Heavenly Dao Engine
Chapter 457 - 457 0323 Almost Bitten the Dust

Chapter 457: Chapter 0323: Almost Bitten the Dust Chapter 457: Chapter 0323: Almost Bitten the Dust Chapter 0323: Nearly Lost His Life

Qi Tian thoroughly explored the entire village, inside and outside. Once confident there was nothing left to find, he returned to the secret passage. As he retreated, he destroyed the passage. This passage had no reason to exist anymore. Was he supposed to let the Ghost God Temple and native cultivators join forces and invade the mine?

Qi Tian destroyed about ten miles of the secret passage. When he returned to the branch junction, he stopped his destruction. He looked up at the upward tunnel and without any hesitation, started walking along it. He wanted to find out where this tunnel led. Maybe there was another secret passage that led to the outside world.

As Qi Tian entered the branching passage, the Heavenly Dao Engine initially didn’t react, but as Qi Tian penetrated deeper within, he was surprised to find that the Heavenly Dao Engine’s reactions were escalating. It seemed as if there was a treasure filled with dense Spirit Qi waiting for him ahead.

Increasing his alertness while accelerating his pace, Qi Tian soon came upon an open space. The end of the branch tunnel was a huge cave approximately five or six acres in size. It was entirely turned into a medicinal garden full of a great amount of shade-loving plants. Some of them were unknown to Qi Tian, but the sight of the others filled him with joy. He found several types of spirit medicine used for refining Golden Elixirs. These medicines, even in Wanjie City, were extremely hard to come by. As it turned out, they were being cultivated here.

Regrettably, before Qi Tian arrived, someone had already swept through the medicinal garden. Almost all mature medicinal materials had been dug up and taken away. Except for a few, the rest were immature. Even if they were dug up, they won’t be of much use. What was even more infuriating was that several spirit medicines had been destroyed, rendering them entirely worthless.

For most people, in such a situation, they would probably just quickly look around the medicinal garden, take a few useful herbs, and then leave. Any energy wasted on destroying the garden could be better spent searching the mine and digging up a few more spirit stones.

However, Qi Tian was not just anyone. With the Heavenly Dao Engine at his disposal, he needed everything imbued with Spirit Qi. Although most of the spirit medicines in the garden were immature and had very low medicinal value, numerous ones were quite rich with Spirit Qi. He would not let them go easily. As for the other immature spirit medicines with lower levels of Spirit Qi, he still planned to take them. This was a medicinal garden created by the native cultivators. Once Wanjie Commerce had taken sufficient spirit stones and left, this garden would return to the native cultivators. Was he really supposed to let them resuscitate it after returning?

Qi Tian immediately took action. Using the Innate Spirit Treasure Level mining spade, he began to dig. All plants, along with the soil underneath them, were dug up by the mining spade and then transported to the Heavenly Dao Engine’s material store. At this time, Qi Tian didn’t want to use all of them as fuel for the Heavenly Dao Engine. The Engine had plenty of fuel at the moment. The over one hundred Half-Step Golden Core individuals he just killed would be more than enough for a long time.

Qi Tian planned to find more books on spirit medicines and make up for his lack of knowledge. He needed to identify what he had exactly dug up. He couldn’t afford to feed some exceptionally precious spirit medicines to the Heavenly Dao Engine as fuel just because he couldn’t identify them, that would be a pity.

Before long, Qi Tian had excavated the entire garden, not even leaving a single leaf of spirit medicine. Just as he was about to turn to leave, he suddenly remembered something. The native cultivators who set up such a large medicinal garden here must have done so for a reason other than the fact that sunlight couldn’t reach here.

He checked around but didn’t find anything special. He then activated the full range sensing of the Heavenly Dao Engine. By casting off all distractions to sense everything around him, he eventually noticed that there appeared to be some fluctuations in Spirit Qi approximately two miles above the center of the medicinal garden. This location was basically beyond the sensing limit of the Heavenly Dao Engine, and if he wasn’t carefully attuned to it, he might have missed this detail.

Qi Tian immediately launched his flying sword and rode it towards the top of the mountain. The closer he got to the mountain top, the more intense the fluctuations in Spirit Qi.

Without hesitation, Qi Tian controlled the mining spade and started digging. As he dug deeper, he found that the fluctuations in Spirit Qi sensed by the Heavenly Dao Engine were getting stronger.

After he dug up a tunnel approximately two miles in depth from the cave roof, he found, to his joy, that he had broken into a rich spirit stone mine. He could easily dig up three or four spirit stones with a single swing of his mining spade. At least one of them would be a middle-grade spirit stone. This pace and high quality of mining even surprised Qi Tian, who had already dug numerous small and micro-veins.

Qi Tian, laughing heartily, began mining. It took him a whopping three days to completely mine the considerable vein, even with the power of the Innate Spirit Treasure level mining spade. Rough estimates suggested that this vein alone had added thousands of top-grade spirit stones, over a million middle-grade spirit stones and billions of low-grade spirit stones to Qi Tian’s inventory.

While mining, Qi Tian thought of a possibility. The native cultivators who had grown medicines in the garden below were most likely aware of this vein. Instead of mining, they had arranged an array to nourish the spirit medicines in the garden below with the Spirit Qi from the vein. Had it not been for this, the vein might have contained even more spirit stones of better quality, probably even top-grade ones. Regrettably, Qi Tian had not dug up a single top-grade spirit stone this time.

After Qi Tian had cleaned out the vein, he activated the Heavenly Dao Engine to ensure that no other veins were overlooked. He triple-checked the medicinal garden, inside out, to make sure there was nothing else left. Then, he left.

What Qi Tian didn’t know was that after Wanjie Commerce withdrew from the mine, the native cultivators retook it. They sent people to inspect the mine. Upon discovering the uprooted medicinal garden and the vein on the mountain top that had been mined to the point of not having a single spirit stone left, they were directly shocked to the point of vomiting blood, almost losing their lives.