After a week of living at the Mystical Qilin Sect, most guests have gotten used to the way of life here. While there were plenty of luxuries, they also had to work hard. Yan Ping was a strict leader and tolerated no nonsense. However, they started to see Anji less, much to the Zhao family’s concern.
Zhao Wanting remained behind after the spell-casting lesson to inquire about her daughter’s whereabouts.
"Ah, don’t worry. She’s currently undergoing accelerated cultivation training. It would take her about two weeks to break through to the next stage of the Strengthened Core. She was at the foundation stage for a while. We had to work on strengthening her physical body before she could progress to the next stage, or her sealed core would cause energy disarray."
It was true. The fact that all of Anji’s food had been specially made with tonics and spiritual pills for the past month was the reason why she was finally allowed to use the accelerated cultivation chamber. Although there was still a strict time limit for using it, Doctor Yun assured Yan Ping that the growing child would face no consequences for fasting sixteen hours a day while in the accelerated chamber for two weeks.
Apart from waking up for a meal at lunch and napping until dinner, Anji spent the rest of the time in the accelerated cultivation chamber in isolation. Doctor Yun monitored her health daily, and Yan Ping checked on her qi regulation.
Zhao Wanting bit her bottom lip when hearing how gruelling Anji’s special training was. She knew that the Mystical Qilin Sect would never endanger her daughter. However, as a mother, her heart ached when she thought about all the hardships her youngest daughter had to endure.
While the unofficial parent-teacher meeting occurred, Anji remained blissfully unaware of their conflicted thoughts. Instead, she focused on removing the shackles in her body.
According to Grandpa Jin, Anji’s soul cultivation far surpassed her spiritual core. While the soul had no limit, the body had a physical limit. Yan Ping’s artificial cores and seals kept the container from exploding. However, moving up a cultivation base meant Anji had to loosen the seals more. The only problem was how painful it became when her meridians constantly flooded with qi without enough outlets.
"Agh!!" Anji screamed in pain as a new wave of energy pulse shook the accelerated cultivation chamber. The pressure was too great for her to control the qi flow. However, this was the best method that existed for tampering with the core. She had to make her meridian network more resilient to overwhelming pressure from within.
"Focus!" Grandpa Jin snapped from their mental connection. "Do not store the energy. Let it run rampant and discharge it smoothly."
It was easier said than done. Although the golden dragon and her shifu told her the same thing, it was instinct for any living creature to hold onto life. Survival instincts were difficult to overcome. Even if Anji knew how abundant the life energy around her was, her subconscious wanted to hold onto the energy after it had been parched for so long. It wanted to drink until it exploded. There was no end to its thirst.
By forcing large amounts of energy through her meridian channels and spiritual core, the goal was to increase the toughness of her body through repeated pressure. Unlike walls made from bricks, the meridians in her body and her spiritual core were like a lump of clay. It could be shaped with enough force to stretch into something capable of holding more energy. Usually, cultivators would focus on expanding the capacity of their spiritual golden core. However, Anji’s core was sealed. Hence, she could only focus on increasing the storage capacity in the individual meridian cores.
Theoretically, it was possible to match the capacity of increasing the golden core by only stretching every artificial core inside her body. However, over four hundred such cores were guarding every single acupuncture point. Thanks to the accelerated cultivation chamber, Anji could not collect energy in each core fast enough with such a rapid flow of energy coursing through her. As a result, when she focused too long on one point, it would cause a qi dam building up and a lot of pain. The shockwave of energy discharge that followed it was a sign of her body rejecting the progress.
Drenched in sweat, Anji silently swore in a language that would shock her dear mother. Between battling the pain and the frustration of not being able to tamper with her body on a strict time limit, manners were the last thing on Anji’s mind.
It was as if she were grasping at straws. Each time she managed to expand three cores on the same meridian network, they would dominate the meridian and upset the energy flow. The constant buildup of energy waiting behind swollen cores resulted in an energy pulse as her body forcefully discharged the dangerous build-up, negating all her efforts for the last hour. Each time this happened, Anji became more discouraged.
Was this truly the right method?
Instead of trying again, Anji resigned to fate. She was too tired mentally to try again and instead allowed the energy rushing through her network to do whatever it wanted. Grandpa Jin studied the exhausted child and sighed. It was true that no human in history had such a difficult condition. Anyone with Anji’s gifted core at birth would have died almost immediately. It was already considered a miracle that this child lived till six with the ability to cultivate, even at an extremely retarded pace. He should not expect more. Chapters first released on novel•fire.net
During her break, an hour passed. Then, three. Before Anji knew it, five hours had passed. However, the pain that she once felt gradually subsided and was replaced by a slow-warming heat inside her body.
The cold sweat from enduring pain now transformed into perspiration from internal heat. Feeling more comfortable with embracing the energy without the need to control where it went, Anji tried circulating her own energy to harmonise with the rapidly flowing one absorbed from the cultivation chamber.
Funnily enough, her body accepted the mixed energy more easily, and her meridians welcomed the familiar signature. Although Anji still had no idea what she was doing, she continued it for the next two hours.
Grandpa Jin, who had taken a short nap, woke up to see a different energy signature. Surprised, he checked on his ward and saw how Anji attempted the art of energy harmonisation instead of conversion.
"Are you trying to blend your energy with the foreign one?" he asked.
Anji did not stop. The energy felt lukewarm now, something very comfortable.
"I don’t know," she replied to the golden dragon in her mind. "I just thought I should stop resisting and fighting the flow to convert it. It’s too difficult. Although this method is slower, there should be an effect to let the cores warm up slowly and expand at their own pace."
The changes were very small. However, it was definitely there. Cold metal was harder to shape than hot metal. Maybe Anji was truly onto something. Previously, they had been trying to alter the shape of her cores with pure force. Strengthened Cores were gained from resilience. Breaking and repairing the weak vessel helped to make it stronger.
However, Anji was using a different approach. Instead of breaking her body down to repair and rebuild it part by part, her method of harmonising was not aimed at changing her true nature or structure. Instead, she attempted to nurture the existing weak vessel into the best possible state it could manage.
Harmonising usually came after those who had attained the Solid Core stage when their raw potential had been fully maximised. The refinement of energy flow and technique in the harmonising stage separated Solid Core and Enlightened Core cultivators.
Excited, Grandpa Jin decided to teach Anji a new sutra that would increase the efficiency of harmonisation after seeing how Anji was capable of the basics. Seeing how Anji’s method worked, they might have been doing this wrong.
"Hey, kiddo! If you want to fuse the two different energies, you’d take at least another year with this method. Don’t forget that you only have sixteen hours a day for two weeks. Let me teach you a faster method. It would take you a few days to master it, but when you do, you can synchronise it with any external energy you pull into your body almost immediately. It’s probably better than the traditional tampering anyway."
Thrilled, Anji agreed. After all, insanity was trying the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result, and Anji was still of sound mind.