Daily life of a cultivation judge-Chapter 950: The old man and the child (2)

So with everyone treating her like some possessed body, only the old blacksmith treated her differently. He treated her like a child and even taught her to read and write, and eventually when she had some strength in her, he had her help him itemize his materials, and go with him as he went inspecting the mountains and hills for prospective mineral lodes.

She was the only one who helped her feel the warmth of human relationships. A match truly made in heaven as the two outcasts of the village

As the days went by, Su Jinjing proved to be a great assistant to the old blacksmith especially when it came to prospecting. With her abnormally powerful soul, she was extremely sensitive to the fluctuations of special minerals, and by special, it wasn’t rare minerals, but those that had a bit of spirit qi in them. She could effectively pinpoint the veins and lodes that had them, which often garnered her a lot of praise from the old man.

It was during one of those prospecting missions that she stumbled onto her greatest find yet, a vein that contained a fist-sized ore of sky wolf iron. It was named so because of the howl-like sound it released whenever it was exposed to strong wind and in terms of grade, it was an earth-rank material.

To a place like the Order, an earth-grade ore wasn’t worth a mention or a second glance, but to a barren place like Su Jinjing’s village, an earth-grade ore was no different than finding a saint rank treasure as evidenced by the old man’s reaction when he saw that ore.

It was the first time Su Jinjing ever saw him flustered, and it was also the time that it confirmed to her that the old blacksmith wasn’t just an ordinary man. Thanks to her soul, she could always tell that he was fundamentally different from others, she just didn’t know how, and being sensitive from a young age she knew well enough not to pry. For her, she was already satisfied with things as they were. She was more than satisfied, she was grateful for the familial relationship she had with the old man.

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As was with most cases, the vein that nurtured the sky wolf iron, also nurtured a few earth-rank herbs, and luckily for the duo, there was not a spirit beast protecting it as is the norm.

That was the day Su Jinjing was introduced to cultivation. Her guess about the old man had been right on the mark about him being different. He was a cultivator, albeit one that was at the middle stages of the qi refinement realm, but a cultivator nonetheless, something that the village never had.

Turned out the old man in his youth left the village and roamed outside, and in the midst of it stumbled upon the path of cultivation, but unluckily he didn’t have the talent for it which was why he only managed to reach the fourth stage of the qi refinement realm despite cultivating for 210 years.

Realizing he didn’t have the talent for it, he became disheartened, especially when the woman he had fallen for, and who liked him back proved to be more talented. At 210, he was only at the fourth stage of the qi refinement realm, while she was already in the late stages of the foundation establishment realm. With the typical lifespan of a qi refinement cultivator, he only had about 90 years left, while she could for a thousand more years with her foundation establishment cultivation realm. He looked like an old fossil at the time while she looked the same as he had met her in his youth.

Whether it was pride, or he was unwilling to impede her cultivation by saddling her with the burden of burying a loved one, the old man left, but even though he did it willingly, it was a decision he struggled to live with, hence his bitter and angry personality at the village.

When he came back to the village, it went without saying, his parents had long passed, his peers were no more, and all he found were strangers. His brash personality and skills as a blacksmith ensured no one wondered too much about who the bitter old man was and what he was doing in such a remote village.

Using the herbs, and the knowledge he had picked up over the years, the old man helped Su Jinjing embark on her cultivation, and in just two years Su Jinjing had moved from someone who knew nothing about cultivation, to a body refinement cultivator who had reached the silver stage.

As he was training her, in secret the old blacksmith had been working on refining the sky wolf iron ore that Su Jinjing had found but because he was at the qi refinement realm and the ore was the equivalent of a foundation establishment cultivator, the old blacksmith couldn’t refine it easily, not with ordinary means that is.

He thus used extraordinary means. The extraordinary means was him burning his soul and blood essence and using it as the fire to smelt that ore. As a cultivator, he knew Su Jinjing would notice if he used such extreme means with how sensitive she was. He thus lied to her he was going to one of the mountains to seclude himself for a breakthrough, leaving Su Jinjing to cultivate by herself in the meantime.

Even though Su Jinjing suspected something was off, she chose to believe him. She only realized what the old blacksmith had been doing when he came back with a lumpy spear in his hands. Even burning himself out the lumpy spear was the best he could do.

With how much of himself he had burned, he only had a year left to live. One could only imagine how shocked Su Jinjing had been when she saw him to the point that she collapsed and was unconscious for a week, when she came to, the first thing she did was disappear to the mountains for days on end in hopes that she could find anything to reverse the damage that the old blacksmith had done to himself.

No matter how powerful her soul was, it wasn’t enough to find something that was beyond her ability to find and thus could only come back in defeat. The old blacksmith used the remainder of his life to pour as much knowledge and share as much of his experience with the outside world as he could with Su Jinjing.

From the moment she was born, the old blacksmith knew how special he was, and he hoped to see her talent flourish so that she could see how big the world was and not waste it away constrained within the village.

As such after his death, he hoped she would leave the village, but she was only six, and despite how much talent she showed, if she was unprepared, she wouldn’t survive a day. So the old man used that one year to prepare her, as much as he could anyway. This was the benefit of a weak cultivator. With just his qi refinement cultivation he had managed to survive for 200 years in the brutal world of cultivation. He may have lacked the talent to cultivate, but he knew how to survive as the weak.