My Portable Spirit Farm: Rise of the Humble Servant

Chapter 214: Unlocking the Core!

Chen Ping followed the Han siblings to their final stop: the technique room.

Pushing open the heavy stone doors revealed rows of towering stone bookshelves. Yet, the shelves were overwhelmingly barren. Eight hundred years was an unforgiving eternity; no matter how exquisite the binding or durable the parchment, mundane materials simply could not withstand the crushing weight of time.

The few remaining jade slips and spirit beast skin scrolls had been bled of their spiritual light. They sat dull and lusterless in the gloom. When Chen Ping brushed his finger against one, the ancient leather instantly disintegrated into a fine, musty powder, its lost history scattering into the stale air.

His gaze shifted to the center of the room.

Resting atop a stone pedestal were three jade boxes of varying sizes. The boxes were forged from a specialized material, their surfaces faintly pulsing with delicate protective runes meant to preserve the contents against the ravages of time.

Chen Ping stepped forward and carefully pried open the first box. Inside lay a deep purple jade slip.

He extended his Divine Sense into the jade. His heart violently skipped a beat.

Thousand Fold Pill Refining?

A rare, genuine smile tugged at the corner of Chen Ping’s mouth. He whispered the name aloud, completely ignoring the venomous glare Han Feiyu shot into his back, and eagerly absorbed the introductory summary.

Moments later, his eyes widened in profound astonishment.

This wasn’t a standard Alchemist’s formula. It was an extreme, borderline heretical pill refining secret art!

Its core philosophy hinged on a terrifying technique called “Fold Refining.” Through specialized Arts and monstrous Divine Sense control, an Alchemist would wait until a Pill was just forming in the furnace—and then forcibly shatter it. They would hurl the dispersed medicinal essence back into the flames and condense it all over again.

By repeating this agonizing cycle, the theoretical limit was a thousand folds. In reality, the technique was bottlenecked by the Alchemist’s soul strength and precision.

Every single Fold Refining viciously purged impurities, compounding the Pill’s purity and medicinal efficacy to terrifying heights. The cost? A catastrophic drop in yield. A furnace meant to produce ten pills might only yield a single, flawless survivor.

It was an art of absolute extremism: sacrificing all quantity in the pursuit of supreme quality.

Naturally, the “Thousand Fold” title was mere hyperbole. The ancient master who authored the slip had only ever achieved five folds. In the Dao of Pills, completing just two folds marked a cultivator as an exceptional talent. Three folds made them a peerless genius. Four or five folds? That was the domain of a once-in-a-century monster—a true Alchemist Grandmaster capable of forging their own legends.

Chen Ping was inwardly shaken. If this jade slip leaked to the outside world, it would trigger a bloodbath among Alchemists.

It was a stroke of divine fortune that Han Feiyu hadn’t claimed it first. If the Yunshui Sect had obtained this art, they would only need a few decades to mass-produce elite Alchemists capable of refining flawless Pills. The resulting monopoly on high-tier medicine would generate enough unimaginable wealth and resources to directly threaten the Heavenly Spirit Sect’s dominance.

The ensuing geopolitical chaos would have drowned the entire region in blood.

Treating it with absolute reverence, Chen Ping stored the purple jade slip securely inside his Jade Pendant space.

He then opened the second and third boxes. Inside sat two ancient, cyan jade slips.

Sweeping them with his Divine Sense, he realized they weren’t Arts, but the lifelong, handwritten journals of the Han family’s ancestor, Han Liren!

The contents were encyclopedic: medicinal herb identification, volatile property combinations, furnace fire control, advanced formulas, and emergency salvage techniques for when a refinement went wrong. It even detailed Han Liren’s original modifications to notoriously difficult recipes.

Between the lines, the text overflowed with a Grandmaster’s profound, hard-won wisdom. For any cultivator walking the Dao of Pills, these journals were beyond priceless.

Chen Ping carefully stored the cyan slips away.

Having stripped the four peripheral chambers bare, the trio returned to the cave abode’s main hall.

At the far end of the cavern sat an entrance to a separate, smaller stone chamber. The doorway appeared entirely unobstructed, an open invitation. Yet, Chen Ping knew perfectly well that stepping through was impossible.

The threshold was sealed by a hyper-condensed, transparent Restriction that rippled slowly like a sheet of standing water.

The terrifying energy radiating from this barrier was far more restrained than the explosive outer Nine Cycles Return to Origin Backlash Array, yet it felt infinitely deeper—like staring into a bottomless ocean abyss.

The moment Chen Ping’s Divine Sense brushed against the barrier, a violent repulsive force kicked back, sending a sharp, stinging pain through his mind.

A third-grade High-grade… perhaps even approaching a third-grade Top Grade defensive Restriction! Chen Ping’s expression tightened.

A barrier of this caliber was absolute. Even if he burned his blood essence and attacked alongside the Han siblings, they couldn’t leave a scratch on it. Even a Violet Palace cultivator would need to bombard it relentlessly for days and nights to force a breach.

Han Feiyu hadn’t lied. The bloodline key was the only way in.

Chen Ping turned to the siblings and jutted his chin toward the rippling barrier. “Your turn.”

Han Feiyu and Han Jingying exchanged a silent look. Their eyes were hollow, drowning in a shared, suffocating despair.

They both knew what awaited them once the tomb was open. To act as the unwitting keys to their own inheritance, laying their ancestor’s final treasures at the feet of a monster—the humiliation was a slow twist of a rusted knife. And to die down here, silent and unremembered, painted their tragedy in the bleakest of colors.

Like walking corpses, the siblings approached the luminous Restriction.

Han Feiyu drew a ragged breath. He lifted his left index finger and bit down hard, squeezing a single drop of vibrant red blood from the wound. Beside him, Han Jingying mirrored the motion in dead silence.

The two drops of blood, thick with the direct lineage of the Han family, fell toward the rippling screen of light.

HUM!

The Restriction violently shuddered. The blood didn’t slide down the barrier. Instead, as if possessed by a phantom sentience, the crimson droplets rapidly spider-webbed across the transparent surface, sketching out an impossibly complex, interlocking pattern of bloodline runes.

The glowing veins instantly engulfed the entrance.

At that exact moment, the siblings violently convulsed. Brilliant, blinding beams of golden light erupted uncontrollably from their eyes. A primordial, resonant aura—echoing from the deepest roots of their shared ancestry—surged from their bodies as the tomb briefly awakened its slumbering masters.

The crimson blood painted across the Restriction flash-boiled, transmuting into liquid, radiant gold.

The entire barrier warped and writhed. The transparent ripples clashed violently against the golden bloodline array, sending heart-stopping shockwaves echoing through the dead cavern.

The struggle lasted for ten long breaths.

Suddenly, the massive Restriction sealing the stone chamber dissolved into nothingness.

But the path it revealed was not the wide chamber itself. Instead, it opened into a claustrophobic, narrow tunnel barely wide enough for two people to walk shoulder-to-shoulder.

The spacious stone chamber had been an illusion. A decoy.

Chen Ping’s face darkened. Cunning old fox.

Even centuries after his death, Han Liren hadn’t missed a chance to spite any invading Violet Palace cultivators who might have brute-forced the door.

From the shadows of the narrow tunnel, a circular stone pedestal, roughly three feet in diameter, slowly ground its way up from the floorboards. Its surface was polished smooth as a mirror, intricately carved with interlocking blue ley-lines and spatial runes.

A small-scale teleportation Formation.

The true path to the core treasury had finally revealed itself.