Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 53: Cultivating with the Sea

Moonlight cascaded over the Dharma Boat, draping its crocodile-like hull in a pale, lunar glow. From a distance, the vessel seemed alive, breathing in the moon’s essence with rhythmic, pulsing exhales. The concentrated moonlight gathered across its surface, revealing the cold, lethal gleam of its armaments.

Xu Qing gazed at it in silence.

Whether in the slums or the Scavenger Camp, his living quarters had always been squalid—save for the pristine cabin Captain Lei had left him. Yet this crocodile-shaped awning boat rested immaculately under the night sky. It radiated a sharp, predatory aura that drew Xu Qing in. He crouched, running his hand along the hull.

Cold. Impervious.

Most importantly…

“It’s mine,” Xu Qing murmured. He moved to step aboard but froze. A razor-thin glint flashed through his eyes. From the shadows, the faint prickle of a malicious gaze locked onto his back.

The watcher was expertly hidden. Unable to pinpoint the location immediately, Xu Qing veiled the killing intent in his eyes. He let his posture relax, feigning a sudden interest in his own feet.

His straw sandals were falling apart, caked in layers of mud and dried blood. Grime coated his toes, visible through the frayed weaving.

After a heavy silence, Xu Qing slipped off the sandals. He sat at the edge of the pier, dipping his filthy feet into the freezing seawater, meticulously scrubbing away seven years of grime until the pale skin beneath finally surfaced.

He appeared entirely at ease, but his peripheral vision scoured the darkness, waiting for the hunter to strike. Yet the stalker was agonizingly patient. Even with Xu Qing projecting such vulnerability, they refused to show themselves.

Expressionless, Xu Qing stood and boarded the vessel. He inspected the awning.

The cabin was claustrophobic and utterly barren: a wooden bed, a meditation cushion, and a small washing basin. The ceiling sloped too low for a grown man to stand, though it offered perfect clearance for seated meditation.

Rather than entering, Xu Qing sat on the open deck. The rhythmic lapping of the waves echoed in the dark as the small boat rocked gently with the rolling tide.

In this fleeting quiet, his gaze drifted, his hyper-vigilance temporarily yielding to distant memories.

He thought of the freezing, desperate nights in the slums. He remembered huddling in his ruined doghouse of a shelter, shivering through winters where he never knew if he’d wake to see the morning sun. Every frost brought fresh corpses to the alleys.

He hated the cold. Perhaps it wasn’t the temperature that terrified him, but the memories it dredged up.

Staring out at the ink-black ocean and the solitary moon, Xu Qing recalled the first man he had ever killed. The scavenger had wanted to butcher and eat him. Instead, a young Xu Qing had sawed off the man’s head and mounted it outside his doghouse. From that day on, the way the slum-dwellers looked at him had changed forever.

The boat swayed.

His eyes remained unfocused, but a chilling thought whispered in his mind.

Should I mount one here, too?

The instant the thought crystallized, Xu Qing snapped his torso backward. A venomous blue arc of steel whistled mere millimeters from his face.

The vacant look vanished from his eyes, replaced by a terrifying, predatory absolute. The charade was over.

“Finally.”

The water beside the boat erupted. A figure launched out of the icy depths, lunging at Xu Qing with a poisoned dagger leading the charge.

Bathed in moonlight, the assailant’s gray Daoist robes marked him as a Seventh Peak disciple. He looked to be in his thirties, radiating a fifth-level Qi Condensation cultivation base. Yet, something about him triggered Xu Qing’s survival instincts.

The man’s face contorted with murderous glee, his dagger thrusting squarely for Xu Qing’s chest.

Xu Qing’s eyes were dead voids. He didn’t even bother dodging the blade. His right hand blurred, striking like a viper to clamp down on the man’s wrist. With the explosive force of his body-refining cultivation, Xu Qing hoisted the grown man off his feet and slammed him mercilessly into the wooden deck.

Boom!

Bones shattered. Blood exploded across the planks. In the midst of the gore, a sickening squelch tore from the man’s torso. A grotesque, mucus-drenched tentacle ripped through his flesh, whipping toward Xu Qing with a power that rivaled the sixth level of Qi Condensation.

Xu Qing didn’t blink. The colossal phantom of the Kui instantly materialized behind him, slamming its oppressive weight down.

Boom!

The tentacle was crushed into a useless, twitching pulp.

Stripped of his hidden trump card, the cultivator vomited blood, his face draining of color. He spasmed, trying to fight back, but Xu Qing’s left hand was already there. A dagger pressed flush against the man’s throat.

The freezing steel bit into the skin. One twitch of the wrist, and the throat would be completely severed.

The disciple froze, absolute terror flooding his eyes.

“How did you mask your presence?” Xu Qing asked, his voice cold and flat. “And what is that mutation on your body?”

“It’s… it’s a grafted sea octopus arm!” the man stammered, words spilling out in a desperate rush. “It boosts my combat power and hides my aura underwater! Half the Sect does this! Junior Brother, I’ll pay you back! I swear! I was just short on Contribution Points, but I have a high-yield mission tomorrow, I can—”

Xu Qing didn’t let him finish. He slashed the dagger across the man’s throat.

The cultivator’s eyes bulged. Before the scream could leave his ruined windpipe, Xu Qing clamped a hand over his mouth. The man violently convulsed, hot arterial blood spraying in a crimson arc across the pristine Dharma Boat.

Within seconds, the twitching stopped.

Xu Qing stared at the ruined deck, his brow furrowing in irritation. He retrieved a vial of Corpse Destroying Powder and emptied it over the body. The flesh and bone dissolved into a steaming puddle of acidic gore. Throughout the entire ordeal, not a single Seventh Peak patrol arrived.

It seemed everyone was accustomed to this.

The sea breeze carried the metallic tang of blood and brine. Xu Qing sifted through the dead man’s Storage Bag. It was pitifully empty.

“He targeted me for the Dharma Boat,” Xu Qing deduced, recalling the round-faced disciple’s warning about the monthly disappearances.

He ran a thumb over his iron spike, a cold glint flashing in his eyes. Retreating to the deck, he opened the brocade box containing his Sect orientation materials and extracted the jade slip detailing the Dharma Boats.

After a long silence, Xu Qing lowered the jade slip. He stared at his vessel, a strange light burning in his eyes.

“This boat… is a weapon.”

Following the slip’s instructions, Xu Qing slammed his palm against the deck. He channeled his spiritual energy, forging a branding mark that sank deep into the wood.

The ship shuddered. A low, mechanical hum vibrated through the hull, as if a dormant beast had awakened.

Without hesitating, Xu Qing bit his finger and drew a blood rune across the planks. The moment the symbol completed, an invisible, tethered connection snapped into place within his mind. He and the Dharma Boat were now intrinsically linked.

With a mere thought, an energy barrier rippled outward, enveloping the entire vessel. Only then did Xu Qing finally feel a sliver of true security.

He returned to the jade slip, memorizing its contents until the schematics were burned into his brain.

The Dharma Boats of the Seven Blood Eyes were modular, terrifyingly scalable assets.

Disciples could invest resources to upgrade them across four metrics: Speed, Defense, Attack, and Special. A cultivator could min-max a single attribute or diversify their portfolio, depending entirely on their capital and preferences.

The first three directions were straightforward. The ‘Special’ category governed anomalous, non-magical capabilities—submarine diving, aerial flight, or radical structural metamorphosis.

But all four upgrades hinged on a single underlying asset class: the hull’s core material.

Generally speaking, Seventh Peak disciples had two supply chains for upgrading. The first was synthetic manufacturing: swapping in higher-grade materials capable of sustaining heavier, more lethal Formations, allowing the boat to advance and become increasingly formidable.

This path required coordination with the Second Peak’s Formation masters. Future development had artificial limitations, but it was still the primary choice for a considerable number of disciples because it was stable, bureaucratic, and highly conventional.

“As for the second direction…”

“That is using the biological material of mutated creatures as the hull, bypassing the need for artificial Formations entirely.” Xu Qing gained a sudden realization. The jade slip detailed how harvesting the biomaterial of mutated anomalies provided natural, biological circuitry.

Their innate talents and raw power were anomalous. This type of organic array was known as a Forbidden Restriction.

Different beast materials contained different Forbidden Restrictions, offering a massive biological catalog of upgrades.

“Both of these avenues burn through catastrophic amounts of capital.” Xu Qing lowered the jade slip, grasping the sheer, oppressive scale of the Seven Blood Eyes’ economy.

As a newly promoted disciple, he had only purchased a Level-One ‘Boat’.

The Seventh Peak classified its naval assets into four distinct tiers: Boat, Ship, Vessel, and Wheel. Each tier demanded ten agonizing levels of upgrades.

And hidden beyond ‘Wheel’ was an apex, mythical tier: Great Wing.

“The resource cost for these upgrades…” Xu Qing couldn’t even calculate the math. Just a rough estimate made his chest tighten.

Setting the jade slip aside, he spaced out for a moment, then looked down at his pouches. Whether it was the leather pouch or the Storage Bag, the remaining Supplies inside were pitifully low.

“I need a revenue stream. Fast. In thirty days, the Sect will start charging docking fees for the berth.” Xu Qing pondered. After a while, he pulled out the second jade slip and began studying it.

This slip contained the proprietary, strictly guarded cultivation technique of the Seventh Peak: the Sea Transformation Scripture.

As a monopolistic powerhouse on the South Phoenix Continent, the Seven Blood Eyes possessed cultivation techniques that dwarfed anything the outside world could offer. Their efficiency at filtering Mutagen and their raw combat multiplier made independent factions and smaller families look completely insignificant.

At the same cultivation level, the gap was as vast as a firefly compared to a blazing torch.

After carefully studying the text, Xu Qing exhaled deeply. He finally understood why every seemingly average disciple in the Seven Blood Eyes emitted a terrifying aura of lethal threat.

The foundation dictated the ceiling.

The Sea Transformation Scripture spanned ten layers, perfectly mirroring the ten stages of Qi Condensation. It demanded proximity to the ocean during cultivation.

With every layer, a cultivator absorbed the ocean’s essence, carving out a ten-zhang Spirit Sea within their Dantian. By the tenth layer—Grand Perfection—their internal Spirit Sea could expand to a maximum of one hundred zhang.

This granted the practitioner an absurdly deep mana pool, letting their spiritual energy surpass those of the same realm by several times over. Combined with endlessly changing spells, they could suppress all opposition.

Worse, the energy carried the oppressive, crushing pressure of the Forbidden Sea. Merely casting a spell would mentally cripple and intangibly weaken any opponent with an inferior foundation.

“The Sea Mountain Technique is purely a body-refining technique. My Kui shadow reaching Grand Perfection only mirrors Qi Condensation Grand Perfection in raw strength. But due to the technique’s low tier, it is much weaker compared to high-level arts of the same stage.”

“However, because I have zero Mutagen within my body and possess the Purple Crystal’s enhancement, I forced the Kui shadow to manifest at the seventh layer instead of the tenth. My combat power is comparable to Grand Perfection.”

“But ultimately, the Sea Mountain Technique cannot compare to the raw magical devastation of the Sea Transformation Scripture. One refines the flesh, the other cultivates the law…” Waves stirred in Xu Qing’s heart as he recalled the words the round-faced cultivator had spoken on the mountain.

Determination hardened in Xu Qing’s eyes. He noticed a critical detail in the jade slip: the one-hundred-zhang limit of the Spirit Sea wasn’t an absolute ceiling.

The limit was dictated by a cultivator’s biological purity.

The less Mutagen in the body, the wider the Spirit Sea could expand. Sixty years ago, a genius with minimal mutation had shattered the Sect record, manifesting a 270-zhang ocean at Qi Condensation Grand Perfection.

That man was now the Peak Lord of the Seventh Peak.

Xu Qing’s pupils constricted. He knew he had absolutely zero Mutagen in his body…

“If mutation isn’t capping my limits… how vast will my Spirit Sea become at Grand Perfection?”

A terrifying anticipation gripped him. Without the toxic bottleneck of Mutagen, his only limit was the physical breaking point of his flesh. And since his body regenerated with monstrous speed, his endurance would naturally be immense.

An unprecedented light burned in Xu Qing’s eyes.

He also recognized that the Sea Transformation Scripture focused purely on spells, not physical reinforcement. After his brutal battle with the Vajra Sect, Xu Qing deeply understood the lethal shortcomings of pure body-refinement.

Without a second of hesitation, he memorized the technique, closed his eyes, and initiated the Sea Transformation Scripture.

Instantly, a howling gale whipped around the awning boat. The dark ocean churned, and microscopic torrents of spiritual energy—laced with the lethal Forbidden Sea aura and dense Mutagen—surged out of the water and swarmed the vessel.

The defensive barrier filtered spells, not ambient energy. The raging Qi flooded through Xu Qing’s pores like a million needles.

Because his body had been endlessly purified of Mutagen, his Meridians were massive, empty highways. The spiritual energy met zero resistance, accelerating into a violent surge.

His flesh acted like a starving leviathan, inhaling the raging tempest of power and slamming it down into his Dantian.

As the energy roared through his system, his Sea Mountain Technique instinctively flared to life, trying to hijack the flow. Initially, Xu Qing suppressed it, fearing internal conflict due to the differing meridian pathways.

But the urge only grew more violent. Taking a calculated risk, Xu Qing let go.

The second the Sea Mountain Technique activated without suppression, the intake of spiritual energy didn’t just increase—it detonated. The influx multiplied exponentially.

The nascent pool of energy in his Dantian violently exploded into a roaring ocean.

Xu Qing was stunned. The two techniques weren’t fighting; the Sea Mountain Technique was actively supercharging the Sea Transformation Scripture!

Embracing the synergy, Xu Qing pushed his blood and Qi to their absolute limits. The massive Kui shadow erupted into the night sky behind him.

The phantom beast threw its head back in a silent, world-shaking roar. It raised its massive arms as if physically grabbing the ocean itself, channeling a catastrophic tidal wave of Forbidden Sea energy directly into Xu Qing’s body.

BOOM!

The violent, churning waters in his Dantian violently expanded, crashing against the boundaries of his flesh. Ten zhang!

Sea Transformation Scripture, First Layer: Perfection.

Xu Qing’s body trembled. Before he could even process the breakthrough, he smashed right into the second layer. Minutes later, the ocean expanded again.

Sea Transformation Scripture, Second Layer: Perfection.

“This fast?!” Xu Qing didn’t hesitate, relentlessly driving the technique into the third layer.

The Spirit Sea inside him violently swelled: twenty-one zhang, twenty-two, twenty-three…

Under this continuous, explosive intake, the atmospheric pressure outside the awning boat violently warped. A massive vortex of spiritual energy formed above his vessel, tearing the wind into a howling gale and churning the harbor waters into a frenzy. It immediately drew the attention of the shore guards.

They stared at the anomaly, their expressions shifting in disbelief.

“Which monstrous disciple is cultivating out there?”

“That intake speed… it’s impossible…”

Before they could finish, the vortex emitted a deafening rumble and expanded outward. The harbor’s waves pitched violently, tossing dozens of anchored Dharma Boats. Numerous disciples stormed out of their cabins, ready to curse out whoever was disturbing the peace, only to freeze in utter shock.

“What the hell is going on?!”

The vortex was still growing!

Inside the boat, Xu Qing’s body vibrated violently under the crushing pressure of his own power. His internal Spirit Sea had, in an instant, torn past thirty zhang, smashing into thirty-seven zhang.

And it wouldn’t stop.

Thirty-eight zhang. Thirty-nine zhang.

Until forty zhang!

Xu Qing’s eyes snapped open. A terrifying, blinding purple light eradicated the darkness in the cabin, completely masking the profound shock in his gaze.

“Sea Transformation Scripture… Fourth Layer!”