Enrolment

Jiang Ting slowly opened his eyes, feeling the gentle spiritual qi flowing around him. He basked in the warmth of it, allowing it to seep into his body bit by bit to revitalize himself. With every breath, he could feel the spiritual qi making his bond and mind stronger, but knew that it was mostly an illusion, since such an amount of spiritual qi could only strengthen the body at an extremely negligible level.

In order to affect the spiritual qi, one had to use their own sword qi to interact with it. It was also possible to use one's will to summon spiritual qi, but there was no training method for the latter, and it was considered as the fortune of whoever could do it, since they could use both their spiritual qi as well as their will to utilize spiritual qi, hence taking their endurance in a battle to staggering levels.

Jiang Junjie imparted a strong qi refining technique known as 'Red Leaf Meditation' to Jiang Ting. It enabled him to refine the spiritual qi extremely quickly. As Jiang Ting focused, he used the technique to draw the spiritual qi into his meridians, circulating it so as to refine it, before depositing the refined spiritual qi into his dantian, the qi center of the human body.

The next step was to draw out the spiritual qi in his dantian and convert it into sword qi. There was no difficulty in the process as long as you had refined spiritual qi in your dantian and had comprehended sword qi. Since Jiang Ting had met the first parameter just now and still possessed his comprehension of the sword qi from his cultivation in his past life, he quickly gained success.

Suddenly, a string of buzzing sounds was heard as the invisible spiritual qi with no material form suddenly started transforming into a string of sword shaped objects, dazzling with a multicolored sheen. This area was extremely close to nature, as such the natural sword qi possessed traits of all 5 elements, being wood, water, fire, earth and even metal, due to some ore deposits found in the mountains.

Given that Jiang Ting had just begun his cultivation, he could only harness a minute amount of sword qi. As he tempered his body with the sword qi, his sensitivity to it would increase, allowing him to harness more sword qi with a smaller amount of spiritual qi, thus enabling him to gather more qi with his limited spiritual qi reserves.

As such, he committed to his training. Cultivation was a long process of seeking immortality. As such, even training the sword phase of Dragon Body Technique might have taken years to accomplish. Fortunately, Jiang Ting had experienced all of this before, so he patiently cultivated.

* * *

In the afternoon, Jiang Ting, paused his cultivation, heading back home for lunch. Cultivation was an energy-intensive process, and the body needed a massive amount of nutrients. As such, his meals were now heavier, and also incorporated spiritual herbs his grandfather had specially grown in their garden, along with the naturally occurring spiritual herbs from the mountain.

These spiritual herbs were simply plants which had grown in areas with a relatively higher density of spiritual qi, causing them to build up spiritual qi within them. All living beings could, at a very negligible rate, absorb, refine and store spiritual qi unconsciously. Since these plants had stored high amounts of refined spiritual qi, although the refinement was subconsciously done at a very rudimentary level, consuming it could allow cultivators to then refine the large amount of spiritual qi within the plants quickly, thereby acting as a precious cultivation resource.

Since Jiang Junjie was an expert from Jiang Clan, the herbs he was growing in the backyard were of such high quality that the spiritual qi within them was too massive and condensed for Jiang Ting to consume, as he would probably implode if he did so. As such, Jiang Junjie painstakingly cooked the herbs in such a manner as to make it possible for Jiang Ting to consume them.

When Jiang Ting returned home, Lunch was already prepared, sp he sat down with his grandfather to eat. The first bite he took was so rich in spiritual qi, that all the exhaustion from his cultivation went away, his body relaxed, and his dantian immediately showed a small increase in spiritual qi level.

Jiang Ting's pupils constricted. In his past life, he was the legendary genius of the academy, showered with precious cultivation resources, following which he had gone outside and obtained several high-level resources never seen in the village. Yet none of them could ever produce such instant effects. He took a deep look at his grandfather, wondering again just what kind of monstrous entity is the Jiang Clan that his grandfather hailed from.

As he continued eating, his grandfather called out to him, "Ting."

"Yes, grandpa?" Jiang Ting looked up from his plate, looking at his grandfather who was looking at him seriously while eating his food.

"Have you given any thought to enrolling at the village academy?"

"The village academy?" Jiang Ting was rather surprised, as he never thought his grandfather would consider the village academy worthy of teaching Jiang Ting, especially since any of his grandfather's cultivation techniques or spiritual herbs were probably precious enough to buy the whole village.

"Indeed," his grandfather said, before explaining," Although you possess high level cultivation techniques, you must still learn a lot of things about cultivation. Now that you have begun cultivation, it is naturally the best time for you to go to an academy for a formal education. Additionally, you will also get to compete with your peers at the academy. Once you have mastered all the knowledge at the academy and become the strongest cultivator there, I will take you to another city to enroll in an elite academy so that you can truly grow. Of course, you don't have to attend academies. There are different paths of cultivation for everyone, this is simply the one I recommend."

Jiang Ting knew better than to doubt his grandfather, so he directly said, "I'll enroll first thing tomorrow."

Jiang Junjie nodded in satisfaction. 'What a decisive kid, he'll make an excellent swordsman, '