Chapter 317: The Fifth Elder's Whimsical Idea

"What a pity Lu Yang refuses to learn my Immortal Fist Technique; otherwise, he wouldn't have fainted." The Immortal Fairy felt that Lu Yang was perfect in every way except for his stubbornness, which kept him from accepting her martial arts.

"The Immortal Fist Technique?" Yun Zhi softly repeated, setting down her chopsticks as a gleam of genuine interest sparked in her eyes.

"It is also known as the Longevity Fist. Once mastered, one's own body becomes the medicine. Whether falling ill or cultivating, there is no longer any need to consume elixirs, and no poison in the world can affect you."

"However, to learn the Immortal Fist, one must first learn over a thousand different styles, such as the Monk Fruit Fist, the Boat-Sterculia Fist, and the Ginseng Fist. You must master them thoroughly, separating the false from the true, discarding the dross and keeping the essence, using the body as a furnace to fuse those thousand-plus techniques into one. That is the Immortal Fist Technique."

Yun Zhi fell silent for a moment, then stood up and asked with deep solemnity, "Could Senior teach me?"

"Naturally."

By the time Lu Yang awoke, he had already left the kitchen.

"Awake? How do you feel?"

Lu Yang thought to himself that he had been knocked unconscious by the sheer spiciness, yet she still asked how he felt.

"My cultivation..."

Lu Yang had barely moved a few times before discovering that his cultivation had actually increased slightly, rising from the initial stage of the early Golden Core realm to the middle stage of the early Golden Core realm.

He had clearly done absolutely nothing.

"Heheh, did you think this Immortal just made an ordinary plate of stir-fried eggs and tomatoes? How could that be! What this Immortal made was a cultivation-boosting stir-fried eggs and tomatoes!"

"You feel the increase is small only because you took a single bite. If you had finished the whole plate, this Immortal guarantees you would have broken through to the late Golden Core stage!"

Lu Yang felt that although practicing step-by-step yielded slow progress, it possessed the virtue of being safe.

If he had followed the Immortal Fairy's theory and eaten the entire plate, he feared he might have directly shed his mortal coil and ascended as a spirit.

Outside the cave dwelling, Meng Jingzhou bellowed at the top of his lungs, "Lu Yang, are you awake yet?"

"I'm awake." Lu Yang stepped out of the cave, the piercing sunlight making him squint uncomfortably.

Standing before the entrance were Meng Jingzhou, Li Haoran, and Qin Yanyan.

Seeing Lu Yang awake, Meng Jingzhou let out a sigh of relief. "You're finally awake! You've been unconscious for three months!"

Lu Yang startled, shocked that the toxicity of the Immortal Fairy's dish could be so potent.

Li Haoran spoke up helplessly, "Senior Brother Meng, Senior Brother Lu clearly only slept for two hours."

"Ah, Junior Brother Li, that's where you're wrong. Is it easy for me to successfully trick Lu Yang just once? And yet you expose me."

Qin Yanyan silently observed this scene, wondering if these two peerless geniuses, Lu Yang and Meng Jingzhou, owed their extraordinary cleverness to the way they integrated scheming and deception into their daily lives.

It seemed highly probable.

"Come, come, let's go find the Fifth Elder together. Once the Fifth Elder joins our Heavenly Court Sect, he'll be a founding member!"

With Li Haoran leading the way, the group quickly located the Fifth Elder, who was currently forging equipment.

The Fifth Elder threw his own Daoist robe into the flames, subjecting it to the trial of intense fire. When the robe became glowing red, he reached out and retrieved it barehanded from the blaze, his face entirely expressionless throughout the process.

The Fifth Elder produced a small hammer from his waist, clinking and clanking against the coat before plunging it into water. With a sharp sizzle, the forging session drew to a close.

Satisfied with the newly refined Daoist robe, the Fifth Elder casually slipped it on. Only then did he notice Lu Yang and the others standing nearby, watching him.

"Ah, little Lu."

"Fifth Elder, were you forging clothes just now?" Lu Yang asked, somewhat uncertain. The process just now did not look like tailoring clothes, but rather like refining some kind of metallic artifact.

"I am trying to combine clothing with means of transportation."

"Combine them?" The group was bewildered. Was there any connection between these two things?

"Why wouldn't there be?" As a Grandmaster of Forging, the Fifth Elder began to enlighten them on the spot.

"A so-called means of transportation, whether it is a horse carriage or a flying vessel, is a tool to facilitate your travel, correct?"

"Carriages, flying vessels, and flying swords all share a common characteristic: they bear our weight."

"Since that is the case, why have we always overlooked the most common thing that bears our weight—our clothes?"

Lu Yang pondered this and realized it made perfect sense. Clothes were worn on the body; looking at it from another perspective, wasn't it the clothes enveloping their forms?

The human was the payload of the clothes.

"Therefore, I believe clothing is the most suitable means of transportation. Look."

The Fifth Elder channeled his spiritual energy, and the refined Daoist robe soared upward, taking him along into the air.

The Fifth Elder did a loop in the sky, landed steadily, and continued addressing the crowd: "Under normal circumstances, one can only fly independently at the Golden Core stage. The exception belongs to sword cultivators, who can ride swords during the Foundation Establishment stage."

"Since Foundation Establishment sword cultivators can fly on swords, why can't ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivators fly on their clothes?"

"Of course, my current method of forging clothes is too complex and cannot be mastered by those at the Foundation Establishment stage yet. Once I refine and simplify the process, register the patent, and promote it throughout the cultivation world, wouldn't endless wealth flow into my Forging Peak?" The Fifth Elder spoke with dancing eyebrows. Only when the Forging Peak became wealthy could they purchase more materials to craft even better magic treasures.

"The Fifth Elder is a man of grand talent!" Lu Yang spoke from the bottom of his heart, feeling that this was highly feasible.

The Daoist Sect possessed countless spirit stones precisely because of exceptional geniuses like the Fifth Elder and the Seventh Elder in forging and alchemy, especially forging, which was widely acclaimed in the cultivation world.

"And who is that little girl?" The Fifth Elder asked, pointing at Qin Yanyan.

"This is the daughter of Junior Brother Li's ex-wife," Lu Yang explained.

The Fifth Elder gasped in shock. When did his disciple get married?

"The daughter of my wife from a past life!" Li Haoran hastily added to clarify.

Realization dawned on the Fifth Elder. "Oh, Qin Yanyan, right? Haoran mentioned you. Calculating it this way, you are technically my grand-disciple."

Qin Yanyan: "..."

She slightly regretted coming to the Daoist Sect. Her generational status here was the absolute lowest. Leaving aside how Lu Yang and Meng Jingzhou constantly called her their grand-niece, she had now directly become someone else's grand-disciple.

Just as Qin Yanyan was about to say that the past life belonged to the past and the present life to the present, and that they should not be conflated, she saw the Fifth Elder pull a magic treasure from his robes.

"Since this is our first meeting, it is only right that I give you a gift. I don't have anything grand on hand, but you appear to be a talisman cultivator. Take this talisman-inscribing pen. Eighteen common talismans are engraved inside it; channeling your spiritual energy allows you to draw them instantaneously. It should be of some use to you."

Qin Yanyan was thoroughly shocked by the artifact's effects. A talisman pen was an essential tool for a talisman cultivator. She already owned one that contained ten types of talismans, which had been custom-made for her by a renowned master smith invited by Su Yiren. That master smith had claimed that a Golden Core grade talisman pen could hold ten types at most.

"This... this is too precious, I cannot accept it."

"Take it. It's just a little trinket I forged in my spare time, it's not worth much," the Fifth Elder said generously.

Li Haoran looked at Qin Yanyan with a twinge of jealousy. Why was it that the first time his master met Qin Yanyan, he gave her a gift, but the first time they met, he threw him into flowing magma?

"Right, what did you all come to find me for?" Only then did the Fifth Elder remember that Lu Yang's group must have a reason for visiting.

"It's like this: we have established the Heavenly Court Sect. It possesses a profound heritage, inheriting the legacy of ancient immortals, backed by great clans. One of us was once half a step away from the Tribulation Transcendence stage, and another is the primary heir of the Nine Nether Sect. We would like to request the Fifth Elder to become a Protector of our Heavenly Court Sect."

(End of Chapter)