Memories of the Fall

"Listen, strange women lyin' in ruins distributin' swords is no basis for a system of cultivation. Supreme karmic power derives from a mandate from the heavens, not from some farcical reincarnation ceremony."

~Recorded complaint attributed to Daoist Cyrn, during a Dao Discussion about the merits of the Heavenly Trials

~ Arai – Spirit Pool ~

They sat there, surveying the devastation for a while longer, in silence. Arai found that it took her quite a while before she felt confident she wasn’t going to make some involuntarily acerbic comment about her sister’s choice of a lightning array in such a qi rich, humid environment. From a certain viewpoint, it made sense, Lightning was the fastest attack they possessed, and probably the most damaging, but it was also the most indiscriminate. Even more so than the corrosion or the mist blades.

“Do we need to find a way to moderate the qi?” she asked after a while, wondering if it was worth going and disabling the water generating arrays.

Sana sat there in silence, on her rock, staring at the arrays.

“We survived this,” Sana said eventually…

She turned to look at the Qi Gathering Array cut deep into the wall, with a grimace. Her vision was augmented by the qi in her body, such that she could see the rippling currents swirling around the array as it drew qi out of the rock.

-Destroying it would be…

It was already as crude as could be. Comparing the effort and investiture in making it to a single symbol array, probably a four symbol array laid down just with their qi in that fashion would require them to be Nascent Soul… at least. The number of symbols multiplied the total qi cost to imprint an array in a cumulative fashion. Three symbol arrays cost as much as three two symbol arrays and two symbol arrays had drained her qi completely when she tried to imprint them directly before. That had admittedly been when she was still at Qi Condensation. She had a magnitude more qi in her body now, at least.

She visualised a two symbol array and watched how much qi flowed away into it with a quiet sigh. It was akin to the quantity she had been spending to imprint one symbol arrays and then a bit more.

Offering a few more choice curses in her head, she relinquished the reserved qi for the symbol and settled down to cultivate again. The matter of the qi density was… manageable, if you discounted the unfortunate synergy with the water. However, the humidity and general Yin ambience of the environment was also acting as an exceptional reserve for it, preventing much of the qi from dispersing. Yes, it had nearly killed them, but…

-At this point what hasn’t nearly killed us, she sighed again.

Their whole experience in this place kept reminding her of Old Ling’s homily he had kept repeating to them, especially Juni and Ling; ‘What does not kill you will probably make you stronger in some way.’

It was a fairly masochistic way to go about your life, if you took it to its extremes, but currently, matters were still somewhat in their favour. If the qi purity was enough to poison the ambient wildlife to death passively and the water itself was able to...She eyed the golden bones again and sighed, cursing the slimes and spiders in her mind as well. The loss of her armour was regretful, but the bones hadn’t dissolved in the water, so maybe something could be salvaged there eventually.

Looking over, Sana had already started on her cultivation again, having decided that her silence meant that they just continue. It still took her a while longer to calm her mind sufficiently to properly start wrestling with her cultivation progress once more.

As she began the next one, she distracted herself by looking back at the greater cycles she had done already to see what else could be gleaned in terms of understanding.

The early ones were hazy, but she was broadly sure they were 2700, 900 then 300. Why at 300 it had just halved she wasn’t clear, and after that, it had gone 100, 75, 60 then finally sets of 50, which was what she was now repeating… for the fifth time. It was those first cycles she was less sure of, but based on what she could recall those numbers seemed pretty accurate. The ‘cycle’ itself hadn’t stabilised in a real sense until they got down here anyway. The continuous refinement also still happened in any event when she was just letting her qi alone and doing other things.

Why the big cycles had split from divisions of three to actual thirds she wasn’t sure. Perhaps that was a minor advancement in the realm. Wondering if the pattern was three, four, five and so on she started the 49th iteration of the 5th cycle of 50. That was where she had been when Sana exploded everything with lightning.

-The scattering and recollection was now easier than it had been before?

She watched as the cycle completed and found that her meridians had been marginally tempered by their unexpected baptism within the waters of the spirit pond and the lightning-metal qi. Her Dantian expanded about eight percent this time, rather than the five she expected…

Pausing her cultivation rather than going straight into the next big cycle she pondered the water and the events that had just transpired.

“Sis…did the lightning have a beneficial effect on your meridians as well?” she queried,

Sana surfaced from her cycle and looked across at her. “… Yeah.”

Then in a much more guarded tone “Why?”

“Do you think it’s worth trying it… again, just not quite as powerful an array?” she asked, slightly regretting her suggestion even as she gave voice to it.

“…We nearly died there,” Sana said, sounding both apologetic and accusatory at the same time.

“Yeah, but we need every edge we can get in this hell hole. That… your accidental application of lighting to the spirit pond expanded my meridians half again as much as it did otherwise,” She mused.

Even as she said that, her mind was producing a few other reasons for proceeding with this insanity

“And if your lightning did that… what about other elements?” she thought out loud.

“I can see the argument for it?” Sana said after a long pause.

“I can also see a very solid argument for you having had psyche break, based on how this conversation is developing. Also one for me hopping over there and hitting you in the head with a rock until you see sense.”

She laughed softly, her voice echoing faintly around the room.

“Yeah, you’re not wrong,” she mused… “But think of it like this. If we get that kind of boost to our capacity every fifty cycles. That’s like… eight and a half hours at this point, as near as I can count, that is a stupidly good return for the investment. On a par with some of those high-grade pills for low realm cultivators that you can only ever consume once, or risk explosion and soul death…”

“It’s ‘investment’ that could kill us though,” Sana pointed out.

“You are the one who put a lightning array into a spirit pool, in an area that is disturbingly rich in qi…” she pointed out.

“Yes, I panicked, for all that it seems to have been super effective I do regret it. My body still hurts,” Sana grumbled.

She sighed, it was hard to articulate… Her mind was supplying quite a few additional reasons for tying this, but there was also a quiet hunch in there that this unintentional discovery, courtesy of her sister was logically sounder than it seemed. Their bodies were acquiring resistance to elemental damage they were suffering, at quite a noticeable rate. It was basically Body Refinement, supported by her mantra and the symbol rather than by a canon, law or scripture. The mists in her flesh, organs and blood were tempering everything passively as well.

-And we are trying to get stronger. If we play it safe, we may well run into something worse than that Nascent Soul rat that doesn’t accidentally off itself or sabotage its chances by attacking some ancient weapon or throw us into a moon colony.

“…”

Sana sighed and, plucking the leaf knife out of her rock, tossed it over to her. “It’s your idea, get carving sis.”

Grimacing at her own possible stupidity, yet still feeling oddly confident that this might actually work, she focused qi into her legs and slipped off the rock.

Standing there in the water, she found herself pleasantly surprised. Her skin still blistered and went dark, but the qi in her body was capable of resisting the worst of the corrosion from the shallow pond. The water was only ten centimetres deep, barely up to her ankles in this room, which probably helped. Thinking back on it, she was sure that the reason she was so badly affected was actually the surprise factor as much as anything. She had been focusing all her qi on the lightning and not the water.

Walking over to the wall, she sat in the alcove they had carved and considered how she might do this. In the end, she put the activation points for the array on the floor, under the water and routing the majority of the array up in the alcove itself. At first, she entertained the idea of merging the lightning into the pond directly, but the framework that the Qi gathering array used had, she realised, the wrong number of external links. It would be possible to link it to another formation, but linking a fifth symbol into it would require redrawing the whole middle of the array.

Puffing her cheeks, she got to work, carving her second-ever five symbol array. The overall framework was akin to the last one, but the orientation of the symbols and links had to change it also turned out. She ended up with a circle with a pentagonal shape with a central core that equally supported all five symbols. It was subtly different from the four symbol one which fed in a continual cycle, and made her realise why that one seemed like it should be ‘difficult’ to disable. She didn’t make that mistake this time, adding a link to the outside that allowed them to cut off the link between the cores of the array from the symbols that made it up simply by injecting qi into it. It was a little bit of extra complexity, but in the process, she found that the ‘State’ symbol was capable of doing this intuitively. In the end, she had two arrays that overlaid each other and which allowed the thing to be stopped. Just in case.

“Done,” she said eventually, waving to Sana.

Sana hopped into the water and walked over, wincing slightly as she did so.

“What should we use for an activation medium?” Sana mused.

“I was rather thinking that we mix our blood with some of the water,” she said, eyeing it.

“Our blood might actually be purer in terms of density than the water,” Sana muttered, pulling a little globe of her blood out of her palm with her qi.

Diluting it turned out to be not that easy, in the end, so she just painted in the connection catalyst with her finger. Only the symbols had to be drawn in single motions thankfully but it was still tough enough. When it was done, they linked together and very carefully pushed qi into the array.

She was prepared somewhat, as the qi mists rolled out of them, followed by large droplet after large droplet, but the amount of qi it took was still horrifying.

Even with both of them, it still took almost five minutes. Watching the last of the qi settle into it, she found that the final cost, for both of them, was about two thirds of all the refined qi in her body currently…

Initializing it on her own, or in a less qi rich environment, even just supplying the qi to initialise it would have likely proven impossible she was sure. At best she would likely have over drawn her cultivation… at worst…

Imprinting an array like this directly would be impossible if she had a hundred times her current qi.

Preparing for a lot of pain, she activated the array. Her instinct was right, because a sheet of lightning qi tore through the water, stunning her in place for several erratic heartbeats as she fought to cycle her qi and get control back over her body.

Grimacing, she cut a few chunks of rock, even as the numbness coursed through her simply because she was near the water, and made a few stepping stones to get back to their platforms.

“W-we s-should have d-done that before,” Sana muttered a bit reproachfully as she also struggled with the rampant qi in her body.

“On the bright side… fate-thrashed... s-spiders...” she snickered.

It was still hard work to get back to their respective rocks. Sitting there, she fought her own body and began cycling her qi. Tiny spectral spiders skittered over her skin and the whole rock. At first they blistered her skin, but after a while, there was no visible damage other than some reddening of her skin and the feeling that some hoard of bugs was under her skin trying to get out.

It was a good thing that the symbol seemed to be able to do something to her brain in terms of pain reception in her physical body. That had come with the constantly being exploded and the acid in the sewers really and only gotten more pronounced since then. Her mantra almost certainly played a part there as well, between its innate means to resist mental trauma and her ability to feed pain and emotional turmoil into it, she was able to retain enough control over her body to make this merely, deeply unpleasant.

She properly began the first minor cycle and sighed in relief as all her hopes were gloriously validated. There was a new colour in her qi droplets as they started to condense, blueish-white. It went with the purple and the golden and silver bits. Silver seemed to come from her bones, gold from her blood, purple she wasn’t sure where from… and now blue was clearly from the lightning.

By the time she arrived at the culmination of this sixth large cycle of fifty, any lingering doubts about the fundamental logic of this were fully laid to rest.

Her qi droplets tore apart with a small thunderclap this time and raged through her meridians, searing them and trying their best to break free. She fought to keep them under control and finally they all completed their final cycle spreading through her meridians, flesh, blood and bones and back into her dantian in a sparkling cloud.

She took a deep breath and watched as Sana also finished her cycle. She could feel her dantian had enlarged by a huge amount this time. Her mental instinct suggested around ten percent, which was double what she had gotten from just the unattributed qi.

“Well?” she asked, exhaling again.

“That was horrific” Sana gasped. “It was almost double what it was before in the end.”

She nodded, and waved her arm around. There was pain still, but her resistance to the lightning-metal qi was quite a bit better as well. She could move her limbs easily enough at any rate and suffered no issues with spasms or disruption.

“Did it also give you another colour in the qi droplets?” she asked.

“Yes… yes it did,” Sana sounded… reluctantly pleased.

“I’m thinking there might be a really solid benefit to getting every colour we have fundamental symbols for…” she said slowly.

“Hmmmmm. Not all at once. That caused a massive explosion,” Sana denied the idea.

“Of course not all at once,” she rolled her eyes and Sana made an obscene gesture at her across the pond.

Thinking through it in her head, she continued speaking. “We feed the cycle; once yin, once yang. That should be ten more of the big cycles? As far as I can see the expansion shows no rate of stopping, and while it gets harder to circulate each time, the density of qi here is such that we can probably continue for as long as it lets us before we break through to Golden Core, or whatever the equivalent is.”

“You want to keep this up all the way to Golden Core?” Sana asked dully.

“Well we need to get stronger, breaking through to Golden Core has to happen,” she pointed out with an amused chuckle.

“Yeah… but that might take…”

“Weeks?” she said drily. “Do you have somewhere else you need to be?”

“Home? In a warm bath? With a lot of alcohol? Getting drunk as a Moon Loon to try to forget this whole nightmare?” Sana complained, but she could tell it was just her sister being herself now.

Laughing, she scrubbed a hand through her hair, looking around with a wry expression. After a moment, Sana also shook her head and started to laugh as well.

“Yeah… this place is just one never-ending parade of devil monkeys throwing shit, isn’t it,” Sana added with an amused sigh. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Yes… speaking of that…” she stood in the water, wincing at the cold and the numbing from the lightning. “It seems that the qi doesn’t have the same effect now that it’s distributed through my body at such a fundamental level…. I guess we can step this up a bit? That was ‘True Yin Lightning’ based on the symbols intent.”

“Erm…” Sana looked at her dully… are you suggesting ‘Pure Yang Lighting’? That’s seriously dangerous you know…not a thing a normal Qi Refinement cultivator should go anywhere near.”

“If we want to do this properly we need yin and yang of each elemental interaction…” she pointed out.

Sana started at her as if she were an idiot and she face palmed mentally even as her sister hopped off the rock. “Then alternate it you moron according to the sagacious table so it stays in balance. If you do it that way you’re going to kill us both!

“Ugh. Let me do It,” Sana said with an eye roll. “It will be ‘Surging Yang Water’ next.”

“Sorry…” she said with a wry chuckle, running her hands through her hair. “You're right, there is a cycle… I was getting ahead of myself.”

“Of course I am right, I do far more with formations than you do,” her little sister sniffed.

She let the snappish comment pass. Sana was correct, there was a cycle and it was probably better to follow it. Part of her suspected that it didn’t work quite so inflexibly in this case, because of the symbol in their mind's eye. However, it was better to stick with what they knew. That way if it all blew up they could at least blame the Heavens for being treacherous in their last moments. Not themselves for being stupid. She ran through the order of probable symbols while Sana worked on the next symbol.

“Hmmmmm it’s probably not necessary to disable the feeding symbol,” Sana muttered to herself as she finished it up.

“Now who's taking risks” she retorted dryly, as Sana finished drawing the symbol.

“Pfft. We are siblings, together in pain, near-death and now cultivation madness,” Sana retorted.

It was that attitude that made her the only one of their ‘generation’ in the Hunter Pavilion who was on more than bowing terms with Grand Master Mang, she thought wryly. For all that she had been complaining earlier.

“Also… ‘Surging Yang Water’, this is going to be unpleasant,” her sister noted as they began to activate it.

That was a huge understatement as it turned out.

A colossal understatement in fact.

…

Surging waves of ‘Yang Water’ Qi, or ‘Surging Yang Water’ as Sana had called it, rolled through her meridians, making her fight desperately for every shred of control over the cycles as she ran through them. ‘Surging Yang Water’ was the qi of primordial oceans; dark and strong with devouring currents, soul-destroying calms and drowning waves. It shook her body to the core with every surging pulse that rolled into her.

-If we tried this before we got this durable we would have been torn to shreds by the primal tidal forces it embodied, she thought with a sense of awed horror as she finished another roiling cycle.

Each cycle tempered her muscles and, perhaps more importantly, her core organs, even as her blood surged and roiled. The traces of thunder that came with it from the previous cycle were also mixed in there. When the last cycle completed, the coalescing pool of droplets in her dantian surged outwards, scattering like a great wave breaking through her body. Her qi droplets in her dantian also started to include those with a deep azure sheen, like the ocean waters beneath the sun.

Next came ‘Original Yin Wood’, the qi of poison, growth and new life. Horrifyingly slippery, hard to control, rampant, vibrant and insidiously destructive yet with an almost all-consuming vitality hidden within it. It was the embodiment of the hidden talons of the natural world.

‘Bright Yang Fire’ followed after. The qi of the sun and bright souls, giver of life to every world yet destroyer in equal measure. Tyrannical, energetic and all-consuming, yet also ephemeral and ghostly. Searing the bones and warming the heart in equal measure. Sunbeams and firestorms.

‘Seizing Yin Earth’ was almost as bad as Yin Wood. It was the qi born of the blooming earth, vitality and primordial origins. Giving birth to all things. A terrifying pit of primordial creation struggling to claim everything in its embrace yet refusing to mesh truly in equal turn as it saw itself in everything it touched.

With Yin Earth complete she let out a ragged breath that misted the air around her with shadows.

It was undeniable that this was… tortuous. There was no two ways about it. On the other hand, she could also see that they had made a mistake. Not in doing this, but in not doing it sooner. They had done five full cycles of unattributed qi before they started cycling through the elements. It wasn’t a fundamental mistake, thankfully, it was just that the order of the cycle was… harder with each cycle. The density of qi she had had to start with was already substantial.

“You know, it occurs to me that we made a slight mistake here,” she grimaced.

“Yeah, we should have started with the unattributed element cycle,” Sana muttered through gritted teeth.

“Well, we did do five cycles normal qi refinement with unattributed qi, so it will probably balance itself out,” she said with a sigh. “It seems that our Physiques are giving us quite a bit of latitude in this.”

Sana sighed as well and nodded wearily while she took in the room.

It was much changed now. The pool itself was flickering with qi. The waters were still millpond smooth, but there was a faint multi-coloured light dancing on the surface, like an aurora; ‘Five Elements Mists’.

Steeling herself she pushed qi into her hand and put it into the water. It was… not as bad as she expected actually, it was certainly tyrannical, but her affinity for it was really quite good. Its danger now wasn’t in the chill, but in the purity and the swirling elements within it.

The density of qi in the room was…. tyrannical.

The corpse of an extra spider mother also lurked near the doorway, slowly dissolving. It had appeared mid-way through the Yin Earth cycle and had succumbed before it even understood what had claimed it. A quick sweep of her perception told her that there were quite a few males dead in the room where the water arrays were. The Five Elements Mist had claimed most of them and the waters and defensive arrays themselves had done for the rest, once they were paralysed in it.

No more slime people had appeared at least. She assumed that it was happy to just reap rewards, or maybe they had gotten lucky and it had actually been injured in some critical way by the loss of the one it sent up here.

The core from it still sat in the collapsed rib cage near the doorway, a strange shimmering misty orb that was slowly being refined in the Five Elements Spiritual Spring Water that was swirling through the spirit spring.

~ Sana, Five Elements Spirit Pool ~

Standing by the now rather crowded alcove Sana found herself pondering the logistics of their next expansion. They had already enlarged the cut section somewhat when it came time to add the Yang Fire array, but this was a more structural problem.

“So… Do we need new circles for the reflected attributes?” Arai looked across at the lightning array with a frown.

“Probably yes,” she agreed. “‘Pure Yang Metal-Thunder’- is not True Yin Metal-Lightning’. We have no way to purify the pool so this is going to feed the whole cycle and hit like something close to tribulation lightning for golden core…”

“Oh, what joy, you’re making me regret my own stupid idea even more” Arai muttered as she sat on a rock nearby, ignoring the Five Elements Mist that was coiling around her legs.

That was… disturbing. It was coiling around her as well, and she still had to focus not to flinch away from it. It was like a cute kitten in how it swirled around them both. A remarkably dangerous and lethally poisonous Cute Kitten that due to its rampant oppression of all elements was terrifying in any circumstance you had to deal with it. It was beloved by formations masters, talisman makers and alchemists, but every one she knew treated it like their Mother in Law. And it was only mildly inconvenient to them.

Shaking her head, she refocused and started to work on the new array in this extension of the shelf that was being carved along the wall. They had cut a bunch of stepping blocks to get over here now, because the water was… it probably was manageable, but having watched that Nascent Soul Spider Mother keel over dead and dissolve…

Its core was still there, somewhat surprisingly, glimmering dimly in the water. The whole room was now faintly lit, like a fairy grotto. A horrifyingly dangerous, beautifully lit grotto.

The ‘Yang Lightning’ was every bit as painful as expected. It was the qi of the Heavens, warring against everything and anything with unbreakable spirit and boundless ferocity. Whereas the Yin lightning refined and purified, the Yang Lightning just wanted to punch holes in things and stomp on them afterwards. The punchier and stompier the better as it raged across the water like an angry tiger. Its form was almost unalterable as well. Not for nothing was it known as the ‘Purity Tribulation’ when it occurred naturally. Fifty cycles of mind-shattering, muscle clenching torment later and her qi droplets had gained an angry bronze shimmer.

‘Yin Water’ was less troublesome, relatively. It was the qi born of the high places and the deep dark. Clouds and lakes, rain and depthless pools. They were both already familiar with its properties from working in the caves so it was just cold and ephemeral, trying to dissolve away all her control over it in weird and mind-bending ways. By the time the great cycle was done the headache was actually worse than the soul seizing chill it carried, and her qi droplets gained a shifting grey-purple shadow.

‘Yang Wood’, which she had naively considered starting with, was another type of torment. Timelessness. The qi of the oldest and most ancient beings; great trees and mythical beasts, unbending with a primordial vitality that refused to be shaped and tried to shape her body and soul to its own rhythm of aeons.

Each cycle seemed to stretch beyond what her mind was capable of comprehending and contained all kinds of awkward interactions as it took on aspects of all the other elemental types it was interacting with. Its vitality was almost a torture in and of itself, trapping her within the confines of its boundlessness as it incrementally wore away at the aeons. When the cycle finally finished she felt thousands of years old although it really had only been eight hours. The symbol and her mantra had to work especially hard just to dull the edge on that.

‘Yin Fire’ was almost the opposite. The qi of the boundary, desire and ephemeral hope and despair. Flickering on the edge of non-existence drawing all the warmth of the world into herself somehow and shrouding her in darkness that tried to suffocate her and blot out that self-same warmth.

The qi was at once both obfuscatingly meek and tortuously insidious as it tried to use her as fuel to burn away the whole world and become the only warmth in it. In the end, she had to shelter her consciousness in the symbols shadow and strive to push the qi through her meridians at arm’s length for a dozen cycles before she felt confident enough to embrace it head-on. When the great cycle finished, the qi droplets in her dantian had gained a tell-tale flicker of sly orange- red. She was also sure she was as close to a psyche break as she had ever been.

The last element of the cycle was ‘Yang Earth’.

Soul crushing, sky-scraping immovability and stability on a scale beyond mortal comprehension. The qi of mountains and the world itself, able to stand up to the fury of heaven and the greed of mortals in equal measure. It pressed down on her meridians like a vice, ossifying the mist and fusing droplets together wherever it came into contact with them. It was, she felt, like she was pushing a savage, jagged, collection of rocks around inside her that wanted to grind down everything and make her one with the world. With the completion of that great cycle, there was a weight to her qi droplets that defied comprehension even as the agglomeration of qi shattered apart under its own inertia once more, it tried to collapse back together almost forcefully.

Her dantian’s capacity was increased by almost double, one hundred and forty percent, by the time she had stabilised the tenth elemental cycle... and fifteenth overall cycle.

There was barely any space for mist left in her dantian now. The qi pulled together like a pool, swirling slowly. She was half expecting it to collapse further, but it just stabilized at that point.

Watching it carefully, she tried to get a feel for how it was behaving, only to be distracted by her bones as she followed it through her body with her qi sense. Before she had been dimly aware that they had a silvery sheen, but now she was able to visualise them properly and could see they had shifting waves of rainbow colour hidden within them. Her flesh also had a faint shimmer to it.

Pricking her finger with the Arborundum leaf she watched as her red blood also took on a faint rainbow shimmer around its edges and when it caught the light.

She stared at her physical condition, holistically and wanted to sob quietly. She had totally misjudged the path that her body was pulling her down. With the completion of that pool she now had a spiritual core. She was now in Qi Refinement.

-All that torment had been to break through to bleeding fate thrashed ‘Qi Refinement’?!?.

Belatedly though, pieces slotted together, or perhaps she thought it better to term it a best guess based on what she knew about Spiritual, Martial and Physical cultivation along with Body Refinement. So far they had experienced ‘Foundation Establishment’, ‘Bodily’ or maybe ‘Physical Refinement’, ‘Qi Condensation’ and had now broken through to ‘Qi Refinement’.

“Ummm,” She said with a grimace.

She was happy, ecstatic actually, to have advanced this far... yes, but the feeling of having misjudged matters so much was a bit…

“Why do I get the feeling that despite our earlier hopes, we just broke through to ‘Qi Refinement’?” Arai muttered.

“Maybe,” she said with a sigh… “Why don’t we think of it like this? Now we are at peak Qi Refinement and just have to make our qi accumulate with enough inherent density to collapse the pool into a Golden Core…..right?”

“Haha…” sister gave a weird non-laugh… “I like your ability to sell lies to yourself sis…it reminds me that you’re human despite your atrocious sense of humour sometimes.”

She waved her hand in an obscene gesture at Arai and then just shook her head. “More seriously though, it looks like this basically confirms what you suggested before?”

Arai nodded. “Yeah, it’s less a combination of laws and methods and more of a holistic thing that has traits of all of them in different ways.”

“Yeah…” she agreed, reassured that they both appeared to be finding the same scripture sheet in this weirdness.

She paused to put her hypothetical advancement in order, splitting it up logically based on what they had experienced so far. “So first we had ‘Foundation Establishment’? Where the symbol formed and then qi infused into our bones. Then it was something like ‘Physical Refinement’ where it connected up all our meridians and infused qi into all our soft tissue giving us that passive qi defence of sorts. Next, we have just finished ‘Qi Condensation’, or some hybrid realm like it, where we turn natural Qi into a reservoir in our bodies that can take in qi from the natural world and refine it to the point where we coalesce a stable pool of liquid qi in our dantian’s. In the process, we somehow seem to have imprinted it with aspects of the great elements Yin Yang Cycle, which is…”

“Well, having just struggled through all that it better be good,” Arai muttered.

“Somehow I doubt it will be weak,” she snickered. “Do you know of any real law in our great world that runs for the full cycle? The very best of the famous ones that everyone knows are just minor succeeding yin or yang cycles.”

“In any case,” she continued, before Arai could break her train of thought. “Now, I guess we have to refine enough qi to max out our capacity to the point where the qi gets dense enough that it changes into a Golden Core or whatever this method has that’s similar to one…. how does that sound?”

“It sounds like I’m glad you’re the theoretical sister after a certain point…” Arai quipped back at her.

“Ha, Ha. So funny. But I’m glad you don’t have any holes to poke in it…” she said with an eye roll.

Most of that came from talks with Ling Yu and Juni in any case, both were knowledgeable in their own ways about spiritual cultivation and willing to talk about the specifics quite freely.

“We will see how that idea holds up anyway,” her sister said with a snicker.

The humour was somewhat infectious really. Despite the stress of the situation, they had just broken through two realms in… a few weeks pretty much, that was fast.

“So I guess we can just continue cultivating here…?” she said looking around the room again.

“Do you have somewhere else you need to be in a hurry?” Arai asked with an eye roll.

“I guess…” she said with a faux sigh. “…You know…the more we use these arrays, the less sure I am that they are anywhere near as ‘basic’ as we first assumed.”

“Well by my calculation that whole thing has taken… five-ish days?” Arai mused, choosing to ignore her comment about the arrays. “Stuff has finally decided to shift off and mind its own fate thrashed business for now… so we might as well actually exploit being ignored.”

“You say that,” she said with another look around the room and the pointed at the doorway.

She had just noticed that they had gained another spider mother corpse, behind the other one, in the doorway. She swept her perception out and saw that two more were dead in there, since she had last checked… both looked like they had been squashed flat.

“Oh... Those? They died when we were completing the Yang Earth cycle…” Arai said, noting her gesture.

-They had? She grimaced, she thought she had been paying attention…

With a sigh, she stretched and settled back to cultivate once more.

Starting to move her qi around her meridians once again she got a grasp for the changes after the last great cycle.

Now each cycle made the pool shift and disperse a little then fall back together a bit more. Each time it did, it increased her Dantian and meridians capacity very fractionally. It was hard to even grasp an exact amount it was so small, maybe somewhere about a half or one percent per full cycle? The cycles were longer now as well. She had more qi to move, and the routes that it took when the symbol guided it slowly were… different.

Before it travelled her basic meridians main channels, dispersing out and back in again. Now it had a double layer route, shifting Qi between her twelve ‘Primary Meridian’ systems and what she would have considered her Eight Principle Meridian channels as a further form of exchange. Before these had not been clearly defined as the symbol just did it for her at Bodily Refinement. Now it was clear she had thirteen meridian gates… not eight.

After coming to terms with this rather surprising revelation, she finally got a grip on how the circulation worked and started to cycle her qi again. The exchange between the two systems served to fully mix all the qi moving through her body within a single cycle. Moving it in and out of her dantian and also mixing it with qi from outside. It was exactly like the blood circulation in her body from her lungs.

She settled down to grind out the cycles with a deep sigh. Time waited for no one and there was no saying if something else might decide to wander over and decide that they wanted this accidental cultivation pool for themselves.

Time blurred around her. She kept her awareness sort of on the entrances with each cycle but nothing disturbed them. She was now drawing in Qi from a six metre radius around her. Curiously this didn’t seem to interfere with her sister’s refinement at all. Presumably, that was because the Qi was so dense that neither was anywhere close to depleting the area around them fast enough for them to actually start competing over available Qi.

Fifty cycles later and she was sure that her meridians were expanding less with each cycle at least. It was now down to maybe a fifth of a percent or something insane. She watched carefully for the next Fifty or so before just giving up. The incremental changes were so slight that she could only feel the difference when comparing progress across dozens of cycles, and the capacity wasn’t even the most interesting part. Her qi was becoming increasingly viscous. It flowed smoothly through her meridians but its density was closer to a semi-solid than a liquid. Her dantian and Principle Meridians had no clouds of qi in them now. The qi circulation system had started to transition to that a while ago, but it was only now that she observed that change to be functionally complete. Only her basic meridians, which were drawing in qi held mist now. The exchange turnover between the two was also getting longer and longer.

It took another 150 cycles for her qi to finally coalesce fully.

She watched as it swirled on itself, drawing in more and more qi until all the liquid qi in her body was concentrated towards that singular point in her dantian. Finally, it destabilized, erupting outwards in a homogenised torrent once more to circle again.

After a further 128 cycles, it repeated this process becoming a magnitude denser.

She spent almost 250 cycles to fully fill it up at the new density. Once it reached capacity it coalesced after 64 cycles.

Her short cycles now only took ten minutes as she counted the seconds. Which was a mercy because it took 512 cycles to fully saturate her body this time. After that though, it only took 32 for the qi to reach the point where it would coalesce.

She was aware that she was drawing in qi from the whole room now, as was Arai. They still were not in conflict as such, thankfully. However, she had an awareness of her sister’s refinement radius that hadn’t been there before, suggesting that they might, at last, be about to exceed the capacity of the impromptu spring to replenish itself faster than they used it up.

The next great cycle was 1024. It finally collapsed in on itself and coalesced into a dense, fluctuating orb of myriad colours after only 16 cycles. It held that for a split second before deforming and exploding outwards. Each explosion was still enlarging her qi capacity. Each collapse seemed to increase it by around five percent.

She finally stopped after the collapse at eight cycles, because it was clear they were, finally, starting to compete for the qi in their refinement radius. The saturation of qi in the room was at the point where it was getting physical manifestations beyond the element mists, mostly in the form of flickering little ghost lights and strange half-seen ephemera around the walls. The water had not risen at least.

“What do you think...?” She asked. “Do we continue?”

“I don’t think we want to bottom out the room particularly,” Arai frowned. “The Qi-Repelling rock is on average about 40cm thick. And if we open it up to bedrock that would be self-defeating. I am pretty certain that that rock is aiding this process significantly.”

“Not to mention,” Arai said, waving a hand at the water, “I am still not confident I want to stand in that…Even with this amount of qi raging in my meridians…”

“Me neither,” she agreed with a shudder.

The water before had been manageable, but this now held a subtle sensation of lethality to it that twanged at her instincts.

“I guess we can try strengthening the gathering formations?” she said, sweeping an eye over the formations.

All of them were still going strong, showing no signs of either decaying or abating in their efficiency.

“Yeah…That’s probably the best bet. If we wait for it to replenish it may slow matters down… a lot,” Arai mused, picking up the leaf which had ended up with her last and looking around at the walls.

“We are going to have to go to a new wall though, that will be annoying.”

“The other option is that only one of us uses it for a cycle or until we hit something close to exponential qi coalescence and then lets it replenish?” she added as a further suggestion.

“That seems reasonable,” Arai agreed. “We can alternate expanding it in the meantime, it seems to be halving each time with an increase in magnitude to go with that. It should be possible to stop at 2 cycles to coalescence without much issue assuming the qi actually holds out. The way this is going I think we might have to let it sit for a day or two before actually attempting the final coalescence anyway.”

“It would nice to not cultivate for a while in any case,” she agreed, stretching her arms.

Arai nodded and passed her over the leaf as she settled back down.

While Arai finished up her cycle she got to work re-organising the room. It was logically a bit bothersome, but it still made a nice change from watching qi flow. Hopping over to the wall she cut a few blocks out of the wall panel and started to toss them over towards the far wall where there were some particularly large panels of the Qi-Repelling stone.

It took her almost an hour to finish up and prepare a new spot for them to potentially put down a new set of arrays. It was really quite enjoyable to just do things, and not cycle her qi incessantly. She reckoned she must have been at this for... close to three months, at least. That was a timelessly terrifying thought actually.

As she cut the shelf back and stacked blocks neatly she also found herself hoping that the refinement speed would pick up again in relation to the cycle length. If it didn’t, she calculated, she was going to be sat here for another three months, going from a cycle of eight to coalesce her qi pool in her dantian to a cycle of two.

She was still pondering this when Arai finally stirred and came over to help her. The drawing out of the new set of arrays went much more smoothly than their previous efforts. Rather than start cultivating immediately, they sat there in silence watching the density increase.

Minute by minute, the humid oppression in the room got deeper. The vibrancy of the little flames increased. The haze of multi-coloured mist that was swirling also got thicker as well. There was a distant sound of something falling off the roof and hitting water a few moments later. They both looked towards the slime pool… it was hard to feel sympathy for the spider mothers really, but that was a pathetic way to die as a Nascent Soul creature.

~ Arai, Five Elements Pool ~

After an hour or so had passed Arai, found it was hard to move comfortably in the stifling humid pressure of the qi rolling around the room. The varicoloured mists, which were thankfully harmless to them, were so thick she could probably scoop them with her hand should she wish it. She poked the symbol which had just been symbolling away as it did, passively refining qi at a rate she could only describe as sedentary at this point.

Taking control of the task of pushing the qi around, she started once again.

Now a single cycle took around six minutes. Better than ten at least, which was a quiet relief at least. She distracted herself from the passage of time by trying to work out why it was jumping down while the number of cycles went up exponentially. As far as she could make out after dozens of cycles of observation, the main culprit was actually the oversaturation of her flesh and bones. Her body refinement stage, if that was a thing for them, might very well be at the point where her body was comparable to a low-grade spiritual treasure. Maybe even a mid-grade one.

It was only her guess though. She had no reasonable frame of reference to be sure. If it was the case though, that meant her body was already comparable to a peak Golden Core Bodily Refinement Cultivator.

The Arborundum leaf and Sana’s bone half spear both still drew blood though, as did some of the bones in her former armour. She had recovered them in a moment of respite weeks ago, as much as a means to test the increasing volatility of the spirit pool they were making. That test was fairly easy. She poked herself with a sharpened bone and if it drew blood yet melted in the pool she wasn’t stepping in it. So far the toughest bone in that armour melted like candy in a boiling pan. The spider mother’s exoskeletons, however, had endured quite a long time, which presumably was why the Undren favoured them for armour.

The thorax carapace of the last ones to come in, during the Yang Earth cycle, were still slowly dissolving away. The Nascent Soul spider crystals were also still there, flickering in the water, as were the golden bones from the slime and the other Nascent Soul crystals from the spider mothers. All had taken on a decidedly myriad hue. The core from the slime was now a deep golden-bronze with flickers of green, red and blue in it.

Abandoning those thoughts, she instead let her mind drift back to considering the different symbols while keeping half an eye on both entrances. There was another distant splash after a while, in what sounded like deeper water, suggesting that the qi density had made it as far as the main room with the slime or at least the staircase proper.

She finally felt her qi coalesce at the 4113th cycle.

-At six minutes a cycle that was way too fate thrashed long!

-Still, if we put that in the perspective of those old ancestors who meditate for centuries to increase their cultivation what is this hardship we are complaining of! She thought wryly.

This time, it only took two cycles to fully replenish her qi back to full having just completed the cycle. It felt like breathing in and out twice, and it only took six minutes in total, three a cycle. For the capacity she currently had, really, that was nothing short of inhumane. That said, the downside was that her qi was so viscous and syrupy in her inner meridians and dantian that it made her inexplicably feel a bit congested. Like someone had poured sugar syrup, or that yang rich tree sap they gathered occasionally for the alchemists down her throat. Frowning, she pushed it out of her Principle Meridians and into her Primary Meridians and blinked in surprise. The viscosity decompressed; the qi became pure and fluid. It didn’t have any extra benefit for refining her flesh and bones at this point, the cycle already double exchanged her Qi anyway.

“I’m at 2 cycles to replenish,” she spoke said out loud.

“Ah. I’ll be there pretty soon,” Sana nodded.

“The cycles refinement times seem to be basically exponential, so it’s going to take probably 8000 cycles to even reach one cycle to replenish… shall we stop at that point and take it from there?” She queried.

“Yeah, that’s better than accidentally screwing ourselves over by having to compete for Qi somehow,” Sana agreed.

…

Despite having expected it to take a while, it still took almost two more weeks to reach 8000 cycles. Both of them stopped and played ‘brick, parchment, shears’ in a fit of childish pique to see who would go first. Having drawn the blunt shears she started cultivating again while Sana watched.

Beyond that, it was still another 224 cycles before she actually hit the coalescence point again. Sana progressed her own cultivation cycles a bit behind her after it became clear that 8000 was nowhere close to the critical point, stopping at 220.

She watched as the qi in her dantian coalesced under its own inertia forming a beautiful spherical orb of purified qi with a copper-bronze sheen with twelve twisting strands inside it for a few seconds. She stared at it, watching, aware that if she willed it, it would set at that point. However, something didn’t quite feel... right.

As she watched it patiently it rotated once, twice... three... four times then gave a faint destabilising wobble and suddenly exploded outwards again.

-So this was the peak of Qi refinement, at long last. She let out a soft sigh.

“It will try to coalesce into a copper-bronze core, don’t let it,” she said, stirring.

Sana nodded in affirmation and then started herself.

Twenty minutes later Sana exhaled and opened her eyes, stopping her practice and stretching her arms. “A copper-bronze core with 12 strands is clearly the most basic type then.”

“So it would seem, I don’t know anything really about core grades beyond the colours, Bronze should be grade seven…” she said with a slightly more frustrated sigh.

“I only know what you know… So we really have nothing other than our own intuition to go on…” Sana agreed.

She skimmed what she recalled of various discussions in her head. Some of it was common knowledge. A dull metallic core was the most basic, a grade nine core. Bronze were all low-grade cores. Silver in various colours was all mid-grade cores. Gold was high-grade cores. There were apparently special cores as well that certain laws or treasures could condense. In terms of quality, most normal people who formed a Golden Core would get a bronze or silver core. Gold Cores required, even in their world a degree of preparation. The quality of the core was also paramount for your future cultivation progress. A silver, mid-grade Golden Core would likely get you to Immortal in Eastern Azure, but you would not really progress past that, even if you managed to cross the tribulation. A low-grade bronze core would see you stuck at Nascent Soul in all likelihood, while a basic core would probably never get past Soul Foundation.

“The answer seems fairly obvious then, we just keep going until it coalesces even if we do nothing to it at all…” she said with a wry smile.

“At least neither of us seemed in any danger of stealing qi from each other.”

“Yeah,” Sana agreed. “In fact, the qi is still getting denser…”

“Mmmmm,” she nodded.

It was a passing concern that they might have overdone that, but it was possible to deactivate them very easily now. Only the original qi gathering one was totally and rather foolishly unconstrained.

Settling back into the timeless zone of just letting cycle after cycle slip by almost two weeks passed in a blur until she felt the Qi in her dantian swirl around under its own inertia and coalesce into a silvery orb with a greenish tint

She watched it rotate for a full 8 turns before it collapsed outward once again.

Each time it did this she was pleased to note that her overall capacity still went up a bit and the overall speed of each cycle sped up. It was now at about the same rate as her heart took to pump blood around her body, so approximately thirty seconds.

The third coalescence took seven days and drew in a huge amount of Qi from the spirit pool around them to form a whitish silver core that remained stable for almost fifteen rotations before collapsing with colossal force. The whole room shook faintly and the water rippled away from her as the shockwave of expanding qi swept out.

That dispersal swept qi into parts of her body she didn’t even realise weren’t fully permeated by it. Forcing it into the minuscule structures that made up the very building blocks of her organs. Planting a tiny seed of silver-white qi inside each one. She intuitively understood that her body had just taken a huge leap forward in durability with that single act. It also increased her body’s total qi capacity by a third over what it had been before.

A few hours later, Sana went through the same event, which also generated a similar shockwave.

Excitement over, it was another six days this time, so marginally quicker again before her Qi coalesced once more. The total number of cycles involved, 16,448 cycles, made her sob internally every time she thought of it.

This time the core was a burnished silvery-purple with a faint hint of gold. The qi strands still flickering away inside. It remained stable for twenty one revolutions before collapsing. The force cracked every bone in her body and turned her flesh to jelly for a heartbeat before its internal structure recovered its coherence thanks to the collapsing force left behind by the absence of the qi. Black blood slicked her whole body within seconds as more impurities were forced out of her body, from where they had been trapped deep in her bones and muscles. Residues of qi poison and qi scarring from wounds or so it mostly seemed.

The next cycle took five days and for the first time, she felt a slight tug on her qi gathering as it competed with her sister once again.

This time the core formed a pale golden hue with a purple tint and lasted twenty-four rotations before turning back into a sea of golden purple qi with shimmering hints of the different colours of the elements within it. Sana moved past that threshold an hour later and this time she saw the problem wasn’t that they were competing for qi as such, it was that there just wasn’t enough Qi left in the room itself after two people had used it intensively for a week.

They toyed with the idea of adding a third set of arrays to the far wall, but decided, after some deliberation, to let it replenish itself. During this time, she observed that nothing else really seemed to have come and bothered them. Likely the reach of the qi purity in the air was such that this whole part of the sewer was basically a no-go zone. If Nascent Soul spiders had been dying beyond their line of sight then, she was pretty sure that the devastation must be quite widespread by now.

As time passed by she was afforded a lot of thought space to ponder how almost everything about this process was somewhere between painfully annoying and borderline unpleasant. The accurate adjective to describe the holistic process was probably ‘Hellish’. Whether it was the monotony of the cycles, the nervous tension that came with the qi actually condensing, its aftermath or waiting for the qi to replenish.

In the end, though, she went and carved a third set of arrays in the next room just to speed the process up and provide her with something else to do in the monotony for an hour – even then it still took a full day for the qi to replenish.

The next core coalescence came after four more days was vibrant gold in colour with a white purple sheen. It lasted for twenty-eight revolutions. When it collapsed, it sent a sea of white purple fire through her body, again cleansing it of impurities and giving her blood a faint golden hue. She watched as Sana also experienced the same blaze of white-gold purifying flame a short while later. Viewing the process from the outside you could be fooled into thinking it was pretty, as white flames licked across her skin, with a faint purple edge in the mysterious many coloured illumination of the room. Almost.

Three days later her qi swirled around and formed a brilliant golden core with a white hue. Twelve flickering elemental flames orbited inside it. It remained stable for thirty rotations before collapsing slowly from the inside out, expelling flickering golden flames dispersing into her body and merging with her organs before fading away.

Two days after this the next cycle completed and her qi once again coalesced. The gold spinning into the centre and slowly merging with a flickering mist of myriad colours, leaving the core an off white with shifting hues of a rainbow in its curves. It held for thirty-one rotations before dissipating back into multi-coloured fog that flowed through her body and into her bones where it condensed as vital qi that was almost translucent except for the shifting hues of the elements within it. Thereafter the qi formed in her body was also translucent and held the same shifting hues, whether it was as mist or liquid.

A day after that the qi once again coalesced. This time into a sphere that slowly turned between pure white, translucence and shadowed darkness as the shifting colours of the myriad elements flickered across its surface like lightning in storm clouds. It lasted thirty-two rotations before exploding outwards in a crash of thunder that shook the whole room. Black and white tinted lightning flowed through her inner meridian channels and swirled into her nervous system directly before burrowing somewhere she couldn’t detect. She let out a long breath and spat out a mouthful of black blood. Sana who was still keeping pace with her ever since she had added that third set of arrays underwent the same thing a short while later.

“Well that’s nine coalescences and it still doesn’t want to sit,” Sana said with a long sigh.

“That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though. None of those cores felt…. Right?” she pointed out.

“Yes, it’s like there is something missing in how they are forming. If you accepted one it would be okay? But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I would regret it later. Even that last one which was clearly related to the traversal of Heavenly Yin and Yang in some way…” Sana frowned.

“We can think on it for a while, the qi in here needs to replenish slightly anyway…” she stood up and stretched.

It was nice to be able to move without feeling like a mountain was pressing on you. That feeling would return, of course, but relative freedom was pleasant while it lasted. She poked herself in the hand with some of the bones. Several still drew blood and she found herself wondering what they were from honestly.

She had settled down to consider the symbols and how they might fit into formations in vaguely auspicious manners for a change of pace when she stopped and suddenly felt like a total idiot.

-Of course, what was missing was the symbol itself.

She put her head in her hands and sighed.

“I know what we were, are probably missing,” she said. “The symbol… some aspect of it also needs to be on the Golden Core.”

“That…” Sana sighed as well. “Talk about forest for trees, we got so caught up in the traditional aspects of the ‘cultivation’ that we forgot that the root of all this is really not anything to do with cultivation as we know it at all.”

“Better to realise it now than make a huge mistake mind…” She pointed out. “I’ll try the next breakthrough and see what it plays out like. It should be possible to cancel it forcibly with a bit of backlash if it really seems like something won’t work...”

“That’s?” Sana narrowed her eyes.

“Well, we are in untested territory!” she replied with a weak smile, explaining her inner logic. “Rest assured, nobody wants to die less in a horrible inner explosion than me at this point. It’s better that we take things carefully. If both of us try it and it doesn’t work we are absolutely done for. But if one of us tries, the other might be able to help if we get in trouble.”

“And anyway I’m the elder sister, so what I say goes!” it was somewhat false bravado, but still…

“…”

Sana shook her head sadly and sighed. “Okay… I’ll come over there then.”

Her sister picked up one of the stacked bits of rock and jumped over to her side of the room. With some trepidation, having just engaged so… directly with ideas of her own potential mortality, she started to stimulate her Qi more.

The process took about the same length of time to arrive at the coalescence point as it had before. This time she focused on putting some part of the symbol into the coalescing qi. It shifted in her mind and let a shadow of itself be projected out of her mind’s eye and onto the forming golden core. This continued for a few rotations until she saw the symbol give a sense that suggested something wasn’t quite right. Something went *ting* and the qi flew apart and settled back to normal.

“What happened?” Sana asked looking concerned.

“Symbol didn’t like it,” she winced, feeling like she had just been punched in the gut and the head at the same time. “I got the sense that it felt the way I was trying to go about it was wrong somehow.”

She frowned and focused once more stimulating her qi and letting it coalesce under its own inertia. This time she pushed the symbol into her qi itself, like she was using it to resist invading qi. It flowed into the golden core as it coalesced without any difficulty swirling around within it and interacting with all twelve elemental flames. The core became a weird inside out colour, slowly turning through itself as If there was an extra dimension involved before snapping back to a sphere. It did this slow weird rotation thirty-three times before collapsing apart as if something wasn’t quite connecting with it in the right way. The symbol shifted slightly as if to say apologetically... ‘That kind of works but I don’t quite think it’s what you want’.

Sighing, she quashed her discomfort and tried a third time. This time she let the core coalesce as before but used the symbol's intent to shift the elemental attributes within the core into the same formation symbol she had used to create it in the first place. Using her qi to form the framework at the heart of the golden core with the elemental attributes in the five points. The symbol itself was the control and connection that formed the centre. The core came together glacially slowly, pulling together and dragging the qi in her dantian around the nucleus of the symbol and its formation.

The shape took form with agonizing slowness and then started to shift and rotate, getting smoother each time as it pulled more and more qi into it. It reached thirty-three rotations and continued to rotate a thirty-fourth time. There was a sensation of abrupt sensation of ‘setting’ and her body nearly exploded under the force of the core forming. She swore her body probably expanded visibly when that happened. Space around her fluctuated slightly and qi was torn in from the surroundings so fast it formed a swirling maelstrom of fog around her. Sana jumped back to get out of the range and then fled the room using her movement art.

Qi rolled into her core from the outside in a seemingly unending torrent. Her Core was now spinning at her dantian’s heart and qi was starting to swirl around it in esoteric forms like a spider web within the clouds. Five points opened up, one after another, between her Dantian and her vital organs; her Liver, heart, brain, lungs, stomach. Connecting a new meridian system into her dantian that somehow unified all the other meridians with her nervous system and circulation system giving them a newfound completeness in a way she hadn’t realised was missing before.

All the while, qi kept pouring into her body, her core drawing it around itself and then pushing out throughout her body. The first place it flooded into was her bones. Within moments they were full to bursting with translucent liquid qi. Shortly after that her bones all started to take on a pale silver then pale gold, then deep gold then bright gold before finally a faint cream sheen that looked like fired porcelain. The spiderweb-like qi veins flickering around her core abruptly swept outwards, passing through her whole body. With their passage they connected every bone to her golden core, before fading away, leaving only the faintest of whiter than white matrices of lines on them.

The devouring sensation in her golden core continued as it drank in all the Myriad types of elemental qi from the surroundings. By the second she could feel it ground denser and denser. The nature of the qi around it was shifting as well. Becoming purer. With a start, she realised she recognised the qi as the most fundamental of the ‘compound’ qi’s from the Perilous Realm, what they had thought of as Myriad Elements True Qi. Her core’s colour shifted again, becoming darker and darker. The white was still there somehow and the black, and the symbol and the Myriad Elements. She felt something else connecting with it suddenly, the intent from the martial cultivation technique was also infusing into the core slightly, turning it even darker. Eventually, it slowed and she started at her core. It was a deep burnished black-gold with shimmering black-white corona and an illusionary ‘array’ within it around which shifted the ten elemental flames and two other hard to perceive colours and the symbol itself in its varicoloured, ever-changing, flower-like form.

As an end to the trail known as ‘Core Formation,’ it felt almost anticlimactic. The lack of lightning was also…worrying.

“Fates that was close…” Sana hissed as she carefully re-entered the room a few moments later, hopping off the walls to avoid touching the waters below.

“What…happened?” she asked.

She had seen Sana flee, presumably because of the qi drain, but hadn’t had the time to focus on it amid everything else that was going on.

“The devouring strength of that was just ridiculous, the symbol could barely keep my qi in my body. If I hadn’t run you would have accidentally taken all my foundation and more besides…” Sana shivered.

“Sorry… that was… outside my expectations,” she apologised and looked around the room.

The mist was still drifting on the water but it looked wan and thin now. The terrifying elemental infused soup was still there but it didn’t seem quite so ominous. “I guess we have to wait for a few days for you to break through then,” she sighed.

“That’s fine, you can explain in detail what you did…” Sana snickered.

…

It took almost a week, in the end – and a further set of qi gathering and transformation arrays in the room with the stair flooding array – to get the density back to what it was. If anything, it might actually be a bit greater than before. She was shocked at the difference in strength now she had formed a core. The pressure from the qi was still there, but it was more like a tight garment that constricted than a crushing mountain bearing down on her.

The core now formed the centre of her dantian, where it pulled in qi from the surroundings which orbited it like dust clouds condensing crystal clear qi droplets that contained Myriad Elements strands of qi. The efficiency was heaven shifting compared to before. At Qi Refinement she had been forced to exhale reasonably large quantities of qi that didn’t get properly purified due to the differing quantities present in innate qi in the environment. Even the relatively balanced spring they made still had a lot of imbalance.

Now, however, her dantian was its own little qi refining eco-system. The misty clouds rained qi of all the elements and they slowly combined under the inertia of the core above a small lake of liquid qi. Purified Qi was pulled upwards to feed the Golden Core and the Golden Core pulled in more qi from the outside to continually replenish everything just by drawing as it did. Nothing was wasted and nothing was expelled. She was literally a ‘potentially’ bottomless sinkhole for innate qi. If she had an upper limit on her qi capacity, it was likely to take quite a while to determine what it was.

She watched Sana form her core much as she had. Her vision had increased enormously after the breakthrough and she was even able to infuse a bit of her qi into it to mimic perception, allowing her to see, properly, the faintly shifting tides around Sana as the core started to draw in qi.

It’s pull was fearsome. She could understand now, why Sana fled the room that fast. With a start she realised she could actually supply qi to this process as well, feeding absolutely pure Myriad Elements Qi towards her sister to help her form the core.

As the elder sister this was only fitting. To not help her sister like this would be unthinkable, and if Sana ended up with an even better core than hers, because of this… well that was also her role as the elder sister, to make sure that they both succeeded as best they could.

Even so…the amount of qi she was able to take in as she supported the process was surprising. She reckoned her qi reserves had increased by about fivefold simply while refining through the cycles to reject the different cores. In the process of the actual Core Formation that had jumped by maybe… fifty-fold over what she had had at the peak of Qi refinement. Of that, she had filled about three-fifths of her total capacity up without even trying in the week it took to restore the qi in the room. It was that extra that was now being injected into her sister’s core formation as carefully as she dared.

Even though she was certain Sana would succeed, she was still nervous as she kept feeding qi to her, until finally she felt the space shudder and constrict subtly, signifying that the core had formed successfully.

Then it went nuts, dragging in qi as fast as she could supply it into the room.

She gawped as it visibly drew down the qi in the room about as fast as she was supplying more. This continued as she warily marked the progress of her own reserves depleting, even as the qi all around them rolled into her sister like it was flooding into a bottomless pit. She was down to five percent of her total capacity and getting ready to run, when it finally slowed down and Sana exhaled and focused on her again.

A ghostly shimmering core seemed to float in front of her suddenly, it was a deep, dark black-gold with a purple-white corona and the Formless Permutations symbol shifting gently at its heart. Around it, like celestial ephemera, lingered a halo of Myriad Elements Qi twisting through the different elemental forms. At a glance, she could tell it was every bit the equal of her own core.

With a thought, she focused on her own core and it floated above her. The two were basically identical apart from the slight difference in corona colours and the subtleties of the ephemera. Seeing the symbol in that form was also a bit strange, because while it was demonstrably the same symbol, the reading was intuitively different for both of them.

“I think we can finally get out of this blasted place…” Sana said with a sigh.

“Maybe... But I think we should make sure our qi reserves are full to burstin,” she grinned.

“Fate-thrashed right we should!” Sana exclaimed, and then grabbed her in an ecstatic embrace.

…

Between them, it took a further two days to fully saturate their new qi reservoirs. Her original estimate of 5000% increase appeared to be a bit out she had to acknowledge once she looked at it properly. Comparing relative pureness and density of qi it was probably close to 7000%. She did some quick mental calculations and decided that one large drop of qi could be considered a ‘unit’. Her new dantian was at least ten times larger than the Qi Pool that she had possessed at the peak of Qi Refinement as well. It was on its way to becoming a Qi Lake and held about 200,000 of the large drops. Or maybe 200 of the ‘units’ she had been collapsing to make her core in the first place. She decided to go with that, it was a rounder number and fewer zeros were better so… ‘200 core units’. That was a lot of qi. Sana’s capacity was actually a bit higher after they did some further comparisons; closer to 220 Core units.

Once that was done with, they weighed up their options and finally decided to seal up both access points to the rooms as best they could with rock and Qi-Repelling stone. It took a while to quarry out the blocks using just the leaf knife, but they had nothing better to do really beyond cultivate. It helped that the Myriad Elements saturated water was no longer at all dangerous to them.

Soon they had stripped two of the halls close to the spider den of their Qi-Repelling stone walls and used the stacked blocks, wedged in as tight as they could to stop the spread any more than it already was into the spider den. Neither of them bothered going through the mist traps to check on it. They still shredded her skin like it was paper.

Eventually satisfied with that, they stacked a few of those that remained and began the slow and laborious job of chopping a way up to the surface using the Arborundum leaf.

It took almost a week of hard work to make it the ninety-eight metres vertically up. Shifting stone down in batches and stacking it against the doorways they had sealed off. Sana eventually gave a shout of joy and pushed up a floor slab in what turned out to be a basement room in the inner city area. They hauled themselves free and replaced the stone slab, making sure to note where it was. The place might make a useful cultivation well if they left it for a week or two to replenish, or just a place to hide if required.

Standing in the basement, she took a deep breath of the humid cavern air and sighed happily.