The Death of an Elder

After learning Shadow Claws, Li Zhu headed over to Spirit Palace, wanting to increase his cultivation as much as he could. Since he had gotten fourth in the inner sect tournament, he could enter the Spirit Palace for a whole two weeks without needing to pay a fee.

Having already been to Spirit Palace before, Li Zhu quickly reached the dome shaped building, and entered without anyone stopping him. Li Zhu was currently well into the eight stage of the qi gathering realm, so his goal was to break through to the next stage by when the inheritance trials began, whenever that may be.

Fortunately, inheritance trials generally did not test strength, rather talent and wit. Generally, when experts died and created an inheritance for future generations, they wanted the person that won it to be able to carry their name forth, bringing them glory. Even though a cultivator may have higher cultivation than another, this did not mean that they would achieve greater things, and the experts who created inheritances knew this.

Although Li Zhu understood this, he still thought becoming stronger could only help, especially in case he needed to escape from dangerous situations. With that in mind, he found a comfortable spot in the vast Spirit Palace, and sat down under a tree, starting to cultivate.

After about ten minutes, which Li Zhu used to get into a relaxed state, a small bottle of pills appeared in his hands. After he had gotten the Hundred Deaths tree from Shen Zan's garden, Li Zhu had briefly visited the Alchemy hall to claim his Cultivation Enhancing pills, which he was now going to use as a way to push him towards the ninth stage of the qi gathering realm.

Li Zhu took one spirit pill out of the bottle, and threw it in his mouth, ready to refine the energy correctly. As usual, he spread the energy in the spirit pill across his meridians evenly, so that his foundation would not have any flaws.

Only a few seconds after taking the first spirit pill, Li Zhu already threw a second in his mouth, followed by a third, and then the seven remaining pills all at once. To actually break through to the ninth stage, he would need an incredible amount of heavenly energy, so one pill at a time would simply not do.

As he refined the energy contained in the spirit pills, Li Zhu also absorbed the heavenly energy from the environment around him, which being in Spirit Palace, was quite abundant.

Controlling two sources of energy was incredibly difficult, since one needed to divide their attention into spreading both energies evenly across their meridians. Fortunately, Li Zhu had been trained on how to do this, since when he was the Crown Prince, he was occasionally given powerful spirit pills, and the places he cultivated had much denser energy than even Spirit Palace.

As Li Zhu pushed towards a breakthrough, an imposing aura was being released by him, attracting the attention of some other disciples.

Since entering Spirit Palace was quite expensive, disciples generally only did it when attempting a breakthrough. Due to this, the disciples simply returned to their cultivation, at most moving a bit farther from Li Zhu, to not be distracted by the aura surrounding him.

'I'm almost there!' thought Li Zhu, sensing his cultivation reaching the peak of the eight stage, with only the bottleneck remaining.

From the moment he had restarted to cultivate, Li Zhu had encountered no problems with bottlenecks, and hadn't stayed at a stage of cultivation for too long. As ones cultivation increased, though, the time they spent in each stage or realm increased exponentially, to the point that most experts lived the latter part of their lives in the same stage, unable to breakthrough.

This was not yet an issue for Li Zhu, though, as the double energy entering his meridians and then the Dantian were pushing him over the edge, close to breaking through to the ninth stage.

There was no flashy phenomenon, or imposing aura, as Li Zhu abruptly reached the ninth stage, surprising even himself with the speed at which he had broken through the bottleneck.

The other disciples in the Spirit Palace were not surprised, though, since they had all felt the heavenly energy from the spirit spring being funneled into one particular spot, and that happened to be where Li Zhu was sitting. Due to the state of harmony with nature that he was in, Li Zhu had inadvertently attracted most of the heavenly energy in Spirit Palace towards him, angering the other disciples.

He was oblivious to this, though, as he happily walked out of Spirit Palace, having only spent about ten hours inside. He had reached the ninth stage much earlier than he had expected, but he now wanted to test his fighting prowess, with Shadow Claws.

Fortunately, as he was about to exit Spirit Palace, Li Zhu noticed a familiar face. Hua Shu was not too far from him, also walking towards the exit, with an overjoyed expression.

"Hua Shu, wait up!" he exclaimed, before jogging towards her. After reaching, L Zhu noticed something different about her, and scratched his head in confusion.

After a short pause, with Hua Shu looking at him expectantly, Li Zhu's eyes opened wide, and asked with an enthusiastic expression, "You have broken through?!"

Although it had taken him a while, Li Zhu was now sure that the difference in Hua Shu was the fact that she was now in the Core Consolidating realm, much stronger than before.

"Yeah, I was already at the peak of the ninth stage, so the Cultivation Enhancing pills helped me break through the bottleneck." she said, pride visible in her eyes.

In Crouching Tiger Kingdom, reaching the Core Consolidating realm at her age was very impressive, and showed that she was bound to become a great figure in the future.

"So you're also an inner sect disciple now?" asked Li Zhu, remembering that anyone in the Core Consolidating realm would enter the inner sect.

"I will be after I report my breakthrough, and they allocate me an inner sect token!" she replied, excited.

"Since my breakthrough, I have been itching for a fight, Li Zhu. If I temporarily seal my cultivation to the ninth stage, do you want to have a friendly spar in the training grounds?" she asked, clearly having wanted to ask this question since he had come up to her.

Li Zhu was slightly surprised, but he had also wanted to test his newly gained strength, so he promptly accepted, saying, "Sure, let's go right now!"

And with that, the two headed over to the training grounds, and waited for their turn to face off, while watching the other fights.

Many weaker disciples were still participating in the inner sect tournament, since each day was allocated to one stage lower, with seven days in total. They did not have any days for first or second stage qi gathering cultivators, since it was quite tough to enter the sect at that level of cultivation, and there wouldn't be enough people for a proper competition.

Because there were still people in the tournament, the training grounds were not particularly crowded, and Li Zhu and Hua Shu had the chance to spar shortly after they had written their names on the list of fights.

As they walked onto the stone platform, Hua Shu said, "Let's fight at the best of our abilities, Li Zhu. May the strongest win!"

Li Zhu and Hua Shu did not talk much, before starting to fight. After all, the purpose of this spar was exclusively to test their new strength. Although Hua Shu restricted her cultivation to the qi gathering realm, she was still much stronger than before her breakthrough, since she could more easily control her heavenly energy.

Hua Shu started the fight with her usual flaming arrows, and Li Zhu also reacted in a predictable way, simply entering Shadow Lurk.

This time, though, the moment he came out of the shadows, three long, pitch black claws had emerged from each of his hands, giving him a deadly appearance.

He was, of course, using Shadow Claws, which gave him a whole new realm of possibilities in fights. Li Zhu had already tested the skill out earlier, so he managed to easily swing the claws, causing short, half moon shaped strikes to shoot towards Hua Shu.

She did not look worried, though, as she shot flaming six arrows towards the strikes, in an attempt to destroy them forcefully.

'I guess Shadow Claws is not the most useful against an archer!' realized Li Zhu, since any strike that was fake would simply allow the arrows to pass through it, changing nothing for the archer. If one was a short ranged fighter, though, the moment they used their strength to attack Li Zhu's Shadow strikes, momentum would push them forward, and if Li Zhu's strike tuned out to be fake, that would make them stumble. This would then give Li Zhu an opening to attack them when they were weak.

'If I could change a strike from real to fake mid air, that would be much more useful!' thought Li Zhu, before suddenly wanting to try if it was actually possible.

Meanwhile, Hua Shu had been somewhat surprised by the fact that two of her arrows passed through Li Zhu's strikes, but she continued her barrage of flaming attacks towards him, anyway.

'Time to test my new theory!' thought Li Zhu, an evil glint in his eyes.

At that moment, though, a person shouting could be heard from the distance, causing both LI Zhu and Hua Shu to turn around.

An old man was flying at full speed towards them, blood dripping from his simple tunic, as he struggled to move in a straight path.

"That is the elder from the library!" exclaimed Li Zhu, recognizing the old man who had saved him from Song Xiu.

All of a sudden, the elder could no longer fly, and simply crashed into the training grounds, not having reached the location he had been aiming for.

"Senior, what is the problem!?" asked Li Zhu, concerned. The man had chased Song Xiu and Yin Shing, and was now close to dying. Even a fool could understand that this had something to do with the inheritance.

The elder was unable to stand up, as he coughed up blood. "Run!" he managed to say, before coughing a few more times.

"We're... We're... being attacked." he mumbled, his voice getting increasingly lower. After he said these words, the elder's body fully slumped onto the ground, unmoving.

Li Zhu stood there frozen, shocked at what he had just witnessed. One moment he was fighting, and the next, an elder was lying dead in front of him, having brought such bad news to the sect.