Who Let Him Cultivate？

Chapter 30: Shrinking Earth to an Inch

Three days later.

Lu Yang stood in a crisp, martial tunic, his spine ramrod straight. A triumphant grin plastered his face; he had finally conquered the esoteric contents of the golden parchment.

“Recite it,” Yun Zhi commanded, her voice a cool breeze.

“A thousand leagues exist, yet before the eyes they are but a breath. Release the bounds, and the world stretches anew…” Lu Yang rattled off the incantation with flawless fluidity. Not a single stutter marred his delivery, proving the sheer brute-force memorization he had subjected himself to.

Yun Zhi offered a faint nod. The mantra was archaic and dense, every syllable heavy with profound cosmic truths. Merely speaking the words aloud drained the mind. For Lu Yang to recite it so effortlessly was a testament to his grueling dedication.

“This incantation is merely a primer,” she explained. “In the early stages, before your technique becomes Proficient, silently chanting it anchors your mind and ensures success. Once you are Proficient in Shrinking Earth to an Inch, the words will become obsolete.”

“Shrinking Earth to an Inch is an art of spatial manipulation. It is admittedly premature for you to attempt it. However, you are a disciple of our Master. Master learned this very technique at your current level of Cultivation. Therefore, it stands to reason that you might as well.”

“The paramount concern when manipulating space is survival. A single millimeter of spatial dislocation will result in immediate decapitation or bisection. Thus, an ironclad rule exists within the Cultivation world: one must never attempt spatial arts without an elder who is an Expert in the field standing guard.”

Yun Zhi’s usually placid demeanor darkened into uncharacteristic gravity. Sensing the shift in atmospheric pressure, Lu Yang wiped the grin from his face and gave her his undivided attention.

“The fundamental principle of Shrinking Earth to an Inch is to compress the physical world into the span of a few mere inches. The caster simply steps over the fold, traversing endless leagues in a single stride. The more Proficient you become, the greater the expanse of earth you can compress, and the further you can travel. Cultivated to the pinnacle, even the boundless vastness of the Central Continent could not hinder your steps.”

“However, technique requires profound comprehension. You have never touched the fabric of space before. Whether you succeed or fail, you must steel your mind.”

“A cultivator remains an immovable mountain before honor or disgrace. Shun extreme joy; banish profound sorrow.”

Yun Zhi delivered these teachings with the serene detachment of a living goddess, imparting her personal Cultivation philosophy.

Lu Yang nodded solemnly. If anyone was qualified to preach about emotional detachment, it was his Senior Sister. He had never seen her exhibit anything resembling a human feeling.

He, on the other hand, was severely lacking in that department.

Initially, Lu Yang had assumed her perpetual blank stare meant she was entirely devoid of emotion. Only after prolonged exposure did he realize she actually possessed emotional fluctuations—they were just microscopic.

By now, Lu Yang had developed a marginal success rate in deciphering her mood based on the subtlest twitches of her facial muscles.

For example, right now… well, he had absolutely no idea.

“I will demonstrate,” Yun Zhi said, oblivious to his internal critique.

She produced a small red flag and hurled it toward the distant peak of the opposite mountain. Before Lu Yang’s eyes could even track the projectile, she took a single, graceful step. She vanished. An instant later, she reappeared in the exact same spot, the red flag resting calmly in her grasp.

“Just like that,” she said smoothly. “Once you succeed, practice a few more times, and you will be as Proficient as I am.”

Lu Yang stood frozen. He blinked. Then he blinked again.

What just happened?

To his mortal eyes, it looked as though Yun Zhi had simply tossed the flag and immediately snatched it right back out of the air. He hadn’t even seen if the flag had reached the opposite peak. There was zero visual evidence of any technique being cast.

Yun Zhi’s delicate brow furrowed—a rare display of confusion. When their Master had taught her, he had demonstrated it the exact same way, and she had mastered it on the first try.

Fearing Lu Yang hadn’t caught the nuances, she demonstrated again.

Throw the flag. Step. Return. A single, seamless motion of terrifying grace. Lu Yang remained utterly bewildered.

“…”

Right. So there were times when even his omnipotent Senior Sister was completely useless. Clearly, grasping the profound mysteries of the universe was a solo endeavor.

Lu Yang met her gaze. This time, he could read her mood perfectly.

She fully expected him to succeed.

Senior Sister, he thought desperately, you have to understand that your teaching methods are a crime against pedagogy.

Suppressing a heavy sigh, Lu Yang abandoned all hope of guidance. He would just have to cast the technique based on his own logical deduction of Shrinking Earth to an Inch.

“A thousand leagues exist, yet before the eyes they are but a breath…” Lu Yang squeezed his eyes shut, his fingers blurring into complex hand seals as he chanted.

“Shrinking Earth to an Inch!” he roared.

Instantly, his figure vanished. The world shifted. Pitch-black darkness swallowed him whole, a suffocating void that felt entirely disconnected from reality.

A thrill of absolute euphoria surged through Lu Yang’s chest. He had actually succeeded on the first try!

He really was a peerless genius!

Senior Sister had explained that the technique twisted and folded the fabric of reality. The caster traversed a pocket dimension—a spatial shortcut that allowed one to reach their destination in a fraction of a second.

Lu Yang opened his mouth to unleash a triumphant laugh, only to choke as gritty, foul-tasting black matter poured down his throat. The same dense matter crushed against his body, pinning his limbs in a vice-like grip. Furthermore, this “pocket dimension” seemed entirely devoid of oxygen. His lungs burned in protest.

After a brief moment of calm, logical deduction, he arrived at a singular, undeniable truth:

He had shrunk into the earth. He was buried alive.

Lu Yang currently faced one piece of good news and one piece of bad news.

The good news was that he had successfully mastered exactly half of the technique: Shrinking Earth.

The bad news was that he had only mastered half.

Up on the surface, Yun Zhi stood in profound silence. She had just watched her junior brother execute a complex spatial incantation, only to plunge straight down into the loam like a rock, accidentally inventing a crude Earth Escape Technique.

How did a high-tier spatial manipulation technique mutate into a basic Five Elements elemental dive?

Yun Zhi was the Senior Sister of the Dao Seeking Sect and the Sect Leader’s eldest disciple. Her Cultivation base and innate talent reigned supreme over the entire sect. She could casually draft master-tier cultivation methods over tea and deconstruct ancient techniques with a single glance. Her peerless comprehension was a terrifying anomaly rarely seen since antiquity; before her, the brightest geniuses of the era were reduced to dim sparks.

Yet, even she could not fathom the arcane logic behind Lu Yang’s technique casting.

They were two fundamentally unrelated disciplines.

With a muffled thwump, the earth parted. Lu Yang’s head breached the surface, popping out of the dirt like a startled mole. It was a sight that instilled a primal, overwhelming urge in the observer to either smack him with a mallet or stomp him back down.

Lu Yang coughed up a mouthful of topsoil, desperately trying to salvage his dignity.

But no matter how thick his skin was, it wasn’t thick enough to deflect the sheer, crushing awkwardness of the moment.

Yun Zhi reached down. Her face an emotionless mask, she grabbed him by the collar and yanked him out of the earth, shaking off the loose clumps of mud.

Exactly like harvesting a radish.

“That was merely a calibration error,” Lu Yang insisted, brushing dirt from his shoulders. “I will try again.”

He felt he was on the verge of a breakthrough.

“A thousand leagues exist, yet before the eyes they are but a breath…” Lu Yang’s hands blurred through the seals, his chanting twice as fast as before.

“Shrinking Earth to an Inch!” he roared.

Once again, reality warped.

Yun Zhi was tall and elegantly slender, yet she still stood half a head shorter than Lu Yang. Usually, he could easily see the crown of her head. Now, however, the perspective was shifting drastically.

Yun Zhi’s form began to stretch toward the heavens. Lu Yang’s gaze went from looking down, to looking level, to looking up. Within seconds, he was craning his neck back as far as it would go just to keep her in sight.

From his new vantage point, her face was entirely obscured by the sheer distance. Yun Zhi had become a primordial titan propping up the sky, her head brushing the celestial firmament while her feet anchored the earth.

“Wait, no! It’s me! I shrank!” Lu Yang screamed. As he stared at the pebbles on the ground—which now loomed like jagged, half-man-high boulders—the horrifying reality of his situation set in.

The three-inch-tall Lu Yang hopped frantically through the forest of grass blades, his voice reduced to a high-pitched, microscopic squeak.

He had successfully mastered the second half of the technique: to an Inch.

In its own twisted way, Lu Yang’s aptitude for technique casting was equally terrifying. A peerless genius like Yun Zhi had only managed to learn Shrinking Earth to an Inch as a single, unified spatial jump. Lu Yang, however, had managed to completely shatter the compound word, independently mastering both Shrinking Earth and to an Inch as two entirely separate, highly literal techniques!

Yun Zhi slowly crouched down, her massive, god-like eyes peering closely at the tiny, flailing Lu Yang. Her delicate eyebrows knit together in deep, profound consternation, as if she were trying to mathematically calculate exactly where the laws of the universe had broken down.