According to the city annals of Yun City, historically, Yun City was a strategic military location, always a place of contention for warring factions.
To prevent the city from being besieged, a tradition was established: the city would always stockpile ten thousand dan of military grain.
This ensured that if the city were ever surrounded, the military and civilians within could be guaranteed three years of provisions.
However, no one knew where this grain was stored; only the City Lord knew.
Then, two hundred years ago, the heavens underwent a drastic change. Daytime turned to night, and the sun vanished.
Everyone was filled with fear and anxiety, believing a natural disaster had occurred and the world was about to be destroyed.
Following this, they saw a streak of blue meteor light, streaking across the sky and descending upon the City Lord's mansion.
It destroyed half of the mansion, and the City Lord himself was crushed by a falling beam, dying instantly.
Later, the imperial court allocated funds to rebuild the City Lord's mansion and appointed a new City Lord to Yun City.
But the ten thousand dan of military grain was never found. Yin Qing deduced that
the grain she had found was the long-lost military supply, which had been sealed away due to the City Lord's sudden death.
When the Xuanwu Base ran out of food, she wasn't as anxious as Feng Gui Qu, because she knew with the ten thousand dan of military grain as a backup, they wouldn't starve.
Initially, she hesitated whether to retrieve the grain, but today, on Yunmeng Mountain, she was provoked by Ming Yue.
So, she directly brought Feng Gui Qu to Yun City and opened the underground granary.
When the entrance to the granary opened just now, she felt something unusual, a special sensation in her heart.
It was a call of kinship, a communication of bloodlines, like the feeling of returning home.
In her previous life, she had also entered this place, but she hadn't felt this sensation. She immediately thought it was related to the lotus seed she had consumed.
That day outside Jincheng, she and Feng Gui Qu were severely wounded by Qi Wu. Feng Gui desperately helped her escape.
Before she lost consciousness, she told Feng Gui Qu to go to a temple on Luoyan Mountain, fifty li from Jincheng.
This was because, with their injuries, even if they survived, they would lose their abilities and become ordinary people.
This was something she would not allow. In her past life, she commanded the wind and rain, and dominated the world.
How could she, reborn, settle for mediocrity and live in constant fear in this apocalypse?
She recalled a piece of information she had heard in her previous life.
It was that in an unnamed temple on Luoyan Mountain, a ancient lotus seed was enshrined.
After the apocalypse, the temple had fallen into disrepair. One day, a survivor came to the temple and accidentally swallowed the lotus seed.
As a result, the survivor, who was originally a level two wood ability user, directly advanced to level nine and was recruited by the Azure Dragon Base.
In her previous life, with her spatial ability, she had never paid much attention to ability users, so she had heard and forgotten about it, not taking it to heart.
But now it was different. She didn't have her spatial ability and was just a low-level, level three wood ability user.
Now, severely injured, in her past life, she would have had healing elixirs in her spatial storage.
But not now. There was no way to heal her wounds, so she thought of using that miraculous lotus seed to recover and improve her level.
When she woke up, she found herself inside the temple, but Feng Gui Qu was already unconscious.
Already severely injured and having overused his wind ability to travel, Feng Gui Qu was on the verge of death.
Following the information from her memory, she found a sandalwood box in the palm of the Buddha statue in the main hall.
Upon opening it, she found a lotus seed. However, this lotus seed was very peculiar.
It was the same size and shape as an ordinary lotus seed, with no discernible difference, except that its texture was not like that of a plant seed.
It looked more like a decorative item carved from blue jade, hard to the touch, and not something edible.
But with things as they were, and Feng Gui Qu on the brink of death, Yin Qing had no choice but to try.
She put the lotus seed into her mouth and swallowed it, immediately feeling its effects.
Not only were her injuries instantly healed, but the wood ability within her felt inexhaustible.
Her ability level soared continuously, from level three all the way to level nine before it stopped.
The primary function of the wood element was healing. When Yin Qing felt her level was no longer increasing,
she immediately used her level nine healing technique to cure Feng Gui Qu's injuries. She also used her own surging wood power
to help Feng Gui Qu elevate his wind ability from level eight to level nine.
In the underground granary, Yin Qing stood still, emptying her mind.
She knew that her unusual feeling came from that ancient blue jade lotus seed. So, she calmed her mind and surrendered control.
Indeed, after she stopped thinking, the feeling intensified.
Following the sensation, she walked towards the north of the granary until she reached the wall.
She was certain that what was summoning her was behind the wall.
So, she condensed a vine, like a javelin, and thrust it into the bluestone wall in front of her.
She continuously channeled her ability, and the vine grew thicker and longer.
Suddenly, she felt the end of the vine become lighter, as if there was no more obstruction. She knew she had reached her destination.
She then retracted the vine, leaving a two-meter diameter passage in the wall.
Inside, a soft glow emanated, illuminating the granary as bright as day through the passage.
The powerful flashlight in her hand seemed like a firefly in comparison to the blue light.
Yin Qing rejoiced. In her previous life, she had seen countless treasures in her jade pendant space.
She knew that was the radiant light emitted by magical artifacts. She hadn't expected to find such a bonus while getting grain.
She also understood that the reason the grain here had remained unspoiled for a hundred years was not due to the superior storage techniques of the ancients.
But rather, it was due to the blessing of the radiant light, which allowed it to remain as fresh as new after centuries.
It seemed that the power of this artifact must be immense, otherwise, its radiant light alone could not cover an area of several thousand square meters.
It could also keep grain from two hundred years ago from spoiling, which was simply mythical.
While marveling at the artifact's power, she also lamented her past life. In her previous life, she had been curious about how this grain was preserved.
Why hadn't she inspected the surroundings of the granary? If she had possessed such a powerful artifact in her past life, would she not have died?
Lost in thought, she had already walked fifty meters down the passage.
She suddenly felt the space open up before her, revealing a space even larger than the granary. However, it was clearly not artificially constructed.
There were no signs of human construction at all; it was a deep pit, rough around the edges, wider at the top and narrower at the bottom.
In the center of the pit, a blue lotus flower, about a dozen meters in diameter,
floated in the air, slowly rotating and emitting a magnificent blue radiance. This seemed to be the treasure that kept the grain unspoiled for centuries.
Yin Qing approached and examined it carefully. She saw that the lotus had three layers of petals, both inside and out, totaling twenty-four blue petals.
In the center was a blue lotus pod with eleven lotus seeds, identical to the one she had swallowed.
However, each was five feet in size, and both the lotus and the seeds appeared to be carved from blue jade. There was an indentation on the lotus pod, clearly indicating one was missing.
Upon seeing this, Yin Qing realized that the lotus seed she had swallowed must have come from this lotus flower, though she didn't know why their sizes were so vastly different.
The one she swallowed must have fallen off for some reason and was enshrined in the nameless temple on Luoyan Mountain.
Just as she thought this, her expression changed, and her face turned pale.