After listening to Yan Ping’s concerns, Zhao Mingfeng frowned. It was late in the night when the Mystical Qilin Sect Leader visited him. It hadn’t even been a month since she entered the deepest cultivation chamber.
"So you’re saying you require an isolated chamber in the forest that has sound-cancelling barriers because of the silver bell?"
Sipping the tea, Yan Ping nodded.
"Soul cultivation isn’t the same as cultivation. In order to seal Anji’s chakra gates, I need to first understand how to access them. Your daughter has naturally aligned chakra gates. It was how she could access her Heavenly Eyes and become spirited away."
Hearing Yan Ping’s assessment, Mingfeng thought it would be easier for her to observe Anji closer and learn how she accessed her chakra gateways while using Heavenly Eyes.
"It’s not that simple," the prophet sighed. "Some people were born with meridian channels that do not need training and functional cultivator cores. They wouldn’t know how to explain what they do even if you asked them. For them, this is as natural as breathing. Anji activated her Heavenly Eyes for the first time about a year ago. She did it without knowing how they worked. I can’t even sense soul energy with my level of cultivation. From what I know, it uses life energy but works very differently from qi."
Troubled, Mingfeng wondered how he could help her break through quicker. Yan Ping had a higher cultivation base than him. Not everyone could enter their astral body even after obtaining a Divine Core. The astral body was a pure creation from qi that could leave the physical body behind, bringing only the mind’s consciousness.
From outside, Zhao Wanting saw that her husband was still awake and working overtime again. Concerned, she visited him and was surprised to find Yan Ping with him. ʀᴇᴀᴅ ʟᴀᴛᴇsᴛ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀᴛ novel-fire.net
"Greetings, Sect Leader Yan. It is very late at night. How was your cultivation training? Was the cultivation chamber good enough?"
Offering Wanting a seat, Yan Ping summarised her concerns and difficulties. After listening to her story, Wanting remembered something Anji mentioned previously when she was spirited away.
"I don’t know if this information would be of much help," she started hesitantly. "Anji shared with me that she had a strange dream while she was spirited away. Initially, I brushed it off as a child’s imagination. However, the void that you mentioned in the inner soul world sounded very similar to what Anji experienced before."
Curious about what Anji experienced in her dream, Yan Ping demanded to know every detail. Without leaving anything out, Zhao Wanting told the Mystical Qilin Sect Leader how her daughter spent a long time in a weightless world without anything except herself. She spent a long time wandering and playing in that space, but there was no exit.
"After Anji became tired in her dream, she relaxed in that dark space and did nothing. However, she felt many itching sensations that resembled the itching she felt when you channelled qi when studying her meridians. However, she also heard a low humming in the background that she could not locate. After which, Anji felt a horrible itch on the middle of her forehead. She focused on that itch, trying to scratch it, but as the itch intensified, she was suddenly pulled into a world full of swirling rainbow colours that made her head hurt. She said she felt as if she was looking at the colours from three people’s perspectives at once, and the colours were what she saw in others while using her Heavenly Eyes. Some of the stronger colours would eat the weaker ones, and the boundaries between colours constantly changed. However, she couldn’t touch anything there and was woken up after that."
The middle of her forehead and the perspectives of three different people gave Yan Ping a huge hint about what she had to do next.
"I think I know what to do now," Yan Ping thanked Wanting. "I’ll go back to the deep cultivation chamber and test it. If it still does not work, please prepare that isolated chamber in the forest with sound barriers."
Leaving as suddenly as she arrived, Yan Ping hurried back to the deep mountain cultivation chamber. The puzzled couple wondered what Yan Ping had figured out from a child’s dream. However, Wanting urged her husband to figure it out tomorrow and head to bed first. Whatever Yan Ping needed, the Celestial Dragon Sect would provide.
Hurrying back to her seclusion chamber, Yan Ping reflected on her new insight. She had been wrong. Although life energy was universal, there was only one reason why Yan Ping could not see Anji’s life energy after her cultivation core was sealed. It wasn’t that Anji was not alive. Different planes existed. If mortals and animals lived on a single plane of a lower dimension, cultivators lived on a higher plane than them, able to sense qi that regular mortals could not. However, soul energy was on a higher plane than qi. This is why only Anji could see the different colours of the cultivators while Yan Ping could not. However, she could see Anji’s soul clearer while she was in her astral body because her ability to sense energy was restricted while she was in the body.
Using her physical vessel to convert energy on a higher level was impossible. Putting this together with the hint from the travelling monk, Yan Ping derived that anyone could cultivate the soul arts because every living thing was given a soul. Cultivators could only cultivate if they had complete meridian circuits and a functional golden core. However, there was no discrimination between bodies when it came to the soul. Hence, anyone could cultivate it.
"My knowledge about this world is still too limited," Yan Ping admitted with shame, feeling like a frog in the well. "I have much to learn after this. No wonder my master always claimed she was still inferior even after becoming a Sage. Obtaining the Supreme Core is only the beginning!"