Chapter 46: Peace and Quiet Within Stone Walls
A total of 108 cultivation cycles had passed since the moment An found himself locked in this dark, damp cage.
Opening his eyes and exhaling deeply, he snapped his fingers.
Immediately, more than fifty Qi Blades appeared around him. Hovering motionless in the air, each one created different vibrational oscillations that made the formations around him creak.
Taking a deep breath, he began to slowly manipulate the blades, creating chaotic movements around himself. He tried to use several movement patterns simultaneously, but realized that his soul and mind were not yet strong or flexible enough.
At this point, he had managed to achieve control over three simultaneous patterns. By dividing the fifty Qi Blades into three groups, he forced each to follow its own distinct movement route.
After finishing his Qi training and waiting for his mind to recover sufficiently, he began a new cultivation cycle.
After another 246 cultivation cycles.
Whooosh~
Crack!
In the center of the cell, An hovered above the ground, continuously creating and releasing dense waves of energy that crashed against the formations with terrible force. The barrier around him cracked and creaked but continued to hold.
"Seventh layer of Qi Condensation!" With a smile, he raised his head upward and exhaled a thick mass of green Qi.
The moment this energy from his mouth reached the walls and ceiling, completely bypassing the barrier, as if it weren't even there, vines and various plants immediately began to sprout from every crevice, greedily reaching out and absorbing the Qi that An was releasing.
"This was faster than I thought..."
"How long did he say it would take me? Eight to nine years just to reach the Foundation Establishment realm..." He remembered Elder Shoa's words, that he would need about ten years to make a breakthrough between realms. But judging by how easily he was progressing now, An was sure that within a year, maybe two, he would reach the peak of Qi Condensation.
Even though he understood that anything was possible, that he might even get stuck at the peak state for ten years, he tried not to think about such things, afraid that such thoughts might actually lead to that outcome.
The main reason he had been able to break through to the late stage of Qi Condensation so quickly was his partial evolution upon reaching the sixth layer, the Sharpness aspect, and the massive increase in his vitality. All of this, in turn, had strengthened the walls of his dantian and given him a direct path to the seventh layer.
"Late stage of the Condensation realm... Now, only the peak stage lies ahead."
Whooosh~
Closing his eyes, he summoned one hundred and thirty Qi Blades around him in the blink of an eye. He immediately divided them into six groups and assigned them different Qi control patterns.
After another 180 cultivation cycles, An began to notice that his cycles were becoming longer each time, and the particles he attracted were growing larger in size and quantity with each cycle.
Waving his hand, An moved all the empty pill flasks into his pouch.
All this time, he had been refining new pills and eating old ones from his reserves. But eventually, after so many cultivation cycles, all his supplies had almost run out.
Hovering above the ground, two hundred Qi Blades had been flying around him the entire time. He decided not to overstrain his mind, rounding the number of daggers to two hundred, dividing them into eight different patterns.
Controlling eight distinct processes, An simultaneously analyzed his recent pill concoctions, trying to understand how to finally achieve perfect quality. All this time, locked in the cage and refining pills, he had been unable to reach that culmination of perfect quality, as if something was missing. He had brought all his recipes to a 1% loss, but he could not reach the complete preservation of a pill's effect.
Sitting, analyzing, and managing the Qi Blades, An opened his eyes and suddenly smiled. He had finally figured it out.
"Hahaha! It was all about the cauldron! Wasn't it... Why? Why did I even start using it?!" Alternating between raising his voice and muttering, An scolded himself in the dark two-by-two-meter room, finally finding the answer to the dilemma that had been troubling him for so long.
He understood why he hadn't been able to achieve perfect quality when refining pills. It was all about the quality of the materials of the cauldron itself. Because An hadn't studied artifacts and their construction, it had taken him so many attempts and so much time to identify the cause of his failures. The cauldron itself, even though it was merely a vessel, during the concoction process, when interaction and manipulation with Qi took place inside it, the cauldron involuntarily became a catalyst in the process.
Holding the cauldron in his hands, An tossed it into his pouch and took out several sets of spirit plants from his meager remaining supplies.
Focusing, he began refining a pill, but this time, he didn't use any vessel. He did everything in the air, right in front of himself. Creating an energy sphere completely sealed from the external environment, he used it as a cauldron.
Easily controlling the preparation process, An got to work.
After nearly an hour, hovering in the air, he held before himself a pure white Beginning of the Qi Path pill, completely clean, with a barely noticeable, pulsating vein on it.
"Perfect quality... close to forming a true first vein... Hehehe!" An threw his head back and began laughing like a villain.
The entire cell was shrouded in a thick fog of pill residue and his own Qi, which was enriched with his vitality and had been escaping from his mouth during his cultivation.
"Oh... Why are all the walls overgrown? Is it because of the preparation process? Or what?" He finally noticed that everything around him was covered in dense vegetation. All the vines had completely occupied the walls and the grate. Flowers had sprouted on the vines, and even small fruits.
"It's because of my Qi..." Feeling that his own Qi, only slightly modified, was emanating from these vines, An was puzzled. He had never seen anything like this before, and he had never read or heard about it anywhere.
Reading the energy, he could clearly understand that the plants were simultaneously happy and hungry. Only by concentrating did he hear faint but clear pleading 'voices' in his head.
"Wait! So it really was the plants?" Opening his eyes sharply, he realized that in the Beast Lands, those thousands of hungry voices had not been hallucinations or side effects from the breakthrough. He had actually heard the voices of the plants around him, specifically, the mutated leaves on the tree branches that had absorbed his energy.
"Can you understand me?" With a thoughtful expression, he ran his hand over the vines, but the plants completely ignored him, only beginning to beg more intensely, feeling his hand on them.
"You definitely have intelligence..." He understood that even though it was very low, it existed. If it didn't, he wouldn't have gotten such a reaction upon touching them.
Sitting and examining all the plants around him and reading the information from them, he learned that some of the spirit plants had crossed the threshold of the first rank and were slowly but surely raising their spirituality through his Qi. The rest lagged behind, constantly trying to break through, but so far without success.
After another 170 cultivation cycles, the entire room was overgrown with plants, completely enveloping every free space. An had stopped moving entirely after the sets of spirit plants for refining pills ran out.
Hovering completely motionless, he only broke his trance when he finished a cultivation cycle, using those moments to create several fist-sized spheres. Each sphere possessed a honeycomb structure inside, resembling a beehive or a miniature dantian. In each sphere, there were a thousand separate honeycomb cells. In each such cell, there was a small mass of energy.
In each of these spheres, there were several groups of patterns. Suspended in the center of the room, An could simultaneously strain his mind with twelve different Qi control patterns.
But An noticed a major problem, one for which, after such a long time, he could not find the right answer. It was the rapid expenditure of Qi from his body and the high demands on his mental and soulful reserves.
Having long realized that he could not simultaneously cultivate and train with a large number of conflicting Qi control processes, as both required large amounts of mental capacity, he decided to replace every third cultivation cycle with a full Qi training session, increasing the number of simultaneous patterns.
In the end, he even stopped noticing the passage of time because of the constant nagging pain in his head and the persistent feeling of heaviness in his body and soul.
The only thing that truly made him happy was his progress.
Through analysis and training, he was not only training his mind but also delving deeper into the study of Qi itself and its secrets, as he believed.
His cultivation had reached the point where his dantian was 78% full. He was confident that within a few dozen cycles, he would break through to the eighth layer of Qi Condensation without any problems, getting closer and closer to the peak of this realm.
'Hmm... I hope he hasn't starved to death in there...' An suddenly remembered the rooster. But remembering that the bird now possessed a degree of spiritual intelligence and even knew how to catch fish, he shouldn't starve while he was locked up. The only thing that worried him was that the bird might be dragged away by some fish, because he might overestimate his abilities out of greed for food.
'How long have I been here... and when will they let me out...' In fact, he roughly knew how long he had been here, but he couldn't say with one hundred percent certainty. And after some time, he simply stopped thinking about it, deciding that the best solution was to focus completely on increasing his power.
Moreover, having been here all this time, he truly felt inner peace, completely disconnected from what was happening out there.
Another 44 cultivation cycles later.
Crack! Crack!
The energy around An created a terrible pressure. With a loud crack and a screeching sound that hurt the ears, the formations on his cell barely managed to contain the pressure of his Qi.
The vegetation greedily grew, absorbing the energy emanating from him. The space in the cell had shrunk to his silhouette size. At some point, he began keeping Qi Armor activated, creating a membrane around himself so that the spirit plants wouldn't distract or irritate him.
Even though those incessant voices had initially annoyed him, over time he grew accustomed to them, and even stopped noticing them.
Whooosh!
An opened his eyes, and a dense wave struck the walls and the plants. At the same time, the weaker spirit flora died from the overly dense and saturated Qi. The stronger ones suffered, but also strengthened, surviving and adapting. In place of the weak ones that couldn't withstand it, new ones appeared, and the cycle kept repeating.
"Eighth layer of Qi Condensation..." An, with an unnatural smile and a hoarse voice, for the first time in a long time, spoke in a whisper and turned his attention to the plants before him.
Several plants had undergone a strange mutation, achieving a state where the outer surface of their leaves and stems, which were closer to An and his escaping Qi, had become like a mirror, reflecting everything.
Looking at his slightly distorted reflection in these plants, An saw a teenager who looked about sixteen years old, with dark brown hair that had grown down to his waist, slightly dirty and matted, from the same residue from pill concoction. His eyes were burning bright green with a strange, detached, and even lost gaze. All his clothes were full of holes and had begun to turn black.
'Simultaneous use of several techniques no longer really strains my mental capacity or my Qi reserves. And now, having broken through to the eighth layer, the expenditure will decrease even more due to the increased density and speed of Qi. Now I can easily maintain, for example, Qi Silence, Qi Armor, and simultaneously control fourteen patterns of Qi Blade movement, numbering several hundred at a time... Even though it will only last me a few seconds with such consumption, at least I can finally withstand such a load in the moment.' Completely ignoring his changed appearance, he averted his gaze and immediately began thinking about his future plans for training and cultivation.
During this time, he had managed to perfect, as much as possible for his cultivation, the use of fourteen simultaneous Qi movement patterns. He had correctly worked out the process by which so many simultaneous Qi patterns could operate without any conflicts.
Moreover, thanks to all this training, he could now easily engage in several mental processes at once. So far, he had managed to ‘divide’ himself equally into two different thought actions, simultaneously, both of which required all his mental resources.
Closing his eyes, he felt a small portion of his cells slowly but surely undergoing evolution.
After observing the process for a long time, he opened his eyes and smiled.
"Thanks to my constant training and deeper understanding of Qi around me and within me, most of my cells have slowly but surely initiated their evolution, following completely in the footsteps of those that have already completed the transformation..."
"If I'm not mistaken, when I break through to the Foundation Establishment realm, my cells will completely finish this evolution, which means they will stop aging and dividing..." An studied his cells with curiosity through his Qi.
He understood that when he broke through to the new realm, his aging would completely stop. But what he didn't understand was his lifespan. As he remembered from biology lessons in his first life on Earth, if cells in an organism stop aging and dividing, the person simply dies. But in this world, where everything was made of and from Qi, including his body, he understood, on a subconscious level, that once all his cells evolved, his physical body would become something akin to immortality, through the symbiosis of energy and the code written in his cells, but only his body.
His main confusion was related to his mind, specifically his soul. An realized that his lifespan at the moment of breaking through to the new realm would be entirely dependent on the strength of his soul, more precisely, on the reserves of strength of his mind, his inner world, which, like his body now, had its own biological clock.
'For now, my lifespan is entirely dependent on my physical body, because my soul is slightly stronger than my body… meaning my inner world will last longer than my body… But what's interesting, in Foundation Establishment, the load and resource distribution will favor my inner world, because my cells won't need to change their internal code… Consequently, my inner world will receive more resources, so there shouldn't be any problems with my lifespan… hopefully I'm not wrong.' An suddenly caught himself at the moment when he fully immersed himself in his thoughts and completely forgot himself, breaking his established routine for a moment.
What he knew for sure was that upon reaching Foundation Establishment, he would remain eternally young until the end of his lifespan. It was a pleasant realization, no one in their right mind would refuse eternal youth.
The same couldn't be said for most cultivators in the Foundation Establishment realm, they did not remain eternally young. Cultivators continued to age, only slowing down the process due to their growing lifespan. Some also used techniques or pills to maintain their youth, but this had to be repeated after some time.
Coming to his senses and realizing that he had wasted precious time, he immersed himself back into his routine.
Another 20 cultivation cycles later, as he was hovering above the floor, An suddenly felt the Qi around him begin to change and become chaotic. Opening his eyes and looking around, he saw the runes on the floor of his cell slowly begin to flicker, their dim light barely penetrating through the dense vines and fog from his Qi.
The runes flared with blinding intensity. Colliding with one another, the chaotic energy flows began to emit a low, grating hum.
'I was starting to think I'd be here forever... Heh.' An smirked, but his eyes were full of disappointment.
He felt the teleportation beginning to activate. Raising his head and closing his eyes, he took a deep breath.
Whooosh!
BOOM!
Opening his eyes, ignoring the still-bright blinding particles around him, he found himself in a massive hall, hovering directly above the altar.
Shredded vines, transported along with him, swirled through the air before slowly raining onto the stone platform below.