A cultivator could only cultivate the Golden Liberation Technique to the Third-Order of Spirit Creek Realm. After that, Lu Ye had to unlock the Spiritual Points needed to cultivate the Red Lotus Sky Mnemonic and meet the necessary requirements first before he could change his cultivation technique.
It was the same now. He could only unlock the Spiritual Points necessary to cultivate the Great Sun Veluriyam Technique until he hit two hundred and forty Spiritual Points.
A moment later, Lu Ye had cultivated a new Spiritual Point. He was going to continue further when suddenly, his surroundings began distorting on its own. Knowing that his time was up, he immediately stopped his movements.
His vision blurred, and the next moment he found himself standing in a new room. It wasn’t filled with condensed World Spiritual Qi, and it was bigger than the previous room he was in. This was obviously the second floor of the Hundred Wards Tower.
A new ward took form before his eyes as he readied himself for his new test. It was yet another ward breaching test.
Lu Ye was surprised. Considering how his test was skewed during the first floor, he thought for sure that he would face a ward creation test. He thought for a moment before deciding against activating Glyph: Insight like he did on the first floor. Instead, he took out the ward flags meant for breaching wards from his Storage Bag, set it on four corners and used them to search for the flaws in the wards.
Insight was an amazing Glyph, and it allowed him to skip a ton of steps when breaching wards. However, it also didn’t improve his attainment in the Way of Ward much.
Take solving a question for example. A normal person would read the question, uncover its hints, and solve the question step by step. However, Insight skipped all these steps and showed him the answer directly.
While Lu Ye didn’t mind cheating to get his victories, there might come a day where he was unable to use Insight for whatever reason. With that in mind, it wasn’t a bad thing to learn how to breach wards the old-fashioned way.
The wards of the second floor were just a little harder than the ones on the first floor, so Lu Ye was able to identify its flaws fairly quickly. It was only then he activated Insight to confirm that he had gotten it right before breaching the ward.
Over time, Lu Ye discovered that his intuition was right. This was indeed the “correct” way to challenge the Hundred Wards Tower because the test types were no longer ludicrously skewed like before. He now received equal amounts of ward breaching tests and ward creation tests.
Thanks to this, he was going through the wards quickly even though the second floor’s tests were harder. In fact, his overall efficiency actually improved because he was facing a lot more ward breaching tests than before.
Meanwhile, a lot of Heavenly Derivative Sect disciples were still waiting outside the Hundred Wards Tower.
The resonance had stopped over four hours ago. It should not need to be said, but the resonance of the Hundred Wards Tower did not last forever. To be more specific, it usually disappeared after the challenger had fully digested the reward they received.
Logically speaking, the disciples should’ve left the valley and returned to their respective businesses long ago. However, they stayed because they had good reason to believe that the mysterious challenger who triggered a resonance on the first floor had a chance of performing well on the second floor as well. If they were right, then they would be able to enjoy another resonance. If not, then they still got what they came for.
The one thing that still confuzzled them was the challenger’s identity. Just who on earth was challenging the tower?
Zhao Li was still resting at Bai Qian’s residence. He knew that Lu Ye was challenging the Hundred Wards Tower but did not expect the young man to be good enough to trigger a resonance.
He was a ward cultivator too, but he could not go to the valley and enjoy the resonance because he was supposed to be dead. He felt depressed and frustrated as a matter of course.
If Ju Jia and Yi Yi weren’t keeping him company right now, he would’ve wondered if his sect had abandoned him.
Buzz…
Suddenly, the massive tower made a buzzing sound once more. The next moment, an invisible power spread out and flooded the valley in no time.
“Here it comes!” A lot of Heavenly Derivative Sect disciples burst out laughing before adopting a meditative position and searching for inspiration from the resonance a second time.
Generally speaking, someone who could trigger a resonance on the first floor should definitely be able to do the same on the second floor. There was a high chance they would succeed on the third floor as well. It was impossible to say for the fourth and higher floors though.
According to the Heavenly Derivative Sect’s record books, the highest number of resonances a challenger had ever managed to trigger in a row was nine. This meant that some extraordinarily lucky disciples had gotten to enjoy nine resonances in a row.
Technically speaking, the benefits they received was nothing like Lu Ye’s. No information was suddenly jammed into their brain, nor did they experience an Enlightenment. What the resonance did was to create an environment where inspiration could come easier to the ward cultivators. To give an example, if the information Lu Ye received was practically etched in stone, then theirs was as ephemeral as a wind’s whisper. Even so, the whisper might just be enough to inspire them and enlighten them to things they didn’t understand before.
The large majority of people would gain nothing from the resonance, but those who did always achieved a breakthrough.
Contrary to the disciples’ cheers, the second resonance only deepened the worry on Yu Xiao and Bai Qian’s face.
They had challenged the Hundred Wards Tower before, so they knew just how attractive its rewards were. Perhaps Lu Ye had ignored their well-intentioned warnings and went all out because he was young—to be fair, most youths wouldn’t have heeded their warning at the beginning either.
However, he should have absorbed the reward and learned how dangerous it was. They were sure he would take it a little easier on the second floor, and yet…
They were still confident in Lu Ye’s judgment, but they could not help but worry that Lu Ye would be blinded by the rewards and kept pushing for the best possible reward despite himself. It could only end badly if their fears were true.
It wasn’t a baseless worry either. The exact scenario had happened more than once in the past.
Meanwhile, Lu Ye was writhing like he was being electrocuted, bulging his bloodshot eyes and weathering a stupidly bad migraine once more.
The room was also, once again, filled with fog-like World Spiritual Qi.
Having learned from his first experience, he digested the information as quickly as possible so that the symptoms would disappear.
Strictly speaking, the reward of the Hundred Wards Tower and the Glyphs of the Tree of Glyphs were similar in the sense that they both imparted their content via Enlightenment. As for which experience was worse… he could only say that both were quite terrible.
There was one silver lining to the Hundred Wards Tower experience though. The terrible sensation would gradually disappear as long as he kept digesting the information. And he did. He dared not split his concentration with anything else.
A few hours passed, and Lu Ye finally let out a small sigh of relief. It was hard, but he was able to digest the reward fully and strengthen his foundation some more. And just like last time, Lu Ye began cultivating and attacking the barriers surrounding his Spiritual Points.
The days flew by in the blink of an eye. The Heavenly Derivative Sect disciples were growing more and more excited.
It was because the mysterious challenger had scaled to the tenth floor in just five short days! Moreover, they had triggered a resonance every single time!
The resonance happened twice per day; once during the day and another time during the night…
This had never happened in the history of the Heavenly Derivative Sect.
Most recently, the most anyone had triggered consecutive resonances was five times. It was because the volume information granted by the Hundred Wards Tower was so huge that the challenger had a hard time absorbing it all. If they failed to do it before entering the next floor, then the problem would only compound until they finally gave up or lost their minds, sometimes literally.
It was such an unbelievable achievement that some disciples wondered if the challenger was a master of the Way of Wards or something. The bold ones tried to ask their sect master and great elder about it only to receive the scolding of a lifetime.
For whatever reason, the sect master and the great elder were in a foul mood right now. Their worry and anxiety had practically become a permanent feature of their face.
Of course they were in a foul mood. They had believed that Lu Ye would recognize the danger of the Hundred Wards Tower and continued his climb in a more conservative manner, but no, it was the complete opposite! Ten consecutive resonances! How could any Spirit Creek Realm cultivator possibly withstand the pressure!?
“Calm down, Elder Bai. The kid has the Soul Cleansing Water, and I’m pretty sure he’s used it before. This means that his Divine Soul is much tougher than your average Spirit Creek Realm cultivator. He doesn’t look like an idiot either, so I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” Yu Xiao said, but he was really persuading himself more than he was consoling Bai Qian.
“You do not know that brat’s courage and determination like I do, and even if his Divine Soul is tougher than the average Spirit Creek Realm cultivator, there has to be a limit, no? I can only pray he knows his limit and exits that tower without exceeding it, or else…”
Who was Lu Yi Ye? He was the madman who dared to apply Glyph: Insight to his own eyes! Bai Qian had cultivated for many years, but he had never heard of a Glyphweaver who was reckless enough to try such a thing. At the time, he had thought that it was a good trait for a youngster to have, but now he realized it was anything but that. He hadn’t slept a wink for the past couple days because he was worried that Lu Ye would die in the tower!
He had already messaged Zhao Li to keep a close eye on Lu Ye’s imprint. He was to report to him the second the imprint disappeared.
While Yu Xiao and Bai Qian were drowning in worry, Lu Ye was busy with work. He had cleared ten floors in a row, and each time he had received a tremendous reward for his efforts. He dared not say that his foundation was perfect, but he was certain that only a handful of ward cultivators in the entire Jiu Zhou could exceed him in this regard.
The Hundred Wards Tower was like an exceptional teacher. Every time he cleared a floor, it would bestow him a comprehensive reward that contained everything he needed to know. Every time he finished digesting the reward, his skill would improve by leaps and bounds. Moreover, each reward he received was deeper and more complex than the last. By now, his understanding of the Way of Wards had reached an incredible level.
No wonder the ward cultivators of Jiu Zhou loved to challenge the Hundred Wards Tower. It was way more effective than researching a dry, bore-inducing book.
Each floor was more difficult than the last, but his attainment was growing at a visible rate thanks to the rewards he received. As a result, he was able to continuosly clear almost the same amount of tests even though he was climbing higher and higher each time.
Take the tenth floor for example. He was rewarded generously because he had cleared around forty tests during the nine-hour limit.
There was a significant ramp-up in difficulty between the tenth and eleventh floor. He would’ve been stumped for sure without the foundation he had established on the tenth floor. Even if he managed to overcome the test, the rewards he received wouldn’t have been nearly as impressive.
But he did establish an excellent foundation on the tenth floor, so his movements never stopped as he used the right ward flags to create or breach wards.
There was also a new test type starting from the eleventh floor, ward restoration. The Hundred Wards Tower would either form a partially completed ward that Lu Ye had to complete, or an incorrect ward that he had to fix by removing the mistakes and installing the proper patterns.
He was stumped for a bit the first time he encountered this test, but he gradually achieved a breakthrough after working out a clear action plan.
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