Extra: THE THOUSAND YEARS OF CULTIVATION IN FIFTEEN MINUTES (Sponsored by the Great Sage Xianxia)
"Here I come...!" The muscle mommy charged her falcon punch for a few more instants before she launched forward.
"HEYAAAAAH!" She shouted.
Every single drop of Chi she had spent a lifetime building roared down her arm and gathered into her right fist, becoming a blazing blue star of concentrated shonen fighting spirit.
That clearly was the strongest hit she had ever thrown. The result of an entire youth of blood, hitting rocks, and surviving dungeons that killed strong people.
She literally put her entire soul into it, and she struck the Great Sage Equal to Heaven directly in her chest.
And... the impact was supposed to produce a sound loud enough to rival the sound of a missile's explosion. But, instead, there was a sound like a mosquito landing on a bank vault.
Wukong didn't even move or blink. Nothing. Zero. Only one single strand of her golden hair drifted lazily down past her face, moved only by the wind of the punch.
Egel watched it fall with the horror of someone who realized she had thrown a tantrum at a God.
'Oh, shit...' She thought.
"...Huh," Wukong said, looking at the fist still pressed against her chest. "You managed to move a hair. That's not bad since most mortals would've broken their hand." She grinned. "But... you're weak. In a way that offends me on a spiritual level."
Egel's arm immediately dropped. "...Yeah. I felt that. I swear."
"But... the good news is that I can fix it. Yeah, yeah. I see potential." Wukong then cracked her knuckles. "I saw that you mortals have a whole tradition for this thing... uhm... what's the name..." Wukong started to think, scratching her chin and tapping her right foot on the ground, unaware that she was literally destroying it.
After a few instants of deep monkey thinking, she snapped. "Ah! I remember!" She exclaimed. "Cultivation. Have you ever heard of it? My Buddha showed me some of the scrolls of the Higher Realms. Thousands of them. And... they were all the same." She then adopted a mock-scholarly tone, wagging her tail. "A young man with a Chinese name and a tragic past finds a mysterious old master. And then he starts traing, breaks through the Foundation Estabilishment Realm, then the Core Formation Realm, then the Nascent Soul Realm, then the Spirit Severing Realm, the Dao Seeking Realm, the Immortal Ascension Realm, the I-Ran-Out-Of-Ideas Realm, on and on, forever, and the whole time some old geezer in a cave is nodding and stroking his beard going 'mmmm, this junior has good bones.' Tch— If only they went through the 0,1% of what I've been through, they wouldn't last an instant. Ah... I remember my battle with Baigujing..."
Egel blinked a few times. Nobody knows whether it was due to confusion or stupor. "That sounds... exhausting." She said, her voice flat.
"It's boring," Wukong said, crossing her arms. "Every single one. Same realms, same breakthroughs, same beard-stroking master, same protagonist who has 'trash talent' for exactly three chapters until he finds a magic ring with a grandpa living in it." She snapped, her voice dripping with venom. "I have declared war on Heaven itself, and I have never been so disgusted by these things. So..." She then planted the Ruyi Jingu Bang in the earth and rolled her shoulders. "We're going to do all of it. Every realm. The whole two-thousand-cultivation journey. In MY WAY." Her voice sent a sonar ping in a 30km radius. "THAT DISGUSTING SIX-EARED FAKE MONKEY WON'T LAY A SINGLE HAND ON MY BUDDHA!" She exclaimed, releasing only 0.1% of her divine aura.
As Egel felt a glimpse of the Great Sage's power, she took a nervous step back, probably regretting every word she had said.
"T-That... That would surely take lifetimes... I mean..." She swallowed some saliva. "Centuries in seclusion, closed-door meditation, comprehending the Dao of—"
"Yeah. That's the fake part," Wukong said. "They padded it out so they can sell more chapters." She then stretched her arms. "Watch me, Mortal. I'll do the honest version. It will only take about fifteen minutes, but it will hurt a lot."
"I... I think I have som—" Egel tried to say, but Wukong grabbed her by the face.
"COME, Apprentice. I'll show you the way of the Great Sage Equal to Heaven."
[HIGHER REALMS LIVE CHAT]Gooner_King: OH YEAAA! MUSCLE MOMMY TRAINING ARC🔥🔥🔥🔥
Dibbs57: THIS IS ABSOLUTE MUSCLE MOMMY CINEMA!🔥
Power_Scaler99: Ok, nice but Goku solo this entire universe
LUKAS_THE_GREAT: @Power_Scaler99 STFU ASSHOLE
Sir_Cumcised: WOOF WOOOF WOOF WOOF WOOF! 🐕🦴🦮
Egel_Fanboy: I HOPE SHE STEPS ON ME! AHHHH! WOOF WOOF! I'LL BE YOUR GOOD BOY, MOMMY!🐶🐶🥵🥵🥵🥵
[FOUNDATION ESTABLISHMENT REALM]
Wukong flooded Egel's body with a controlled torrent of divine Chi, forcibly ripping open every meridian in her body at once. In the xianxia scrolls, this stage took a promising young disciple three years of careful and patient breathing exercises in a serene mountain grotto, usually while a rival sect's arrogant young master sneered at him from a distance and said something like "You trash Fang Kael. You dare cultivate here? HUH?" Ah, the classic never dies.
Well... Wukong did that in four seconds by shaking Egel like a snow globe.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGHGGH...! FUCK! IT HURTS!" The muscle mommy screamed.
"Breakthrough!" Wukong announced, cheerfully. "See? Foundation established. We even skipped the boring part." She then "gently" slapped her back, but the impact almost broke her ribs. "Feels good, right? You're welcome." Wukong said.
"Y-Yeah," Egel said.
'I want to go home. Save me, Kaitoyama!'
[CORE FORMATION REALM]
"Now..." Wukong said, holding the convulsing and steaming muscle mommy martial artist down by one ankle, "this is the part where you spend a decade condensing your Chi into a golden core. Very slow but also very spiritual. Boring. Lots of sitting cross-legged under waterfalls having 'insights.'" She rolled her eyes. “Insights. As if enlightenment happens because you sat in cold water long enough.” She laughed. “No. Enlightenment happens because someone stronger than you makes you understand.”
After her words, she spun Egel around twice and slammed her Chi inward like a man compacting a trash bag.
”IT FUCKING HURTS! AAAAHHHH!” Egel screamed, but suddenly, there was a sound of something crystallizing.
”If it hurts, it’s working. Do you think you’d be able to fight by my side in your pathetic state? HAH!” She said.
Then, Wukong stopped for an instant. Egel was still down on her knees.
’What…?’ Egel thought, looking at her own hands and arms.
She could see golden energy flowing through her veins. She even closed and opened her hands multiple times to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. “What’s this…?”
”You feel it, don’t you? There. Golden core.” Wukong nodded in approval.
“I—“ Egel didn’t even have the time to say something before she collapsed face-first onto the floor.
”I must admit that it’s a good one, nice and dense.” Wukong then looked down at the crumpled muscle mommy on the floor and nodded in satisfaction. “You’d appreciate it more if you were conscious, but that’s fine. We’ll get there. Moving on to the next phase.” She grinned.
Egel was, in that moment, half-dead on the floor, and the system logged the event as a “character growth milestone” and moved on.
[NASCENT SOUL REALM]
Suddenly, Egel came back to life screaming, which Wukong took as a sign of excellent spiritual health.
”Do you feel that? That little version of yourself sitting behind your heart just right now? That’s your nascent soul. Usually, forming one takes more than a hundred years and a 90% chance that your mortal body might explode.” Wukong stretched her arms and shoved off some dust from her own shoulders. “I skipped the exploding part. Well…” she leaned closer to take a better look at her. “You’ve got a small crack on your ribs, but that’s fine. It looks cool. Good bones, mmmm.” She said, stroking an imaginary beard.
Egel, still lying down on the ground, coughed a small amount of blood and gave a shaky thumbs-up, because underneath the agony and the broken ribs, something extraordinary was happening.
She was getting stronger. For real, I swear. Extremely stronger. She could feel the power flowing through her, something that would've taken thousands of years. A power that was crammed into her body in real time by an impatient Monkey Goddess who was just bored with waiting.
"I..." Egel gasped, staggering to her feet while her body glowed with a light ten times brighter than before. "I... I can feel it... The Chi is not fighting me anymore... It's flowing... naturally... like a tide..." She said, looking at her veins again.
"THAT'S IT!" Wukong nodded her head. "And you only died once! Faster learner than the last guy!"
"...The last guy?" Egel repeated, still kneeling.
Wukong shrugged. "A pig, and a very stubborn one. Always complaining. 'Too hot, too cold, I want to eat, I want to sleep...' In the end, I left him in a swamp for three days, and when he came out, he was a little wiser. And much quieter."
Egel looked at the Great Sage with wide eyes. "You... left him in a swamp?"
"He needed to think," Wukong said, with a smile that left no room for argument. "And anyway, he's recovered. More or less. I wonder where he is... I must ask my Buddha... Mmmmh..." She scratched her head before turning her attention back to Egel. "Are you ready for the next stage, Apprentice? I won't go easy."
Egel immediately bowed her head in respect. "YES!"
"Good." Wukong smiled.
[SPIRIT SEVERING REALM. DAO SEEKING REALM. IMMORTAL ASCENSION REALM.]
"Now..." Wukong added, cracking her knuckles for the last time. "This is the part where the trash talent guy swallows about forty different colored pills he bought at a spirit auction, and each one advances him in a whole realm, and everyone at the auction gasps because a mysterious masked young man is outbidding the arrogant rich clan. My Buddha explained everything to me and said that the pills are basically microtransactions. You pay spirit stones, you get power with no effort." She then spat to the side. "Garbage. Cheating. Disgusting. This is something the Great Sage Equal To Heaven cannot approve. We do different things here."
Then, Wukong did these three realms in a single combination move that Egel would later be completely unable to describe, because she experienced all three in the span of one long scream. It involved being thrown in the sky, being hit back by the Ruyi Jingu Bank like a shuttlecock, and then a headpat delivered with enough force to realign her entire spiritual foundation. Holy shit.
At some point during the fall, Egel had achieved what the scrolls would have called "a deep enlightenment regarding the nature of the martial Dao."
In reality, she had hit so hard and precisely that her body understood what Wukong had meant about flowing instead of pushing.
The lesson didn't arrive as a serene insight under a waterfall. It arrived as a fist, and it turned out that was faster.
Then, Egel landed on her feet. For the first time of all afternoon, to be specific. Poor girl.
The blue aura was gone, replaced by something quieter, denser, and way more dangerous. Even the scars on her arms glowed faintly.
The muscle mommy had just compressed the entire two-thousand-year cultivation journey of a hundred identical Wang Ling or Ling Fei into roughly fifteen minutes of the worst experience of her life.
"...Woah," Egel breathed, looking at her own hands for the 20th time.
"Yeah... admire the results of your training," Wukong grinned ear to ear, her tail wagging with genuine pride. "You did it, apprentice. Pure, honest, and concentrated suffering." She then jabbed a thumb at her own chest. "This is what those scroll-writers never understood. Strenght is not a subscription service you unlock one realm at a time to keep the spectators hooked. Strenght is pain applied by someone who loves you enough to hurt you."
Egel then wiped the remaining blood from her mouth and, somehow, laughed. "That's... a really strange philosophy, Master Wukong." She said.
"Nah," Wukong shrugged, clearly unbothered. "You know what the difference is between those beard-stroking cave hermits and me? Huh?" She asked.
Egel shook her head rapidly.
"Then let me tell you, apprentice." She took a deep breath. "They talk endlessly. 'The Dao is like water, junior.' Or, 'True strenght comes from within, junior.' Or even, 'One must comprehend the heavens before one can shake them, junior.' Hours and hours of an old man saying nothing while his disciple only sits there nodding." Wukong's eyes sharpened. "I don't explain the Dao. I only hit you in the right points until your body figures everything out on its own. Way better and faster." She then grinned and opened her arms. "Now hit me, Apprentice." She bounced on the balls of her feet, cracking her neck. "Hit me again with your full power, and show me the results of this training."
In that moment, Egel didn't think about it twice.
She set her feet, breathed in deeply, and concentrated, feeling her new power.
This time, the Chi moved through her like a rising ocean, calm and total, and when she stepped forward and struck the Great Sage Equal To Heaven in the chest, the sound was not a mosquito on a vault.
It was thunder, sending a shockwave strong enough to break the ground under their feet.
Wukong slid backward a full three inches. Three inches.
For a mortal, those three inches were the same as moving a mountain.
Wukong looked down at her own feet, at the grooves in the stone, and then back up at the panting, grinning, almost destroyed muscle mommy in front of her.
"...Three inches," Wukong said softly. Then, louder, throwing her arms in the air: "THREE INCHES! HA! You really did it!" She then pointed her staff at Egel, beaming. "That's it. You're my official first disciple. We gotta destroy that disgusting Macaque. You'll need deep training now."
"...I... I did it..." Egel panted, about to fall.
"Yeah, good job," Wukong said.
Meanwhile, in the Higher Realms, an admin who had been watching every moment of this training stared at the feed in something between horror and awe.
[SYSTEM NOTE: Subject "Egel" has completed a standard 2000-year cultivation arc in 14 minutes and 38 seconds. This is a new record, and also a violation of several narrative pacing laws. The Xianxia Author's Guild has filed a formal complaint through an intermediary called Fang Kael, but it has been ignored because it was very funny.]And in that moment, both of them heard something strange. Something carried by the wind from a distant city: a rumble in the sky, a familiar smell, and the unmistakable feeling that someone had dared to touch their beloved Mordecai physically.
In that moment, Wukong's head snapped up, her nostrils flared, and her entire expression became that of a predator.
"Someone has touched my Buddha. He's in danger. I MUST GO!"
In that moment, Egel's stomach dropped as she remembered that Kaitoyama would've bought her something to eat. "THE DINNER!"
"NIMBUS!" Wukong called, and her cloud appeared almost immediately.
And then, she flew away, completely ignoring everything else, including Egel.
As she flew away, Wukong sensed something else.
"Six ears..." she hissed. "You're listening, aren't you? You're hearing everything." A fierce smile curled her lips. "Then listen carefully, you false one. My Buddha is mine. And if you dare touch him..." Her voice became a growl. "I'll make you wish you'd never been born."