Dual Cultivation System: My Cultivation Was Crippled, So I Rely on Intimacy to Level Up

Chapter 254: Seeking Techniques Within the Hundred Rivers Pavilion

With the plan set, Zhou Kai grabbed Li Youci’s hand. Their bodies sank as the solid earth and stone rippled like water, silently swallowing them into the crust.

The crushing weight of the earth muffled all external noise, plunging them into a dead, heavy silence broken only by the faint, metallic scent of deep soil.

Seeing them successfully submerge, the lethal sharpness in Shen Hanyi’s eyes melted into a rare, soft warmth. The freezing sword intent swirling around her quietly retracted into her core.

“How did it go?” she asked, her voice clear and cool as ever.

“Minor skirmishes,” Zhou Kai replied casually, giving her a brief rundown of the chaotic dogfight and the sabotage in the sky above.

Knowing that bumping into the enraged Song and Yang factions on the road back would be an unnecessary headache, the trio agreed to split up. Shen Hanyi blurred into a streak of sword light, departing first.

Li Youci’s figure shimmered. In the blink of an eye, her breathtaking features, physical proportions, and even her unique aura completely morphed, leaving behind a plain, utterly forgettable female cultivator.

Concealing their bio-signatures, the two navigated the subterranean route back. Half a day later, they quietly breached the surface, stepping past the boundary of Tongming Valley.

Just outside the valley exit, a massive crowd had already gathered at the base of Tongtian Peak.

Song Buqi and Yang Zhonglei stood like statues, their faces completely devoid of joy or anger.

On the opposite flank, Li Juefeng, the Patriarch of Calamity Abyss Valley, was beaming with absolute approval as he looked at Shen Hanyi.

“Shen Hanyi! Exceptional work!”

Li Juefeng’s gaze then shifted, landing on Zhou Kai, who had just emerged shoulder-to-shoulder with his daughter.

The warm smile froze on the Patriarch’s lips before vanishing entirely. His eyes turned flat and indifferent, causing the ambient temperature around them to noticeably plummet.

He forced four stiff words through his teeth. “You did well, too.”

Zhou Kai acted as though he didn’t notice the suffocating hostility. He cupped his hands respectfully, thanked the Patriarch, and obediently stepped behind Li Juefeng, keeping his eyes respectfully lowered and his expression neutral.

Over the next two weeks, the surviving disciples from the various sects straggled out of Tongming Valley.

Li Qiwen led a group of True Disciples back. Every single one of them radiated refined, dense auras and confident smiles—they had clearly reaped massive Fated Chances inside the zone.

Zhou Kai’s taut nerves finally relaxed only when he spotted Fish Baibai, Mo Qianyuan, and Fang Lizhe safely mingling in the returning crowd.

Then came the spectacle.

Dong Cheng, the untouchable Holy Son of the Jade Flower Palace, was literally dragged out of the portal, supported by two random Foundation Establishment disciples from Calamity Abyss Valley.

He looked like a corpse. All the blood had drained from his face, and he couldn’t even stand on his own two feet. His once-overwhelming, late-stage Golden Core aura flickered weakly, like a dying candle in a hurricane.

As the final straggler cleared the gate, the massive formation anchoring Tongtian Peak flared with blinding light. The spatial tear distorted, and the colossal entrance to Tongming Valley groaned before snapping shut, vanishing without a trace.

Zhou Kai scanned the dispersing crowd, his eyes narrowing. Du Chuyao and Wu Hongxiao were nowhere to be seen.

Did Du Chuyao actually abandon Dong Cheng and extract early? he mused.

As the crowd thinned out, Zhou Kai pulled Fang Lizhe aside. He handed over a sealed jade vial and ten glowing spirit herbs.

The vial contained the hyper-pure demon blood harvested from the subterranean pool. The herbs were the Soul Channeling Nether Grasses, each pulsing with roughly two thousand years of concentrated medicinal potency.

“Lizhe. Deliver this vial directly to Gao Feihuang. Give the herbs to Su Xuan.”

“You got it, Big Brother!” Fang Lizhe accepted the contraband with utmost solemnity, carefully stashing it away.

With his logistics handled, Zhou Kai formally excused himself from Li Juefeng’s retinue.

“Where are you going?” Li Youci asked.

“Up Tongtian Peak. I need to browse the sect’s archives.”

“I’m coming with you,” she stated, leaving no room for argument.

A short distance away, Li Juefeng and his son, Li Qiwen, watched Zhou Kai and Li Youci walk away together.

“Father, look at that kid,” Li Qiwen muttered, his face twisting in utter confusion. “What kind of bewitching potion did he feed Youci?”

Li Juefeng’s eyes were dark and profound, his mind rapidly processing the variables. Perhaps this boy… is it possible that by tethering herself to him, Youci could actually touch the threshold of Soul Formation?

A gentle mountain breeze brushed past them on the stone steps.

Zhou Kai glanced at the silent woman walking beside him. “Are you looking for something specific?”

“The family archives have far too few records concerning my specific constitution,” Li Youci replied softly. “I’m going to Tongtian Peak to try my luck.”

The two ascended to the midpoint of Tongtian Peak. A colossal pavilion pierced through the drifting clouds, anchored impossibly to the sheer cliff face. An ancient plaque hung above the grand doors, bearing three massive characters: Hundred Rivers Pavilion.

Zhou Kai silently admired the naming convention—a hundred rivers converging into the sea; ten thousand methods returning to the source. This was the absolute repository of Calamity Abyss Valley’s accumulated knowledge.

At the entrance, a deacon disciple glanced at Zhou Kai’s token. His face remained expressionless. “Elder Zhou. True Disciple Li. A reminder: texts within the pavilion may not be removed from the premises under any circumstances. You may only read them here.”

The rental fee was five hundred low-grade spirit stones per hour. Non-negotiable.

Zhou Kai nodded to himself. For unrestricted access to the complete archives of a major sect, it was a bargain.

The heavy wooden doors of the Hundred Rivers Pavilion swung open. The rich, intoxicating scent of ancient wood, dried ink, and centuries of undisturbed dust instantly filled Zhou Kai’s lungs.

The interior was a spatial marvel, engineered to hold a pocket dimension vastly larger than its exterior suggested. Rows upon rows of towering wooden bookshelves stretched upward, vanishing into the artificial clouds near the domed ceiling.

The shelves were densely packed with tens of thousands of jade slips, bound beast-skin scrolls, and ancient tomes. It was an ocean of knowledge.

Despite having broken through to the third major realm in both physical and magical cultivation, Zhou Kai knew his actual academic foundation was full of holes. He lacked the broad, encyclopedic knowledge of techniques and utility arts that traditional cultivators spent decades mastering.

The Tongming Valley operation had brutally exposed his tactical blind spots.

When his divine sense was suppressed, he had been functionally blind. If he had spotted the Song Family ambush earlier, the opening engagement wouldn’t have been so passive.

What would he do the next time he entered a sensory-jamming zone? Relying purely on channeling qi and vitality into his physical eyes was a crude, inefficient bandage. It wasn’t a sustainable long-term solution.

I need an ocular technique, he decided.

Furthermore, his insect swarm tactics required an immediate overhaul. The Jade Arm Mantis and Split-Back Katydid swarms were lethal, but their attack patterns were painfully linear. They only knew how to zerg-rush the enemy without any tactical cohesion.

Zhou Kai navigated directly to the technique repository.

His divine sense swept over a massive shelf dedicated solely to ocular arts. There were over a hundred jade slips here alone, bearing titles like Spirit Breaker Insight Eyes, Purple Extreme Demon Eyes, and Glazed Fire Eyes.

He rapidly filtered through the introductory summaries, shaking his head repeatedly.

Spirit Breaker Insight Eyes required a specific, dormant bloodline to activate. The Purple Extreme Demon Eyes required a highly corrupt, evil cultivation process. Glazed Fire Eyes was purely an offensive laser, lacking the utility he needed.

He painstakingly sifted through the inventory for nearly half an hour. Finally, his finger brushed against a dusty, unassuming jade slip, and his eyes locked onto the title.

True Insight Eye.

This technique didn’t offer offensive lasers or flashy illusions. It was engineered purely for absolute, penetrating perception.

At peak mastery, it allowed the user to pierce through illusions, perceive the invisible, and strip away the superficial layer of reality to see the raw energy underneath. At its limit, it could even grant x-ray vision through standard rock and reinforced walls.

Best of all, the barrier to entry was low. It simply required circulating a specific qi formula while periodically washing the eyes with a customized alchemical liquid.

This is the one. Zhou Kai permanently burned the cultivation formula and the alchemical recipe into his memory.

Next, he pivoted to the spirit insect section.

Li Youci’s harsh critique still echoed in his mind. Without a unified command structure, an insect swarm was just an expensive, chaotic mess. He needed a genuine command-and-control art.

The Chen Family’s True Explanation of Spirit Controlling focused almost entirely on establishing psychic empathy and targeted breeding. It was a manual for farming bugs, not weaponizing them.

He paced through the aisles, his divine sense rapidly scanning the catalog.

Suddenly, he stopped. Tucked away in a dark corner was a frayed beast-skin scroll detailing forbidden methods for forcefully mutating spirit insects.

High-grade, sentient demon beasts—specifically the demon cores of the Yao race—when combined with highly specific, heaven-and-earth-grade spirit grasses, can forcibly shatter the genetic limitations of a spirit insect’s bloodline, exponentially increasing the swarm’s potential and forcing rapid evolution…

Zhou Kai’s eyes lit up. He memorized the precise names of the dozen rare materials listed.

Invigorated by the discovery, he slotted the scroll back and resumed his hunt with renewed aggression.

A few minutes later, his divine sense locked onto a technique manual titled Edge Transformation Art.

This technique operated on a philosophy completely divorced from the True Explanation of Spirit Controlling. It didn’t care about making friends with the bugs; it cared about absolute, structural lethality and fluid tactical geometry.

Insects gather into an edge, sharp and decisive.

By practicing this art, the cultivator forged a microscopic qi tether to every single insect in the swarm. Using divine sense as the central processing unit, the cultivator could mentally fuse thousands of individual insects into a single, cohesive macro-structure.

With a single thought, the swarm could physically lock together to form a towering greatsword, condense into an impenetrable shield, or even mimic the shape and movements of a roaring giant beast. It offered flawless transitions between offense and defense.

Perfect! This is exactly what I need! Zhou Kai’s heart raced. He didn’t hesitate, aggressively downloading the entirety of the Edge Transformation Art into his mind.

Having secured his tactical upgrades, Zhou Kai let out a long breath. I’ve got the ocular art and the swarm command protocol. Now, I need to figure out a solution for my women.

He pulled up the System Panel, navigating to the specific tabs for Chen Ziyi, Lin Zhiwei, and Wang Qiaoqiao.

The system had notified him back in Tongming Valley that their profiles had updated.

[System Message]

Chen Ziyi: Jade Marrow Body

Lin Zhiwei: Spirit Ripple Body

Wang Qiaoqiao: Extreme Lightning Body

Zhou Kai’s brow furrowed tightly. Jade Marrow? Spirit Ripple? Extreme Lightning?

Just from the nomenclature alone, he knew these were painfully ordinary physiques. Compared to Shen Hanyi’s apocalyptic Suppress Demon Return to Ruins Sword Embryo or Li Youci’s Blue Fall Ash Soul Body, they were like comparing flickering fireflies to the blazing sun. It was a completely different dimension of power.

Is it because their baseline innate talent was simply too low, and they only reached this stage because I hard-carried them with System resources? Or did forcing them to practice hyper-accelerated cultivation methods artificially cap their potential, resulting in these mediocre physiques?

A heavy knot formed in his chest. A profound wave of guilt washed over him.

He had the System. His meteoric rise to the top was practically guaranteed. But he absolutely refused to let his women be left in the dust, stranded so far behind they couldn’t even see his back!

He wasn’t going to drag them to the front lines to slaughter enemies, but forcing them to settle for such mediocre foundations was an insult to them and to himself.

With a renewed, grim determination, Zhou Kai turned away from the technique section and marched directly toward the archives detailing the origin, evolution, and mutation of human physiques.