Chapter 135: Life 66, Age 20, Martial Master 1
Once I was done absorbing all of the essence in the cavern, I turned my attention to the glowing formation that had appeared when I had finished off the golem.
I tried to study it and work out its secrets, but even with energy vision, it was like I could only half see it. The lines that formed it were disconnected, and so much was missing that what remained didn’t make any sense.
Giving up on the idea of stealing this knowledge for myself, I walked forward and stepped onto the formation. The room around me disappeared and was replaced with a nearly identical cavern.
I was standing near the passageway that served as an exit from the trial once again. This time, instead of just a single golem, there were two that I would need to defeat.
With the way I had claimed victory in the first room, the increased number of opponents posed no additional challenge. I repeated the exact same process, siphoning away all the qi and then engaging them carefully to drain their remaining energy reserves. They both fell to the ground without fanfare, and I brought an end to their existence.
Once they were both destroyed, essence flooded the room once more, and I cultivated to draw it all into my acupoints.
This pattern repeated in the next three caverns with the number of golems increasing each time. However, defeating five was no more difficult than defeating one. I just needed to create the formations and drain the room. The stone constructs posed no danger.
This made me wonder how my classmates were faring without the ability to build Qi Gathering Formations. They would likely end up having to fight these things in actual combat. I could only imagine the difficulty of trying to put down such creatures with only the strength of a Martial Master 1. I hoped they were doing well.
As I cultivated the essence that was my reward from defeating the fifth stage, I tried to understand what was happening with it. After the essence passed through my acupoints, it seemingly disappeared. The more I stared at my acupoints, trying to understand what was happening, the more I felt a twinge inside, like there was an itch I couldn’t scratch. Was that real, or had I just convinced myself I was feeling something? I didn’t know.