb garden became clear to him—the space inside the jade pot was far more expansive than it appeared from the outside, spanning several tens of feet. A soft light flowed from the top, the ground was covered with fine spiritual soil, and the concentration of spiritual energy in the air was so dense it was almost tangible.

"A spatial artifact..." Xiao An's voice came from behind, tinged with genuine surprise, "and it's specifically designed for cultivating spiritual herbs. The spiritual soil inside is of extremely high quality, and it even comes with a small spirit-gathering array."

Li Hanshan carefully examined the jade pot for a moment, noticing two extremely small and faint ancient seal characters on its bottom: "Qiankun" (乾坤). He carefully put the jade pot away, turned and walked out of the stone hall, returning to the herb field. He didn't rush to harvest the herbs, but first activated the jade pot—infusing spiritual power into the core runes on its body. A soft emerald green light shone from the mouth of the pot, like a miniature world unfolding before him, opening a narrow entrance. He carefully enveloped the roots of the first azure Ganoderma lucidum with his spiritual power, transplanting the entire plant intact into the spiritual soil inside the jade pot. The moment the herb settled in that spiritual soil, its roots automatically unfurled like awakened tentacles, burrowing deep into the soil, the azure light on its leaves becoming even brighter than before.

"It really works!" Li Hanshan was overjoyed. He quickened his pace, transplanting the spiritual herbs from the medicinal field row by row into the space inside the jade pot. Each herb quickly adapted to the spiritual soil, stretching its roots as if it had always been there. One after another, the herbs were moved into the pot, neatly arranged into new rows in the emerald green light, growing quietly in the small world created by the jade pot.

Xiao An stood to the side, watching his busy figure, and whispered, "These spiritual herbs should be enough to support Senior's cultivation to the Dao Integration stage. With the added benefits of dual cultivation, it probably won't be long before Senior breaks through the Void Refinement stage and attains Dao Integration."

Break through the void and attain the Dao!

Li Hanshan felt a surge of warmth in his heart.