Chapter 2708 — A Peculiar Result

As for why he called it similar rather than identical, that was because Wei Zhao's memory of it had blurred somewhat; he could no longer recall the exact appearance of the medicinal cauldron.

Be that as it may, whether identical or not, Wei Zhao understood one thing clearly: he had missed out on something truly extraordinary. That cauldron was unquestionably a treasure, and someone had carried it off.

Shaking his head, he set the matter of the cauldron aside for the moment and turned to Yu Xiaoke. "Apart from that cauldron, was anything else taken from here?"

"Nothing else that I could find..." Yu Xiaoke shook her head.

Just then, White Leader let out a cry of surprise. "Found it! The treasure is at the very bottom of this shelf!"

At his exclamation, Wei Zhao and Yu Xiaoke followed the direction of his pointing finger. There lay a large round pearl, ashen and dull in appearance, looking nothing at all like a treasure. Most likely even tomb robbers would have overlooked the thing, mistaking it for an ordinary stone.

"How is this used?" Wei Zhao asked, glancing at the great pearl before him.

"The method is actually quite simple. You need only place your hand upon it and circulate the incantation of your cultivation art," said White Leader. "The colors the pearl displays will reveal the attributes of your constitution."

"Oh? All right!" Wei Zhao nodded, placed his hand on the great pearl as instructed, and began to circulate the Xuanyuan Dragon-Taming Art. In an instant, the formerly drab pearl was utterly transformed!

Seven bands of color took shape upon it, though none of them shone with particular brightness, and each band was hollow at its core.

At the sight of these colors, White Leader's face contorted into an expression of utter astonishment and wonder. For a long while he was speechless. Only after quite some time did he manage, in a voice of dread, "A Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution—but every single attribute is a Void attribute. Within your body there is not one True attribute, nor even a False one!"

"Oh? Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution? All Void attributes? What sort of constitution is that?" Wei Zhao was stunned, and White Leader's words had shaken him badly. He himself possessed a Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution, yet all of it was Void, with not a single True attribute?

"Indeed. According to the records here, each attribute corresponds to one color, and this Five Elements Pearl can display seven colors in all, representing metal, wood, water, fire, and earth, as well as the ice and mist attributes derived from the water element," White Leader explained. "A fully solid, bright band of color indicates a True attribute. A half-solid band indicates a False attribute. But a hollow, dim band such as these indicates a Void attribute... And a Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution means that your body possesses the five elemental attributes and at the same time the three water-derived constitutions of water, ice, and mist—seven in total. Hence the name Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution!"

Wei Zhao's eyes went wide at White Leader's words, though he was left somewhat speechless as well. His constitution was indeed remarkable—a true Five Elements Sevenfold Constitution would surely be a rarity unmatched in the world. But as fate would have it, his attributes were Void, and the five elements could not form a cycle within him, locking instead into a state of mutual suppression. That alone made it impossible for him ever to become an alchemist.

"Then... this constitution of mine... what is it exactly?" Wei Zhao stood there dumbfounded for a long moment before he finally managed to ask.

"Your body possesses no True attribute whatsoever. In the common parlance of the cultivation world, that makes you a dud—a waste of a cultivator. Even if you can cultivate, you could never attain any great strength. You can generate Void attributes, yes, but the cultivation speed of a Void attribute is markedly slower than that of a True or False attribute constitution," White Leader said. "And yet you happen to possess so many Void attributes, and your cultivation speed is far from slow. That is truly strange!"

"I..." Wei Zhao could only smile bitterly. He knew his own affairs best. Was his cultivation speed truly fast? On the surface it seemed so, but without the jade pendant's space, without Wang Xinyan, would it still be fast?

The answer was plainly no. Without those advantages, Wei Zhao would still be a lone wandering cultivator, and the other cultivators would long since have left him countless miles behind.

"Even if you were to receive the source attributes through inheritance, it would still be a great deal of trouble. You would have to seek out inheritances at five elemental sites and seven source sites—that is far too troublesome," White Leader said with some helplessness.

"In other words, there is no solution for the time being?" Wei Zhao asked.

"As things stand, no." White Leader spread his hands and gave a bitter smile.

"Very well. If that is how it is, there is no use forcing the matter." Wei Zhao did not agonize over it unduly. After all, to have come this far and to finally understand the nature of his own constitution was already no small thing. As for transforming all his attributes into True attributes, that still seemed to him a distant impossibility.

"By the way, you mentioned earlier that an incense burner is missing from here?" White Leader asked, looking toward the empty spot where something had been removed.

"Yes, a medicinal cauldron. It was still here when I left last time, but this time it was gone. Plainly someone who had pored over the Record of Strange Tales and Curious Matters before us made off with it!" Wei Zhao said.

"Oh? A medicinal cauldron?" White Leader was briefly taken aback. "What cauldron? What did it look like?"

A medicinal cauldron here would certainly have been a treasure, and that it had been taken filled White Leader with immense regret. Had he come a little sooner, might things have turned out differently?

"This cauldron was like this—You Panhu once traded me a pile of junk for some things. That junk cauldron of his ought to be very similar to this one. I have a photograph of it here." With that, Wei Zhao took out his phone, called up a picture, and handed it to White Leader.

"What? The Shennong Cauldron?" White Leader stared at the photograph of the cauldron in Wei Zhao's hand, his eyes going wide with shock.

"The Shennong Cauldron?" Wei Zhao was taken aback, thinking to himself: Could this really be such a treasure?

"The Shennong Cauldron was used to refine immortal elixirs. In ancient times it was called the Cauldron of Creation. As everyone knows, in remote antiquity Shennong tasted a hundred herbs for the sake of the people and laid the foundations of medicine for later ages. But what most people do not know is that Shennong was the forefather of all alchemists—it was he who invented the art of elixir refinement, and the alchemy of us cultivators has all flowed from his hands and been carried forward and made great!"