"Try it for yourself." Wei Zhao picked up a stone and handed it to her. Ying Ziyu took it and casually flung it back the way they had come; the space ahead was plainly empty, with no barrier in sight, yet the stone rebounded out of thin air.

"How can that be?" Everyone was stunned.

"A formation. This place has been sealed with a formation—and not an ordinary one, by the look of it," Wei Zhao said. He had sensed the formation's presence the very instant he arrived; only, with Qiu Lingshan and the others all here, he had not dared to turn hostile to their faces.

This was, after all, the Cangwu Sect of the Northern Island. Once matters came to a head, no one but Wei Zhao himself would be able to leave—Qiu Lingshan and the rest would all be trapped, their lives in danger. Better to go along with the tide and take things one step at a time.

Ying Ziyu would not give up. She picked up stones and tested them in every direction, sparing neither the cliff face nor the sky above, and the results proved this to be an invisible prison without a single blind spot, hemming them all in and leaving not the slightest gap for escape.

"Climbing-Heaven Cliff... isn't this just a damn copy of Reflection Cliff..." Zhao Qilei only now caught on.

"And that vice sect master kept going on about how only the highly esteemed may enter this place—so this is what he meant by esteemed. A smiling tiger!" Wu Chengtian said with a bitter laugh. He had thought rather well of Chen Dongcheng before; for a vice sect master to humble himself so thoroughly was truly rare. Now that he knew the truth, tears fell...

"So what do we do?" Qiu Lingshan and the others looked to Wei Zhao. Until a moment ago they had still been caught up in the thrill of their first journey across boundaries; they had never expected a crisis to strike so soon.

"We make do," Wei Zhao said with an indifferent smile.

"Huh?" Everyone was baffled. From what they knew of Wei Zhao, he had never been the sort to swallow his anger and say nothing. What did he mean by "make do"?

"Since they want us to stay, we stay. No one will disturb us here—perfect for quiet cultivation. We may as well treat it as a closed-door retreat," Wei Zhao said, unexpectedly philosophical this time.

"Uh..." The others were somewhat reluctant. But since Wei Zhao had spoken thus, they would not object.

Wei Zhao was the first to sit down and begin cultivating. Seeing this, the others each found rooms nearby. Wherever one went, strength was what ruled; they knew very well that it was precisely because their own power was too weak that they found themselves in this stifling predicament. If they were not early Foundation Establishment and peak early Foundation Establishment now, but Golden Core experts instead—would the Cangwu Sect of the Northern Island dare treat them so?

Grow stronger. They had to grow stronger—only thus could they hold their heads high and live.

Their experiences in the Ancient Trial Grounds had already driven this home to them deeply, and now they felt it all the more keenly.

Thanks to Wei Zhao's presence, they enjoyed what might well be the finest cultivation environment in all the world, and not one of them lacked talent. If anything was missing, it was perhaps motivation; with no great outside pressure all these years, they had grown somewhat slack. Now they had come to the Cangwu Sect of the Northern Island and been placed under house arrest straight away—pressure bearing down on them from every side.

Wei Zhao smiled. Seeing them in this state, he rather felt it might prove a blessing in disguise. Setting all else aside, Climbing-Heaven Cliff was in fact a decent place for a closed-door retreat.

The spiritual energy here was not especially rich, but the setting and the view made up for it. As the saying goes, the mind shapes the world—and the world in turn shapes the mind. Those with broad horizons seldom hit bottlenecks; such intangible influence mattered even more than hard conditions like spiritual energy. Besides, with all the pills Wei Zhao had given them to make up the difference, what did a little thin spiritual energy matter?

Everyone was working hard, and Wei Zhao was no exception. He was using the spiritual-awareness grass roots to temper his spiritual sense bit by bit. The process was agonizing throughout, yet Wei Zhao savored it, for he knew full well that after the pain came the reward.

For every extra quarter-hour he endured, Wei Zhao could feel his spiritual sense grow a fraction stronger. This was not merely recovery and accumulation in quantity, but a tempering in quality as well—and the latter especially was a genuine and unexpected delight for him.

Because of the primordial spirit projection, the overall strength of Wei Zhao's primordial spirit could not be mentioned in the same breath as it had been back on Cloud-Tier Island. If his original primordial spirit at the Xuan Ascension stage was worth ten thousand points, then after the tremendous drain of the projection, what he had now was at best a one-point, quasi-Xuan Ascension primordial spirit—greatly reduced in quantity, and with some regression in quality as well.

Still, with the tempering of the spiritual-awareness grass roots, Wei Zhao believed that even if he could not recover much in quantity, in quality he would soon return to his Cloud-Tier Island level, his spiritual sense truly reaching the Xuan Ascension standard.

He might even become stronger than he had been on Cloud-Tier Island!

Apart from constantly tempering his spiritual sense, another core element of Wei Zhao's cultivation was the Soul-Hooking Hand. His encounter with the Nine Infants in the Ancient Trial had made him realize something: all along, he had been walking the wrong path!

From the moment he had projected his primordial spirit into the mundane world, the first thing Wei Zhao did was condense a primordial spirit body, and everything he had cultivated since then revolved around that body—ceaselessly raising its grade until he could once again unleash top-tier killing moves like the Five Elements and Eight Trigrams Slaughter Qi and Thunder Burial, and thereby stand undefeated. Such had been Wei Zhao's original line of thinking.

He had held to that line all the way until he hit the bottleneck of peak Foundation Establishment. Only then, having run his head straight into a wall, was he forced to start groping after various spiritual-sense techniques—yet even then, right up until his confrontation with the Nine Infants, he had never truly awakened.

Now, at last, Wei Zhao realized he had made a colossal mistake. He was a primordial spirit now; the primordial spirit was the root. To chase single-mindedly after the power of the spirit body was to put the cart before the horse. No matter how hard he cultivated that way, he would never break through that invisible wall. Only by returning his focus to the primordial spirit itself was the true path.

There were two directions to primordial spirit cultivation. The first was raising the primordial spirit's level, which was exactly what Wei Zhao was doing with the spiritual-awareness grass roots. The second was primordial spirit techniques—and in that regard, the only move he currently had to his name was the Soul-Hooking Hand.

Raising the level of the primordial spirit was no work of a single day or night; it required the slow drip that wears through stone. But the Soul-Hooking Hand, with Wei Zhao's comprehension and insight, still had room for further improvement.

Ever since he had fused into it the core essentials of the Nine Infants' devouring primordial spirit, his Soul-Hooking Hand had become a veritable trump card—yet Wei Zhao knew very well that its full power was still far from being drawn out. (To be continued.)