Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way

one’s meridians were enough to add 200 years of life.
If you hit Foundation Establishment, you could add another 200 more years.

If you could gather your hun together into your core and turn your po into nascence, you could easily live past a thousand.

Of course, that was all assuming you didn’t get murdered along the way or do something really suicidal like cultivate in some forbidden technique or other dangerous cultivation technique.
Or dig up some grave or go on some adventure in hope of discovering something that could help you in your cultivation journey, then end up getting trapped somewhere and die tragically for no good reason.

But it was also true that most cultivators did not end up dying naturally.
After all, you always needed more resources and greater understanding in order to arrive at the next stage.

And where would these resources come from? You could rob someone of them, or join a powerful faction and possibly end up risking your life for them.
Otherwise, you had to go on a journey to seek out more opportunities and hope to get lucky, like find something left behind by a formidable cultivator.
Either way, all these methods had one thing in common – they were all highly dangerous activities.

Of course, if you had a great father, a good family or a good sect, none of this would apply to you.
After all, the most important thing in cultivation was your level of giftedness and that could be improved with certain techniques even if you weren’t born with enough talent.
Otherwise, other resources like spiritual stones were helpful to have.

The least important were the usual bullshit in novels like resilience and experience etc.

Those who succeed solely by relying on their empty ambitions and willpower wouldn’t live for long…

Unless, you were a lucky fellow, or what was called a Child of Fortune.
And what was a Child of Fortune? Simply put, you had the good fortunes of the world in your body, like an OP MC.

But of course, becoming a Child of Fortune also depended on what you looked like.
What were fortunes anyway? Simply put, this was something that most living creatures in a particular world subconsciously wanted to become or wanted to strive for.

The most obvious example was one particular anime about ninjas that was shown on Earth.
In times of war, the only thing that everyone wanted was for the war to end and for life to be peaceful.
All the noisy people with negative intelligence scores appeared.
Why was their intelligence poor? Because the rules of that world were extremely simplistic and could barely count as a domain of a cultivator.
It was already not bad for a living creature to continue living in it, so one shouldn’t ask too much of it.

In the comic, Storm Riders, every character wanted to become a martial artist, so all of them focused on learning martial arts and the royal courts were weak.
The court lost its authority and the might of martial artists became the driving force of that world.
A tyrant later wanted to conquer the world and struck terror in the hearts of everyone, so the two MCs of the comic appeared to save the world.
That’s what everybody wanted.

Back to the story.

Before this, I already mentioned that besides looking like humans, cultivators were basically no longer humans.

It only took about a hundred years for them to become no longer bound by the constraints of worldly desires and human needs.
The bulk of a cultivator’s life was actually free time.

A few years ago, a signboard that read “No Money? Don’t Bother” was hung up and this bookshop quietly opened for business.

There was no opening ceremony and the owner did not seem interested in competing with the other shops in the neighborhood.

This nondescript, ordinary looking bookstore that never had any customers continued to stay open for years.
Everyone was so surprised that it was able to stay afloat.

But it didn’t take long for everyone to guess that the owner of this shop had opened it just for fun.
Why else would he have given it such a ridiculous shop name?

They were relieved when they were sure that this new shop wasn’t going to threaten their livelihoods.
From time to time, they would chat and play chess with the owner.

From these interactions with him, they were even surer of their guess now.
I mean, seriously.
Have you ever seen an owner whose clothes were expensive enough to buy the entire shop despite being in his 20s? Not just that – they had seen it for themselves.
The three young ladies serving the young man were so pretty and elegant, they were no less than the pampered daughters of the rich and powerful of the city.

……

Gu Suihan placed an incredibly luxurious looking and immensely expensive chair in front of his shop in the morning and lay down lazily on it.
He pulled away the book on his face and asked the young lady massaging his back, “Meihua, how are you doing in your cultivation lately?”

Meihua…

…was obviously Fang Rou.

Every time this name rang in Fang Rou’s ears, she would instinctively feel a sense of oppression, sadness and anger.

But it was too bad that she couldn’t fight her circumstances.
No matter how conflicted she felt, she never dared to show any of it on her face.
The young man before her looked harmless and even looked just like one of those spoiled wastrels from a rich family, but he was really a cultivator at Origin Core, whose origins nobody knew anything about.