My Portable Spirit Farm: Rise of the Humble Servant

Chapter 229: The Mysterious Seed

Chen Ping snapped his head toward a specific corner of the Black Earth.

There, buried quietly in the loam, lay another ancient, bizarre seed he had acquired early in his journey—one that had stubbornly refused to sprout despite the terrifying temporal acceleration of the soil.

The intricate, esoteric patterns etched across the new seed’s surface were slightly different in form, but the profound, archaic aura they radiated was identical. There was absolutely no mistaking the resonant connection.

Two seeds… from the exact same origin? Could they be fruit from the same mythic plant? A storm of shock battered Chen Ping’s mind. He had long suspected the dormant seed possessed an apocalyptic background. Finding its twin practically confirmed it.

What kind of heaven-defying flora produced seeds armored in naturally occurring, profound runes? And what impossible conditions were required to force them to germinate?

Forcing his racing heart to slow, Chen Ping walked over to the patch of dirt holding the dormant seed. He gingerly scooped out a small pit next to it and nestled the new, dark-gold seed into the soil.

Since they share an origin, maybe planting them together will trigger a reaction. Or maybe they just need time, he reasoned.

If the Black Earth couldn’t force a sprout, he could only bury them and wait. The twin seeds were undoubtedly tethered to an ancient, world-shaking secret.

As for what that secret entailed… Chen Ping honestly preferred not to know. Ignorance was often the greatest armor in the Cultivation world.

But he knew the truth was inescapable.

He had looted the first seed from the corpse of the great expert resting on the ice bed. According to the dead man’s suicide note, he had discovered the seed at the base of something called the “World Tree.” The tree itself had already withered and died, rotting away to reveal a colossal subterranean cavern beneath its roots. The seed had been resting in the center of that abyss, pulsing with a faint, ghostly light.

That was the origin of the first seed. It was highly probable this second seed shared a similar, apocalyptic history.

Just sprout already, Chen Ping thought, staring at the dirt. Be brave.

Finally, only the last box remained.

After the violent emotional whiplash of the previous four boxes, Chen Ping’s mental state was dead calm. He popped the lid.

There was no heaven-defying treasure. There was no miraculous Spirit Pill.

Resting at the bottom of the jadeite box was a single, ancient white jade slip.

Chen Ping had fully expected the final box to hold Han Liren’s ultimate legacy or core cultivation technique. Clearly, the old ghost had different priorities.

He picked up the jade slip and slowly threaded his Divine Sense into the matrix.

Etched at the very top of the record was a single, utterly baffling sentence:

[In my lifetime, I have witnessed countless bizarre and fantastical horrors. Yet, only this singular truth—even as I record it now—remains utterly inconceivable and terrifying to comprehend: The world we inhabit is suspended upon the branches of a tree.]

The words detonated in Chen Ping’s Sea of Consciousness like a localized earthquake!

The world… is hanging on a tree?

It was sheer, unadulterated madness! It was geographically and cosmically absurd! Whoever had carved these words into the jade was either a raving, terminal lunatic, or a man who had stared into the abyssal truth of the universe and had his mind shattered by the revelation.

Just trying to conceptualize the sentence triggered a creeping, existential horror that violently assaulted Chen Ping’s cognition. For a terrifying split second, the foundational laws of his reality seemed to buckle and warp.

He violently severed the thought, refusing to let his mind be sucked into the vortex of cosmic horror.

Gritting his teeth, he forced his Divine Sense deeper into the jade slip.

Beneath the madman’s scrawl was a map. It was drafted with obsessive, almost microscopic detail.

But the topography was completely alien. He could say with absolute certainty that the landmasses depicted were nowhere near the Anli Country or any known region of the Cultivation world.

The map displayed five colossal, asymmetrical continents, completely isolated from one another by a boundless, terrifyingly vast ocean. The water-to-land ratio was staggering—the oceans were easily three times the size of the combined continents.

But it was the center of the map that commanded his attention.

Erupting from the dead center of the largest ocean was a titanic, impossible structure.

A tree.

No, looking closer, it didn’t resemble a standard tree. The main trunk exploded from the abyssal depths of the ocean, dwarfing the continents in scale. The upper branches didn’t just support the landmasses; they literally pierced through the bedrock of two of the five continents, impaling them.

The entire structure looked less like a plant and more like a colossal, cosmic “pedicel” or “stem” connecting the world to something vastly larger… and darker.

Chen Ping stared at the map until his eyes burned. It was grotesque. It was fundamentally absurd.

The map and the raving inscription felt like the abstract, symbolic fever dream of a dying madman, not a literal geographical survey.

“Deliberately mystifying garbage,” Chen Ping muttered, violently withdrawing his Divine Sense and stowing the jade slip.

The concept was too massive, too far beyond his current scope of survival. Agonizing over it was a waste of mental energy. He would archive the information and verify it if he ever reached a realm where such cosmic truths actually mattered.

Subconsciously, Chen Ping violently preferred the theory that the author was just a raving lunatic who had convinced himself of a baseless, terrifying delusion.

With that, the blind boxes were finished.

Chen Ping stared at the mountain of empty jadeite boxes and the millions of Spirit Stones’ worth of medicinal ash littering the floor. With a thought, he brought his spiritual pressure crashing down.

The jadeite and ash were instantly pulverized into microscopic dust, completely annihilated from existence. The Mortal-grade treasures were useless clutter; he wasn’t going to let them take up space in his ring.

With the spoils fully processed, Chen Ping sat cross-legged on the Black Earth. His heart was still racing, but his mind was razor-sharp. It was time to formulate a concrete battle plan.

His immediate objectives were absolute:

First: Mobilize every available resource to hunt down the three main ingredients for the Mystic Primordial Pill. Specifically, he needed viable seeds or seedlings for the Mystic Primordial Fruit and Mystic Yellow Grass. Getting those planted in the Black Earth was the absolute fastest way to violently accelerate his cultivation in the short term.

Second: Hoard Spirit Stones like a starving dragon. He needed a staggering amount—at least 3 million Low-grade Spirit Stones, which converted to 30,000 Middle Grade stones—to trigger the Jade Pendant’s next evolution. The fifty-fold temporal acceleration was incredible, but it wasn’t fast enough. He needed more speed.

Third: Begin a passive, deep-cover intelligence sweep for the Shedding Dust Pill’s ingredients. Finding a Purple Sun Fruit or a live cutting from a Purple Sun Treasure Tree was a borderline impossible pipe dream, but it was the foundational key to unlocking the Violet Palace. No matter how microscopic the odds, he had to lay the groundwork now.

With a concrete, actionable roadmap locked in his mind, the lingering anxiety evaporated.

Chen Ping exited the Jade Pendant space, materializing back in his cave dwelling.

His first operational task was liquidating the massive pile of unusable loot from the tomb into cold, hard currency. Given the sheer volume and eclectic nature of the haul, dumping it at the Qingyun Sect Marketplace was practically begging for an interrogation. He needed the black market.

After meticulously altering his bone structure, facial features, and violently suppressing his aura to a generic, unmemorable baseline, Chen Ping slipped into the night.

He navigated the familiar, winding descent into the subterranean black market.

After casing the sprawling, chaotic bazaar, he stopped in front of a massive, newly established storefront. The heavy wooden sign read: Treasure Hunt Pavilion.

The Pavilion had quickly garnered a stellar reputation among the underworld rogues. Word on the street was that the owners possessed terrifyingly deep pockets and lethal backing. More importantly, they operated on an ironclad code: they only facilitated transactions. They didn’t ask where the bloodstained loot came from, they didn’t ask where the seller was going, and they absolutely never engaged in back-alley assassinations to reclaim their gold.

A “conscientious” criminal enterprise. It was exactly what Chen Ping needed.