Cultivation: I Can Steal Lifespan from Spirit Beasts

Chapter 181: Spirit Poultry Advancement!

At the periphery of the Sword Billow Garrison.

Within the confines of his allocated territory, inside a humble wooden hut, Wang Ba sat cross-legged on his bed. He stared at the jade slip containing the Primordial Dual Polarity Art, his mind still struggling to process his luck.

He had entirely abandoned hope of finding a technique to forge a second Dantian. He had assumed such a heaven-defying method simply didn’t exist—otherwise, how could hundreds of Foundation Establishment cultivators in the sprawling Ghost Market be completely ignorant of it? Yet, right on the precipice of his departure, Tang Ji had casually handed him the very prize he had despaired of finding.

Because it was the original jade slip, Wang Ba absorbed the knowledge without expending much time or mental energy. He quickly grasped the art’s unique mechanics.

Strictly speaking, it was a supplementary art divided into three distinct phases.

The first step was to carve out an auxiliary Dantian, either within one’s own flesh or within an external vessel. The spiritual root attribute of this new Dantian would perfectly mirror the native attribute of its container.

The second step required sourcing a separate cultivation technique for this auxiliary Dantian, driving its power from the first layer of Qi Refining all the way to Foundation Establishment Perfection. The catch? The container could only endure a cultivation base one major realm lower than its own inherent grade. To house an auxiliary Dantian at Foundation Establishment Perfection, the vessel had to be at least a third-grade Top Grade treasure.

The final step was consumption. The main Dantian would devour the perfected auxiliary Dantian, violently expanding its own limits and laying an unprecedented, monolithic foundation. This supreme foundation practically guaranteed extraordinary phenomena during the formation of a Golden Core.

For instance, even a cultivator who hadn’t achieved a Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment would gain a minuscule chance to awaken an innate spell upon reaching the Golden Core stage. Such spells were mandates from heaven and earth; as long as the caster remained in this world, they could trigger the spell at will, suffering almost no Qi drain.

“So the true terror of a Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment only blooms at the Golden Core stage…” Realization dawned on Wang Ba. No wonder he hadn’t felt particularly god-like after his own Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment, aside from a denser Qi vortex and purer energy. He had half-suspected the legends were merely exaggerated hearsay. It turned out his vision had simply been too narrow.

Beyond the mechanics, the jade slip detailed several viable paths for selecting a vessel and a corresponding cultivation method.

The first path was to mend the fractures in the Five Elements.

In this era, cultivators worshipped singular spiritual roots because the world’s ambient Spiritual Qi was drying up. This decay critically impacted a cultivator’s Lifespan, making theoretical maximums impossible to reach. Ancient texts claimed a Foundation Establishment cultivator could live for three centuries; today, they were lucky to see their two-hundredth year. That missing century was a guillotine, severing the Golden Core ambitions of countless cultivators burdened with four or five spiritual roots.

Thus, the modern meta prioritized single roots and rapid realm advancement. Yet, the Dao of the Five Elements was the bedrock of reality. Cultivating only a single element offered explosive early-stage growth, but upon reaching the Nascent Soul stage, the universe would inevitably demand a toll for those missing elements.

The Primordial Dual Polarity Art was originally birthed to pay that toll, allowing mighty cultivators to retroactively complete their Five Elements and forge a flawless ‘Five Virtues Body.’ Only then could they gaze upon the apex of the cultivation world.

Naturally, this didn’t mean possessing five spiritual roots was suddenly a blessing. In the current apocalyptic environment, a five-root cultivator would die of old age before sniffing Foundation Establishment, let alone possess the resources to forge an auxiliary Dantian.

“It’s a balancing act,” Wang Ba mused. “Melting down my Fire Spiritual Root wasn’t a mistake after all.”

But it did complicate matters. Procuring a pure, single-attribute Metal vessel was agonizing enough; finding a vessel perfectly balanced in both Metal and Fire to patch his specific deficiency bordered on the impossible.

The second path veered into the extreme: variant spiritual roots.

Ice, Wind, Thunder—these anomalies existed outside the traditional Five Elements, rendering the ‘Five Virtues Body’ irrelevant. Cultivators of this path were heaven’s true tyrants, capable of brute-forcing their way to the highest realms through sheer, unadulterated destructive power.

However, extreme power invited extreme calamity. Variant paths were choked with heavenly tribulations and environmental hazards. The higher an Ice Spiritual Root cultivator climbed, the more their mere existence warped reality. Rumor spoke of a female Sect Leader in the Great Yan dynasty whose casual strolls froze the earth for a thousand miles and buried ten thousand more in snow. Even her own disciples gave her a wide berth, lest their blood freeze in their veins.

Such conspicuous, world-altering vanity was the exact opposite of Wang Ba’s philosophy. More pressingly, grafting a variant root into his auxiliary Dantian would violently clash with his native Five Elements foundation.

The third path was a crutch for the weak: mirroring the main Dantian. By doubling up on the same attribute, a mediocre cultivator could artificially inflate their talent and Qi reserves, brute-forcing a wider path to the Golden Core. This was the route Zhao Feng had previously suggested.

After cold calculation, Wang Ba chose the first path.

It was an easy choice. He despised the flashy arrogance of variant roots, and his Heavenly Dao Foundation Establishment meant his foundation was already an impregnable fortress. With his Lifespan panel, he didn’t share the mortal terror of aging out before reaching the Golden Core; he just needed to grind patiently.

“But where in the hell am I going to find a dual Metal-Fire vessel?” The art was notoriously lenient regarding materials—Magical Artifacts, spirit beasts, raw ores, even Pills could serve as a Dantian. Yet, the purer the attribute and the higher the grade, the better the result. If he was going to build a second engine for his cultivation, he refused to settle for garbage.

“Wait… my immediate goal isn’t to build a perfect second engine. It’s to use the Yin Food Worm mother worm to swallow my soul aura.” His eyes gleamed with cold logic. “I only need a disposable vessel for now. Once I don’t need the camouflage, I can excise the auxiliary Dantian and rebuild a proper one later.” Though discarding an auxiliary Dantian exacted a bloody toll on the body, it wasn’t permanent damage. It was a calculated sacrifice he could afford.

Memorizing the Primordial Dual Polarity Art until the runes were burned into his consciousness, Wang Ba finally stepped out of the wooden hut.

Outside, the territory hummed with life. Spirit Poultry scratched the dirt, turtles basked, and the Mountain Moving Apes wrestled. The Earth-Ape King sat in deep meditation.

Wang Ba’s eyes narrowed in surprise. He could sense a microscopic, deliberate current of Spiritual Qi being forcefully drawn into the giant ape’s massive frame.

“A spirit beast cultivation method! It actually figured out how to cycle Qi on its own.” Though the technique was crude—so violently primitive it barely qualified as a method—it was unequivocally tailored to the Earth-Ape King’s unique biology. It was the genesis of a monstrous new legacy. Wang Ba chose not to interrupt, quietly leaving a pile of spirit fruits nearby. Given the suffocating Pressure of a second-grade High Grade beast, none of the lesser apes dared to pilfer the offering.

Moving on, Wang Ba inspected the first-grade Top Grade mother Spirit Poultry that Alpha-Fifteen had recently serviced. She was dutifully brooding, and Wang Ba’s Yin Spirit could already detect the faint, rhythmic pulse of life within the shells.

Satisfied, he uncorked his Storage Bag and dumped Alpha-Fifteen onto the dirt.

He caught the flash of suppressed, hyper-intelligent venom in the rooster’s eyes. Wang Ba smirked inwardly, entirely unfazed, and seamlessly bound the creature’s movements with a precise thread of Yin Spirit power. Leaving the immobilized bird in the dust, he returned to the hut to prepare the alchemical nightmare required for Alpha-Fifteen and Alpha-Sixteen’s Bloodline Breakthrough. He had failed the last time. He wouldn’t fail again.

[Ding!]

[Detecting signs of life from the Host’s descendants…]

[Detected that the grades of the Host’s descendants are first-grade Top Grade and second-grade Low Grade respectively.]

[You have obtained Lifespan +30 days]

[You have obtained Lifespan +10 days]

Lin Xiwen, currently trapped in the pathetic vessel of a rooster, felt his beady eyes bulge against his skull.

“It’s real! This ludicrous ‘Many Children, Many Blessings’ System is actually real!” The sheer absurdity of trading offspring for raw Lifespan defied the laws of heaven, but Lin Xiwen was currently drowning in a tidal wave of unprecedented ecstasy.

Days ago, he had been gnashing his beak in fury over the Demonic Cultivator stealing his Yin Food Worm mother worm. Now? The mother worm looked like utter trash. Cultivating the Incense Path meant treating human lives like cattle—painstakingly disguising parasitic larvae as Pills, tricking Qi Refining cultivators into swallowing them, and constantly regulating the horrific energy feedback to prevent the mother worm from mutating and eating its master. It was a life spent dancing on the edge of a razor.

But this System? All he had to do was put in a little elbow grease, visit a few hens, and harvest an ocean of Lifespan! As long as he kept his head down and his loins busy, he would outlive this arrogant Demonic Cultivator. Time was the ultimate weapon. Demonic Cultivators walked the razor’s edge of death daily; how long could the bastard possibly survive?

A heavy, suffocating boulder vanished from Lin Xiwen’s heart. He looked around the pen. Suddenly, the clucking hens didn’t look so repulsive. They looked… inviting.

“Wait, what the hell am I thinking?!” Lin Xiwen violently shook his feathered head, horror warring with instinct. He waddled over to the hen he had recently serviced, pressing his comb against the eggs. He could literally feel the thrum of his own bloodline echoing from within the shells.

“Pah! What bloodline connection! I am a Golden Core True Person! I am a master of the Yin Spirit! I am NOT a chicken!” His feathered face flushed dark with humiliation, and he scrambled away from the nest. But then, he glanced at the other hens. He slowly turned his head, ensuring the terrifying Demonic Cultivator was nowhere to be seen.

Swallowing his pride, Lin Xiwen locked his sights on a second-grade Low Grade hen. Higher-grade descendants yielded more Lifespan. A Golden Core True Person had to be practical.

With a flutter of wings, he pounced.

Inside the wooden hut, Wang Ba quietly withdrew his Yin Spirit observation, a cold smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

“Excellent. The parasite is adapting.”

Two days bled by.

The territory was now a bustling maternity ward for Spirit Poultry. Wang Ba crunched the numbers: the fertilization rate for first-grade eggs hovered around a respectable sixty percent. For the second-grade Low Grade hens, the success rate plummeted to under twenty percent.

But Wang Ba didn’t care. A single second-grade Low Grade bird was worth a hundred first-grade runts. The Spirit Chow refined from their flesh would possess explosive potency.

The bottleneck was his equipment. Bao Chao’s borrowed first-grade tools simply couldn’t withstand the thermal intensity required to butcher and refine second-grade meat.

“I need an artifact refiner to forge a custom set,” Wang Ba calculated. But he had zero connections within the Heavenly Gate Sect’s crafting halls, having always relied on mass-produced Magical Artifacts from the market. “Patience. I’ll wait until Alpha-Fifteen breeds a proper flock of second-grade birds before burning funds on custom gear.”

With the Bloodline Breakthrough alchemical sludge needing a few more days to ferment, Wang Ba pivoted to practicing the Primordial Dual Polarity Art. To conserve resources, he injected his Qi into unfertilized chicken eggs, attempting to carve microscopic Dantians within the yolk. The drain on his soul and Qi was negligible, making it the perfect low-risk training method.

Throughout his experiments, he could feel Alpha-Fifteen glaring at him from across the yard, the rooster’s aura radiating a muffled, toxic killing intent. Wang Ba ignored it. He had already hard-coded a kill-switch into the Yin Spirit’s soul. If the chicken stepped out of line, it would burn.

Ten days later.

The breakthrough sludge had perfectly matured. Wang Ba dragged a thrashing Alpha-Fifteen and Alpha-Sixteen into the hut and went to work.

Unlike the gentle nourishment of a Lifespan Breakthrough, a Bloodline Breakthrough was an act of biological violence. As the grades climbed, the process became a gruesome orchestration of tearing flesh, mutating bone, and forced evolutionary agony.

When the screaming finally stopped, Wang Ba tossed the exhausted birds into the dirt. Alpha-Fifteen looked at him with eyes brimming with genuine, primal terror. Wang Ba felt nothing. He meticulously logged the beasts’ pulse rates, pupil dilation, and Qi fluctuations into his ledger—priceless data for future, higher-grade refinements.

Wiping the gore from his hands, Wang Ba activated a Spirit Light Talisman, illuminating the results.

A satisfied smile broke across his weary face. “Success. Two second-grade High Grade Phantom Chickens.”

On the floor, Alpha-Fifteen’s mind was a chaotic storm. For the past ten days, he had been subjected to skin-flaying, bone-crushing torture. He had watched this psychotic Demonic Cultivator casually crush his unfertilized eggs just to practice some twisted magic. He had been plotting a dozen different ways to orchestrate the man’s gruesome death.

But as he lay panting in the dirt, he felt the terrifying, explosive power coursing through his new second-grade High Grade veins. His intrinsic Lifespan had surged by decades.

Lin Xiwen fell dead silent.

“Maybe… maybe this Demonic Cultivator isn’t a complete waste of space. Sure, the process felt like being shoved through a meat grinder, but the results were undeniable. If my daily routine consisted of nothing but crushing hens and enduring a few days of torture to rapidly ascend the evolutionary ladder… it wasn’t the worst deal in the world.”

Especially when he realized the Demonic Cultivator was sweating blood and burning fortunes just to make him stronger.

“Heh! I’ll drain your resources dry, you demon spawn!” Lin Xiwen sneered internally, suddenly deciding that Wang Ba breaking a few eggs was a perfectly acceptable tax.

Ignorant of the rooster’s grand delusions of exploitation, Wang Ba immediately forced the newly upgraded Alpha-Fifteen and Alpha-Sixteen to mate.

Days later, Alpha-Sixteen was nesting on a clutch of eggs. Wang Ba scanned them—only one was fertilized.

Still, anticipation thrummed in his chest. Two second-grade High Grade parents. The offspring was practically guaranteed to inherit the grade. If he then applied a Lifespan Breakthrough to the chick… could he artificially forge a Top Grade Spirit Poultry?

But just as the shell began to crack, a violent vibration shattered the quiet of the hut.

Wang Ba yanked the Heavenly Gate Task Token from his belt. As he read the glowing runes, the blood drained from his face, leaving behind a mask of cold fury.

“The Heavenly Gate Sect orders me to deploy to the frontlines against the Incense Path remnants. I have one month to report…”

His jaw clenched, his vision swimming with a dangerous, icy edge.

“Cheng Shu… he actually bred a Top Grade Spirit Poultry?”