When he got home there was a pot on the stove boiling some random flowers Tuzai had found. It smelt delicious. He wondered where such a perfect woman came from, he didn't know what she did during the day but she was caring, loving, kind, cute, quirky and funny. She would provide food for him and look after him when he was hurt. He felt quite useless in comparison, he wasn't a genius anymore. He was just poor old Cultivation Bug Fuyo.

"Ah, you're home. Have you been out gathering energy?"

"yuhgh, ahgh brk thrh gagehn"

"What?"

Pah, pah, pah.. He spat out the yellow crystals in his mouth, he didn't have pockets so he had to carry things in his mouth.

"I said yes, and I broke through again." Fuyo smiled but she never seemed to hear anything he said.

"Where did you get these?" She almost jumped at him when she saw the yellow crystals on the ground.

"What? These yellow things? I found them in a little pond."

"Th...These are yellow spirit stones!"

"What's that?" Fuyo thought it must be worth something but he didn't know what they were called or what they were used for. She had such an excited expression on her face so he knew he did a good job bringing these back.

"Yellow spirit stones means money. A white spirit stone can be exchanged for one silver, a yellow one can exchange for ten and you have ten of them. That's one gold!" Her breathing was erratic like she was going to have an asthma attack.

"Is that a lot?" Fuyo had to ask, but judging from her expression it must be a lot.

"Well, no. It's not but I only make 5 gold a year from my day time job. It's like 10 weeks of wages dropped out of the sky. Wait, you said you broke through again? How is that possible."

She instantly sent out her spirit sense and scanned his body.

"H..how did this happen?"

"It's incredible right!" Fuyo laughed and lifted his head to the sky.

"Incredible? Your cultivation is gone."

"My cultivation is what now?" He quickly sent his spirit sense into his body and found that it was just like she said. His cultivation was completely gone. Not even the first layer of Qi condensation was there. All ten layers of his dantian were empty and clear like glass.

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"How could this be..." Fuyo almost passed out, all his hard work vanished without a trace.

"Did you eat something you shouldn't have?" Tuzai had to ask, she too couldn't make sense of the situation.

"No, I only ate normal leaves and... Well I had those yellow spirit stones in my mouth."

She shook her head. "That wouldn't be it then, spirit stones are used for increasing your strength. They wouldn't have an adverse effect like that. Are you sure you never ate any weird looking flowers?"

He nodded his head. "I'm sure, it must be something else. Wait, you said they can be used to increase your strength?"

"Yeah, they are full of spirit energy that's why they are called spirit stones. But you can't absorb the energy in them because you have no open meridians."

"Can't I just eat them?"

"Eat them? Spirit stones absorb energy, if you try to eat them then they will absorb your energy and kill you. You have to drain the energy from them little by little."

Fuyo felt a bit down, he had this great treasure but couldn't use them.

"However, you could trade them in for herbs or flowers with high spirit energy content. But 1 gold isn't really enough for anything amazing, it is however good for daily necessities like food and clothes."

"Okay then, I'll let you sort everything out. You said you work, what do you do?"

"I work as a store hand and help the local alchemist, hopefully he will teach me how to make potions one day. But I have to ascend first because brewing just a single potion could take more than 12 hours and I can't maintain my transformation that long." She sighed but then her expression changed when she saw the ten yellow spirit stones.

"Okay, let's have dinner first. Tomorrow, I'm going to go shopping." She rubbed her hands like doctor evil. She was going on a shopping spree tomorrow!

Fuyo realized her reaction but he didn't mind, it was useless to him at the moment. All he needed to do was get strong. But his cultivation was gone, how did this happen? It would terrible if this happened again. That means he would never get stronger.

They ate dinner and then went to sleep.

In the morning he headed out into the forest once again, this time he made his way in another direction but he never found more yellow orbs even though he searched for six hours. He ate a lot of vegetation and in no time he was back to his plump old self. He broke through to the first qi condensation level and was half way to breaking through to the second level. But it was getting late so he went home.

He woke up and this time he went out again, but it was another uneventful day. He didn't find any yellow orbs but he successful broke through to the second qi level after 12 hours of painful running and jumping to collect white qi orbs. Just from his daily actions, one couldn't help but admire his determination and hard work.

But he wasn't as excited this time. He couldn't shake the feeling that his cultivation might reset. It started growing like a bad fear and it make him slightly depressed.

It was getting dark so he made his way home; his head hung low so he didn't pay attention to his surroundings. He wondered slightly off the track and found another pond, unlike the last one this had little white smoke being emitted from it. He activated Totemic God once more and shrunk his body down to a thin like worm. He dived down head first. There were many more rocks at the bottom of this pond, many times more than the last one.

He couldn't help but feel excited, it slightly alleviated his sadness. It was too dark to see what he collected up so he made his way home.

His mouth full of hard stones.