150. Wuji Advances to the Nascent Soul Stage

After a wave of dizziness and disorientation, Xie Wuji opened his eyes and was astonished to find himself back in his rented apartment. Intense pain now coursed through every inch of his body, making him gasp for air and break out in cold sweat.

He tried to roll over, only to tumble clumsily onto the floor, his back landing squarely on a can of pork.

"How am I back here? Weren't I rescued by those masked figures? I..."

Struggling to turn his body, Xie Wuji leaned his back against the wall and began to breathe heavily.

Feeling that his muscles were severely strained, he instantly recalled the manual Dongmen Yong had obtained—a compilation of the eight supreme techniques of the Undying Longevity Sect.

"This is unbearable. If this keeps on, I'll be in agony until I die. I might as well treat a dead horse as if it were still alive..." Regardless of why he had suddenly reappeared in the mortal realm, his top priority right now was to recover his strength and heal his injuries. How could he ever hope to return to the otherworldly realm otherwise?

With that thought, Xie Wuji sank his consciousness deep into his Dantian. The Undying Bird spirit had also suffered considerable damage; curled up into a ball, it was currently undergoing a slow, self-directed healing process.

The storage space within Xie Wuji's Qingtian Jade Belt was vast, and he had stashed away quite a few miraculous elixirs and spiritual pills. Selecting the ones most densely imbued with spiritual energy, he immediately began to ingest them.

As he consumed the pills, he simultaneously started guiding his blood and Qi to undergo a complete refinement in accordance with the techniques of the Undying Longevity Sect.

Grip of Annihilation, True Fire of the Undying, Exterior Spirit, Golden Body of Immortality, Skull of Undestruction, True Blood of the Undying, Heart of Unscathed, and Immovable Golden Honored One.

Xie Wuji ran through all eight branch techniques of the Undying Bird divine art within his own body. To his surprise, he could now feel that his long-stagnant bottleneck was finally showing signs of loosening!

This left Xie Wuji feeling both exasperated and elated.

He was exasperated because of all the times he could have broken through, why did it have to be at this exact moment? Yet he was elated simply because he was finally able to breach the bottleneck.

Naturally, the optimal time to break through would have been before falling out with Dongmen Yong. If he had managed to reach the Nascent Soul stage back then, he likely would have been able to fully unleash the Thirty-Six Minor Sword Array.

Fortunately, since the minor sword array had not been successfully released at the time, the thirty-six spiritual swords remained intact, though each of them had lost a considerable portion of its spiritual energy.

While the spiritual energy was depleted, that level of loss was still repairable. Of course, Xie Wuji currently had no time to spare for restoring that spiritual energy.

"One spirit and eight techniques—it really is overly complicated. Now that I've mastered the sect-guarding martial arts of the Undying Longevity Sect, although my realm remains the same, several parts of these eight techniques actually overlap..." Xie Wuji muttered to himself.

For instance, the Exterior Spirit and the True Fire of the Undying did not conflict, because the True Fire was simply the flame belonging to the Undying Bird itself, while the Exterior Spirit was the physical entity of the Undying Bird's spirit; thus, the two could be merged into one.

Similarly, the True Blood of the Undying served to rapidly restore the body's blood and Qi, and the Heart of Unscathed did much the same, allowing internal organ injuries to heal with great swiftness.

If one were to calculate it this way, the Grip of Annihilation served to fortify the fists, rendering them invincible, while the Golden Body of Immortality, the Immovable Golden Honored One, and the Skull of Undestruction reinforced the limbs, torso, and skull respectively.

Xie Wuji pondered deeply. Condensed into three major categories, these techniques could be simplified into three fundamental aspects: super-regeneration, iron skin and copper bones, and the fire of the Undying Bird.

A wave of great joy washed over Xie Wuji. Discovering this simplification would be of immense help to him.

Without delay, he divided his spiritual energy into three streams of warm current, circulating them through these three aspects. The previous method had required dividing his focus among eight different directions—how could anyone possibly maintain concentration while splitting their attention eight ways?

Yet now, Xie Wuji only needed to divide his focus into three parts, and the efficiency of his cultivation had improved by more than just a little!

Following this streamlined routine, Xie Wuji suddenly sensed an intensely scorching aura extending outward from his Dantian.

Immediately afterward, a deeply comforting sensation spread through all his limbs and bones, as if he were soaking in a hot bath.

When he opened his eyes, he was pleasantly surprised to find that his power had finally advanced to the next level. Furthermore, the majority of his injuries had healed; most of his surface cuts and a significant portion of his internal damage were now completely cured!

Xie Wuji burst into hearty laughter with excitement, for he had successfully advanced to the Nascent Soul stage!

He immediately pulled out the ancient mirror, intending to use it to return to the otherworldly realm. To his horror, however, he discovered that the bronze mirror completely failed to respond!

"What is going on?!" Panic surged in Xie Wuji's heart, but the ancient mirror seemed entirely unusable now.

The Undying Bird spirit residing within his abdomen spoke up: "During that previous ordeal, you recklessly unleashed all the power the ancient mirror had accumulated over these past few months in one go. At the very last moment, the mirror instinctively brought you back to this world precisely because you originally belong here."

"So it's you, bird-brain! Is there still any way for me to go back?" Xie Wuji asked anxiously.

"Bird-brain your sister! You must find a spiritual spring in this world right now to make up for the mirror's depleted reserves. Otherwise, if you rely on the current rate at which the mirror absorbs the spiritual energy of heaven and earth, it won't be able to recover in less than three months," the Undying Bird retorted.

Hearing this, Xie Wuji was dumbfounded: "This... how could such a thing happen?"

Just then, Xie Wuji noticed that his phone, sitting on the table, suddenly displayed ten missed calls. He felt a hint of curiosity; the mobile phone he used in this world had not been brought with him to the otherworldly realm since there was no signal there. He had only brought a single phone along to watch little movies and occasionally use as a calculator.

Picking up the phone and unlocking it, Xie Wuji discovered that all the missed calls were from the exact same person.

"Aunty?" Xie Wuji paused to think before remembering that this "Aunty" was Zhu Feifei's mother.

Zhu Feifei's mother was a hardworking, down-to-earth female laborer who worked in a restaurant for meager wages. Back when Zhu Feifei was still in university, her mother had provided for all of her expenses.

Because of this, Xie Wuji had also shouldered a share of the financial burden at the time, as he was well aware of the straitened circumstances of Zhu Feifei's family.

Zhu Feifei's mother knew Xie Wuji well and was very fond of him. Although Xie Wuji was not one for smooth words and felt rather awkward in front of elders, he was undeniably a sincere person.

Though merely a worker, having spent decades in a restaurant witnessing all sorts of people, Aunt Zhu firmly insisted that Xie Wuji was a young man with a fundamentally kind nature.

Later on, however, Aunt Zhu contracted a chronic illness. Xie Wuji never quite learned what specific disease it was, but he knew it was an extremely costly ailment.

"Hello, Aunty?" Xie Wuji felt quite apprehensive, but recalling how kind and warm her mother had always been toward him whenever he visited their home, he decided it was only polite to return the call.

Zhu Feifei had taken her mother's surname. Her father had passed away in a car accident when she was still very young. There were rumors that her father had suffered a great deal of grievance as a son-in-law.

Xie Wuji had never met Zhu Feifei's grandmother, but from casual chats among the neighbors near their old single-story houses, he gathered that the old woman had a very sharp tongue. She passed away not long after Zhu Feifei's father died.

Xie Wuji intended to tell Aunt Zhu about his breakup with Zhu Feifei: "Um, Aunty, let me tell you..."

"I've finally found you! Sob, sob, sob..." Hearing Xie Wuji's voice, Zhu Feifei's mother immediately broke down in tears, her voice hoarse as she asked, "Child, do you know where Feifei has gone?"

"Aunty, please don't panic. Listen to me... Actually, Feifei and I have already..."

Before Xie Wuji could finish, Aunt Zhu was suddenly seized by a fit of violent coughing. Struggling to speak, she said, "She has been out of contact for two months! Ever since she suddenly wired me two hundred thousand yuan two months ago, she vanished without a trace. You're Feifei's boyfriend, you must know where she went, right? Did you... did you two have a fight?"

Xie Wuji could sense that Aunt Zhu's condition had worsened once again. She suffered from chronic pneumonia and renal failure—in short, uremia, and still in its early stages.

The Zhu family was far from well-off.

"Aunty, where are you?" Unable to bear telling Aunt Zhu the truth out of fear that she might do something foolish, Xie Wuji decided he should meet her in person to talk.

"I'm in the capital... Right now... right now I'm standing on an overpass, and I... I don't know where to look for Feifei anymore..."