Extra's Strategy: Cultivate Protagonists, Become Invincible
Chapter 80: The Circle Of Laws

Chapter 80: The Circle Of Laws

"Lie here in this tomb I’ve made, using laws that shall never fade, feeding on you in a cycle of qi, it is a fair trade," Han Xuhan muttered the instructions of the dragon, feeling that he was finally on the track to success.

"The tomb feeding off the entombed through qi cycles, is this the solution? But the dragon also said that Shi Xian, the entombed disciple, would have to reach a level of cultivation where his own dao is born in order to leave the tomb. So this chain of inference is also not entirely correct..."

Shaking his head in confusion, he adjusted his sitting posture and decided to go at it. The qi reserves of his body had been emptied a while ago. He needed a refill anyway.

After having cultivated for a month, he didn’t need spirit stones to sense and keep track of raw qi, unless his goal was to speed up the session. For a simple refill like this, he could somewhat slowly absorb qi by himself anywhere, at anytime.

Entering the deep meditative state after a bit of effort, he began to draw in the raw qi from his surroundings. The pores of his skin, connected to the meridians, widened up to welcome the influx. However, Han Xuhan discovered something quite odd very quickly.

The qi around him didn’t flow inwards despite the mental connection he had established with it after the cycle initiation. Instead, the qi seemed to be repulsed by him and slowly dispersed away, further and further while he tried his best to control the qi.

What the hell is this? Is cultivation prohibited here?

....But it did seem to fit the mechanism described by the dragon. The ’Circle of Laws’ was to feed on the entombed through his cycle of qi!

His curiosity spiking up, Han Xuhan stood up in a trance and started tracking the traces of the qi using his constantly weakening mental connection.

SMACK!

"Ow, dammit!"

He had forgotten to open his eyes while walking behind the moving qi. The traces had led him straight to the wall ahead, and it resulted in the painful collision just now.

It was a difficult feat for a rookie like him to stay in his meditative state while consciously moving around. It took him a great deal of effort and not a small amount of time to finally get a good understanding of what was going on.

Upon observing the wall in front of him closely, Han Xuhan discovered that the more qi he tried to absorb, the more qi entered the walls instead. It gathered inside the grooves created on the walls by the archaic, indecipherable texts engraved on them.

To verify his doubts, he began to conduct further experiments with new qi. More than half an hour passed without any rest before he found the qi in his surroundings diminishing in volume and quality. The overall results from his experiment were...interesting.

It seemed that the engraved texts on the walls worked like his own meridians, able to sustain and channel qi. And something about this entire stadium made it so that once somebody tried to recover or replenish their qi, almost all of it would instead flow to the walls and fill up the grooves of the engraved texts.

After understanding this particular rule, Han Xuhan had searched out one of the least densely written parts of the wall and used the qi replenishing process to fill up a particular jumble of texts that had been engraved far away from the rest of the texts around it, almost like a detached paragraph.

His line of thought was very simple. Among the many traits of qi known to cultivators, one of the most important ones was to act like a medium and a reagent. Since the qi was attracted to the texts, there must be an underlying reason behind why such a rule was created inside the stadium by whoever had built it.

The most obvious answer was the activation of whatever was written in the texts. If the phrase ’Circle of Laws’ was relevant to this place, then forming some guesses about these texts was not difficult.

Due to the complicated arrangement of most of the texts on the walls, Han Xuhan had tracked down this detached jumble of texts in order to ensure that his qi could fill it up entirely without leaving a single stroke empty.

The moment his qi filled the last millimeter of the grooves, Han Xuhan felt something intangible explode inside his brain.

It felt like his head was being soaked inside a tornado of virtual symbols and complicated shapes that made no sense.

Yet, unlike a typical mental reaction to incomprehensible symbols, these refused to be forgotten. They started to occupy every bit of his consciousness as if his brain was trying its best to memorize them even without his intention to do so.

He felt a splitting sensation in his head for the next few seconds before the hallucinations faded away. Focusing his eyes on the wall in front of him, Han Xuhan realized what had just happened.

The jumble of texts on the wall no longer felt foreign to him. It was the most complicated style of written language he had ever seen in his lives.

Every stroke, every curve, every shape had different meanings, different subtypes and subtle differences to them.

Han Xuhan could only decipher the small jumble of texts he had managed to fill up. It took up barely two square feet on the wall. Yet he could recognize at least fifty different alphabets in it that could be read from up to down, right to left, corner to corner, and vice versa.

Scarily enough, all of those would have the same meaning regardless of how many ways one deciphered the texts. It was almost like a constantly adjusting living thing!

This language no longer seemed to consist of dead words on a flat surface but visible, intangible, moving imprints that could affect the reader’s mind and forcibly make them perceive what the writer wanted them to perceive.

Slowly, Han Xuhan managed to read the mass of text in front of him after getting used to the alien sensations his brain experienced while deciphering the words. It read:

[ No creature below the Soul Reformation Realm shall activate any law fragment of this circle, nor.... ]