At this moment, all other herbs below the heavenly grade could be harvested multiple times a day, so he didn’t have to worry about the rest of the sect advancing all the way from low-grade spiritual roots to divine grade.
Of course, these wouldn’t be given away for free and would all need to be fought for inside the tower dungeon.
As for heavenly and immortal grade herbs, Xiang Yu didn’t think he could give them to just anybody.
While the other herbs cost him nothing to make and he could create practically infinite amounts of them, heavenly and immortal grade herbs were much more complicated and would take considerable time and man power for him to manually craft through his creation domain.
At the moment, he believed he could make about one hundred heavenly grade herbs and ten immortal grade ones a day. With such numbers, he could refine these hundred heavenly grade herbs into awakening pills and save them for exceptionally performing people in the sect.
Besides, who in the sect was currently at divine grade waiting to upgrade to heavenly grade? It seemed they would have to wait for quite some time before these pills could actually be used.
For the immortal grade herbs, he would refine them and use them to gain spiritual root experience.
Although there were some dangers in externally stimulating the root like this without properly advancing it, with his physiques and bloodlines, he should be able to bear the consequences without risking damage.
Still, there was the risk of regression, so he decided to take just one per day. Even with only one daily, it would be enough to significantly shorten the time needed to gain a million experience points to level up to celestial grade.
Speaking of, he turned his attention to his enlightenment, which was also working toward celestial grade.
He needed to figure out a solution for enhancing enlightenment. Although he already understood how the enlightenment trigger worked, he didn’t know exactly how to implement it on a herb so that it would stimulate the enlightenment of whoever took it.
Enlightenment itself was such a vague concept that targeting it wasn’t easy.
The first thing that came to mind was, well...the mind.
But although the two were related, they were drastically different, especially at higher grades.
After hours of grueling research - research that took eleven clones and spanned almost a full day - Xiang Yu finally glimpsed something.
After searching for things that could interact with enlightenment without success, he stumbled upon his black tortoise and phoenix bloodlines. These two were able to interact with enlightenment. But even with these discoveries, he was still lacking a crucial ingredient.
After searching even more, he found out that the solution was something he could never have expected.
The answer actually lay in the human bloodline.
Although the human bloodline was just a common bloodline, it had a unique trait. Just like how every bloodline had their own special characteristic, so did the human bloodline.
The human bloodline’s unique trait was related to enlightenment.
Basically, every human born naturally possessed basic enlightenment.
Some had higher levels, but a pure human would never be born without enlightenment. This was why humans, despite being less powerful than other monsters, were naturally born with intelligence and didn’t need to cultivate to awaken it.
Farming clone Xiang Yu let out a sigh of relief, having finally gotten the final piece of the puzzle he was looking for to complete his theory.
The way he was going to create an enlightenment stimulant was by analyzing how enlightenment formed in the human bloodline naturally. He would then take the most useful aspects of enlightenment formation - these aspects would allow him to interact with others’ enlightenment.
Then he would analyze how the enlightenment boost worked in bloodlines like phoenix and black tortoise and extract that information as well. After that, he would use all the gathered information to create a herb that could stimulate enlightenment.
He let out a long sigh. Even so, this was just a theory, and he had yet to actually implement it. And even if he succeeded, this would only provide a short-term enlightenment boost - he still didn’t know how to truly advance someone’s enlightenment level permanently.
...
Inside a castle made entirely of ice, a pale woman looked at her reflection on the ice crystals that formed the castle walls. Seeing her reflection, she threw a punch, cracking the crystals so she couldn’t see herself anymore.
She fell to the ground, holding her face.
"What is happening to me?" she thought.
She wondered how long it had been now. Ever since a few days ago, something strange had been happening to her. All sorts of thoughts and feelings she didn’t recognize were flooding into her head.
She wondered if it was some kind of curse.
But who could possibly be strong enough to curse her?
The Heavenly Dao? The World Tree? No, they wouldn’t care about a weak woman like her. They also had their own restrictions.
She entered a state of meditation and tried to use the law of causality, only to scream out in pain, clutching her head once again. It was just like before - the curse was getting worse whenever she tried using any causality-related power.
"Dammit," she cursed, getting up from her position.
All her power relied on causality. This was like cutting off her limbs. How was she supposed to survive like this?
She walked right through the crystal walls, entering some sort of secret basement.
The place was dark, with only a little light passing through a small opening. She waved her hand, causing light to appear. At the corner of the room, there were countless ice crystals, each containing someone with the same appearance as her frozen inside.
She moved over to one of the crystals, placing her hand on it.
She seemed to be transferring something into the clone within the crystal. She then started screaming, but she hardened her face with determination, placing her other hand on her head and continuing.
After some time, she seemed to be finished and let go. But instantly, the clone inside the crystal exploded, shattering the entire ice crystal it was encased in into a million pieces.
Nothing remained.
She looked at the scene in shock. "Impossible. All these bodies are at the god level. There’s no way they could explode like that just because of some strange memories and emotions," she thought.
At the same time, she clutched her head once again in pain. She had attempted to transfer the incoming memories and feelings into one of her clones but had failed. Now the curse seemed to have strengthened.
She fell to the ground with a thud. The light in the room began flickering.
On her ankle, a red string appeared for a split second before disappearing.
She slowly rose up. Her expression had changed and become unreadable. Her eyes began pouring blood tears. She smiled.
"Senior brother... it hurts so much... where are you? You don’t like me anymore?"
Her expression then twisted into something more menacing.
"Then I can only capture you and tie you up here. That way, you won’t leave me anymore... this is the only way... a happy ending..."