Depthless Hunger

Technically, Zae Zin Nim was guarding her mana pool, but she wasn't sure what would actually happen if she was challenged. The Thundering Scorpion tribe required everything to be done in pairs, due to their strange formation, and she was alone. Of course, she would bet on herself against any two of these inferior cultivators, but they might try to twist the rules against her, and she couldn't fight them all at once.

In theory she had the Bloodcoral sect to support her, and presumably they could grant her a second team member if it was necessary. She preferred not to think about them, so she focused on her training.

The bottom of a narrow pit would be an excellent, if undignified, place to cultivate. Mana training was less sedate, so Zae Zin Nim found herself pacing around the mana pool so much that she practically wore her footsteps into the stone. She regularly absorbed small emanations of mana from the center, just to boost her progress slightly further, then she returned to training.

Omilaena's idea about merging her qi techniques with the Coldfire Corona had set off a new sequence of ideas for her. She moved through the formal positions of the Brightwind martial arts that she had learned from birth, but she made the mana fire roll along with her movements. Even though it was shockingly presumptuous to add new elements to such ancient formations, she felt as though she owned them even more than before.

Once she finished with that, however, her next training was entirely derived from Kai. She walked up to one of the walls at the bottom of the pit, took a deep breath, and then slammed her palm against it.

It was a brute force technique, as used by some hard martial artists, and her techniques all followed soft principles. Yet it felt right, from the way her mana traveled through her arm to the way the force leapt back into her palm. All of her old instructors would have been horrified, saying that she would ruin her flawless hands with calluses, but she trusted that her Physique would protect her.

After one thousand strikes, she walked to the opposite wall and shifted to practicing her Coldfire Palm. The exact movements of qi and mana became easier and easier, until the two automatically formed into the technique. She had practiced most of her other techniques for years, yet this one had become natural in such a short time.

By the time she was done, she had left a handprint in the wall taller than her.

Zae Zin Nim had been so focused on her training that she was shocked to feel herself truly a little stronger than before. Most of the time when she felt stronger it was simply using her body more effectively, putting more of her available strength into the palm strikes. But this was a true difference, meaning that her Coldfire Corona had finally advanced, so she eagerly checked her soul.