I walked with Cassandra to the largest building on the peak, the elder’s residence. We walked into a large room in the middle of the building where elder Niang was waiting for us at a table.

When we reached the table and sat down, Cassandra activated the artifact and the bubble of secrecy, as I was now calling it, covered us.

“Cassandra came to me with news of a troubling story.” Elder Niang started.

“At the mention of you and the church of the one true Dao I asked that you be brought so the story could be explained to me.” She continued. She motioned for me to go ahead, and I told her my story from the beginning including about the church’s activities on Setria 9, and Jia and I’s encounter with the church at the waterfall near Liusha city.” When I finished my story, her hands were clasped very tightly in front of her.

“Thank you for bringing this plot to our attention Astra. I will personally look into your claims, and should they be true, I will take them to the patriarch in secret where we will devise a plan to counter the church’s. We will allow them to enact their plan on the day of the sect competition to flush out all of the church’s members within the sect and we will utterly annihilate them!” She said with increasing excitement as she spoke.

“I’m sure once their plot has been thwarted, you’ll be rewarded for bravely bringing this information to us, despite not knowing if we were members of the church ourselves.” She told me. I blushed a little and explained how I tried to test Cassandra in her home but they both just face palmed when I finished my story.

“Astra, if I had been part of the church, I would have just pretended I wasn’t in front of Jia and Ji.” Cassandra said and my blush devolved into a full-on face reddening. The two older women just laughed, and Cassandra and I walked back to Cassandra’s house, her loudly congratulating me on being praised by the elder for my good work on my first missions. Giving any possible spies in the peak no reason to suspect that their secrets had been revealed.

We made it back to Cassandra’s house where Jia and Ji were still waiting for us, and Cassandra activated the bubble of secrecy again.

“Now that that situation is being handled by elder Niang. Spill the beans about your cultivations you three. With a little bit of a flush on my face I explained to Cassandra about the inheritance I received and how I learned from the mysterious text in my head that cultivation was meant to be done with body cultivation and spirit cultivation in tandem to reach the greatest possible heights. She almost seemed more shocked at this story than of the plot being planned by the church of the one true Dao.

“So, you’re saying that with my current cultivation, I’m not going to be able to reach the greatest heights possible? Is it too late for me to start?” She asked.

“What’s your current cultivation level?” I asked.

“I’ve been holding off on going to the core formation stage until my foundation is stronger. I’ve been stuck at this level in my cultivation for years now.” She said, looking a little downtrodden.

I explained that it wasn’t too late for her if she started body cultivating right now and didn’t move on to the core formation stage until she reached the body training stage in body cultivation at least.

She clapped her hands in excitement and asked for tips on body cultivation. As a cultivator with a highest-level single branch water spirit root, she should find it easier to cultivate her body than most as she only needed to cultivate one element. As the number of branches in one’s spirit root lowers, fewer elements are needed to cultivate but the more time would be required to cultivate that element. While the time to cultivate may be increased, it isn’t so much more that cultivating two elements would be easier than cultivating one element.

Cassandra ushered us out of her house after hearing the explanation we gave her on how to cultivate her body and ran off to the peak’s water qi training building. We all shrugged and after deciding we didn’t have anything left to speak about, Ji went back to his own petal to train as much as he could before the sect competition. Jia and I decided that we needed to rest after the day’s revelations and went back to our dorm and promptly fell asleep, Shimmer sleeping with Jia like normal.

When we woke up the following morning we began focusing on our cultivation in earnest. We both needed to be stronger for the sect competition in a few months, both to try and win the competition and to make fighting off the church’s disciples in the sect easier.

I joined Jia in going to the water qi training building but instead of working on my body cultivation like she did, I worked on my spirit cultivation. I sucked up the water qi in the room like an endless void, annoying Jia, so I moved to my own room to cultivate in, leaving her to cultivate her body. I continued cultivating with the room all day and over the next few days, and after a week of cultivating, I reached a bottleneck in my cultivation. At the same time as I hit my bottleneck, I heard a muffled yell of excitement from Jia’s room and ran over to see what happened. When I opened the door I saw Jia dancing naked in the middle of the room, coated in black gunk. When she realized I was watching she tried to cover herself up but I couldn’t see anything.

I ignored her attempts at modesty and asked her what happened. She forgot about her state of undress for a moment and explained that she had finished cultivating her marrow with water qi thanks to the pearl’s effects speeding up her cultivation. She now only needed to cultivate her wind qi and she’d reach the body training stage. I promised to hug her when she was done cultivating for the day and all cleaned up and she switched to spirit qi cultivation for the day trying her best to reach the next breakthrough.

I switched to cultivating my body for the rest of the day while also trying to ponder the true nature of the Dao of water. Try as I might I wasn’t able to attain any enlightenment, but I managed to restore the amount of water qi stored in my body to the maximum. I didn’t manage to reach the next stage in the body training realm with water, but I managed to train my viscera completely before I called it off, but all in all it was a successful day of cultivation.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

After we were finished for the day, I gave Jia her promised hug and went back to the dorm room with her. Tomorrow, we decided to start cultivating our wind element together as well.

Like with the water qi cultivation, I tried my best to stay a little way away from any other cultivators as I cultivated my wind qi. I took another week to reach my spirit cultivation bottleneck, but Jia didn’t manage to reach the body training realm until another week after that. She got the same talk I had from one of the instructors in the training building when she reached the body training realm, and we celebrated her improvement to that realm that night after tracking down Ji.

He had been making his own strides in cultivation, he had reached the body training realm and was working on his spirit cultivation. He was at the highest stage of the realm and was learning the techniques from his cultivation technique book.

Now that Jia had reached the body training realm, she returned to training her spirit in preparation of reaching the core formation realm before the outer disciple sect competition.

I reached two fifths of the way to the bottleneck in body training with the wind element a few days later and moved on to the earth element. I felt that reaching the golden core realm would be more important for the sect competition because even if I focused all of my time into body cultivation I wouldn’t make it to the next level in time for the competition. I said hi to Ji whenever I saw him practicing and it only took me a week and a half to catch my spirit and body training up to match my wind and water.

Metal was next and it took the same amount of time as earth had to train as I was untrained with both of them at the start. I still felt that my cultivation speed was fast compared to others, though my body training was taking much longer than my spirit training was.

Wood qi only took a few days to finish training my body with since I had trained so much in Liusha city. Fire was all that was left. I made my way to rustling petal peak and their training hall. When I approached the guards, they took a look at what peak I was from and a look of disgust showed up on their faces.

“It’ll be one thousand sect points per day to cultivate here, disciple.” The guard at the front entrance to the building stated.

“Why is it so expensive?!” I asked. He shrugged and didn’t say anything but the other guard piped up before I could make a fool of myself to the guard.

“Wait, Chen, I think she’s the girl that got Ban Li in so much trouble with the disciplinary hall.” he said and a knowing look and a smirk showed up on the first guard’s face.

“Oh well that changes everything, little Ban has been very obedient since then so we’ll have to thank you in some way. We’ll drop the price down to six hundred sect points per day, we can’t go any lower.”

“That’s fine, thanks for giving me the discount!” I told them with a smile on my face, glad that something useful had come out of the situation with Ban Li. I paid the sect points and went in to train. The fire training hall was somewhere I had never been before but the raging bonfire in the middle of the room was a clear enough indicator of what I was expected to do. I idly wondered why the water training hall on flowing petal peak was the only one not set up like the others but I needed to focus on cultivation. The sect competition was in two weeks so I should make it in time.

After two days of spirit cultivation I broke through to the high rank of the foundation establishment realm. I spent the next week and a couple of days cultivating my body and reached the same level as all my other elements in the fire element.

I made it back to the dorm room, exhausted on the last day of training, the sect competition only a few days away. Jia was waiting for me with Shimmer in tow when I returned and she congratulated me on finishing my cultivation preparation for the competition. She had managed to reach the peak of the foundation establishment realm in the time before the competition but she was a little down that she couldn’t make it to the core formation realm. I told her that the amount of outer disciples who have reached that realm are probably countable on a single hand and that we still had the edge of our body cultivation to give us a chance against them. She consoled herself by petting Shimmer.

The remaining days before the competition I spent my free time in the water training hall contemplating the nature of water.

On the last day before the competition I reached a form of enlightenment. I was contemplating the uses of water when it happened.

Water primarily gives life. I thought to myself. But you can die from drinking too much water or from drowning if you’re not a cultivator, so water can’t just be related to life. I thought back to my insights on wood. Maybe the trick to the first step of enlightenment is realizing the dual nature of each element in relation to life and death? I thought more on that. Water would sustain life, but a flood would destroy countless life. Water can douse the fire just as easily as it freezes a body in the cold. Both life and death are representative in water just like with wood. Water represents the endless cycle of life and death! At the end of that thought a bell chime sounded in my head and I opened my eyes from my musings. I felt a deepened connection with the water qi around me. Excited, I made my way to each peak and repeated the process of my revelation with water with each of the other elements. Wind was simple, I thought of the relationship between how wind could stoke the flame but blow it out just the same. The earth provided nutrients for growing crops but in some places the earth was unsuitable for growth and barren. Each of the elements were a cycle of life and death and only required reaching that realization in the correct way to be recognized by the Dao.

I reached an issue when thinking about metal qi. I couldn’t think of a way to relate metal qi to life in the cycle of life and death. It was easy to come up with relationships between metal qi and death but the opposite was stumping me. Before I could realize it the day was over and I needed to return to the dorms. When I returned I was almost tackled as I walked in the door by Jia.

“Astra! Where have you been all day?” She asked. I was confused by her question but answered regardless.

“I was cultivating, thinking on the meaning of the various elemental Daos. I managed to get acknowledged by the Daos of water, wind, and earth today!” I told her.

“I know! Just look at Shimmer!” she said, pointing at the fox.

I looked over and was shocked to see a fox nearly triple in size from my little furry companion and now adorned with four fluffy white tails, though the tails still seemed small for the size of the fox. Each tail, now tipped with an eerie glowing fire each held a different symbol within the flames. One for wood, one for water, one for wind, and one for earth. Shimmer padded over to me and rubbed against my leg, and I bent down and pet her vigorously. She rolled over onto the ground and let me pet her stomach, her tongue lolling out of her mouth.

“Well that was certainly a big change!” I said.