**Chapter 5: The Subterranean Canopy and the Ten-Year Silence**
The surface of the Qinghe Market was a scab attempting to heal over a festering wound. The Class-Three Beast Tide had retreated, leaving behind shattered walls, blood-soaked earth, and a decimated population of low-level cultivators. In the outer slums, the price of spiritual rice had skyrocketed, while the value of a human life had plummeted to the cost of a single, moldy steamed bun.
But fifty feet below the misery, in the soundproofed, temperature-controlled subterranean manor, the Lu family was preparing for an unprecedented expansion.
Xia Ruyan moved through the suffocating darkness of the ancient, abandoned sewer tunnels that snaked beneath the market. She wore a heavy, hooded cloak that masked her refined features, and her clothes were intentionally rubbed with dirt and ash. In her hands, she clutched a cloth bundle containing mortal silver and a few fractured shards of low-grade spirit stones—the currency of the desperate.
She remembered her husband's cold, pragmatic instructions. *"Find the ones who have given up on the heavens. Find the ones who only want to survive the winter. Bring them to the dark."*
She emerged through a rusted iron grate into the heart of the refugee encampment set up outside the market's southern gate. The stench of unwashed bodies, gangrene, and despair was a physical wall. Tents made of ragged linen flapped weakly in the cold wind.
It took her three days of careful, methodical searching to fulfill her husband's quota.
She did not look for striking beauties; beauty in the slums without power was a curse that attracted gangs and demonic cultivators. She looked for sturdy frames, wide hips indicating safe childbearing, and, most importantly, eyes that held the dull, resigned acceptance of a draft animal.
She purchased them from indebted fathers, from dying mothers, and from the local slavers who had rounded up the orphans. Ten women, ranging from sixteen to twenty-two years of age. Some were the daughters of ruined mortal merchants, others were illiterate farm girls whose villages had been trampled by armor-piercing boars. One, a girl named Su Mei, possessed an incredibly faint, dormant spiritual root—so weak it wouldn't even register on a Sect's testing crystal, but enough to give her a slightly better constitution.
When Ruyan finally led the ten terrified, shivering women back through the sewer maze and opened the heavy stone door leading into the Lu family's underground compound, the women fell to their knees in shock.
They had expected a slaver's den or a demonic cultivator's blood-refining pit. Instead, they were greeted by the soft, warm glow of embedded moonstones illuminating a massive, impeccably clean subterranean courtyard. There were polished stone tables, the smell of roasting beast meat, and the sound of children's laughter echoing from a side chamber.
Lu Changsheng stood at the center of the courtyard, waiting for them.
He was dressed in a simple, gray silk robe. He slouched slightly, his face intentionally pale, his eyes carrying a practiced, hollow emptiness. He looked exactly like what he claimed to be: a man whose grand path to immortality had been violently severed, leaving him a broken, wealthy mortal seeking solace in the flesh.
"Stand up," Lu Changsheng commanded, his voice devoid of the terrifying spiritual pressure he possessed, sounding merely like a tired, wealthy merchant.
The ten women scrambled to their feet, keeping their heads bowed submissively.
"I am Lu Changsheng," he began, pacing slowly before them. "You have been brought here because the world above is a meat grinder, and you were the meat. Here, you are safe. There are no beast tides here. There are no gangs demanding protection fees. You will eat three meals a day, you will sleep on soft beds, and you will never feel the winter wind again."
He stopped, letting his gaze sweep over them. "But this safety has a price. I am a crippled man. My cultivation was destroyed. The heavens rejected me. So, I have rejected the heavens. I care only for my bloodline now. Your purpose in this house is to bear my children. You will be my concubines. You will raise my heirs. And in return, you will live like queens of the dark."
He stepped closer, his voice dropping to a harsh, serious whisper. "There is only one absolute law in this manor. You do not speak of this place. You do not attempt to leave. The door you entered through is sealed. If you try to return to the surface, you will be killed. If you bring danger to my family, I will personally throw you back to the slavers. Do you understand?"
"We understand, Master Lu," they chorused, a mixture of profound relief and terrified awe in their voices. To trade their freedom for absolute safety and full bellies was a bargain they would make a thousand times over in this brutal world.
Lu Changsheng nodded, his inward focus shifting to the Sea of Consciousness. The Eternal Bloodline Tree stood majestic and silent, its golden roots thrumming with anticipation.
"Ruyan, Wan'er, Qing," Lu Changsheng called out to his three original wives, who stood respectfully to the side. "Help them bathe. Feed them. Assign them their chambers. The canopy must expand."
### The Decade of the Golden Canopy
Time in the subterranean manor lost its meaning. There were no sunrises or sunsets, only the rhythmic, eternal cycle of the Gou Dao.
Ten years passed.
In the cultivation world above, ten years was enough for empires to clash, for secret realms to open and close, and for brilliant geniuses to rise and fall like shooting stars. The Azure Mountain Sect fought a minor border war with the neighboring Crimson Valley Sect. The Qinghe Market saw three different overseers assassinated. The Black Wolf Gang was replaced by the Blood Viper Gang, which was in turn slaughtered by the Iron Fist Brotherhood.
Below the earth, shielded by ten feet of compacted dirt and an array of sound-dampening, Qi-concealing talismans, Lu Changsheng achieved a terrifying, silent apotheosis.
The ten new concubines had integrated flawlessly into the household. Driven by gratitude and the comfortable environment, they fulfilled their singular purpose with astonishing efficiency.
The underground manor echoed with the constant, chaotic symphony of infancy. Over the course of the decade, the thirteen women (his three wives and ten concubines) gave birth to an astonishing thirty-two children.
Within his Sea of Consciousness, the Eternal Bloodline Tree had transformed from a sturdy sapling into a magnificent, sprawling behemoth. Its branches were heavy, adorned with exactly thirty-nine radiant, pulsing golden flowers.
And the 1/1 Feedback system was a geometric engine of absolute power.
Because the vast majority of the concubines were pure mortals, twenty-eight of the new children possessed no spiritual roots. In a standard cultivation clan, they would be considered useless mouths to feed, destined to be exiled to the mortal world to manage mundane businesses.
But to Lu Changsheng, they were pure, unadulterated foundation.
Every single day, as the thirty-nine children ate spiritual beast meat, practiced basic martial arts under Zhao Qing's instruction, and grew, their combined physical vitality was fed directly into Lu Changsheng's body.
He sat cross-legged in his private, heavily reinforced meditation chamber, his upper body bare.
If anyone from the surface could see him now, they would think they were looking at an ancient, dormant dragon taking human form. His muscles were not overly bulky, but they were dense to the point of absurdity. They looked as if they were carved from dark, polished marble. His skin emanated a faint, metallic sheen, a hallmark of extreme body refinement.
*Rule Two Activated: The Branches of Feedback.*
A continuous, invisible river of golden energy flowed from the canopy of the Bloodline Tree into his Dantian and his meridians.
Three years ago, the sheer volume of this passive feedback, combined with the pure Qi generated by his Earth-Grade Five-Element Root, had effortlessly shattered the bottleneck to the **Sixth Level of Qi Condensation**.
But that was just the beginning.
Of the thirty-two new children, four had inherited spiritual roots. Two possessed low-grade Five-Element roots, one possessed a mid-grade Four-Element root, and miraculously, the child born to Su Mei (the concubine with the dormant root) had inherited a **High-Grade Three-Element Root (Water, Wood, Earth).** The moment Su Mei's son, Lu Feng, had successfully sensed Qi and stepped into the First Level of Qi Condensation, the feedback had been apocalyptic.
The high-grade quality of the root, combined with the accumulated volume of the other thirty-eight children's vitality, had triggered a qualitative mutation in Lu Changsheng's own foundation.
He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. As he did, the ambient spiritual energy in the soundproofed chamber didn't just flow toward him; it rushed into his pores like water spiraling down a massive drain.
He had broken through to the **Seventh Level of Qi Condensation**—stepping into the Late Stage.
Furthermore, the feedback from Lu Feng's Three-Element Root had violently purged his own Earth-Grade Five-Element Root. The red (Fire) and gold (Metal) elements of his root had been forcefully suppressed and cannibalized by the overwhelming presence of Water, Wood, and Earth.
Lu Changsheng's spiritual root had evolved again. He now possessed a **Heaven-Grade Three-Element Root.** He was no longer a trash-tier cultivator compensating with extreme caution. Purely in terms of talent, a Heaven-Grade Three-Element Root would guarantee him a position as an Inner Sect Disciple in the Azure Mountain Sect. He would be given a master, endless resources, and a path straight to Foundation Establishment.
"Late Stage Qi Condensation," Lu Changsheng murmured, slowly opening his eyes. A terrifying, tangible pressure briefly materialized in the room, cracking the solid stone floor beneath him before he forcefully reined it back in using the perfected *Tortoise Breathing Sutra*. "My spiritual energy pool is ten times larger than it was at Level 5. I could sustain flight on a sword for days. I could cast advanced elemental spells without hand seals."
He clenched his fist. The air in his palm compressed with a sharp, explosive *pop*.
"And my physical body..." He smiled, a cold, pragmatic curve of his lips. "That is the true terror."
### The Titan Bone Art
The physical transformation was entirely thanks to his eldest twins, Wushuang and Chuan.
Now fifteen years old, the twins were anomalies. Having inherited their mother Zhao Qing's blacksmith constitution but no spiritual root, they could not absorb Qi. In the cultivation world, mortal martial arts were considered children's play, incapable of piercing even the weakest Qi shield.
But Lu Changsheng understood a fundamental truth: a physical object moving with enough mass and velocity would shatter anything.
Five years ago, through a proxy buyer in the black market, he had purchased a highly obscure, incredibly dangerous mortal body-refining manual called the **Titan Bone Cleaving Art**. It was a technique originally designed by a mad mortal emperor to create an army of giant slayers. It required consuming massive amounts of toxic beast blood and enduring agonizing bone-crushing exercises to force the marrow to mutate. It had a ninety percent mortality rate.
Normal parents would never subject their children to it.
But Lu Changsheng, utilizing his Heaven-Grade Qi and immense alchemical knowledge (gained passively from Zixuan, who had taken an interest in alchemy and successfully brewed basic pills), had perfectly synthesized and purified the beast blood. He acted as a flawless safety net, using his Qi to protect the twins' internal organs while they practiced the agonizing art.
The results were monstrous.
Wushuang, a fifteen-year-old girl, stood six feet tall. Her body was a masterpiece of lethal, compact muscle. She wielded a custom-forged iron hammer that weighed eight hundred pounds with the casual ease of a child swinging a wooden sword. Chuan was even larger, built like a brick wall, his skin possessing the density of tanned rhinoceros hide.
They had reached the absolute zenith of mortal physical conditioning.
And because of the 1/1 Feedback, Lu Changsheng possessed the combined, compounded physical strength of *both* of them, stacked upon his own Level 7 Qi Condensation cultivation.
He was a human siege engine wrapped in the illusion of a crippled, sickly talisman maker.
He stood up from his meditation mat, pulling his gray silk robe over his terrifyingly dense muscles, instantly slouching his shoulders and dimming the light in his eyes. The predator vanished; the prey returned.
It was time for the weekly family dinner.
He walked into the massive central dining cavern. It was a sight that would make any Sect Patriarch weep with envy. Four long stone tables were lined up, filled with nearly forty children of varying ages, from teenagers to babes in arms. The thirteen women moved seamlessly, distributing massive platters of roasted Horned Boar, steamed spiritual rice, and hearty vegetable stews.
Ping'an, now sixteen, sat at the head of the children's table. He was quiet, unassuming, and completely invisible—the perfect heir to the Gou Dao. He had just reached the Third Level of Qi Condensation using the Tortoise Breathing Sutra. Zixuan, fourteen, sat beside him, her fingers stained with the faint scent of medicinal herbs; she was Level 2.
The cavern was loud, chaotic, and brimming with absolute, untouchable vitality.
Lu Changsheng took his seat at the head of the main table, his wives flanking him. As he looked out over his bloodline, a profound sense of satisfaction settled over him. He didn't need to fight for the Mandate of Heaven. He was building his own heaven in the dirt.
But the universe, as always, despised a perfect hiding spot.
### The Ripple from the Surface
It happened three days later, in the dead of night.
Lu Changsheng was awake, analyzing a complex array diagram Zixuan had drawn, when his meticulously tuned spiritual senses—extended via extremely faint, invisible threads of Qi wired to the surface shack—twitched violently.
Someone had entered the decoy shack above.
This was not highly unusual. Over the past ten years, homeless mortals or drunk thugs had occasionally broken into the "abandoned" ruin of his former home to sleep. Lu Changsheng usually just ignored them, letting them leave in the morning.
But these were not mortals.
Through the faint sensory threads, he felt the sharp, chaotic fluctuations of spiritual energy. Two cultivators. Both at the Fifth Level of Qi Condensation. They were radiating the distinct, foul aura of blood-refining demonic cultivators.
Lu Changsheng closed his eyes, his consciousness expanding up through the fifty feet of earth to observe them.
*"Seal the door, idiot!"* a harsh, raspy voice hissed. *"If the Sect Enforcers catch our trail, they'll skin us alive for harvesting those mortal brats."*
*"I'm sealing it, I'm sealing it! Stop yelling,"* the second voice replied, accompanied by the sound of heavy wooden boards being slammed against the doorframe. *"This place is a dump. Who lived here?"*
*"Registry said some crippled talisman maker ten years ago. Probably dead. It's perfect. No one looks twice at an abandoned slum shack. We wait out the Sect patrols here for a week, then slip past the northern barricade into the Bloodwood Forest."*
Lu Changsheng remained completely calm. They were just hiding. As long as they stayed on the surface, they posed no threat to the subterranean manor. He would wait them out. Patience was the core of his Dao.
But then, the situation catastrophically devolved.
*"Hey, look at this,"* the first cultivator said, his voice dropping in surprise. *"The floorboards here. They're heavily reinforced with ironwood underneath the rot. And there's a seam."*
Lu Changsheng's eyes snapped open in the dark cavern.
The decoy shack had a trapdoor. It didn't lead directly to the manor—it led to a ten-foot drop into a false cellar filled with junk, but beneath that junk was the heavy, Qi-sealed stone slab that acted as the true entrance to the vertical shaft.
If they tore up the floorboards and found the false cellar, their demonic, paranoid instincts would prompt them to scan the ground below. A Level 5 scan might just detect the faint, residual ambient Qi of thirty cultivators and magical arrays living fifty feet down.
*"Help me pry this up. Might be a hidden stash left by the cripple,"* the second cultivator grunted. The sound of a crowbar biting into wood echoed through Lu Changsheng's sensory thread.
The Dao of Caution dictated that one must never invite trouble. But it also dictated that if trouble breached the absolute inner sanctum of safety, it must be eradicated instantly, silently, and with overwhelming, absolute prejudice, leaving no witnesses and no trace.
"Ruyan," Lu Changsheng whispered.
Xia Ruyan, who was sleeping lightly beside him, woke instantly. She saw the terrifying, icy void in her husband's eyes.
"Do not let anyone leave their rooms," he commanded softly, slipping out of bed. He did not put on his robe. He stood in the dark in his simple trousers, his terrifying musculature rippling under his skin.
He walked to the corner of the room and pressed a specific sequence of stones. A narrow, perfectly vertical, tube-like emergency tunnel opened. It bypassed the false cellar entirely, leading straight up to a hidden panel located behind the hearth of the surface shack.
He stepped into the tunnel. He did not use Qi to fly up; any fluctuation of Qi might alert the Level 5 cultivators above.
Instead, he relied entirely on his monstrous physical feedback. He pressed his hands and bare feet against the smooth dirt walls of the narrow shaft. With terrifying, mechanical precision and strength, he scaled the fifty-foot vertical climb in less than ten seconds, moving completely silently, like a massive, predatory spider.
He reached the top, his face inches from the thin wooden panel separating him from the shack.
Through the cracks, he saw the two demonic cultivators. They had managed to pry up three floorboards, revealing the dark void of the false cellar below.
"Fetch a lightstone," the first one said, leaning over the hole.
Lu Changsheng did not hesitate. He did not issue a challenge. He did not manifest a glowing spiritual sword.
He simply exerted the physical strength of two peak-mortal Titan Bone Cleavers, multiplied by a Late-Stage Qi Condensation foundation.
He punched directly through the solid stone hearth and the wooden panel.
His fist, moving faster than the speed of sound, created a vacuum implosion. It bypassed the first cultivator's automatically triggered Level 5 Qi Shield as if it were a soap bubble.
*CRUNCH.*
Lu Changsheng's hand drove straight through the back of the first cultivator's ribcage, pulverizing his spine and completely obliterating his heart before the man could even register the sound of the wall exploding.
The cultivator's body jerked violently, a spray of blood erupting from his mouth. Lu Changsheng immediately retracted his arm, pulling the corpse backward to muffle the sound of it hitting the floor.
The second cultivator, standing a few feet away, froze. His brain simply could not process what had just happened. A hand had burst from the solid stone wall and instantly annihilated his partner.
"What the f—"
He didn't finish the word.
Lu Changsheng practically teleported out of the hole. He didn't use a movement technique; his leg muscles simply detonated with physical force, launching him across the room.
The second cultivator panicked, desperately forming a hand seal to cast a Blood Spear spell.
He was too slow.
Lu Changsheng's left hand shot out like a striking viper, clamping over the man's face, completely sealing his mouth to prevent any scream. His right hand casually grabbed the man's throat.
With a sickening, wet *SNAP*, Lu Changsheng twisted. The cultivator's neck broke cleanly, his spinal cord severed instantly. The chaotic spiritual energy gathering in the man's hands dissipated into harmless sparks.
It was over in less than three seconds. Two Level 5 cultivators, men who had terrorized mortals and survived the Sect's purge, had been slaughtered like chickens, without Lu Changsheng utilizing a single offensive spell.
He stood in the dim shack, the two fresh corpses bleeding out on the floorboards. His breathing was completely even. His heart rate hadn't even elevated.
"Level 5," Lu Changsheng muttered, looking at his blood-soaked hands. "Too fragile."
He immediately shifted into cleanup mode. This was arguably more important than the kill. If the Sect Enforcers found two dead demonic cultivators in his supposedly abandoned shack, they would investigate the area thoroughly.
From his storage ring, he retrieved a bottle of Zixuan's newly brewed, high-grade 'Corpse-Melting Powder'—a highly corrosive alchemical byproduct she had created accidentally, which Lu Changsheng had immediately recognized the utility of.
He stripped the bodies of their storage pouches, ensuring there were no tracking runes on them. Then, he sprinkled the powder over the corpses and the bloodstains on the floor.
The powder reacted instantly. The flesh, bone, and cloth hissed violently, dissolving into a foul-smelling, translucent liquid that seeped harmlessly into the dirt below the floorboards. Within five minutes, there was absolutely no physical trace that the two men had ever existed.
Lu Changsheng carefully replaced the pried-up floorboards, ensuring the nails were bent back exactly as they had been. He used a minor wind spell to ventilate the acrid smell of the melting powder, replacing it with the standard stench of the slum. Finally, he repaired the hole in the hearth he had punched through, using spare stone and mud kept in the false cellar for this exact purpose.
Within thirty minutes, the shack looked entirely undisturbed, a perfect monument to rot and abandonment.
Lu Changsheng slipped back down the emergency tunnel, sealing the panel behind him.
When he emerged back into his bedroom in the subterranean manor, Ruyan was waiting, holding a damp towel. She didn't ask what happened. She merely wiped the few specks of blood from his forearm.
"It is handled," Lu Changsheng said softly, the terrifying physical dominance fading back into his slouching, cautious persona.
"Were we exposed?" she asked, her voice tight with anxiety.
"No. They were vagrants. They are gone." He sat on the edge of the bed, running a hand through his hair. The encounter, while easily won, had shaken his absolute sense of security.
The Gou Dao was infallible, but it relied on distance. The world above was getting too chaotic, and the subterranean manor, while massive, was a finite space.
"Ruyan," he said, his eyes reflecting the soft glow of the moonstones. "Ping'an is sixteen. Wushuang and Chuan are fifteen. In a few years, they will be adults. The other thirty children will follow."
He looked at his wife, the realization of his own exponential cheat dawning heavily upon him.
"The bloodline tree requires branches to bloom. If my children remain hidden down here forever, they cannot marry. If they cannot marry, they cannot produce the third generation. If I have thirty children, and they each have ten children..."
Ruyan's breath hitched as she did the math. "Three hundred grandchildren. Three hundred sources of feedback."
"Exactly," Lu Changsheng said, his eyes burning with an intense, terrifying ambition that he usually kept buried deep within. "The first generation healed me. The second generation pushed me to the Late Stage of Qi Condensation and made my body invincible. But the third generation... the third generation will push me to Foundation Establishment and beyond. They will make me a true Immortal."
He stood up, pacing the room.
"But we cannot fit three hundred people in this cavern. And I cannot risk sending them out into the world as loose cultivators to be slaughtered for scraps."
"Then what do we do, Husband?" Ruyan asked, realizing that the family was approaching a critical bottleneck.
Lu Changsheng stopped pacing. He looked up toward the ceiling, toward the surface world that he had hidden from for fifteen years.
"We can no longer just hide in a hole, Ruyan. It is time to evolve the Dao of Caution." His voice was cold, calculating, and absolute. "If we cannot hide from the world, we must become a part of it so deeply, so fundamentally, that the world doesn't even realize we are there. We are not going to be a family of loose cultivators hiding in the slums anymore."
"Then what are we going to be?"
Lu Changsheng smiled—a slow, terrifying smile of a man who was about to orchestrate the greatest, most invisible coup the cultivation world had ever seen.
"We are going to slowly, legally, and entirely boringly... buy the Qinghe Market. The Lu Clan will not conquer with swords. We will conquer with merchants, ledgers, and absolute, overwhelming mediocrity. It is time for the third phase of the plan: The Shadows in Plain Sight."