Chen Mobai escorted Qing Nv home, where she invited him to stay for a while.

This was a single apartment in Danxia City. After asking, he learned that Qing Nv had been orphaned since childhood and grew up in an orphanage.

At the age of fifteen, due to her outstanding performance in a Q&A session, she was taken as a disciple by Gu Changfeng, who came to give a lecture at her school. She then started working at Changqing Pharmacy. With the help of her master, she rented this apartment and began living alone.

Chen Mobai took a look around. As it was a public rental house, the facilities were quite basic, with only the most basic supply of first-grade lower-quality spiritual energy.

“To me, my master is like a father,” Qing Nv said, her eyes reddening again. Perhaps due to the hardships she had endured since childhood, she was mentally resilient and her emotions were stable, unlike the breakdown she had in the store.

Chen Mobai comforted her for a while longer. Seeing that it was getting late, he decided to leave.

Qing Nv got up and saw him out. Then, in the empty room where she was alone, she squatted down with her back against the door. After hearing the footsteps outside fade away, she hugged her knees, buried her head, and began to sob quietly.

Upon reaching the ground floor in the elevator, Chen Mobai walked out of the main entrance and came face to face with a strange man wearing a mask.

However, the eccentric attire of the young people from the Immortal Gate was not uncommon, so he didn’t pay much attention.

“It seems to be on the seventh floor,” the man muttered as Chen Mobai passed by him.

The seventh floor? Wasn’t that where Qing Nv lived? There were also three other apartments, probably her neighbors.

With this thought, Chen Mobai turned to glance at the masked man, who was just entering the elevator.

Their eyes met as the elevator doors slowly closed.

“Ding!”

Chen Mobai frowned as he watched the numbers on the electronic screen start to jump, indicating the elevator was ascending.

“That kid, there’s something off about his gaze,” the masked man muttered to himself in the elevator. His mask had a “fear curse” on it, causing ordinary people to lower their heads and avert their eyes as if they couldn’t see him.

But Chen Mobai showed no fear.

“Ding!”

The seventh floor arrived, and the masked man stepped out of the opening elevator doors. He raised his right hand, and a pair of crescent-shaped hooks flew out from his sleeve. He walked up to Qing Nv’s door and knocked lightly.

“Who is it?” came Qing Nv’s slightly hoarse voice from inside.

“I’m your new neighbor, just came to say hello.”

“Okay, but I’m not available today. Please visit another time.”

Qing Nv’s voice came from inside the door. The masked man tilted his head slightly and responded with a tone of regret, “That’s a shame.”

Buzz!

The crescent hooks lit up with a clear light, ready to cut open the door, when a vast, invisible spiritual power suddenly surged from behind.

Someone’s behind me!?

The masked man was startled and turned around, only to be met with a huge palm pressing heavily on his face, shattering his mask and immobilizing his entire body.

Crack!

Hearing the noise, Qing Nv, with red and swollen eyes and a puzzled look on her face, opened the door and stepped out, only to see the shattered mask on the ground.

After looking left and right and finding nothing unusual, she closed the door again.

Back at home, Chen Mobai pondered over the whole incident.

The coroner said that Gu Changfeng died from a cultivation deviation, and the law enforcement cultivators agreed with her judgment. Could it really have been suicide?

Thinking of this, Chen Mobai searched online for information about Gu Changfeng’s death, but found nothing.

Finally, he went to the Water Mansion. On the cultivation aid software, he entered keywords like “head explosion”, “divine consciousness”, and “suicide”. As expected, with his fifth-grade user privileges, he found a very mysterious post.

The post was made by a third-grade anonymous user.

The title was: “On the Possibility of Improving the God Devouring Forbidden Technique”

Forbidden technique?

In the Immortal Gate, there were some powerful techniques and secret methods that had severe side effects after cultivation. These were known as forbidden techniques, which, as the name suggests, were prohibited from cultivation.

Chen Mobai first read the post. The poster’s writing was not very good, as if assuming that the readers knew about the God Devouring Forbidden Technique, and directly wrote a long paragraph of his own speculation and improvement plan.

However, the post mentioned that the biggest problem after cultivating the God Devouring Forbidden Technique was the inability to control the sudden surge of divine consciousness, which exceeded the limit of the Purple Mansion’s sea of consciousness and could result in a head explosion.

Chen Mobai thought for a moment, then opened the National Library’s software and entered the keyword: God Devouring.

Indeed, a technique appeared.

“God Devouring Technique – Fragment”: An ancient evil way secret method, using one’s own divine consciousness as a divine seed, injecting it into the sea of consciousness of a cauldron cultivator. When the cauldron is fully formed, the divine consciousness can travel and control the qi, refining the divine consciousness out of the body, returning to one’s own divine consciousness, until the divine consciousness travels in the vast void, achieving the great law.

After reading the beginning, Chen Mobai found it very intriguing and clicked in to read more, but a prompt popped up: Insufficient authority, insufficient points, unable to exchange.

After his small account, Turtle Immortal, was represented, he was already a third-grade user of the National Library, equivalent to a Golden Elixir Taoist master, and he still didn’t have enough authority?

Chen Mobai looked at the small print at the bottom of the “God Devouring Technique”, and sure enough, it said that only fourth-grade users could view the full text with points.

No wonder it’s a forbidden technique, the threshold is so high.

Chen Mobai had no choice but to give up.However, it wasn’t entirely without gain. He now knew that if one practiced the “God Swallowing Technique”, they would end up like Gu Changfeng, dying from a burst head due to demonic possession.

And then, the problem arose again!

Practicing the “God Swallowing Technique” required a cauldron. Over the years, Gu Changfeng only had one disciple, Qing Nv. Could it be…

Thinking of the worst possibility, Chen Mobai slightly furrowed his brows, feeling the need to find a way to verify whether there was a so-called “God Seed” planted in Qing Nv’s sea of consciousness.

However, even if he verified it, he had no way to deal with it.

Gu Changfeng was a Foundation Establishment cultivator. If he really did something to Qing Nv, what could he, a mere Qi Refining sixth layer cultivator, do?

A sense of powerlessness welled up in his heart. This was the first time he desperately needed power.

If his previous cultivation was just to meet his parents’ expectations and the self-satisfaction and joy after his own breakthrough, then now, Chen Mobai’s cultivation had an additional desire to shake off this feeling of powerlessness.

He sat on the cushion in the Water Mansion, took out a tube of Spirit Water that Qing Nv had refined, looked at it for a while, and with a determined look in his eyes, he uncorked it and drank it all in one gulp.

For seven consecutive days, Chen Mobai caught up on the lessons he had missed by using his newly developed divine sense during class, cultivated his mind in the school’s cultivation room, chatted and shared his thoughts with Qing Nv after school, and went to the Water Mansion to cultivate after returning home. In his spare time, he also read the books he had bought from Nanxi Market.

Whether it was knowledge, cultivation base, or even divine sense, all were steadily improving.