"Is there any way to shorten the growth time?" Yang Kai frowned. He had long guessed it would come to this, but hearing it spoken aloud by Mu Zhu still gave him a headache.
"I'll go give it a try!" Mu Lu said, and without waiting a heartbeat she spun around and flew deep into the medicine garden, clearly determined not to waste a single instant and to do everything in her power to shorten the Life Restoration Fruit's growth cycle.
Mu Zhu glanced after her and smiled wryly. "Even if we give it our all, we can only shave off half the time at most."
"That's still over fifteen hundred years..." Yang Kai couldn't help but grit his teeth. What an incomparably long stretch of time. For an cultivator of his current level, waiting fifteen hundred years was nothing in principle—but he had only lived a little under two hundred years in total. Put it that way, and fifteen hundred years became genuinely terrifying.
"Who did you run into? A Demon Saint?" Mu Zhu was rather curious about who had managed to kill Yang Kai.
"Someone far more powerful than a Demon Saint," Yang Kai replied with a bitter smile. It was the Great Demon God—the very being from whom all demons in the entire Demon Realm had sprung. With a single command, the Demon Saints had obeyed involuntarily, even sacrificing themselves to be fused and devoured by him.
Mu Zhu gasped. "Such a person actually exists in this world?"
Yang Kai nodded. "Indeed. He has lived for an unknowable number of years. His situation is actually somewhat similar to mine now—his physical body was destroyed, but his soul endured. The difference is that he had no Warm Spirit Lotus. How exactly does a bare soul survive for tens of thousands of years? Could his soul have already reached a level of immortality?..."
"Tens of thousands of years..." Mu Zhu was even more stunned. The soul was a wondrous thing—every living creature with spiritual awareness possessed one. Yet it was also extraordinarily fragile. No matter how powerful one's strength, without a body to shelter it, once a soul was exposed, it would scatter and dissipate in short order.
Even someone as mighty as Tian Yan had needed to first reconstruct a physical body before he could emerge from the Spirit Wandering Mirror.
Mu Zhu could scarcely imagine how a person, stripped of a body, could sustain his existence through sheer soul power for tens of thousands of years—and that this person was even more formidable than a Demon Saint. What manner of being could he be?
She was about to press for more details when she noticed Yang Kai's eyes suddenly blazing with light, a deeply contemplative expression on his face, muttering something under his breath.
Mu Zhu listened carefully and finally caught what Yang Kai was saying to himself.
"Immortal and imperishable, immortal and imperishable..." The gleam in Yang Kai's eyes grew brighter and brighter, and then he burst into laughter. "How could I have forgotten about that!"
"What do you mean, Master?" Mu Zhu asked, bewildered, unable to fathom what had struck Yang Kai so suddenly and made him this ecstatic.
Yang Kai fixed her with shining eyes and said emphatically, "Immortal and imperishable, immortal and imperishable—doesn't that remind you of something?"
Mu Zhu vaguely grasped the thread of his meaning, but before she could react, Yang Kai's soul form drifted sideways and soon arrived before a small tree roughly the height of a person. His gaze burned upon what stood before him.
The small tree was oddly leafless from its midsection upward—completely bare, as though it might wither and die at any moment. Yet paradoxically, it radiated staggering vitality. One could say that the combined life force of every plant in the entire medicine garden could not match a fraction of what this single small tree possessed.
"The Ageless Tree!" Mu Zhu cried out, instantly understanding why Yang Kai had been so excited.
Legend held that whoever refined the Ageless Tree would obtain an immortal and imperishable body, able to share the lifespan of heaven and earth and shine alongside the sun and moon.
The Wood Spirit clan, a race that had been dealing with all manner of rare spiritual flowers and herbs since ancient times, was naturally well acquainted with the legend of the Ageless Tree. But it was, after all, merely a legend—no one knew whether it was true or false. In truth, before meeting Yang Kai, both Mu Zhu and Mu Lu had doubted whether the Ageless Tree even existed.
"You're going to refine it!" Mu Zhu said, staring at Yang Kai.
"Of course," Yang Kai nodded. "Is there any other way?"
The Life Restoration Fruit was one path out, but it would take at least another fifteen hundred years. Yang Kai simply could not afford to wait.
"But haven't you tried before?" Mu Zhu asked, frowning.
Yang Kai smiled faintly. "I've tried, yes—but never in this state. Perhaps this time, there will be an unexpected surprise."
"Then be careful in everything you do!"
Yang Kai wasted no more words. Now that he had discovered another way out, there was nothing to deliberate over. At worst he would fail, and even failure would be better than simply sitting here and waiting.
His soul form dissolved into a mass of pure spiritual consciousness and began slowly enveloping the Ageless Tree. Before long, the entire tree had been enveloped within his soul.
The Ageless Tree had been obtained from a peculiar secret realm within a lower star field. Yang Kai still remembered that inside that realm, a resplendent divine peacock had been guarding it—the Seven Radiance Divine Light radiating from the creature's body had been impervious to any force...
At the time, all he could perceive was that the divine peacock was immensely powerful. Now, having ascended to the level of Great Emperor and looking back with those eyes, he still felt that the divine peacock was not something one could overcome through raw strength alone...
It was absolutely not a divine bird that should have belonged to a lower star field. How it had ended up in that place, he had no idea.
After obtaining the Ageless Tree, Yang Kai had attempted to refine it many times, but never succeeded. The only thing that had come of it was that the tree's leaves had allowed him to save a number of lives—at the cost of stripping the entire tree bare of every last leaf, leaving it as it stood now.
Precisely because his repeated attempts had borne no fruit, and every leaf had been spent, Yang Kai had stopped paying attention to the Ageless Tree and had long since cast the legend from his mind. Had his physical body not been destroyed this time, leaving him in desperate straits, he likely would never have remembered it.