I woke up and slowly opened my eyes. Slowly, very slowly. I felt as if waking up after having just gone through a terrible flu. My chest and back felt cold with sweat and I groaned as I pulled myself upright.
The breakthrough to the Golden Core...
[Did… Did I do it?]
It was all slowly coming back to me. With all the pain and effort, it felt as if all that happened ages ago. I rubbed my eyes and looked around. I was in my room. The underground room of my Master’s home. I didn’t remember coming home.
A sealed letter was on the nightstand beside the bed. It carried the seal of Elder Li.
I opened it and slowly read.
Disciple, let me first congratulate you on your successful breakthrough. Unfortunately, I cannot be there to celebrate your achievement. Something important came up and I might not be back for a few months. I know you know the place is protected by Formations, but try not to break anything in my absence. It’s expensive.
Below was signed Elder Li Roy.
I gently put the letter down and sighed. So I was alone. And just when I needed guidance the most. Well, it wasn’t the first time, and probably wouldn’t be the last. I would have to do with the knowledge I already had. There was plenty of it anyway. And I had finally reached the Golden Core Realm! How hard could other stuff be? Surely not any more difficult than my breakthrough was.
I sat on the bed and relaxed my mind.
Golden Qi flowed through my veins, and what I once found difficult, was simple to control. My body, or better yet, my Soul, was busy refining this silken energy from its base form.
I sent my consciousness deeper and examined my Soul. Even after the hard battle, it looked as good as new. It felt so much stronger though, and was in greater part Divine, with the Fragments nowhere in sight. It must have devoured them all while I slept.
Still didn’t remember how I got back home, but that wasn’t that important. My Soul was healthy, and I had experiments galore.
[Let the ability testing… begin!]
First on the agenda was something I wanted to do for years! Conjuration magic!
I summoned a tiny bit of Golden Qi and formed it into a square about a finger thick. I willed it, and it became solid. I knocked on it and it sounded like a piece of wood. It was hard but clearly lacked that oomph. Stuffing it with more Qi I pushed it to the limit and knocked again. That time it felt like a piece of glass or stone, very dense and completely solid.
As long as I kept up my concentration, that golden tile remained unchanged. I could move it around, throw it at a wall, and even after releasing it from my mental grasp, it kept its shape for a few seconds before unraveling and decaying into nothing.
Very interesting. But I knew there was a way to anchor it in space. I created another golden tile at about knee height and used the pilfered memories to guide me. The technique was relatively simple, I just needed to order my energy to not move, relative to the ground, and it would stay there.
It was the same with creating Golden Qi armor. It could stay in place if the designated anchor was my body.
Anyway, the tile became solid, and when I nudged it with my foot it refused to budge. I took a step and rose higher. It completely held my weight, and I wasn’t even using gravity manipulation to keep myself light.
My muscle was so dense, I could easily break normal wooden steps. The one made of Golden Qi, however, was completely unbothered. Very useful when you wanted to walk on air. That’s how other Cultivators did their fancy techniques without the ability to fly. Very clever.
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However, you had to be very quick in creating these steps. I needed at least half a second to summon one that was strong enough to hold me, and that was way too long for a high-speed run.
It wasn’t a problem with my ability, quality of Qi, or my weight. It was just that it was something new and I wasn’t able to do it completely mindlessly yet.
When I tried to jump in the air and form another step under my foot to double jump, it immediately shattered as its formation wasn’t complete. Fractions of a second mattered a lot at higher levels.
Anyway, I would have to train to get better at it, just as with any skill.
Also, apart from finally having Golden Qi I could use naturally as a tool, I could also create weapons out of it. For example, my golden claws.
Ten 20-centimeter-long curved claws grew from my fingers and hardened into razor blades. I tried to scratch my unprotected skin, and with a bit of force, it pierced, drawing blood. As soon as I imbued my flesh with Qi though, my skin became indestructible. No matter how hard I tried, I was unable to hurt myself.
The claws were good, but not good enough. Good thing I had many different ways to fight.
[Good stuff. I should be invulnerable to damage of this caliber.]
All this magic testing was great, but as the old ghost said, my veins would be too weak for Golden Qi. My Golden Meridians were the ones that carried most of the strain, and they were still very weak. I had to first upgrade them and build them stronger. That was probably also why it seemed my Qi was still flowing so slowly. The amount of Qi my Meridians could transport was limited.
I closed my eyes and relaxed. My body was burning up from just that bit of magic, so I had to cool down and recover first before trying anything else.
I focused on my mental upgrades. Having stepped into the Golden Core Realm, I had gained a clearer picture of the world through my other senses. Spirit Sense, or what the technique called Arcane Eyes, allowed me to see stuff unseen to the naked eye. I could detect the minuscule changes in the external Qi, allowing for greater control and accuracy with magic. Every tiny string of Base Qi could be detected, observed, and understood.
I focused deeply, and suddenly detected an anomaly, a presence that shouldn’t be there.
I opened m eyes and shot a Qi Blast at the wall before I even saw what was there. It exploded, flashing the stone protected by a Formation. There was nothing there. I looked frantically across my room and then ran to the door and looked both ways down the hallway. There was nothing. Complete emptiness and silence.
[Am I going crazy?]
I returned back to my room and closed the door behind me.
[I could have sworn I felt someone spying on me...]
But there wasn’t anyone anywhere. I checked and double-checked with all my senses, yet the only thing I could detect was the loud beating of my heart. I was alone.
[Must have been a fragment of some poor sod’s Soul I hadn’t properly assimilated.]
While unlikely, that was the most probable explanation. In any case, I didn’t care too much to be chasing ghosts. If there was anyone there, they could watch. Not like I was doing anything illegal anyway.
I had to test one more thing before taking a rest. It was the Avatar, or whatever the physical form of my Soul was called. In the Golden Core Realm, such a thing became possible.
I called upon my stores of golden Qi and pushed it out through every pore in my body, quickly forming a mist that solidified into the shape of my Soul. The body I made was completely solid, while the wings remained partially ethereal as they would get in the way otherwise, not to mention they also consumed my energy to simply exist. I didn’t even know why my Soul had flaming wings. Maybe because it was bonded with three flying creatures of great power? That could have been the case.
I guessed it was fiery because of the Phoenix, and black as coal because of that Soul Eater or whatever… I didn’t completely understand my abilities still.
Either way, as I was done creating it, my body was completely encased in this golden shell-looking thing. It moved as I did and was solid to the touch like some large piece of plate armor. I decided to call it a Soul Cuirass. While it did cover my entire body and the word cuirass didn’t exactly fit that description, I thought the word Soul Armor, or anything similar, would be just too generic for a cool name. I wasn’t against changing it down the line if I came up with something better though. (This is your cue to comment on a name for the solid, transparent, golden energy armor if you have any.)
After admiring my creation for a while, I realized I was actually pretty hungry, so I went to get something to eat. Luckily the kitchen was stocked with food, so I wasn’t going to go hungry any time soon. Not that it would be a problem. Food was pretty cheap considering my wealth. Well, I did spend a lot to advance to the Golden Core Realm, but I still had a handful of Spirit Stones.
I snacked on some meat jerky while preparing my meal. I carried the juicy steak into my room and ate it there while thinking. I had some important things to do, still. Decisions too, had to be made. There were things a person just had to do when stepping into the Golden Core Realm, and I was no exception. Well, my Soul and body felt fine, but I had to improve my Meridians at least. That should take quite some time. Without it, my magic ability would actually drop as my body became unable to endure so much strain from Golden Qi.
I would have to go into closed-door Cultivation again to fix that. I was not looking forward to it.