Molting the Mortal Coil

With his goals laid out, Sage began his training regimen. He hadn’t seriously trained his Qi Cultivation for quite some time spending only an hour every morning to maintain his current level. Once he had hit rank 3 and the Qi Sea formed inside him, Sage had at first tried to keep training hard. When it took him more than three times longer to increase by 1 stage than it had while at rank 2, Sage grew even more discouraged. That was the reason he’d only advanced to stage 2 after more than a decade. This time, Sage seriously gave it his all. In order to train Divine Breath he had to gather up a huge amount of Qi. With just what his own Dantian held, it was not nearly enough so he had to gather up and hold as much as he could, a feeling like he was holding his breath, and then combine it with his own Qi sending the energy flooding into the Qi Pores in his lungs, throat and mouth.

Qi Pores were normally closed to keep the bodies natural Qi from leaking out everywhere. Without Qi the body would no longer be able to heal and rapidly deteriorate, the Qi Pores could only be opened by a Cultivator who could control their energy and keep it from leaking out. They were like muscles normal people didn’t know they had. If they were unable to properly control the unknown muscle they could easily sprain or otherwise damage it.

Sage had to slowly gather qi for a full hour before he had enough to make one attempt, and then another hour to recover his own qi. The attempt itself took another hour, so every time he tried to open a Qi Pore three hours were used up. To make matters worse, after a few days, Sage realized he only had about a fifty percent success ratio. With a couple hundred Qi Pores that had to be opened, Sage decided to only make one attempt per day which meant he’d take more than a year before he could perform Divine Breath. Such a long time… such are the limits of talent.

After calculating the timeline, Sage changed his mind and decided to push a bit harder for as long as he could. Once he grew upset with his lack of progress he’d switch to the more relaxed schedule and focus on his other training topics more. What surprised him was that after a couple weeks had passed, Sage wasn’t growing upset, instead he was getting excited. Each time he performed another round of expending and gathering energy it was slightly faster than before. It was only a few minutes less each time so he barely noticed it. It was only after a week when the total time for an attempt had shortened to half the original time, an hour and a half, that Sage realized the change. Instead of only six attempts in a long eighteen hour day, Sage had made twelve! From then he started to track his progress and saw that the speed of improvement went down, each round only a few seconds faster than the last, but it was still improving! What is going on, why am I suddenly so much faster than before?

In order to reach rank 4, one had to continue the accumulation of Qi just like for rank 3. In addition the main concern was taking the liquid Qi of the Qi Sea and solidifying it to build a foundation. It was like a sea of energy that needed to have an island built in the middle of it. The island was a foundation that had to support the forming of an Inner Core for rank 5. If it was not stable enough, a Cultivator would never be able to form a Golden Core as the instability would interrupt their work. The forming of the foundation could be done in any number of ways, but it was commonly said that a Cultivator had to refine the essence, breath, and mind. The common saying about creating an Inner Core was to use the Dantian as a Crucible and the Qi Sea as a material. A Golden Core would form and the Cultivator’s Soul would move from the Spiritual Sea into the core. It was the dividing line between normal cultivators and true experts. The Qi Sea was a reservoir of energy that was hard to put to use and took painstaking effort to refill again. The level of Qi Cultivation technique determined the actual rate but it was akin to use a bucket to fill and empty an ocean. Those with powerful Cultivation techniques would be similar to using a firehose, but it was still far from being fast. The Inner Core on the other hand was like a huge battery. With the right techniques it could discharge huge amounts of energy and also charge much faster. Normally the Core was called the ‘Golden Core’ as that was the result of the majority of most Cultivation techniques, but there was always exceptions.

With this change in mind, Sage spent a whole day on simply Cultivating. He didn’t attempt to open any Qi Pores, he only focused on improving his strength. At the end of the day, he checked his progress and it was many times faster than it had been a decade ago when he last tried. What was the cause for such a change? Wasn’t talent supposed to be unchangeable? Sage thought of the changes over the ten year period and his most likely culprit was getting fused with the Twin Ringed Soul Serpent. He’d never heard of anyone changing their level of talent before, but in his opinion nothing was impossible. Things that people thought were impossible just hadn’t been done yet. There was hundreds of examples of things in his old modern world that people would have thought to be impossible thousands of years earlier. Could merging with other creatures change his talent? From what he experienced everything about them was merged into one whole. Was this the level of talent that the Serpent had which he was now able to benefit from? From his approximation his current speed was still far from the best, but it was much higher than the dreadfully average he had before. I can’t be too upset at before, it was technically called average. That means half the population is equally as unskilled and most just live with being regular civilians.

In the lower ranks cultivation speed wasn’t so obvious. He had taken months to increase a stage while the higher talent people took weeks. They were more advanced but it was only a stage or two. As he grew older they pulled further away. Each rank was many times slower than the one before. During his time trapped underground in the Back Mines of the Lang Clan he had been battling constantly and almost exclusively eating Spirit Insects and Spirit Animals to survive. His progress was many times faster than normal. Afterwards he began a run for his life and at this time he realized how slow his progress really was. Training normally for only a few hours a day he saw little to no progress. Joining the Holy Flame Sect he tried to make up for his lack of talent with a Profession. Unfortunately, he realized that Professions could increase your battle strength, but it was still limited by true strength and rank. While he could boost his prowess there was a limit to how much. When he was trapped at the barrier to rank 3 his only hope was to spend all his time making money and spending it to train in the Sunfire Pagoda. Even with the assistance of such a great training location he still took many years to finally breakthrough.

My luck seems to be turning around. Even though I’ve found all these wonderful items I still don’t know how to make use of them. This new level of talent is finally something good I can take advantage of!

Sage was quite excited with how lucky he’d been lately, since the Seed of Life he had been muddling along hoping for a break trying everything haphazardly. While fusing with the Serpent had been an accident because of his greed, in the end it was a huge benefit! The Eye of the World didn’t seem to do anything, but he assumed it was too far out of his league, just like the Seed of Life. Two spectacular treasures that he could only look at and hope to use someday.

Putting away that discouraging thought, Sage returned to his training.