The first thing Xan felt was bitterness so intense that his face turned into one of disgust after less than a second.

After that first "bitter punch," he felt how his tongue started to go numb. Although this was annoying, he began to lose the feeling of taste, so he didn't need to care about the bitterness anymore.

When he thought he was getting used to the coin, he felt something moving on his stomach. Realizing he was about to puke, Xan spat the crystal, which rolled across the floor to the other edge of the kitchen.

'Ok, maybe putting it in my mouth is not the best way to do this.' Xan accepted the truth as he tried to move his tongue from side to side of his mouth.

As he did this to recover the sensibility of his tongue, he realized that his mouth was now full of minor burns. They were not extensive or severe enough for him to seek treatment, but they were still annoying.

'The coin is cold. Why did it burn my mouth? Maybe the coin leaked some of its energy into my mouth, and that caused the burns. If that's the case, maybe I was not all that wrong when I decided to put it in my mouth,' Xan thought while scratching his chin.

Xan sat on the kitchen's wooden floor for a few minutes while leaning his back against the wall, even if he had a table with chairs only a few meters away.

After some time, his mouth returned to its normal state, even if it still had some burns.

'Ok, the first step is to prepare the second lunch. I can continue with my experiments about how to eat the coin.'

As he stood up from the floor, Xan gathered some ingredients before he started cooking again.

The Guburg had focused their gastronomy on cooking meat since its origin. Even now, meat was always the main ingredient of most dishes, with things like vegetables used just as condiments or accompaniments.

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Xan wasn't the exception to this, so after cooking a large steak and devouring it, he returned to his room with the coin's pouch in his hand and sat crosslegged on his bed.

As he took a slightly moist coin out of the bag, he grabbed it with two fingers before looking at it again.

'I don't have any problem while holding it with my hands. Maybe the problem is that my mouth is too sensible for so much energy. If I hold it somehow in front of my mouth or nose, it should release some energy when I cultivate, right?' Xan thought as he neared the coin to his mouth once again.

But this time, instead of putting it inside, he bit it with his teeth while maintaining his lips away from it, as if he had just put something scorching in his mouth and was waiting for it to cool down.

Realizing he wasn't feeling as bad as last time, he closed his eyes and began cultivating.

With each breath, the energy that entered his body was several times more than it was in the last cultivation sessions, which confirmed that his method worked.

But not everything was good news.

Because the amount of energy had increased, he had problems controlling it with his mind, causing some to deviate from the path toward his dantian and flow across his body.

But even with that, the amount of energy his dantian was getting was still higher than before, so he decided to continue until he felt tired.

After more or less a quarter-hour, he felt his mind too tired to continue. Even thinking a whole phrase seemed like too much work for him at that moment.

He opened his eyes and saw a figure in front of him, which scared him as he didn't expect anyone.

"What the hell are you doing? You have been cultivating with a fucking energy coin in your mouth for at least ten minutes." Rad asked, trying to understand what was happening.

"I thought that I could cultivate faster if I managed to get some energy from the coin. And you know what? I was right.' Xan confidently replied.

"Yes, cultivating with energy coins is possible before cleaning your dantian, but it is incredibly inefficient," Rad explained while rubbing his eyes with two fingers.

"Is there any more efficient method?'

"Yes, people usually use food from magical beasts and plants that contain more energy than regular food," he said as he raised a bag from which some vegetables peeked out." I thought you might need them to give a little boost to your cultivation, so I brought you a bag with some ingredients."