My dao to eternity

Li Fan didn't rush toward Core Condensation, even with grief sitting heavier in the shop's silence than any prior season had ever asked him to carry. He'd distrusted the forced bottleneck in other cultivators for too many years to let loss talk him into the same mistake now, and the discipline of that distrust proved, in its own quiet way, a kind of anchor through the worst of the first month alone.

He spent the weeks that followed in careful study instead, working back through every text he owned that touched on the realm ahead of him. Wei Baishan's old manuals described Core Condensation the ordinary way — accumulated qi compressed steadily until it crystallized into a stable core. The Primordial Origin Dao Sutra offered something less definite and considerably more unsettling: a passage describing the sutra's method not as compression at all, but as origin, a core formed by returning qi to whatever shape it had held before accumulation ever began.

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