It wasn't long after Kai's party that John finally hit 100% full in his dantian. He had inched closer all this time, working in the Garden helped considerably with all the wild Weird qi floating through the air. It also helped that the time restriction in the Inner Sect was gone since Benjamin advanced and several more were quite close. John retracted his standard qi-catching web and enjoyed the feeling of being completely full for the first time in months. His enormous dantian was packed tightly with a twisted mess of silk strands, a solid mass of cobweb that he had not felt since hitting peak Qi Condensation.
All cultivation stages existed to make oneself stronger, and Foundation Establishment was no exception. Qi Condensation gathered and compressed qi through several stages mimicking the stages of matter. At the peak there was a small bottleneck, but surpassing it allowed the solid qi to sublimate and begin reinforcing the body. The initial sublimation enhanced the body and the dantian, producing stronger qi than even peak Solid stage Qi Condensation cultivators as well as giving a flat boost to the power of the cultivators body. The biggest gain in strength was still the ability to actively enhance one's body.
Foundation Establishment was a further and more thorough elevation of the flesh. Most cultivators worked from outside inwards, destroying and repairing the skin with qi, then the muscles, then the bones, and finally the organs. At peak Foundation Establishment, one would be strong enough to survive the ascension to Golden Core, hopefully.
John's cultivation was not so straightforward.
Advancing to Foundation Establishment the first time had felt a lot more like corruption than a holy enlightenment of his body. His qi formed a massive cocoon around himself as his body changed, like a silkworm metamorphizing, his early experiments proved that actively enhancing his body to progress through the tier was going to be similar. John commit early on to take an unconventional path through this cultivation stage and elevate his bones first--if his cultivation was unusual, it was worth taking advantage of those peculiarities when he could.
John moved to his pavilion bathroom, locking the building down behind him. Advancing his body was likely to produce a pile of disgusting sludge, and he didn't want to wait long before scrubbing it free. Adopting a meditative stance and taking several deep breaths to narrow his focus, John began.
His qi exploded outwards, wrapping him up in a huge cocoon in only moments while John slipped into a deep trance. The world outside his cocoon faded slowly into nothingness, all noise and perception replaced by a black void. In John's mind eye the cocoon ballooned, accelerating away from his still-sitting form until it surpassed his sight. John poured his qi into his body, the strands of silk flowing through him with an energized thrum. Where it passed, his body seemed to melt away, foaming and sublimating into the void.
Eventually, nothing remained but a fine icy mist. John's perception floated there in a complete out of body experience, it was surreal even by John's standards. He could still sense his qi existing in the tiny shards of frozen body, idling and waiting for him to act. John focused on his bones. It felt like he was simultaneously imagining what his skeleton looked like and feeling his bones in his body in a bizarre manner. Like the prickling and thrumming sensation of the blood, only noticeable after keeping still for a long period, John felt his bones deep within.
Strands of qi stretched out of the mist in the void, reaching for each other, entangling, and pulling. Bits of matter assembled and rapidly merged into an entire skeleton, floating in the void. John's perception was still 'outside' his body which allowed him to approach and view his skeletal structure at and impossibly close distance and with unparalleled detail. John could see all the imperfections, all the points of still-mortal waste that would need to be expunged. His bone-marrow was especially filthy, the fibrous jelly was literally packed full of contaminants that accumulated over his entire life to date.
It was unsettling to see inside his bones this way. John could 'see' into his bones using spiritual sense, but it was not the same as now where it felt like using his eyes. It was more unsettling to realize he would need to break his bones in many places to allow the contaminants within to escape properly. John grit his non-existent teeth in this form and set out to work, getting ready to break his right femur when suddenly a massive creaking could be heard through the void.
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John turned around and stared. The void creaked once more before finally a thick crack broke through the endless dark, shattering it like one side of a hard-boiled egg. Dull red light seeped through, and several more loud cracks rang out in rapid section. The center of the fracture broke and huge chunks of void fell away, yielding to the eternal bloody glow beyond it. Endless noise poured into the space--grinding gears and screaming voices loudest of all.
John was utterly frozen, unable to look away, unable to move, unable to terminate his advancement. He could just barely see some of the infinite facets of the Wheel moving as it made and unmade countless worlds. Something twisted and the wheel was gone, only to be replaced by an enormous eye pressed painfully at the jagged edges of the break in reality. It's pupil shifted shapes endlessly, morphing smoothly between shapes recognizably human and animal to the totally alien. It's iris was a cascade of color dancing through the visible colors, below red and above blue into colors indescribable. Each red vein was a line of angry and unreadable runes, drifting across a sclera of tormented souls splashing through molten white iron.
John felt its terrible focus land on him with the force of an anvil. His qi revolted against him, spooling out into a dense skein of spiritual energy which was put under further pressure until it melted into a pool of quicksilver. John dreaded the being's attention but he could no more resist it than he could resist the sun rising. There was a moment of peace. A hammer of unstoppable force slammed into the tiny bone at the tip of his pinky, shattering it completely, John screamed out in his floating form as best he could, but no sound came out. Then, the puddle of molten qi moved as if carried in a crucible and poured itself into the fragmented remains of his broken bone. The burning qi vaporized any contaminants, melted bone fragments, and forged itself into a cloudy dark grey. It was beyond agony. It repeated 205 more times.
The alien force broke and remade his bones, one by one, moving up his hands, through his arms and into the rest of his body. John felt the force at work was somehow dispassionate at the process. Completely alien but lacking the vivid cruelty and malice that the Wheel emanated. Still, John would have torn himself apart to make the endless torment stop if he could have.
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John awoke.
His advancement had been a demented nightmare, but like a nightmare the impact of it faded the more awake he felt. John had a lingering sense that something terrible had happened, but the cocoon around him broke apart and flaked away like old snake skin. His bones felt unbelievable solid and dense. John wouldn't be surprised to discover his body weight considerably more now. The surging strength was only cut by phantom aches in his bones. John stretched and pulled his limbs around to shake off the feeling. All he had to do now was scrub off and get to testing just how much he improved.
John froze. There were no contaminants on his body. He looked around, incredulous at what he was seeing, examining every part of his body just to be sure. He checked the drain of the bathroom, just to be sure they hadn't somehow washed away in the duration of his advancement. The drain was dry, the doors were still locked. John frowned, had that awful sequence been real? Everything was a near blur. Sending his spiritual sense deep inside himself to check the results is what proved it. His actual bone structure had not changed much. More perfect, more symmetrical, but not an extraordinary change like he expected. Focusing very hard, he could sense the color of his bones indeed changed from a bloody red to a mottled silver gray. His bone marrow had been replaced with a bright white spongy material.
Double checking his dantian, a whopping 87% of his qi had been used in the enhancement, all at once. Only a mere 13% remained... John frowned. What exactly had been done to him? Why had an outside force interfered with his advancement? What were his bones even made of now? It was clearly not just bone or metal, it was something between and more than that. His new 'bone marrow' was already replacing his old mortal blood with a milky white substance.
Having stronger bones would allow him more martial strength, since he was no longer at risk of breaking his bones through the strength of his qi-enhanced muscles, but with bones well beyond the norm, where was his limit? Qi-rich blood would suffuse his whole body and incrementally improve it, especially the organs. While those were all good things, John couldn't help but be afraid of the terrible being that infiltrated into his advancement, and all the unanswered questions were not comforting.