**Chapter 4: The Art of Being Useless and the Subterranean Canopy**
To possess power and flaunt it is the instinct of beasts and fools. To possess power and perfectly conceal it, allowing the world to mistake you for a harmless worm, is the pinnacle of survival.
Lu Changsheng sat at his worn wooden table, the dim light of a single tallow candle casting dancing shadows across his face. Before him sat a stack of low-quality yellow talisman paper. Beside him sat his six-year-old son, Ping'an.
"Watch my wrist, Ping'an," Lu Changsheng instructed gently. His voice was a soft murmur, barely carrying past the edge of the table.
He picked up the frayed spirit-hair brush, dipped it into the diluted cinnabar, and began to draw a Dust Cleansing Talisman. But he did not draw it with the smooth, flawless precision of a master, nor with the effortless flow that his newly acquired Qi Condensation Level 4 cultivation base could easily provide.
Instead, his hand trembled ever so slightly. He intentionally forced a minuscule stutter in his spiritual energy at the apex of the central curve. The brush snagged on the rough paper, leaving a microscopic blot.
The talisman was completed. It glowed faintly for a fraction of a second before dulling into a mundane piece of yellow paper. It was a functional Dust Cleansing Talisman, but it was ugly, inefficient, and clearly the work of a struggling, low-tier cultivator.
"Do you see the flaw?" Lu Changsheng asked, setting the brush down.
Ping'an, his small face scrunched in absolute concentration, nodded slowly. "You paused at the Earth-Gathering node, Father. You let your Qi pool for a breath too long. It made the ink heavy."
"Exactly," Lu Changsheng smiled, reaching out to ruffle his son's hair. "Now, why did I do that?"
Ping'an recited the lesson he had been taught since he could speak. "Because perfection draws eyes. If a slum-dwelling talisman maker suddenly produces flawless talismans, the merchants will become suspicious. The gangs will demand a higher cut. The Sect might investigate to see if we found an ancient legacy."
"And what happens when we draw eyes?"
"Danger comes to our door," Ping'an answered with the solemnity of a tiny monk reciting scripture.
"Good boy." Lu Changsheng handed the brush to his son. "Now, draw one. And remember, I want to see at least three minor imperfections. If it looks too good, I will throw it in the fire."
As Ping'an painstakingly began to copy the flawed drawing, Lu Changsheng leaned back, allowing his mind to wander to the profound changes that had occurred within him over the past month.
Breaking through to the Fourth Level of Qi Condensation had fundamentally shifted his position in the food chain. He had transitioned from the "bottom-feeding trash" tier to the "capable cannon fodder" tier. In the outer slums, a Level 4 cultivator could easily lead a small gang, extort dozens of mortal households, and walk the muddy streets with their head held high.
But thanks to the absolute, 1/1 feedback of the *Tortoise Breathing Sutra* perfectly mirrored from Ping'an, Lu Changsheng's aura concealment was absolute. The Sutra, inherently designed to mimic the inert state of a hibernating tortoise, allowed him to suppress his spiritual fluctuations entirely. Even a Foundation Establishment cultivator actively scanning him would only sense the chaotic, broken remnants of a Qi Condensation Level 2 cripple.
He was a tiger draped in the rotting skin of a sickly sheep.
His physical body had also undergone a terrifying transformation. The passive, daily feedback from the robust mortal constitutions of his twins, Wushuang and Chuan, compounded heavily upon his Level 4 cultivation.
He casually pressed his thumb against the edge of the solid ironwood table. He didn't circulate a single drop of Qi. He purely used the mechanical strength of his flesh and bone. With a soft, terrifying *crunch*, his thumb sank half an inch directly into the dense wood, leaving a perfect, smooth indentation as if pressing into warm wax.
*I am physically as strong as a Level 7 or 8 Body Refining cultivator,* Lu Changsheng calculated silently, withdrawing his thumb and rubbing the sawdust away. *If someone manages to bypass my concealment and close the distance, expecting a weak talisman maker, I could punch a hole directly through their sternum before they even form a hand seal.*
But that was a last resort. Violence was failure.
Over the next four years, the Qinghe Market remained relatively stable, and the Lu family canopy expanded silently in the dark.
### The Subterranean Manor
Four years passed like water flowing under a hidden bridge. Lu Changsheng was now thirty-four years old.
In the cultivation world, thirty-four was considered youth, a time for geniuses to push for Foundation Establishment. For Lu Changsheng, it was simply another tick of the eternal clock he was no longer bound by.
The surface shack remained unchanged—a miserable, drafty hovel that perfectly maintained the illusion of abject poverty. But beneath the dirt, a marvel of mortal engineering and cautious cultivation had been born.
When Ping'an turned ten, Wushuang and Chuan turned nine, and Zixuan turned eight, the shack had become physically incapable of holding the growing family. Furthermore, Lin Wan'er had given birth to another daughter, Lu Bao, and Zhao Qing had delivered another son, Lu Feng.
The Eternal Bloodline Tree now held seven radiant blossoms.
Instead of buying a larger house and risking exposure, Lu Changsheng utilized his greatest physical asset: the twins, Wushuang and Chuan, and their mother, Zhao Qing.
Possessing absolute, monstrous mortal strength inherited from the blacksmith bloodline and refined by Lu Changsheng's passive feedback loop, the trio became a subterranean excavation crew. Under the cover of night, using heavily modified, sound-dampened iron shovels, they began digging.
They didn't just dig a basement; they carved out a manor.
They excavated a massive cavern fifty feet below the slums. Lu Changsheng, drawing upon his expanding knowledge of formations (learned purely from cheap, public-domain books and improved by his enhanced Level 4 comprehension), created an array of structural support pillars using compacted earth and low-grade spirit stones.
To solve the problem of ventilation and moisture, he utilized his profession. He painstakingly crafted hundreds of modified Dust Cleansing Talismans, altering the runes slightly to filter stale air and draw moisture into designated cisterns. It was an incredibly inefficient use of talismans by standard metrics, but for a man hiding his family, it was a stroke of genius.
The dirt excavated from the manor presented the biggest security risk. A mountain of fresh earth appearing in the slums would instantly draw the gangs.
Lu Changsheng's solution was brilliantly tedious. Every night, he packed the excavated dirt into dozens of small, spatial storage pouches (cheaply bought over years). Every day, under the guise of delivering talismans to the outer market borders, he casually sprinkled the dirt into the massive, rushing Qinghe River, returning with empty pouches.
It took them two full years to complete.
Now, fifty feet below the rotting slums, the Lu family lived in a sprawling, comfortable, dry, and perfectly soundproofed subterranean courtyard. There were separate bedrooms, a large communal dining area, a training room for Ping'an, and a massive pantry filled with dried mortal grains, salted meats, and pickled vegetables capable of sustaining them for five years without surfacing.
It was the ultimate Gou Dao fortress.
### The Conscription Edict
But the heavens do not favor the overly comfortable. The universe of cultivation inherently abhors stagnation.
It was the peak of summer, the air above ground sweltering and thick with the stench of the slums. Lu Changsheng was sitting in the cool, artificially lit underground dining room, listening to his daughter Zixuan recite mortal poetry, when a sound pierced through fifty feet of earth and sound-dampening arrays.
*BOOM... BOOM... BOOM...*
It was the profound, soul-shaking resonance of the Azure Mountain Sect's War Drum. It was a spiritual artifact designed to broadcast sound over hundreds of miles, bypassing physical barriers to strike directly at a cultivator's Sea of Consciousness.
Lu Changsheng's eyes snapped open. The warm, fatherly smile vanished, replaced instantly by the cold, calculating mask of survival.
"Silence," he commanded. The room fell deathly still. Even the toddlers instinctively held their breath.
A voice, magnified by massive spiritual power, rolled across the entire Qinghe Valley, speaking directly into the minds of every cultivator present.
*"By the decree of the Azure Mountain Sect Patriarch: A Class-Three Beast Tide is forming in the depths of the Bloodwood Forest. The horde marches upon the Qinghe Market in three days. All Sect disciples are to man the inner walls."*
The voice paused, carrying a cruel, authoritative weight.
*"All loose cultivators residing within the Qinghe Market jurisdiction, from the Second Level of Qi Condensation and above, are hereby conscripted. You will form the Vanguard Vanguard Array on the outer walls. Refusal to report to the registration squares by dusk tomorrow is punishable by immediate execution. Deserters will have their souls refined in soul-searching flames. This is the Sect's decree."*
The drum beat once more, a final punctuation of absolute authority, before the transmission ended.
In the subterranean manor, the silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
Lin Wan'er's hands flew to her mouth, tears instantly welling in her eyes. Zhao Qing gripped the edge of the stone table so hard her knuckles cracked. Xia Ruyan's face drained of all color, her mind instantly calculating the horrifying mortality rate of a "Vanguard Array" against a Class-Three Beast Tide.
"Husband..." Ruyan whispered, her voice trembling. "A Vanguard Array... they are using the loose cultivators as a meat shield to exhaust the low-level beasts before the Sect disciples engage. It's a death sentence."
"I know," Lu Changsheng said softly, his voice eerily calm.
"You are registered," Ruyan continued, panic bleeding into her tone. "Ten years ago, when you first rented the shack, you were registered as a Level 2 Qi Condensation cultivator. Your name is on the registry rolls. If you don't show up... they will hunt you down."
"And if I do show up," Lu Changsheng countered, "I will be thrown into a meat grinder against thousands of frenzied demon beasts. Even at my true cultivation level, surviving a chaotic battlefield of that scale is a roll of the dice. And I do not gamble with my life."
"Then we run," Zhao Qing said firmly, standing up. "We pack the storage pouches, take the emergency tunnel to the sewers, and leave the valley tonight. We can hide in the mortal kingdoms."
Lu Changsheng shook his head slowly. "Too late. A Class-Three Beast Tide means the forest is already spilling out. The roads will be choked with fleeing mortals, and the Sect will have locked down the perimeter with flying boat patrols to shoot down deserters. Running now is walking into the open."
He stood up, pacing the length of the stone room, his mind working at terrifying speeds.
He had to dodge the draft. He had to be removed from the registry. But how? Bribing an official was impossible; during a beast tide, Sect Enforcers handled the rolls, and they could not be bought with the meager funds a "slum talisman maker" supposedly possessed. Attempting to bribe them might just get him executed for hoarding resources.
He could fake his death. Burn the shack down with a corpse inside. But finding a body double in one day was risky, and Sect Enforcers had methods to track spiritual signatures of the deceased.
There was only one foolproof, absolute method to be struck from the cultivator conscription rolls.
He had to cease being a cultivator.
Lu Changsheng stopped pacing. He turned to his wives, his eyes filled with a ruthless, icy resolve that sent a shiver down their spines.
"I am not going to the wall," Lu Changsheng stated. "And we are not running. I will stay right here. But to do so, Lu Changsheng the cultivator must cease to exist."
He looked at Xia Ruyan. "Ruyan, go to the surface immediately. Go to the apothecary in the outer market. It will be chaotic, people will be panic-buying healing pills. I need you to buy three stalks of Fire-Poison Weed and a vial of Earth-Scorpion Venom."
Ruyan gasped. "Husband! Those are highly toxic! They violently conflict with any spiritual energy! Consuming them will shred your meridians!"
"Exactly," Lu Changsheng said, his lips curling into a grim, humorless smile. "Go. Quickly."
### The Art of Self-Destruction
The next morning, the Qinghe slums were a portrait of despair. Wailing women clung to their husbands and sons as Sect Enforcers, clad in imposing azure armor and riding massive spiritual wolves, patrolled the narrow alleys, clutching jade scrolls containing the registry.
Anyone Level 2 or above was forcefully dragged out of their homes and marched toward the outer walls. Any resistance was met with a swift, brutal execution on the spot, their headless corpses left in the mud as a warning.
A squad of three Enforcers, led by a stern-faced inner sect disciple at the Late Stage of Qi Condensation, arrived at Lu Changsheng's dilapidated shack.
The disciple checked his jade scroll. "Lu Changsheng. Talisman maker. Level 2 Qi Condensation. Registered here ten years ago. Kick the door in."
An Enforcer stepped forward and delivered a vicious kick, shattering the reinforced door off its hinges. The three men stepped into the dim, squalid interior.
What they found made even the hardened Enforcers pause in disgust.
The shack smelled of vomit, blood, and the unmistakable, acrid stench of burned spiritual energy. Lu Changsheng lay sprawled on the floor next to the hearth. He looked like a corpse that had been left in the sun for three days. His skin was a sickening, ashen gray, heavily veined with black lines radiating from his chest. His breathing was a wet, ragged rattle.
His three wives were huddled in the corner, holding their children, weeping uncontrollably, performing the roles of their lives.
"What is this?" the lead disciple demanded, stepping over a pool of coagulated black blood on the floorboards, his hand resting on his sword hilt.
Xia Ruyan threw herself forward, kowtowing on the dirty floor. "Immortals, please! Have mercy! My husband... he heard the drums yesterday. He was terrified. He... he tried to forcefully break through to the Third Level using cheap black-market pills so he would have a better chance of surviving the vanguard."
She let out a heart-wrenching sob, pointing at the shattered remains of a cheap porcelain vial on the floor. "The pills were poison! His Qi rebelled! He coughed up blood all night. His... his Dantian cracked."
The lead disciple frowned in deep suspicion. Deserters tried every trick in the book, including self-mutilation, to avoid the front lines. He stepped forward, radiating a heavy, suffocating pressure, and grabbed Lu Changsheng by the throat, hauling him halfway off the floor.
Lu Changsheng's eyes rolled back, a weak groan escaping his lips as fresh black blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
The disciple forcefully injected a strand of pure, probing spiritual energy directly into Lu Changsheng's body. He bypassed the physical flesh and drove his senses straight into the man's Dantian.
Underneath the surface, Lu Changsheng was engaged in the most dangerous, agonizing performance of his life.
Hours prior, he had consumed the Fire-Poison Weed and Earth-Scorpion Venom. But he hadn't let them ravage his true Level 4 Dantian. Utilizing his masterful control, he had isolated the toxins into a peripheral meridian pathway near his stomach. He then siphoned a fraction of his own spiritual energy into this pocket, allowing the violent, explosive reaction between the toxin and the Qi to occur in a localized, non-lethal area.
It was agonizing. It literally shredded the peripheral meridian, simulating the exact physiological symptoms of a catastrophic Qi deviation. Furthermore, he used the *Tortoise Breathing Sutra* to completely lock his true Dantian down to the size of a mustard seed, hiding it beneath the chaotic, burning wreckage of the localized explosion.
The Enforcer's probe swept through Lu Changsheng's body.
The disciple felt the shattered peripheral meridian. He felt the residual, highly toxic heat of the Fire-Poison. He scanned the area where the Dantian should be and found nothing but a chaotic void of collapsed spiritual pathways, completely devoid of any cohesive Qi.
To the probe, Lu Changsheng's cultivation base was entirely eradicated. The foundation was destroyed. He was not just a mortal; he was a crippled mortal whose internal organs were failing.
The disciple violently threw Lu Changsheng back onto the floor, wiping his hand on his robes as if he had touched feces.
"Idiot," the disciple sneered, looking down at the groaning, pathetic figure. "Tried to cheat the heavens with garbage pills and ruined himself instead. His Dantian is collapsed. Meridians are shredded. He doesn't have a single drop of Qi left."
"Is he exempt, Senior Brother?" one of the Enforcers asked, pen poised over the jade scroll.
"The Sect demands cultivators for the Vanguard, not dying meat," the disciple spat. "He wouldn't survive the march to the wall. Cross his name out. Mark him as 'Cultivation Destroyed - Reclassified as Mortal.' Let him rot here with his whores."
The Enforcer struck a line through Lu Changsheng's name on the glowing jade scroll.
With that single, bureaucratic stroke, Lu Changsheng officially ceased to exist in the eyes of the cultivation world.
The Enforcers turned and left the shack, moving on to drag the next screaming victim from their home.
The moment the sound of their boots faded down the alleyway, Lu Changsheng, who was supposedly dying on the floor, suddenly sat up. The wet, ragged breathing instantly smoothed out. The pained expression vanished, replaced by an unsettling, calm clarity.
He wiped the black blood from his chin, reached into his robe, and pulled out a high-grade detoxification pill he had prepared specifically for this moment, swallowing it dry.
"Husband!" Ruyan gasped, rushing forward with a wet cloth. "Are you alright? Your face is so pale!"
"I am fine," Lu Changsheng said, closing his eyes as his true Level 4 cultivation surged, instantly flushing the isolated toxins out of his system and beginning to repair the intentionally shredded peripheral meridian. The sheer vitality stacked from his children made the healing process visible to the naked eye. The ashen color faded from his skin.
He opened his eyes, looking at his wives with a triumphant, brilliant smile.
"It is done," he whispered. "I am officially a crippled mortal. The Sect will never draft me again. The gangs will ignore a ruined man. We are completely, entirely invisible."
He had paid the price of extreme pain to purchase a lifetime of absolute security. The Vanguard Array would be a slaughterhouse, and he would sleep soundly in his subterranean manor while the world burned above him.
### The Second Bloom
The Beast Tide assaulted the Qinghe Market for three straight weeks. The outer slums were heavily damaged. Thousands of loose cultivators died defending the walls, their bodies torn apart by demonic wolves, armor-piercing boars, and venomous arachnids.
But fifty feet below the carnage, insulated by thick earth and sound-dampening arrays, the Lu family continued their peaceful existence. Lu Changsheng spent his days recovering his peripheral meridian and focusing on the next generation.
It was time for Lu Zixuan to begin her journey.
Zixuan was eight years old. Unlike the sturdy twins or the quiet Ping'an, she was delicate, highly observant, and possessed an intellect that frightened even Lu Changsheng at times. She had inherited a Low-Grade Five-Element Root—the exact same miserable talent her father had started with.
But she had one distinct advantage her father never had: a patriarch who understood exactly how to exploit the system.
In the deepest chamber of the manor, Lu Changsheng sat opposite his daughter.
"Zixuan," he said softly, handing her a jade slip identical to the one he had given Ping'an. "This is the Tortoise Breathing Sutra. Your spiritual root is poor. Your progress will be agonizingly slow. You will watch others soar into the sky while you crawl in the mud. Do you understand this?"
Zixuan, with eyes too old for her young face, took the slip. "I understand, Father. The bird that flies highest is the first to be shot by the hunter. The tortoise lives for a thousand years because it carries its armor and moves slowly."
Lu Changsheng beamed with pride. She inherently understood the Gou Dao.
"Begin."
For six months, while the market above slowly rebuilt from the devastation of the beast tide, Zixuan meditated. Her Five-Element root made gathering Qi incredibly difficult. The spiritual energy in the air constantly fractured into five conflicting streams before it could settle in her Dantian.
But Lu Changsheng was there. Utilizing his Level 4 cultivation, he acted as a human filter, subtly guiding and smoothing the ambient Qi into her body, acting as training wheels for her fragile meridians.
Finally, on a quiet night, it happened.
Zixuan's small body trembled. The five conflicting streams of energy suddenly harmonized, snapping into a unified, stable core.
She opened her eyes, a spark of spiritual light flashing in her pupils. She had broken through to the First Level of Qi Condensation.
Simultaneously, within Lu Changsheng's Sea of Consciousness, the Eternal Bloodline Tree erupted.
The fourth flower on the branch, tethered to Zixuan, exploded into a supernova of golden light.
*Rule Two Activated: The Branches of Feedback.*
*[Descendant 4: Lu Zixuan has reached Qi Condensation Level 1]*
*[Spiritual Root: Low-Grade Five-Element]*
*[Initiating 1/1 Comprehensive Feedback...]*
The feedback from Zixuan was entirely different from Ping'an's. Ping'an had provided pure, voluminous energy. Zixuan, possessing the exact same elemental root structure as her father, provided something far more profound: **Resonance.**
The golden energy flooded Lu Changsheng's body, but instead of just expanding his Dantian, it aggressively attacked his spiritual root.
His High-Grade Five-Element Root, already purified by Ping'an, was suddenly bathed in the resonant frequency of Zixuan's breakthrough. The five colors—red, blue, green, gold, brown—began to swirl violently, merging and separating, stripping away the final layers of mortal impurity.
The root thickened. It pulsed with a heavy, ancient vitality. It crossed the threshold.
Lu Changsheng gasped as his spiritual root upgraded from High-Grade to **Earth-Grade Five-Element Root.** While still a Five-Element root, an Earth-Grade rating meant its capacity to absorb, retain, and process ambient spiritual energy was vastly multiplied. He was no longer constrained by the slow absorption rates of trash talent.
With the sudden, massive upgrade to his root's efficiency, his Level 4 Dantian instantly violently greedily devoured the remaining feedback energy. The bottleneck holding him back, already weakened, shattered completely.
*Crack.*
Lu Changsheng broke through to the **Fifth Level of Qi Condensation.**
He exhaled a long breath of white, misty Qi, feeling the terrifying density of his newly formed spiritual power. Level 5 was the watershed mark of the Qi Condensation realm. He could now externally manifest Qi for sustained periods, cast mid-tier spells without exhausting himself, and utilize spiritual artifacts to their full potential.
If he went above ground right now, he could demand the position of a market overseer from the Sect itself.
But he just smiled at his daughter, his aura instantly retracting and vanishing beneath the infallible cloak of the Tortoise Breathing Sutra, making him appear as the crippled mortal he had registered as.
"Well done, Zixuan," he praised, his voice betraying none of the earth-shattering power surging through his veins. "You have taken the first step. Now, hide it."
### The Canopy Must Expand
Later that night, long after the children were asleep, Lu Changsheng sat at the stone table in the main cavern with Xia Ruyan. She was meticulously reviewing their supply ledgers under the light of a glowing moonstone.
"The beast tide caused a massive influx of refugees from the surrounding mortal towns," Ruyan noted softly, running a finger down a column of figures. "The market is flooded with orphans and destitute families. The price of mortal grains has tripled, but human life is cheaper than dirt."
Lu Changsheng listened, tapping his finger rhythmically against the stone.
His mind was calculating the mathematics of his immortality. Two children cultivating had pushed him from Level 2 to Level 5. His physical body was a monster. His spiritual root was Earth-Grade.
But it wasn't fast enough.
He was thirty-four. If he wanted to reach Foundation Establishment safely, without risking his life in secret realms for heavenly resources, he needed a massive, exponential increase in feedback. Five children were not enough.
"Ruyan," Lu Changsheng broke the silence.
She looked up, her intelligent eyes meeting his. "Yes, Husband?"
"I am officially a ruined mortal now. A cripple whose cultivation is destroyed," he stated calmly.
Ruyan nodded, a slight frown touching her lips. She hated the title, even if it was a protective lie. "Yes. The registry has crossed you out."
"For a cultivator to take many wives is a sign of ambition or lust, and draws attention. But for a crippled, depressed mortal who has lost his grand path to immortality, wallowing in earthly pleasures and taking multiple mortal concubines to drown his sorrows... is an entirely expected, pitiful cliché."
Ruyan paused, her brush hovering over the ledger. She was highly intelligent; she instantly grasped the implication of his words. She didn't feel jealousy. In this brutal world, the strength and size of the family were the only guarantees of survival. Her husband's strange obsession with expanding his bloodline had already kept them alive through horrors that wiped out their neighbors.
"You wish to expand the household," she said softly, a statement, not a question.
Lu Changsheng nodded. "Three wives is the foundation. But a true canopy needs more branches. The refugees you mentioned... there must be many young women of good constitution, perhaps even with faint, dormant spiritual roots, who are currently starving in the outer alleys, desperate for a roof and a bowl of rice."
He looked deeply into his wife's eyes, fully trusting her intellect and loyalty. "I need you to act as my proxy, Ruyan. Use the emergency tunnel. Disguise yourself. Go into the refugee camps. Find women who are healthy, docile, and willing to disappear into our subterranean manor. The official story is that the crippled talisman maker Lu Changsheng is buying mortal girls to ease his misery."
Ruyan set her brush down. She didn't hesitate. She understood her role in the Dao of Caution.
"How many, Husband?" she asked, her voice steady and entirely professional, ready to manage the logistics of exponential family expansion.
Lu Changsheng looked at the glowing Eternal Bloodline Tree in his mind's eye, envisioning a thousand golden flowers blooming in the dark.
"Start with ten," he replied, his voice cold, pragmatic, and utterly terrifying in its quiet ambition. "We have the space. We have the food. It is time to truly plant the forest."