The Eternal Farmer: I Trade My Harvest for Immortality

Chapter 291: Life from Death

Just as Jiang Chen was struggling to process the horrifying, fragmented image in his mind, a tidal wave of bone-chilling cold violently erupted from the depths below.

Amplified by the mutated Frost Cabbage, the freezing Yin energy was terrifying. The ambient temperature within the stone cavern instantly plummeted by a full third. A thick, creeping layer of rime frost rapidly coated the cavern floor, accompanied by an oppressive, macabre aura that sought to freeze the blood in his veins.

Operating on pure instinct, Jiang Chen triggered his Thick Earth Domain.

The surrounding soil, loose rocks, and gravel violently erupted from the ground, swirling upward to form a dense, impenetrable hemispherical barrier around him. From the outside, he looked exactly like a startled tortoise violently retreating into its shell.

But it worked. The dense earth perfectly deflected the biting chill, physically locking the malignant Yin energy outside.

Yet, the unnatural cold was relentless. It churned and whipped around the earthen dome like a living entity, frantically probing for the slightest crack or structural weakness to seep through. It stubbornly persisted for several long moments before finally, seemingly realizing its efforts were futile, the oppressive aura sullenly retracted back into the earth.

Inside his protective shell, a flicker of genuine shock crossed Jiang Chen’s eyes.

He had suspected something unnatural was buried down there, but he hadn’t anticipated stumbling upon something this deeply profane.

The fragmented image his seismic perception had brushed against finally snapped into horrifying clarity. It was a corpse.

Due to the sheer degradation, its gender was entirely indistinguishable. The entire body was pitch-black, charred and desiccated, as if it had been struck by a divine thunderbolt.

The pieces fell into place with hyper-rational precision. The Frost Cabbage hadn’t mutated randomly. It had mutated because it had been planted exactly ten meters above this buried, unknown corpse, gradually feeding off its necrotic energy to become a ‘Cradle Ice Embryo.’

A sickening realization washed over him. The corpse wasn’t just fueling the plant; it was actively using the mutated ice womb as a vessel for its own necrotic rebirth.

Considering the intense, unbridled malice the entity had just directed at him, Jiang Chen abandoned all hesitation.

He immediately pushed the max-level Thick Earth Load-Bearing Art to its absolute limit, violently dragging the ambient Earth Qi toward him and aggressively forcing it into the Frost Cabbage.

Logically, as a mutated spirit plant, it should have been controlled using Wood Qi. But Jiang Chen had tried that previously to no avail; the necrotic taint was too deep. As for his Fire Qi, the intense elemental friction would simply incinerate the valuable specimen. Only pure, unyielding Earth Qi could safely manipulate it.

As if responding to an absolute, tyrannical command, the frozen black soil surrounding the cabbage violently cracked and parted.

Soon, the plant’s entire root system was laid bare.

Placing his hands on either side of the icy shell, Jiang Chen channeled his Qi, intending to rip the entire structure out by its roots.

To his absolute horror, the plant resisted. A normal Frost Cabbage possessed a short taproot and fibrous offshoots no longer than twenty centimeters. But as he pulled, the roots just kept coming. One meter. Two meters. Three meters.

When the primary taproot finally breached five meters, the true nightmare revealed itself.

The root wasn’t a root at all. It was a thick, writhing, pitch-black tentacle—something resembling a monstrous, swollen earthworm made entirely of necrotic flesh—that had physically fused with the base of the ice embryo.

As Jiang Chen watched, the grotesque appendage violently convulsed, wriggling with independent, malignant life.

Sheer, visceral disgust coiled in his gut. Without a second thought, he snapped his fingers, unleashing a concentrated tongue of searing, crimson Fire Qi directly onto the fleshy tendril.

Sssssssss!

A foul, acrid stench filled the cavern, accompanied by a sickening sizzle that sounded exactly like rotting meat thrown onto a hot skillet. The tentacle violently withered and snapped.

With the unholy tether broken, Jiang Chen swiftly swept the entire Frost Cabbage—the Cradle Ice Embryo—into his personal storage space.

The moment the embryo vanished, the oppressive, bone-chilling cold that had saturated the cavern evaporated without a trace. If not for the lingering scent of ozone and rotting meat, one might have thought the entire ordeal was a dark hallucination.

Yet, despite securing the prize, Jiang Chen’s face remained entirely grim.

Down in the freshly excavated crater, the severed black stump of the tentacle was still frantically writhing, blindly groping at the air as if searching for its stolen host.

He couldn’t just walk away. If he left this malignant entity buried beneath his property, it would eventually spread, poisoning his Spirit Farm and ruining his livelihood. The threat had to be eradicated.

Making a rapid, pragmatic decision, Jiang Chen simultaneously ignited the roaring Fire Qi and heavy Earth Qi within his dantian. His entire body practically glowed, radiating a scorching, oppressive heat.

With a sweeping gesture, he commanded the Earth Qi. The black soil ahead of him violently churned and rolled back like the parted sea. The crater rapidly deepened—from one meter, to three, to five, until he finally hit the ten-meter mark.

He was going to confront the corpse directly.

The deeper he excavated, the worse the infestation became. Countless black tentacles webbed through the soil, sprawling out like a diseased, necrotic root system. He also noticed that the deeper he went, the darker and more slickly wet the soil became. It was as if the earth itself was putrefying, providing a vile, nutrient-rich slurry to sustain the corpse.

It was a deeply unsettling thought.

Finally, at the ten-meter mark, the source was exposed.

It was a pitch-black, desiccated corpse, curled into a tight, unnatural fetal position. Protruding from its hollowed abdomen was a pulsating, black mass of flesh. From this tumorous growth, thousands of hair-thin black tendrils sprouted, burrowing deep into the surrounding earth to feed.

Suddenly, that familiar, bone-piercing cold erupted once more, pouring directly from the corpse.

A metallic, silvery sheen spread across the desiccated skin, instantly condensing the ambient moisture into a thick layer of rime frost. It acted like a localized blizzard, projecting a terrifying wave of Yin energy.

Yet, despite standing practically on top of it, Jiang Chen realized the power output was significantly weaker than before. Without the Frost Cabbage acting as an amplifier and a catalyst, the corpse was severely crippled.

Simply circulating his Fire Qi was more than enough to perfectly insulate him against the chill.

Seeing this, Jiang Chen didn’t immediately incinerate the thing. His hyper-rational mind took over. He wanted to observe. He wanted to see exactly how much residual energy this broken entity actually possessed.

He stood his ground, letting the cold wash over his fiery aura.

One minute passed. Then two. By the third minute, the localized blizzard began to falter.

At the four-minute mark, the metallic sheen vanished entirely. The terrifying Yin energy fizzled out, and the entity returned to being nothing more than a pathetic, charred husk. It had exhausted its reserves.

Rustle… Squelch…

Suddenly, the sickening sound of wet flesh dragging against dirt echoed from all sides. It was a dense, overlapping cacophony—they were completely surrounded.

Jiang Chen’s eyes narrowed. He instantly flared his Earth Qi, reactivating the Thick Earth Domain to completely encase himself in a reinforced earthen sphere.

A heartbeat later, thousands of black tentacles violently erupted from the crater walls. They lashed out in a frenzied, mindless swarm, raining down upon his earthen barrier with a staccato barrage of rapid thuds, like torrential rain hammering against a wooden roof.

But the max-level barrier held firm, utterly impervious to the pathetic physical assault.

Realizing blunt force was useless, the writhing mass of tentacles changed tactics. They surged forward, rapidly coiling around the earthen dome in a desperate attempt to constrict and crush it.

Jiang Chen let out a dry, cynical sigh. “Are you kidding me? This is useless.”

He didn’t even bother deploying his Fire Qi. He simply flexed his will, violently expanding the diameter of the Thick Earth Domain outward by a single meter.

Snap! Snap! SNAP!

The abrupt, unstoppable outward expansion instantly over-torqued the constricting tentacles. Unable to withstand the sheer kinetic force, they violently ruptured and snapped like over-tightened bowstrings.

It wasn’t even a fight. Before Jiang Chen could even formulate a proper offensive counter-attack, the remaining tentacles—and the fetal corpse itself—suddenly froze mid-thrash.

Then, right before his eyes, the entire necrotic structure rapidly began to desiccate and crumble, dissolving into fine, black ash. It had literally burnt itself out.

When the dust settled, nothing remained in the crater save for a single, fist-sized chunk of material that looked exactly like a piece of burnt charcoal.

Jiang Chen blinked, genuinely bewildered. “I didn’t even hit you yet. That’s it?”

Cautious, he didn’t physically touch the charcoal-like lump. Instead, he swept it with a focused beam of spiritual sense.

His eyebrows shot up in profound surprise.

It was bizarre. The object, born from a necrotic, undead corpse, was currently radiating an incredibly dense, overwhelmingly pure aura of life. It was as if the charred lump had condensed and cannibalized the absolute totality of the corpse’s original vitality into a single core.

The juxtaposition was jarring, yet eerily familiar. To Jiang Chen, it felt exactly like the paradoxical aura he had witnessed radiating from the legendary ‘Life from Death Tree’ back in the Nether Spring Medicine Garden.