Xiao Qing and Xiao Bai were irrelevant. They were originally undeveloped, low-level spirit beasts. Only after meeting Lu Xuan did they truly embark on the path of cultivation. Apart from Lu Xuan, they had almost no attachment to this world.
Xiahou was similar to the two women; he was an orphan in his early years. By chance, he learned swordsmanship. But he honed his skills primarily through his travels in the martial world. Being free of worldly ties, he was incredibly excited when he heard he could leave this realm.
The only pity is that he's getting old. This means his cultivation progress can no longer keep up with the depletion of his lifespan. So, he might not live to see the day he departs. However, Xiahou has no complaints about this. He has already lived for nearly a hundred years since following Lu Xuan. For someone who has wandered the martial world since childhood, not knowing if he will even live to see tomorrow, this is already an immense stroke of luck.
"To gain it is my fortune, to lose it is my fate."
"Good...good...good..." Seeing that everyone had returned, Lu Xuan said "good" three times in a row, his tone full of emotion.
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Chapter 403 Departure (End of this volume)
Lu Xuan required everyone in the cave to be proficient in a martial art based on one of the five elements. These techniques were simplified and modified from the Ape Strike Technique, designed to help them better adapt to the environment in the demiplane.
This is no simple process. The laws of the demiplane are incomplete, and ordinary people simply cannot withstand them. Furthermore, Lu Xuan has no idea how much time will be required during the journey.
Perhaps he would arrive in another world in the blink of an eye. Or perhaps it would take over a hundred years to prepare. Therefore, he needed to make thorough preparations in advance.
In fact, Lu Xuan's idea was that they should be in a state of slumber when they entered the demiplane to reduce energy consumption, thereby maximizing the time they could spend waiting inside.
Time passed in this preparation. Another hundred years went by, and Xin Shisi Niang broke through to the Golden Core stage.
This most famous cultivation genius in *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio* increasingly unleashed his cultivation potential after becoming Lu Xuan's disciple. At the age of 118, he achieved the Golden Core Dao. After transforming into human form, he possessed almost no demonic aura whatsoever.
However, in contrast to Xin Shisi Niang, Xiahou died.
Despite Lu Xuan's efforts to prepare various elixirs to prolong his life, he still died of natural causes at the age of one hundred and sixty.
In his early years, he roamed the martial world, sustaining countless hidden injuries. After following Lu Xuan, he learned methods of Qi cultivation to heal himself. However, while the injuries could be healed, the lost vital energy was difficult to replenish.
Lu Xuan used various elixirs to extend his lifespan, but elixirs have their limits.
There is a prerequisite for using elixirs to extend lifespan in the long term: your own cultivation level must also improve.
There are many examples in online novels of people improving their cultivation levels by taking drugs. It's not impossible, but the prerequisite is that you actually improve. If you want to maintain your current level without diligent cultivation and then rely on alchemy to achieve immortality, that's impossible. Because that would lead to a common medical phenomenon: drug resistance.
Unfortunately, Xiahou started cultivating immortality too late, and his talent wasn't particularly good. Therefore, he ultimately couldn't overcome the lifespan limit and died at over a hundred years old.
Xiahou's death left Lu Xuan somewhat disheartened, but it also spurred everyone in the sect to cultivate even more diligently.
The greatest terror lies between life and death; only those who have witnessed death firsthand can truly understand the meaning of this saying.
Hongxiu was the third to reach the Core Formation stage. As a spirit of precious jade, she seemed to have avoided the bottlenecks faced by human cultivators, but the number of heavenly tribulations she endured was far more terrifying.
Including the time Lu Xuan intervened, Hongxiu actually experienced three heavenly tribulations before she reached the Core Formation stage. This clearly shows that the requirements for cultivation in this world are much stricter.
Fortunately, under Lu Xuan's tutelage, she had a solid foundation and survived all the heavenly tribulations, successfully forming her golden core and embarking on a completely new path of cultivation.
Lu Xuan had been in this world for nearly three hundred years. He could already sense that day was approaching. And since Hongxiu, the remaining Fu sisters, the two female ghosts, and the two lesser demons in the sect had all reached the bottleneck of Core Formation, but there was no time for them to comprehend the Dao.
Actually, the remaining two demon generals are both exceptionally talented. Xiao Qing might be a little weaker, but with Lu Xuan's various elixirs, she is still absolutely top-notch.
However, the cultivation of demons is different from that of humans. The higher their talent, the more difficult it is to improve their cultivation. But correspondingly, once they overcome the bottleneck, they are definitely not comparable to ordinary demons or human cultivators.
To give a simple example, the difference in cultivation and supernatural powers between a tiger that has reached the Core Formation stage and a rabbit that has reached the Core Formation stage is like heaven and earth.
Therefore, the two little guys are forming their cores much more slowly, but this makes Lu Xuan look forward to what will happen after they form their cores.
As for the two female ghosts, it was purely a delay. Lu Xuan's cultivation methods were designed for humans, and didn't actually suit their ghostly forms. To avoid leaving any flaws in their future cultivation, after Lu Xuan achieved Golden Core, they completely dissipated all their magical power and started cultivating from scratch. However, they reached a bottleneck and didn't have time for the sudden enlightenment of the Golden Core stage.
The twin sisters were the slowest, their cultivation only at the intermediate stage of Foundation Establishment. But they did not hesitate and were still ready to follow Lu Xuan away without hesitation.
Three hundred and fourteen years in the world of Liaozhai. That day has arrived.
Lu Xuan took everyone into the demiplane. Then he had them use a technique similar to feigning death, a kind of tortoise-like breathing technique, to minimize their own energy consumption. They waited quietly in the demiplane.
Lu Xuan was also waiting, but what he sensed first was not the so-called time travel, but the power of the laws of the Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio world.
A powerful force of laws, overwhelming heaven and earth, suddenly struck. Lu Xuan knew that this must be the final settlement of karma before leaving this world.
In a mortal's life, countless karmic debts are inevitably incurred. These debts cannot be fully repaid in this life. But that's alright; they are repaid in the underworld. Simply put, most of the punishments suffered in the underworld are actually paying the price for the karma accumulated on earth. As for excessively severe punishments, they can be understood as penalties for overdue payments.
Therefore, the idea that death means the annihilation of one's spiritual essence does not hold true in this world, because the karma accumulated in one's previous life continues to be repaid after death, and even after reincarnation. Of course, there are exceptions; if a person dies with their soul completely dispersed, then they basically do not need to repay any debts.
Now, the group of humans, demons, and ghosts surrounding Lu Xuan are about to leave. In other words, they have no intention of repaying their karmic debts, nor do they plan to be completely destroyed, which is unacceptable to this world.
The reason for establishing the law of cause and effect is to ensure the balance of spiritual energy in heaven and earth.
The reason why the spiritual energy of heaven and earth declined back then was because the earliest ascending beings took away too much spiritual energy from the human world and did not return it, resulting in less and less spiritual energy in the human world.
Later, this group discovered the problem, but I didn't pay much attention to it at first. Only as time went on did they find themselves having to intervene.
Because those people discovered a very serious problem: the three realms of Heaven, Earth, and Humanity are both opposing and interdependent. The medium for this interdependence is spiritual energy. In other words, the omnipresent spiritual energy is like the air pressure that maintains the balance inside and outside the human body, permeating every crevice of the three realms.
The dissipation of spiritual energy in the mortal realm is equivalent to a continuous decrease in air pressure, while the air pressure in the celestial realm continuously increases. The ultimate result of this phenomenon is that the excessively high air pressure in the celestial realm directly crushes the mortal realm. Simultaneously, without the pressure relief from the mortal realm, the celestial realm itself also explodes.
To prevent this from happening, Heaven and the Underworld jointly established rules. They sealed off the paths between Heaven and Earth, ensuring that spiritual energy in the mortal realm wouldn't dissipate, while simultaneously maintaining the dominance of these pioneers. In reality, in the world of *Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio*, the more talented a cultivator is, the less likely they are to reach the end. Those who become immortals are the same kind of people Lu Xuan encountered in the Underworld. In the original story, Xin Shisi Niang ultimately became an immortal because she received enlightenment from a deity, that is, she entered the inner sanctum of the divine path.
Currently, Lu Xuan's group has three Golden Core cultivators, and the rest are at the half-step Golden Core stage. If such a vast amount of spiritual energy were to leave this realm, both the Heavenly Realm and the Underworld would have to replenish it with the same amount of spiritual energy to return to the mortal world. Otherwise, an imbalance would be reached.
Therefore, when the laws of this world discovered that Lu Xuan and the others were about to leave this realm, they made such a big show of directly intercepting them.
The immense force tore at Lu Xuan's small world, distorting and warping it, but it was too late. A power countless times stronger than the laws of the world suddenly appeared. The next second, Lu Xuan's figure vanished from the world of Liaozhai.
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