Who Let Him Cultivate？

Chapter 5: I Think the Third Test is About Wisdom

The towering expanse of the Mountain of Mind Questioning loomed before them. To most, it felt like an ordinary peak, but Man Gu immediately sensed the suppression. The ancient, boiling blood of the barbarian tribes within his veins—a force that usually provided him with an inexhaustible wellspring of power—fell dead and dormant. His monstrous physical metrics plummeted, forcibly aligned with the frailties of the rest of the group.

Everyone exchanged nervous glances before their eyes settled on the strongest among them.

“I’ll go first.” Seeing their expectant looks, Man Gu didn’t stand on ceremony. He stepped directly onto the first stone tier.

First step, second step, third step… tenth step.

The first ten steps were effortless. But the moment his foot struck the eleventh, the pressure manifested. An invisible stone slab slammed onto his shoulders. With every subsequent step, the phantom weight multiplied.

Still, it was within a bearable range. He continued his ascent.

Man Gu took two heavy breaths, steadied his heart rate, and pushed toward the twentieth step.

By the time his foot cleared the twentieth tier, his movements had turned sluggish, his pace grinding to a crawl. When he reached the twenty-ninth step, cold sweat was already seeping through his shirt, plastering the fabric to his back. His lungs burned. Unable to take another step, he collapsed onto the stone, gasping for air.

*Even sitting offers no reprieve,* Man Gu gritted his teeth, too exhausted to speak. The crushing weight remained constant; he had merely transitioned from standing under a boulder to sitting under one. His stamina was recovering at an agonizingly slow rate.

Seeing the single-minded barbarian prodigy reduced to a gasping mess, the crowd’s hearts sank.

“I’ve heard the Elders in my clan speak of such places,” a youth said grimly. “The Mountain of Mind Questioning tests the purity of one’s Dao Heart. The simpler the mind, the firmer the will, and the more genuine the desire to seek the Dao. Man Gu hails from the ancient barbarian tribes, famous for his unwavering focus. If even he is pinned down, we are in for a brutal ascent!”

“What about calming mantras to settle the mind? Would they work?” another recruit suggested.

The third test only required reaching the fiftieth step; it didn’t specify that only the first few to arrive would pass. They weren’t competing against one another here.

A murmur of agreement rippled through the crowd. It was a sound strategy. Their elders had all imparted similar mantras for self-cultivation and nurturing the spirit.

Lu Yang opened his mouth, then closed it. He didn’t know a single calming mantra.

“Want me to teach you one?” Meng Jingzhou offered.

Lu Yang shook his head. “Hold on. Let me think of a more practical angle.”

Seeing Lu Yang’s focus, Meng Jingzhou didn’t press the issue and sat down to meditate.

…

When Meng Jingzhou emerged from his trance, his mind was a placid lake.

The calming mantra worked!

Because his meditation had lasted longer than most, the others were already agonizing over the twenty- or thirty-step mark. They were drenched in sweat, requiring immense, bone-deep willpower just to drag their feet upward. Heavy droplets of moisture slicked their faces, and they lacked even the spare energy to wipe them away.

A few had tried to cheat the system. One recruit assumed the pressure was confined to the stone steps and attempted to scale the adjacent grassy slope. He quickly discovered the error of his ways; the entire Mountain of Mind Questioning exerted a uniform, crushing gravity the higher one climbed.

Another recruit attempted to summon a Dharma Treasure, only to find the artifact lying dead in his palm. Stripped of its miraculous Spiritual Qi, the treasure couldn’t even be activated, rendering it a hunk of useless scrap metal.

No wonder Dai Bufan hadn’t bothered confiscating their Dharma Treasures.

Then there was Lu Yang. He was lagging behind everyone, making him incredibly conspicuous.

He crouched on the tenth step, missing one shoe, staring intensely at the stone as if deciphering the secrets of the universe.

“What are you doing? Everyone else is miles ahead,” Meng Jingzhou asked, bewildered.

Lu Yang didn’t answer. He simply held up his shoe and tossed it onto the eleventh step. “Pick that up.”

Though confused, Meng Jingzhou complied. The moment he lifted the shoe, he noticed it was unnaturally heavy, as if invisible hands were dragging it downward.

A spark of realization hit him. He tossed the shoe onto the twelfth step. It fell through the air at a normal speed, but the moment it struck the stone, picking it up required significantly more effort than on the eleventh step.

“Notice the pattern?” Lu Yang asked.

Meng Jingzhou frowned, his tranquil mind processing the physics rapidly. “If an object is airborne, the mountain’s pressure doesn’t affect it. The suppression is only transmitted when the object makes direct physical contact with the ground?”

“Exactly.” Lu Yang slammed his fist into his palm, thrilled to find a fellow man of science.

Meng Jingzhou’s eyes widened. “The stairs are on an incline. Look at all these trees. We could construct a massive ‘7’-shaped bridge. We anchor the base in the dirt down here, and extend the top straight over the fiftieth step!”

Lu Yang nodded with absolute solemnity. “Precisely. This third trial is clearly a test of our wisdom. This is the standard answer!”

Meng Jingzhou fully grasped the genius of the plan, but a glaring logistical flaw immediately presented itself. “How do we fell the timber?”

They had no axes or saws. How were they supposed to harvest enough wood for a giant ladder?

“Got any sharp Dharma Treasures on you?” Lu Yang had already anticipated this bottleneck. He had considered cooperating with the others, but unfortunately, none of them possessed the intellect to comprehend his vision.

Meng Jingzhou drew a sleek dagger from his robes. “A clan Elder gave me this for self-defense. It’s forged to strike with the speed of a Golden Core cultivator when guided by intent. It can’t fly here on the Mountain of Mind Questioning, though.”

“Doesn’t matter, as long as it cuts,” Lu Yang smiled. The Meng family was a titan among clans. Even if their refined Dharma Treasures couldn’t be magically activated, their base molecular sharpness would effortlessly outclass any mortal saw.

It was the perfect lumberjack tool.

“Come look. While you were meditating, I already drafted the blueprints.”

Lu Yang led Meng Jingzhou to a patch of soft dirt where he had traced a highly technical schematic of a giant “7”.

After a brief consultation on load-bearing angles, the two went to work.

The Meng family dagger was terrifyingly sharp. Thick, ancient pines yielded before the blade like wet paper. Within minutes, the two had carved the fallen timber into a pile of oddly shaped wooden planks.

Because the Mountain of Mind Questioning suppressed all spiritual anomalies, the trees growing here were entirely mundane.

But soon, Meng Jingzhou discovered another critical flaw.

“How do we bind these planks together? We don’t have iron nails, and even if we did, they wouldn’t be long enough to pierce wood this thick.”

“Have you ever heard of the sacred art of mortise and tenon?”

“I have not.”

Lu Yang sighed at the ignorance of cultivators. Taking the Golden Core dagger, he began carving precise geometric joints into the ends of the planks, lecturing Meng Jingzhou on mortal wisdom as he worked.

“This protruding node is the tenon. This recessed cavity is the mortise. When joined, they form a mortise and tenon structure. Its greatest feature is that it maintains absolute structural integrity without the need for a single nail.”

Meng Jingzhou listened with rapt attention. His family relied entirely on Spiritual Qi and esoteric forging techniques for artifact refinement; they had never considered the profound mechanics of basic carpentry.

High above on the steps, the other disciples were locked in a grueling battle of wills. They sweat blood and gasped for air, driven by the desperate desire to reach the fiftieth step and claim first place.

Perhaps the first to pass would earn the Dao Seeking Sect’s favor and receive elite cultivation resources.

They finally understood why the trial had no time limit: the caloric drain was so severe that if they lingered too long, they would starve before they could even stand, let alone climb.

Down below, Lu Yang and Meng Jingzhou were also sweating profusely and gasping for air—from extreme manual labor.

After hours of relentless deforestation and several structural failures, their magnum opus was finally complete.

It was a grotesque, towering monstrosity of wood. Thick at the base, tapering at the top, and jutting out at a harsh, right-angled curve. It was less a ladder and more a colossal, wooden “7” looming over the trial grounds.

The surrounding landscape, once a pristine, verdant forest, was now a barren wasteland of stumps and sawdust, looking as though a gargantuan boar demon had taken a massive bite out of the earth.

Nearby, a Dao Seeking Sect disciple nervously peeked at Dai Bufan. Everyone knew Senior Brother Dai Bufan’s greatest pride and joy was the lush, picturesque scenery of his Mountain of Mind Questioning.

Dai Bufan’s eyelid twitched violently. His fists clenched of their own accord.