The Eternal Farmer: I Trade My Harvest for Immortality

The massive lid and the body of the sarcophagus fit together with absolute, seamless precision, giving the illusion that the monolith had never been hollowed out.

Carved into the exact center of the lid was a colossal, unblinking Heavenly Eye. The pupil wasn’t made of stone; it was an embedded chunk of translucent Netherworld Jade. This ultra-rare mineral was famously native only to the Return to Ruins Secret Realm.

Surrounding the sarcophagus were eight monolithic stone pillars. The pillars were bound tight with mummified, leathery tendons harvested from ancient corpses. Suspended from the apex of each pillar was a single bronze bell.

The bells swayed rhythmically in the dead air, yet they produced absolutely zero sound. The eerie silence was nauseating.

Seeing the layout through his puppet’s shared vision, Jiang Chen’s pupils contracted. “Could it be…?”

The Seal Bone Tomb was historically recorded as the final resting place of Patriarch Carving Trace. At some point in antiquity, for reasons entirely lost to history, the tomb had locked itself down, mutating into a high-tier secret realm that only opened once every five hundred years and strictly barred anyone below the Golden Core stage.

Generations of elite cultivators had attempted to crack its secrets. Qin Hao’s martial uncle, the ‘Heart-Eye Sword’ Mo Yuan, had managed to excavate a massive stone slab and the anomalous Talisman Spirit Flower during a previous cycle. Yet, despite decades of research, he had failed to decipher their true purpose.

Staring at the apocalyptic scale of the sarcophagus, Jiang Chen formulated a terrifying thought regarding its occupant.

It was either Patriarch Carving Trace himself.

Or it was an entity the Patriarch deemed monumentally important to seal away.

Either way, the monolith and whatever slept inside it were catastrophically dangerous.

Jiang Chen hadn’t expected to hit the motherlode right before leaving the dimension. Eager to push his luck, he mentally commanded the Pattern Bone Puppets to advance on the central sarcophagus.

They couldn’t.

The moment the skeletal puppets crossed a specific threshold, a suffocating, invisible pressure slammed down on them. They froze in place, locked out by the tomb’s absolute laws. The furthest they could advance was the perimeter ring of smaller, secondary coffins.

Jiang Chen analyzed the layout. “Whatever is inside that sarcophagus is highly valuable. I need it. But this ring of smaller coffins… it’s an interconnected Formation array. If I dismantle the array nodes, the suppression barrier should collapse.”

His strategy was brutally simple. He funneled a massive surge of Spirit Qi into the portal, forcefully reviving another wave of Pattern Bone Puppets.

He updated their primary command: “Retrieve the immobilized frontline puppets. Dismantle and extract the secondary coffins to the portal zone.”

Whether the brute-force method would actually shatter the Formation was irrelevant right now; it was the only viable starting move.

Having issued his commands, Jiang Chen immediately severed his spiritual link. He dispelled the Major Rain Spell, exited his pocket dimension, and walked out of the Sea Demon Pavilion.

He casually merged into the bustling foot traffic of the Shattered Demon Market.

“How much for this water demon?”

“Is the meat still fresh?”

“Come on, I’m provisioning for an Immortal Sect. Cut me a wholesale discount!”

After a grueling hour of ruthless haggling, Jiang Chen secured his required ingredients. He wasn’t buying a pound or two of meat; he was purchasing literal tons of raw flesh and spirit herbs.

The Cloud Sea Sect maintained a garrison of several hundred disciples in Mystic Heart City. While standard military rations were barely a step above a Vitality Pill, the meals Jiang Chen cooked were infinitely close to genuine spirit cuisine. They provided tangible, measurable buffs to spiritual recovery and physical stamina.

The food was so potent that even the Golden Core elites—Qin Hao, Chen Tian, and Feng Lie—made it a point to eat his cooking at least once a day.

Jiang Chen harbored zero resentment regarding his role as the sect’s glorified caterer. In fact, he reveled in it. Let the Golden Core masters bleed out in the ocean fighting monsters; he was perfectly content to stay safely behind the walls, washing vegetables and securing his position.

Seven days vanished in the blink of an eye.

The week passed without any apocalyptic incidents, though the ocean remained volatile. The Turbid Current Belt, heavily polluted by necrotic energy, began spawning mutated water demons and sea monsters with significantly higher levels of power.

Rumors even circulated that a Green Water Demon Ape had been sighted.

While its carcass wasn’t as valuable as a millennial flood dragon, a Green Water Demon Ape was an exceptionally rare, high-tier beast. More importantly, its innate, monstrous physical strength and absolute mastery over water manipulation made it the ultimate aquatic spirit pet. If a cultivator could tame one, their combat effectiveness at sea would instantly double.

Consequently, the core disciples of the three major Immortal Sects, along with the elites from the minor Cultivation sects, were currently scouring the ocean in a frenzied manhunt.

None of this concerned Jiang Chen.

His entire focus was locked onto his pocket dimension—specifically, the retrieval efforts within the Seal Bone Tomb.

His brute-force approach had proven correct. For every small coffin his puppets extracted from the Formation layout, the invisible suppression barrier protecting the central sarcophagus degraded. Based on his current extraction rate, his puppets would breach the monolith’s perimeter in exactly three days.

Then, he would finally crack open the lid and see exactly what Patriarch Carving Trace had buried.

However, his patient anticipation was suddenly derailed by an event that plunged Mystic Heart City into utter chaos.

Zhao Qianyun had returned.

He hadn’t arrived via ship or teleportation array. He was found drifting aimlessly on the ocean currents, half-dead and delirious, before being fished out of the water by a Dragon Tiger Immortal Sect patrol.

“Zhao Qianyun? The City Lord’s son? Isn’t he a late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator?”

“Didn’t he have a mutated Ice-Water dual Spirit Root?”

“I thought he was leading the expedition on Dream Island!”

A massive crowd gathered around the city square, whispering furiously as they stared at Zhao Qianyun’s prone, ruined body.

The commotion was so massive that it immediately drew out the heavyweights. Qin Hao, Su Ningshuang, and Zhao Lie quickly pushed through the crowd.

Qin Hao crouched down, his brow furrowing. “Old Mo, are we absolutely certain this is Zhao Qianyun?”

Zhao Lie shot him an irritated glare. “Since when are we on a first-name basis?”

Qin Hao offered a diplomatic, apologetic smile. “Ahem. Fellow Daoist Zhao.”

Zhao Lie turned his attention back to the body. “Identity confirmed. This is Zhao Qianyun, son of the Mystic Heart City Lord. However… his physical foundation has been completely annihilated.”

Qin Hao swept the body with his Divine Sense. He recoiled slightly. “This is impossible. Where is his essence, energy, and spirit?”

Zhao Lie shook his head grimly. “It’s not just his essence. Every single drop of vital yin-yang energy in his body has been violently plundered.”

It was an incredibly polite, euphemistic way of stating the brutal truth.

The surrounding cultivators weren’t idiots. Realization dawned rapidly. Some wore expressions of sheer horror, while others looked profoundly uncomfortable, fighting the inappropriate urge to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the method used to cripple a high-ranking young master.

Still, it was deeply unnerving. A late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator possessed a robust, highly fortified bodily foundation. To be completely drained of life force required a staggering, terrifying level of parasitic extraction.

Hidden in the back of the crowd, Jiang Chen narrowed his eyes, his calculating mind rapidly analyzing the situation. Why return now? Why not earlier, or later? And more importantly… why is he the only survivor?

According to the sect’s intelligence, Zhao Qianyun had led an initial force of over a thousand cultivators to Dream Island. Following the severing of the dragon vein and the subsequent destabilization of the region, nearly ten thousand more desperate rogues and civilians had flocked to the island seeking refuge or profit.

An army went to Dream Island. One hollowed-out husk returned. The implications were catastrophic.

Kneeling beside the body, Qin Hao placed a hand on Zhao Qianyun’s chest and channeled a specialized diagnostic spell. His eyes widened in absolute shock.

“His Spirit Root…” Qin Hao breathed, his voice trembling slightly. “His Ice-Water Spirit Root has been completely erased.”

The declaration hit the crowd like a physical blow. Su Ningshuang, Zhao Lie, and the other core disciples surged forward, their expressions shifting from concern to raw, unfiltered horror.

A cultivator’s entire existence was predicated upon Awakening a Spirit Root.

To lose a Spirit Root was to be violently demoted back to a mortal.

While Zhao Qianyun’s baseline physical constitution was still far beyond a commoner, his Cultivation path was permanently severed. Without a Spirit Root to sense, channel, and anchor ambient Spirit Qi, his dantian was a cracked vessel. Any remaining spiritual power in his meridians would slowly bleed out until he was completely, irreversibly dry.

But extracting a Spirit Root wasn’t a standard combat technique. It required a level of sadistic, esoteric precision that was practically mythological.

Every single Golden Core elite in the square instantly arrived at the exact same conclusion. There was only one syndicate in the entire region capable of orchestrating the severing of a dragon vein and the cruel erasure of a Spirit Root.

The Yellow Springs Alliance.

Zhao Qianyun’s emaciated body was covered in brutal lacerations. Some were jagged tears from submerged coral reefs, while others were bite marks from deep-sea predators. A few of the wounds were so horrific they exposed the white bone beneath the ruined flesh.

Standing in the back of the crowd, Jiang Chen’s eyes locked onto a deep gash on Zhao Qianyun’s forearm.

His breath caught in his throat.

Etched directly into the exposed, bloody bone was a microscopic, highly complex rune.

Jiang Chen recognized it instantly. It was the exact same control rune carved into the Pattern Bone Puppets currently marching through his pocket dimension.