Lin Feng asked himself.
While scanning the barren wilderness, Lin Feng quietly pondered, "Since it's a secret chamber that even the Hundred Herbs Sect's own disciples are unaware of, that means it's a place that unauthorized personnel definitely cannot access."
"Unauthorized personnel cannot access it, yet the Grandmaster himself can freely frequent the place ..." Lin Feng stomped his feet and stared at the gravel on the ground. "If one excavates a cave in the heart of Changchun Peak but doesn't leave a path to it, then passers-by wouldn't be able to access it."
"And as a cultivator in the Nascent Soul stage who can transverse space while negating terrain constraints, he would be able to enter the cave effortlessly just by knowing the exact location of the cave.
A smile crept over Lin Feng's face. "I may not be at the Nascent Soul stage but I can still enter the old duff's little treasure chest."
Once the Heaven and Earth Mirror confirmed the cave's exact location, Lin Feng waved the Black Cloud Flag and vanished on the spot in a spiral of dark mist.
When the kaleidoscope of images flashing randomly in space finally settled to pitch black, Lin Feng knew he had arrived.
In total darkness, Lin Feng's eyes were still sharp as ever, with the darkness not hindering his vision in the slightest.
Lin Feng came upon a door, but avoided touching it carelessly. Since this was the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster's secret elixir chamber, he would have put in place multiple precautionary measures to prevent others from entering.
Using the Black Cloud Flag's teleportation abilities, Lin Feng passed through the walls to the other side of the door.
He was welcomed by an array of traps installed by the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster.
Mutated man-eating giant ants from Nanjiang that feed on gold and metal.
Red devilish miasma that corrodes gold and drains the mana of cultivators.
Dense white fog that makes victims distraught and disoriented.
Ferocious demonic beasts under mind-control by the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster, that rival Aurous Core stage cultivators in strength.
But for Lin Feng, he could pass through all these obstacles with ease using the power of teleportation.
Yet, at the final hurdle, Lin Feng was stuck.
There was a thick layer of impenetrable ice that encircled the chamber, like a frigid ice fortress blocking Lin Feng's path.
Worse still, Lin Feng realized that the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster had imposed a spatial embargo in the area.
He didn't obstruct Lin Feng's teleportation abilities, but if Lin Feng attempts to cross the ice barrier and touch the spatial embargo, the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster would notice him immediately.
Lin Feng knocked on the ice. Its incredible sturdiness and durability may only be outmatched by the ancient glaciers of the North Polar Sea. God knows how the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster acquired such ice.
"The Grand Sun Primordial Flame can probably break this ice wall." Lin Feng summoned the kindling of the Primordial Flame, and shot out a ray of heavenly fire like a golden needle, and slowly melted the thick ice.
As one of the Seven Legendary Primordial Fires, the firepower of the Grand Sun Primordial Flame was astonishing, promptly cracking the surface of the ice and continuously penetrating deeper.
Suddenly, Lin Feng felt an odd sensation, realizing that the melting ice had triggered a reaction from the ice fortress.
This was a defence mechanism set by the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster. Once it is activated, he would immediately sense the presence of the intruder.
Lin Feng reacted instinctively, and immediately lifted his hand in the air and chopped downwards.
It was the Fences of the Heavens Spell, which broke the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster’s mana control of the area.
Lin Feng executed the spell extremely cautiously, taking great care not to cut off the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster's connections with the place permanently, but merely to create a temporary shield to contain all reactions from the changing ice wall within the cave, so as to not alert the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster.
But these types of barriers cannot last for long.
Especially since this wasn't Lin Feng's actual body, but the Avatar of Ares. Lin Feng's physical body has immense strength, but this spell could not rely on his physical prowess for power.
Lin Feng glanced at the progress of the melting ice and did a quick estimation. His heart sank.
The Fences of the Heavens would collapse long before the Grand Sun Primordial Flame manages to burn through the ice wall.
All in all, even though the Grand Sun Primordial Flame is formidable, having just one kindling is still too little.
Just a while more and the ice wall may have been broken, but there was no time to spare.
"Maybe I can try using this?"
An idea flashed through Lin Feng's mind, and he took out a reddish blue fruit. The top half of it was fiery red with scalding heat, while the bottom half was icy blue and freezing cold. It was the Fire and Ice Fruit which Lin Feng previously won from a lucky draw.
Based on its description, it's a very strange item. It turns cold when it touches something hot, and vice versa.
Lin Feng threw the Fire and Ice Fruit at the ice wall. When the fruit came into contact with the frigid ice, it suddenly transformed.
The fruit peel glowed with piercing red light, and instantaneously sparked a drastic reaction with the freezing ice wall.
The severe cold air suddenly ignited.
The ice was burning!
The freezing ice instantly morphed into raging fire, and the growing flames spread incessantly in all directions.
The freezing air fuelled the inferno further and the flames roared on.
Lin Feng gasped in awe. "Sure enough, it melts freezing ice into fuel for burning. The colder the ice, the stronger the flames. This little thing indeed contains a few unique twists and turns that defy common logic."
The special characteristics of the Fire and Ice Fruit certainly bear some similarities with those of the Two Elements of Creation Formation, which can turn raging fire into falling rain and transform howling winds into roaring thunder.
Lin Feng kept the Primordial Flame kindling and sure enough, the falling temperature of the ice wall instead triggered the Fire and Ice Fruit to burn even stronger, heightening the intensity of the flames.
In just a short amount of time, the raging fire scorched a huge hole in the ice fortress and through the entire width of the wall. After reaching the other side, the fire had no intention of extinguishing, and instead blazed even wilder, about to incinerate the entire fortress.
Lin Feng frowned. This was not what he had intended to do.
He threw out the kindling of the Primordial Fire once more, not at the ice wall but this time at the Fire and Ice Fruit.
Since the Fire and Ice Fruit has such flexible capabilities, Lin Feng could now use them to produce freezing air from the intense flames.
But when the kindling touched the Fire and Ice Fruit, the flames did not chill to freezing air.
Lin Feng then realized, "The Fire and Ice Fruit has its limits too. It cannot freeze flames as intense as those of the Seven Legendary Primordial Fires."
After keeping the Grand Sun Primordial Flame, Lin Feng summoned his Acalanātha Inferno.
This time he succeeded. Upon coming into contact with the Fire and Ice Fruit, the milky-white flames rapidly chilled to piercing cold air, and slowly extinguished the raging fire.
The freezing air even started to glaciate the wall again, and was about to seal up the hole Lin Feng made.
Lin Feng kept the Acalanātha Inferno and the Fire and Ice Fruit, and leapt through the hole in the ice wall.
The Fire and Ice Fruit burned through the ice wall within a very short amount of time, so Lin Feng's Fences of the Heavens was still intact even after he went through the wall.
After keeping the Fences of the Heavens, Lin Feng realized that, even though there was a now a gaping hole in the ice wall, there was no mana or spiritual energy left on the wall, so the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster's defences triggered no reactions.
It was as if the ice wall already had a hole in the first place.
Lin Feng smiled and put his heart at ease, then continued deeper into the ice fortress.
The Hundred Herbs Grandmaster's cave in the heart of Changchun Peak was immense, with layers of fortified defences shielding the true elixir chamber inside the ice fortress.
Within the ice fortress stood a massive stone house. Lin Feng walked in and realized that it was split into outer and inner halves.
The outer half was empty, with nothing at all.
Lin Feng's nose twitched as it took a whiff of a faint herbal aroma.
The aroma was peculiar, with the fragrance brimming with life and vitality yet hiding an undertone of death.
"What elixir is this?" Lin Feng twitched his eyebrows and walked forward, opening the stone door that led to the inner chamber.
The inner chamber was more than twice the size of the outer half, and unlike the outer half, was filled with a whole array of things.
Exactly fifty huge urns were arranged orderly in rows across the chamber.
The herbal aroma Lin Feng had noticed earlier were drifting out from these fifty urns.
A small stove was set up beneath each urn, each burning with a small green flame.
Lin Feng took out the Heaven and Earth Mirror to check, and realized that the Swelling Earth that the Hundred Herbs Grandmaster had collected were evenly distributed beneath each of the fifty urns.
"Brewing elixirs?" Lin Feng walked forward and lifted the cover of one of the urns.
He looked inside, and a surge of cool air instantly rushed from Lin Feng's feet up to his head.
The urn was filled with a thick black herbal concoction that bubbled from time to time.
And inside the black herbal concoction, there was a four or five-year-old boy being boiled!
"What the f*ck!" Lin Feng almost toppled the huge urn as he shot out his leg in shock. "Does the Xianxia World also dabble in biochemical weapons?"
Upon closer inspection, Lin Feng realized that he got it wrong.
The Hundred Herbs Grandmaster was even more psychotic and ruthless than he had imagined.
Inside the boy's body, was a small illusory elixir crucible held together by herbal spiritual energy. And in this virtual crucible, floated an equally illusory elixir pill formed also from spiritual energy.
At first, Lin Feng thought that this was the supposed Mortal Spiritual Elixir. But then he realized that it was not the case.
Because the pill gave off a faint underlying scent of immortal gold that transcended life and death.
In other words, there were Aurous Cores that resembled cultivators in the Aurous Core stage.
"How is it possible to form the Aurous Core at such a young age?" Lin Feng shook his head and tried to calm down. "His Aura Sea hasn't even opened, his Spiritual Altar hasn't been established, and although the spiritual energy in his body is more than ample, it's all forced in externally. He can't even be considered as a true cultivator."
"But there's a crucible in the body, and a growing Aurous Core inside. This is really strange."
Lin Feng carefully used his own mana to investigate the illusory elixir, and promptly realized that despite bearing the scent of an Aurous Core cultivator, the overwhelming herbal aroma would make it less of an Aurous Core and more of an elixir.
"I get it now. The supposed Mortal Spiritual Elixir is not the single pill, but the boy's entire body." Lin Feng's face went blank, and he stared at it with cold eyes. "This child is the damned Mortal Spiritual Elixir."
"It's not just the medium to craft the elixir in, but it's also the elixir itself."
Lin Feng exhaled a long breath of impure aura and sneered, "Hundred Herbs Grandmaster, you certainly have impressive ideas, but it would be preposterous for me to just let you have your way."