Chapter 288: Life 76, Age 16, Martial Disciple 2
Most of my time over the next couple of weeks was spent studying cultivation techniques, but I spent a few hours each day observing the situation in my inner world.
At several points, I considered removing the seed of the Solid Mountain Fire from my soul and replacing it with something else. As a Martial Disciple, this would have been dangerous, but as long as I first drained the seed of energy, it might have been possible.
I needed to use the Expanding Realms Fire to start growing the world again, but removing the Solid Mountain Fire would mean removing the world’s primary source of qi. Then, as the world grew, and as people cultivated and locked qi away in their bodies, the world’s qi density would gradually decline, eventually making it impossible to cultivate in the world once again. Still, growing the world was more important than maintaining its qi density.
With these thoughts in mind, I resolved to swap out the fire seed. However, that was when a new problem became apparent.
While all of the earth cultivators were able to pull in energy and store it in their bodies, Masters were unable to form meridians, and Grandmasters were unable to compress their qi. The only people who were able to advance were Disciples.
I only knew of one possible explanation for this. The world’s earth Laws weren’t complete enough.
After considering this situation, I decided to leave the Solid Mountain Fire in place so that my world could continue to absorb its Laws. To advance to Rank 2, the world would need to absorb a second set of Laws, and the Solid Mountain Fire was a pure earth seed, so there wasn’t any risk of an unexpected advancement. Also, by concentrating the energies and Laws that I was pouring into the world, I could more easily study their effects.
By the end of my first month in the clan, I had collected three more random Disciples in my soul space. Their combat instructor was far from happy with me, but my display of martial prowess had stabilized my position, so there wasn’t much that he could do to me.
As I was sitting in my cultivation room, reviewing a variety of both single- and dual-element Profound-Rank techniques, a series of three soft knocks broke me out of my concentration.