The Eternal Farmer: I Trade My Harvest for Immortality

A cold sweat broke out across Jiang Chen’s back, and his skin crawled with visceral dread.

I cannot stay in this city a second longer, he realized, his pragmatic survival instincts screaming at him. I might have an eight-hundred-year lifespan, but I am nowhere near invincible.

Mind made up, he immediately turned away from the crowd and retreated to the Cloud Sea Sect’s temporary compound.

Not long after, Chen Tian, Long Ao, and the rest of the Golden Core strike team returned from their maritime patrol. They looked satisfied, having slaughtered a substantial number of deep-sea demons and monsters.

Jiang Chen intercepted Chen Tian immediately. “Senior Brother Chen, I need to request a leave of absence. I want to return to the sect and check on my Spirit Farm and crops.”

Chen Tian blinked in surprise. “You want to head back already?”

Jiang Chen spread his hands in a gesture of utter, helpless boredom. “Other than cooking meals, I serve absolutely no combat role here.”

Chen Tian chuckled and nodded in understanding. “A fair point.”

Forcing a cultivator whose entire existence revolved around peaceful agriculture to languish in a high-stakes battleground was tantamount to torture. Furthermore, Jiang Chen had already been heavily compensated for his scouting efforts. There was no reason to keep him tethered to the front lines.

“Before I go,” Jiang Chen asked, feigning casual curiosity, “is the Canglan Sea truly this dangerous? Are we really relying solely on the core disciples to hold the line?”

Chen Tian waved a hand dismissively, lowering his voice. “We are merely the vanguard, stationed here to draw out the enemy and act as a deterrent. Make no mistake, my Master and several other Nascent Soul stage Immortal Elders have their Divine Senses locked onto this entire sector.”

I knew it wasn’t that simple, Jiang Chen thought, exhaling a quiet breath of relief.

He bid Chen Tian farewell, but he didn’t immediately bolt for the city gates. To avoid raising any sudden suspicions, he stayed to prepare the sect’s lunch.

While cooking, he overheard the latest gossip sweeping the compound: Zhao Qianyun had awoken from his catatonic state and surrendered the exact location and sea routes for Dream Island.

Jiang Chen felt absolutely zero interest in participating in the inevitable, blood-soaked crusade. Instead, he kicked his cooking speed into overdrive. The moment the last dish was plated, he didn’t even stop to say goodbye. He summoned the Shattered Moon Flowing Frost, launched himself into the sky, and fled Mystic Heart City at top speed.

He stayed airborne only until he was certain he was completely alone over the open ocean. Flying was far too conspicuous; a lone cultivator in the sky was a prime target for aerial predators or rogue ambushes.

He killed his momentum and plunged directly into the ocean, instantly deploying the Thunder Dragon Water-Repelling Boat.

Underwater, the advantage shifted entirely to him. Not only was he shielded by the boat’s advanced concealment formations, but if worse came to worst, he could trigger the Flood Dragon Transformation to drastically boost his combat and evasion prowess.

The Canglan Sea was currently a boiling cauldron of sectarian and demonic violence; paranoia was the only logical policy.

Jiang Chen piloted the vessel deep into the lightless abyss, finding a quiet, geographically isolated trench. Only then did he finally allow himself to relax, slipping out of reality and into his personal pocket dimension.

The moment he materialized, he was greeted by a highly pleasant surprise.

His Pattern Bone Puppets had been incredibly industrious. They had successfully extracted nearly a third of the secondary, small coffins from the Formation grid surrounding the central sarcophagus.

The coffins were piled haphazardly near the portal entrance. Some were heavily damaged from the brutal extraction process, while others were perfectly intact. The dense, esoteric runes carved into the wood remained completely indecipherable to Jiang Chen, but it didn’t matter.

Inside his pocket dimension, his word was absolute law. The spatial laws of the realm suppressed and neutralized any hostile magical or external threats. No matter what horrors were sealed inside these coffins, they were powerless here.

Jiang Chen approached an intact coffin. He mentally mapped and memorized the runic configuration on the lid, then stepped back. He gestured to the surrounding squad of Pattern Bone Puppets. “Open it.”

Click. Crack.

The skeletal puppets dug their bony fingers under the lid and violently wrenched it upward.

Hisssss!

A thick, pungent plume of black, necrotic gas violently erupted from the interior, filling the immediate area with the sickening stench of localized rot.

Jiang Chen waited for the miasma to dissipate before stepping forward to inspect the contents.

His eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated shock.

“What the hell…?”

It wasn’t a cursed artifact. It wasn’t a demonic weapon.

Lying inside the coffin was the corpse of a human cultivator.

And more horrifyingly—it looked fresh.

Jiang Chen had assumed that the coffins shielding the millennial sarcophagus contained ancient, profound relics directly tied to Patriarch Carving Trace. He never imagined they were essentially living sacrifices.

The corpse was severely emaciated, its flesh sunken and withered, completely drained of all vital essence. Yet, the high-grade fabric of its robes and the lingering effects of a dust-repelling array indicated that the cultivator hadn’t been dead for very long.

A chilling thought struck Jiang Chen. They might have been thrown in here while they were still breathing.

“Open the rest,” Jiang Chen commanded instantly.

The puppets systematically popped the lids off the surrounding coffins. His grim hypothesis was validated: every single one contained a human corpse.

However, the timeline was scattered. Some corpses had been sealed for centuries; the moment the lids were removed, the sudden exposure to the outside air caused their rotted robes and desiccated bones to instantly collapse into fine, gray dust.

It painted a terrifying picture. The central sarcophagus was a parasite, feeding off a constant, centuries-long supply of sacrificial cultivators to power its suppression array.

Jiang Chen began meticulously looting the fresher corpses. He struck gold, securing several high-capacity Storage Bags and Storage Rings.

The loot was phenomenal. By examining the personal effects, he managed to identify several of the victims.

One of them had actually been a high-ranking Golden Core talisman master from the Cloud Sea Sect.

Cracking open the master’s Storage Ring, Jiang Chen discovered an absolute treasure trove of highly advanced talisman-crafting literature, jade slips, and personal grimoires.

More importantly, he recovered a set of ultra-premium, professional-grade crafting tools: a Three-Aperture Spirit Brush, reams of Five-Elements Talisman Paper, a Myriad Spirits Inkstone, a Soul-Locking Cinnabar Box, a Rune-Settling Paperweight, a Spirit-Wrist stabilization bracelet, a Hundred Talisman Appraisal lens, a Purifying Spirit Cloth, and a specialized Spirit-Carrying Bag.

These items weren’t just high-end; they were bespoke, master-crafted tools worth a small fortune.

“I can only use this gear in absolute privacy,” Jiang Chen muttered pragmatically, pocketing the haul. “If I ever bust out a master’s signature equipment in public, someone will recognize it and ask very uncomfortable questions.”

Meanwhile, inside the Seal Bone Tomb, the extraction operation was reaching a critical tipping point.

As the number of secondary coffins dwindled, the oppressive suppression barrier shielding the central sarcophagus continued to degrade. Once the puppets had removed a full third of the sacrificial coffins, the barrier catastrophically collapsed.

The Pattern Bone Puppets could now march directly up to the monolithic stone sarcophagus without triggering any defensive retaliation.

The irony wasn’t lost on Jiang Chen. The tomb was an impregnable fortress designed to obliterate any foreign intruder, yet it was being casually dismantled from the inside out by its own subverted tomb guardians. The Formation recognized the puppets as ‘allied’ entities, allowing them to bypass the absolute laws of the realm.

Through Crow Five’s shared vision, Jiang Chen stared at the colossal, rune-scarred sarcophagus.

His heart hammered with intense anticipation. Whatever was sealed inside that monolith was the ultimate prize of a 500-year cycle.

He needed it. His cultivation had reached its absolute limit at Foundation Establishment Perfection. The next hurdle was the Golden Core tribulation.

If he possessed a standard, single Spirit Root, breaking through to an Earth-Grade Golden Core would be a manageable challenge. But Jiang Chen, driven by his obsessive need to perfect his spirit farming, had aggressively altered his physique to encompass all five elemental Spirit Roots.

As a result, the Heavenly Tribulation he would face during his breakthrough wouldn’t just be scaled up—it would be unimaginably apocalyptic. The turbid lightning would be at least eight times more concentrated and lethal than a standard tribulation.

He needed every single high-tier resource, artifact, and miracle he could get his hands on to ensure his survival.

Calming his racing thoughts, he commanded the vanguard of Pattern Bone Puppets to lift the sarcophagus.

They failed catastrophically.

The moment the first thirty puppets attempted to hoist the monolith, the sheer, crushing mass of the Profound Yin Stone caused their skeletal frames to instantly buckle and violently shatter into bone shrapnel.

The sarcophagus was unimaginably heavy.

“Fine. Brute force it is,” Jiang Chen grunted.

He funneled massive surges of Spirit Qi through the portal, reviving hundreds of dormant puppets from the surrounding boneyard. Drawing upon his newly acquired talisman mastery, he mentally cast a dense array of localized weight-bearing runes directly onto their skeletal frames, exponentially increasing their physical durability.

When the swarm of heavy-lifting puppets exceeded a hundred, they crowded around the monolith and heaved.

RUMBLE…

The subterranean plaza violently shook. Slowly, agonizingly, the impossibly heavy stone sarcophagus hovered an inch off the ground.

Jiang Chen’s heart leapt into his throat. He hadn’t felt this kind of visceral thrill since his first visit to the Fragrance Pavilion.

CRACK. SHATTER. RUMBLE.

For every single agonizing step the puppet swarm took toward the portal, at least twenty skeletons were violently crushed under the sheer mass of the stone.

But Jiang Chen was relentless. He stood at the portal’s edge, constantly pumping Spirit Qi into the tomb to revive the shattered puppets and seamlessly cycle them back into the lifting line.

Hours bled away in a grueling, grinding war of attrition.

Inch by inch, the swarm dragged the monolithic sarcophagus out of the deep plaza, through the ancient corridors, and into the outer perimeter.

Finally, the colossal stone rested exactly one step away from the gray vortex of the portal.