THE NEXT DAY, Menghu waited for Mo Tianliao at the same place, cracking his knuckles in anticipation of teaching his junior a lesson.
But Mo Tianliao was unfazed. “I heard you’re skilled with the broadsword,” he said. “My spiritual energy has been increasing of late, but I have no one to practice with.”
“Not a problem. I can suppress my cultivation to match yours.” Menghu eagerly reduced his cultivation to qi-refining stage and swapped his precious blade for an ordinary magical saber. “It hasn’t been all that long, but your cultivation has improved by leaps and bounds.”
Mo Tianliao raised an eyebrow. His senior didn’t seem all that surprised by the speed at which his cultivation was increasing. He looked down and took out a wooden sword.
“Shidi, I switched to an ordinary magical weapon for you, but why are you switching to a wooden sword?” Menghu wasn’t too pleased—surely his weak junior was going to be knocked down in one move.
Mo Tianliao said nothing. He attacked with a flourish of his sword.
“Whoa!” Startled, Menghu dodged the sword before it could pierce him in the armpit. His guard went up at once.
In his previous life, Mo Tianliao’s basal attributes had been average. Apart from spamming spiritual stones to increase his spiritual power, he spent his days and nights training. He made sure he was proficient in everything, from swordplay to using spells with pure spiritual energy. Before he’d made his name, he’d studied under a certain old sleazeball who’d taught him all sorts of underhanded moves.
The wooden sword imbued with spiritual energy aimed straight for Menghu—he blocked the blow, only for thorny vines to shoot out from the sword’s tip toward his eyes. Menghu dodged them with a tilt of his head and grabbed the vines, and a trail of fire shot back along the vines from his fingertips.
Quickly discarding the burning vines, Mo Tianliao spun into the air and flicked a finger, sending a tiny fire snake darting forward toward Menghu’s crotch to set it on fire.
“Yow!” Menghu leaped up in shock and rolled onto the ground. Absorbing the fire into his palm, he threw it back at Mo Tianliao. Mo Tianliao caught the flame with his wooden sword, and it blazed merrily at the sword’s tip.
“That’s so dishonorable!” Menghu huffed as he got up.
“No one cares about manners or methods in a life-and-death battle,” Mo Tianliao said nonchalantly as he let the woodfire burn down the wooden sword.
Finding it embarrassing to lose to his junior in battle, Menghu insisted on another match the following day. He lost again.
Never one to yield, he became more motivated with each defeat and kept hounding Mo Tianliao for a fight every day. Gradually, he stopped losing as fast, but Mo Tianliao’s never-ending repertoire of underhanded tricks drove him crazy. Mo Tianliao told him to raise his suppressed cultivation level to the foundation establishment stage—once he did, they finally managed to tie.
Through sparring with his senior, Mo Tianliao gradually mastered control over his divine tree body and integrated some of the techniques he had used a lot of in his previous life. His cultivation rapidly improved, until finally, on one fine morning, he broke through to the foundation establishment stage.
Establishing one’s foundation was the first step on the path to immortality, and establishing a solid foundation would trigger a minor atmospheric phenomenon. What had been a sunny morning turned overcast with dark clouds. A green and a red beam shot up from Qingning Palace’s side courtyard, twisting into a pillar of light that disappeared into the clouds.