Chapter 51: Consumption and Body Tempering—This Definitely Has Potential

[Dietary Ingestion] was one of the spells Feng Xue had purchased from the Ninth Aunt. According to the four foundational categories of the Mortuary Arts manuals, it belonged to the [Transformation] lineage. It imbued mana with a property similar to spider venom known as [Pre-digestion]. To put it simply, it processed food using mana to make it much easier to digest and absorb.

It seemed like a very practical skill, capable of effectively replenishing the depletion of vital essence caused by profound practitioners extracting primordial energy.

Yet, in reality, very few profound practitioners liked to use this spell.

The reason, naturally, was the imbalance between income and expenditure.

Although the Dietary Ingestion technique could increase the nutrients the body extracted from food, these nutrients still had to undergo physical transformation to become vital essence. Afterward, through breathing and meditation, they were converted into primordial energy, which was finally absorbed by the spirit and soul to generate mana.

Through such layers of transformation, the mana gained with the help of the Dietary Ingestion technique was sometimes even less than the mana consumed while casting it.

Even though the main focus of this spell was to enhance the primordial energy available for the spirit and soul to grow and absorb, if the mana could not achieve a balanced ledger, a profound practitioner's risk-resistance ability would drop significantly. Not to mention that the mana control of profound practitioners before entering the Dao was extremely pathetic; a slight mistake meant losing the entire capital investment.

Therefore, except for those completely non-producing cultivators who never stepped out of the mountains before entering the Dao and whose every resource was supplied by their master's sect, most profound practitioners only used the Dietary Ingestion technique when they obtained some celestial herbs or spiritual medicines to boost absorption efficiency, or after achieving enlightenment, to harvest the primal energies of heaven and earth, such as jade essence, which were otherwise unabsorbable.

However, Feng Xue himself did not care about this. He had more mana than he knew what to do with, and he did not rely on the dietary technique to increase his primordial energy. He practiced this purely to strengthen his vital essence, and combined with the Nourishing Essence and Body Forging techniques to nurture his essence and consolidate his breath, thereby rapidly improving his physical fitness.

Had there been an evil art capable of feeding primordial energy back to nourish vital essence via dietary ingestion, Feng Xue would probably have performed a meter-spinning-in-reverse trick right on the spot.

Quickly familiarizing himself with the movements of the Body Forging technique, Feng Xue began to flip through the Nourishing Essence technique. He roughly figured out the ingredients and preparation methods suitable for body forging, sorted them by culinary difficulty, and planned to teach them to Liu Yunxi bit by bit later...

"Wait a minute! I have a new tool person now!"

A thought flashed through Feng Xue's mind, and with a sharp snap of his fingers, the translucent Moying drifted out from the scroll. She looked around in a daze, and upon noticing the few books placed in front of Feng Xue, she immediately assumed, "I haven't fully digested the one I copied this morning yet. Let me study it for a while before looking at anything else..."

"Who is talking to you about books? I have a job for you!" Feng Xue interrupted Moying, pointed at the recipe book in front of her, and said,

"From now on, you are responsible for teaching Liu Yunxi how to read and how to cook."

"You take me for some..." Moying was about to refuse, but upon seeing Feng Xue raise his palm, her expression instantly flushed red. The half of her body that had already drifted out of the scroll immediately shrank back, leaving only half her head exposed as she muttered,

"I don't know how to cook! I've never studied it, I can't even tell salt, sugar, soy sauce, and vinegar apart!"

"I didn't ask you to know!" Feng Xue rolled his eyes, turned his head to glance at Liu Yunxi, who was already starting to serve dishes onto the table, and said,

"Just treat the recipe as a reading textbook and teach it to her; she can tell oil, salt, soy sauce, and vinegar apart! By the way, it's about time you practiced your clipping illusion realm. It'll be just right to pull Liu Yunxi into the illusion realm to teach her, which will also save some time."

"Who is clipping through walls!" Even though she still didn't understand what clipping meant, Moying already knew it wasn't anything nice and immediately retorted. Liu Yunxi, hearing the commotion over here and unaware of what was about to befall her, smiled and said,

"Dinner is almost ready, come over and eat!"

"Coming." Feng Xue scooped up the jade token inscribed with the character [Eat] and engraved with the Dietary Ingestion transformation ritual, sat down at the table, and began wolfing down his food.

As mana was injected into the jade token, a warm current wrapped around Feng Xue's body under his guidance. Accompanied by a flowing sensation that wasn't exactly uncomfortable, but slightly unusual to get used to, the sense of satisfaction brought by the food was increasing at a speed several times faster than normal eating.

Then Feng Xue discovered that this table full of dishes didn't cause him to feel even a tiny bit of bloating!

He seemed just like one of those big eaters commonly seen in comic books; clearly having consumed a massive amount of food, yet not even his stomach bulged.

Seeing that the effect of the Dietary Ingestion technique was so immediate, Feng Xue was quite surprised. However, he didn't daze off because of this; instead, he immediately stood up and began moving according to the postures of the Body Forging technique.

Generally speaking, one shouldn't engage in strenuous exercise right after eating, but because of the effect of the Dietary Ingestion technique, Feng Xue didn't worry about any issues like gastroptosis. Accompanied by movements that looked somewhat like broadcast calisthenics, Feng Xue vaguely felt a warm current slowly flowing along with his movements.

It felt a bit like primordial energy, but not as real as primordial energy; it just followed the process of tendons stretching and muscles contracting, unhurriedly trailing behind his consciousness.

It was precisely with the emergence of this feeling that what originally looked like a set of fitness aerobics instantly took on a layer of mystery, and Feng Xue felt even more a sense of accomplishment practicing it.

Pity that this kind of exercise still seemed insufficient to trigger his golden finger, as no notification for a Body Forging technique or the like popped up directly.

Recalling the description of the movement process in the [Body Forging] manual, Feng Xue found that his own sensations were far more intense than normal body forging. Naturally, he didn't think he was some one-in-a-million martial arts genius; without a doubt, this warm current was clearly the bonus brought by the Dietary Ingestion technique.

"Dietary ingestion combined with body forging really has potential!"

Feng Xue nodded in satisfaction, yet didn't wonder why other people in this world didn't do it this way. After all, no profound practitioner would spend precious mana to help a martial cultivator complete a task that could be solved simply by eating more and practicing hard.

Having practiced like this for half an hour, Feng Xue felt the warm current begin to dwindle. Mentally calculating the time, he pulled out a piece of paper and began revising his schedule—

Body forging wasn't troublesome, but it also required giving the body time to consolidate, so doing it once after breakfast, lunch, and dinner would suffice. Then, in the morning when his physical condition was at its best, it would be just right for standing stake. At night, as usual, he would extract primordial energy to feed his spirit and soul.

"Looked at this way, it's really just adding a morning workout and post-meal exercise." Feng Xue nodded, effectively setting this schedule in stone.

Seeing that it was only a little past four o'clock, Feng Xue reached out and patted Liu Yunxi, who was slumped over the dining table, only to remember that this fellow had been dragged into the illusion realm by Moying for tutoring. He immediately began contacting his spiritual ghost.

Perhaps due to being inside the illusion, the signal wasn't very good, and Feng Xue could only sigh at his own trashy spirit and soul, groping around his pocket to fish out a jade token carved with the character for ghost.

He had a dozen jade tokens in his pocket, and pulling out the exact one he wanted wasn't done through mahjong-tile shuffling or peeking from an over-the-shoulder perspective, but stemmed from a spell called [Summoning Objects].

To put it bluntly, this spell was actually very simple. It used the technique of the [Spirit-Attachment Curse] to fix one's mana onto an object, and edited specific annotations into the mana according to the different objects.

In this way, whenever he wanted something, all he had to do was sense the mana imprint on it to make a quick judgment. If one could integrate [Transfer], one of the four major properties of mana, into it, it could even achieve the effect of allowing the spiritual ghost to retrieve objects from a distance (Note ①).

However, Feng Xue—a trashy fellow who still relied on a magical artifact even to transform his mana—was clearly still far from that; he could merely distinguish the types of magical artifacts in his pocket.

At this moment, as mana surged into the jade token, the weak signal immediately cleared up, and shortly after, Feng Xue heard Moying's soft and cute voice—

"A little means a little, how am I supposed to know how much that is? Why don't you try it yourself when you're cooking... Ah, Ma... Master! Are you looking for me?"

Feng Xue didn't mind Moying's still somewhat reluctant form of address and directly issued an order: "Release Liu Yunxi... Never mind, just tell her directly that starting from tonight's dinner, her food portion should be increased by two—well, increase it by three times! The ingredients at home should still be enough for the next two days, and after that, I'll have the agency send ingredients regularly; she's just responsible for cooking!"