Leon solved the puzzle before Claire. And then he solved the next one, and the next after that until she finally beat the first level. Leon spared her feelings by not mentioning his progress to anyone other than Sophia, but when she began to gloat, he was forced to shatter the illusion. The alternative was just too painful.

Then again, he didn’t really mind giving people back massages. It was the bragging that was too annoying to ignore. If looks could kill, Leon would’ve died a week ago. Sadly, the stream wasn’t deep enough to drown him and he was a light sleeper thanks to his rapidly advancing cultivation. The practice with the puzzle box also helped to keep his mind sharp, the thing acting like a whetstone for his brain.

It took him five days to complete the first level, but after he got the hang of things, Leon managed to beat one level per day until he reached a bottleneck. It wasn’t until the eleventh day that he got stuck. Of course, he was spending over four hours a day doing the puzzle, so while he made it sound easy, the labyrinth was actually very difficult.

The first problem was that you had to create tiny threads of Qi that could fit into the pathways without bumping the walls. Easy, right? Well, the only issue was that the Qi threads had a tendency to vibrate, bump into the walls, and trigger the puzzle to forcefully kick you out. Leon could ‘cheat’ by condensing the thread a bit, shrinking it enough that if it did shake, it would be less likely to touch anything.

The solid threads seemed to also be more stable, but Leon wasn’t completely certain about that.

Still, those minor advantages could only help so much. The pathways of the three-dimensional labyrinth could slope, bend, twist, or even move in a set pattern. What Leon found incredible was how none of the shapes seemed to be the same. Sure, they mixed things up by combining many of the simpler patterns, but that made it more difficult than anything else. Having to feed a hair-thin strand of Qi through a corkscrew pattern that liked to straighten out and then reverse its spiral was a nightmare.

He had been stuck on the fifth puzzle for two days now, with this being the third day of being unable to progress. It was also the eleventh day since they started attempting. Leon glanced through the endless space of darkness, looking out at the other four threads of Qi. Each one wound through a different labyrinth, with the fifth and final thread wobbling like crazy as it hovered at the mouth of the moving corkscrew.

Controlling two threads with one part of his brain was a monumental task. He could barely control one of them for the first five days, but thanks to his diligent practice, he was swiftly getting used to controlling four at once. However, while he was still improving in his ability to control two with each half of his mind, his growth was rapidly slowing down. It seemed that he’d found the limits of his mental evolution. Leon could barely maintain the other four threads while manipulating a fifth, and judging by his hundreds of previous attempts over the last two days, he would not be able to complete this puzzle today.

Still, he had to try. Leon breathed in and focused his mind. The thread stilled and began to move into the corkscrew. The path slowly wound itself into a spiral until it suddenly locked in place, Leon’s Qi thread barely missing the wall as it stopped moving. His reactions were so much slower now that it was almost painful. After a few agonising seconds, the corkscrew began to unwind. It was slow and gradual, but Leon failed to move the thread in time.

He tried, he really did.

His mind perceived the movement, he remembered the timings from previous failures, but when the corkscrew did start moving, the thread simply failed to react as he willed. It was too much for his mind, and as the thread touched the wall, he was launched out of the puzzle space. His Qi was shoved back into his spirit, his brain felt like it had been smacked with a hammer, and his stomach began to cramp as his dantian became a region of chaos, the flow reversing in his channels and crashing into his dantian.

The minutes passed in silence until Leon could muster the strength to stand up. He was done for the morning, his hand resting on his stomach as he gradually rose to his feet. Sophia hopped up from her sleeping bag and asked if he had succeeded, but when he simply shook his head, she frowned in a forlorn way that he couldn’t really understand.

“What stumped you?” Claire said, opening her eyes as she came out of her meditative trance. “If the heavenly genius is stuck then we may have to give up and move on.”

“Each new level forces me to use another thread of Qi,” Leon said, rolling his eyes. “I only needed one on the first level, which was easy thanks to my split mind, but now I need five. Using two threads with each side of my brain was hard enough, and now I have to use three? I’m stuck unless I can somehow evolve again.”

Claire raised her eyebrow in suspicion. “Are you really stuck or are you giving me a chance to catch up?”

“No, I’m stuck. We can give up and move to the Central Plane or we can keep trying. Up to you guys.”

“I’m fine with continuing. Maybe the extra practice will let me overtake you at something.”

“I want to try and beat the first level,” Sophia said, her eyes bright and excited. “Maybe I can overtake you both!”

Leon chuckled at that. Sophia had awakened her spirit two days ago, allowing Leon to gain some insight into how the process worked. He had watched the event with his aura sight, the ambient aura getting sucked into her pores. They guessed it was her spirit drawing the natural aura from her surroundings to generate Qi.

Sophia moved to take a turn at the puzzle while Claire went back to cultivating. Leon followed her, sitting down at his sleeping bag to keep working on his bones. He had made a lot of progress in that area and was almost ready to break into the next minor realm. Despite doubling his cultivation speed, it still took nearly two weeks to reach the step. Thankfully, kicking the tree had confirmed his theory to be correct. If not, he would’ve needed an entire month to advance beyond Bone Forging.

If every advancement took twice as long as the previous one, how many months would it take him to break out of Foundation Forging? Reaching late Foundation Forging would take six months for a normal person and three for Leon with his speed doubled. And that was if the pattern of three minor realms for each stage continued. After that, late Foundation Forging would take Leon nearly seven months.

Hopefully he was wrong, but if he wasn’t, he could always try to figure out an even better cultivation shortcut in the meantime.

Leon huffed as he sat down, his spirit aching from the repeated failures. Attempting the puzzle didn’t expend any Qi, which was incredibly useful for cultivating, but what it did do was bruise the shit out of his spirit. It also gave him a progressively bigger headache. Leon took the agony on the chin, considering them both forms of training that would hopefully push his mind until it evolved again on some fundamental level.

Sadly, he hadn’t managed to figure out how to permanently increase the density of his Qi. He tried pressing down on his entire supply while it was resting in his dantian, but as soon as he expended the denser Qi and allowed it to regenerate, the new Qi would dilute the rest and slowly regress his dantian back to its normal state.

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He had also tried to permanently shrink his dantian by squeezing it smaller. Which sounded very stupid now that he thought about it, but the lance of agony had knocked him out, not even allowing him to try. It appeared that there was more to the problem than he knew. Especially considering that trying to shrink his dantian should only make it smaller, not produce denser Qi.

Maybe he really did need one of those ancient cultivation manuals that Mila had spoken about.

Once night began to fall, Leon and the girls stopped cultivating to prepare dinner. The panther was huge. In order to use as much of the meat as possible before it spoiled, Sophia had decided to make biltong, a traditional South African Jerky. Only unlike the beef jerky he knew, biltong was air-dried rather than cooked. According to her, the Afrikaner pioneers had decided to put a bunch of spices on some raw meat and hang it on a tree branch until it dried in the hot and dry air of the savannah.

They used to have children standing guard to keep insects away, but they didn’t face such problems since they were in a pocket world. No one had noticed the lack of insects until now. It was odd that an integral part of the biosphere was missing, but with no way to explore the reason why, they just had to ignore it and hope there wasn’t some giant grasshopper or spider lurking in the trees.

Without insects, however, they were able to use the meat as bait. They caught several squirrels in the first few days until they depopulated the entire pocket world. Now they had Leon’s entire body weight in biltong to keep their strength up, and with a nearby stream of water and some flora to scavenge, they were able to keep relatively healthy despite mainly living on dried meat.

Leon had also tested his shins by kicking a big tree, which was as stupid as it sounded. At least it proved that using denser Qi was more helpful. Compared to the agony of slamming his right shin, his left had only hurt a bit from the impact. Thankfully, he had healing elixirs to recover. Which he soon came to realise was not the same thing as a pain reliever, leaving him to suffer until the pain went away on its own.

And speaking of alchemy, Leon had tested a lot of the strange ingredients out over the last ten days. None of them had noticeable effects when he ate them raw. Sophia guessed that they needed to be combined with other ingredients to bring out an effect, but Leon didn’t have the time to randomly mix and match over ten different herbs.

In fact, no one had that much time. It would take years to test out that many combinations, and that was if he made ten different elixirs every single day for the rest of his life. He needed a recipe or another ingredient that had an obvious effect. When he sampled the mushrooms and herbs, they did nothing but give him the runs. Sophia theorised that one or two of them may cure poisons. The only problem was that he wasn’t poisoned, and that meant they did nothing even if he ate several at once.

Leon didn’t agree with her assessment since he could feel the energy flow into him from the Bloodroot berries. The other herbs and mushrooms didn’t release anything when he ate them, meaning that a component was missing entirely from the herbs. Maybe they hadn’t matured enough or simply didn’t have any kind of innate effect on humans?

He eventually tried to use True Sight, but that also rendered very little in the way of useful information.

[Mushroom]

A red mushroom infused with blood aura.

Standing over Sophia, Leon watched as she looked over the panther’s corpse one last time. They had quickly made a bone curry with the last of the panther, which was stewing on the fire. Only some of the bones were rich in marrow while the rest were largely useless for cooking. That left the corpse a hodgepodge of bones and entrails, the smell making Leon gag.

He hadn’t wanted to do this out of fear. If absorbing its potent blood aura triggered a transformation, he would have no one to cry to because that would be it. He would die and become a demon. But as he was coming to learn, risks were meant to be taken. Not to mention that he had experimented with a few smaller pieces of meat and found that there were no concerning changes after a week.

While he did need to take risks, Leon wasn’t an idiot and would take some measures to ensure his safety.

“Ready?” Sophia said, standing up and coming to stand a little behind him.

“No, but let’s just get this over with.”

Leon also figured out how to control the devouring ability of his grey arm. The need came after he had turned their steak dinner into solid chunks of grey rock. Sophia was still upset about that, but there was nothing Leon could do besides teaching her a few skills and, ignoring the glares of certain people, gifting her pretty flowers when he came back from foraging.

The little genius could even name a few as they were also found on Earth.

Standing over the panther, Leon stuck his arm out. It became submerged in the bloody aura lingering above its corpse and yet his arm didn’t absorb a single drop. He could feel the limb raging against him, its voracious hunger threatening to overwhelm his mind. He had also trained quite a bit against this insatiable desire. It was a great way to strain his mind, the results speaking for themselves considering how quickly he reached the fifth level of the puzzle while Claire was stuck on the third.

It also helped Leon to increase his control, allowing him to hold his arm back for minutes instead of the seconds he had started with. What was even better was that the hunger and rage increased the longer he held it back, making it more difficult to maintain his control and straining his mind even further. If it continued growing in severity, he would always have a way to train his mind, the challenge only rising in difficulty every time he became used to the impact.

But Leon wasn’t here to train. He was here to devour the beast and make its power his own.

Working with the arm instead of against it, Leon pulled on the bloody aura lingering above its corpse and drew the haze into his arm. The power flowed up his veins and condensed from a paltry mist into a thick stream of bloody Qi in the main vein of his arm. The power merged with his body and filled him with strength, but the feast didn’t end there.

Leon checked his status and then placed his hand over the heart of the panther. It had no rib cage as Sophia had wanted to make ribs for dinner on the first night, the empty space now allowing Leon to directly touch the beast’s heart. From it came a dense stream of something new. Rather than aura, his arm drew upon the flesh and blood of the beast, sucking the liquid up through his pores and into his own body.

A shiver ran up his spine at how cold the blood was. Thankfully, the sensations faded as the blood ran up his arm and transformed into something new. From a liquid to motes of red, these tiny grains of sand were carried by his bloodstream until they reached his chest. A new burst of strength filled Leon’s body as the grains merged into his own heart. Despite none of the grains entering into his muscles or internal organs, his blood brightened as it flowed through his heart. The substance enriched his body further with each beat, every organ and muscle growing far more powerful compared to the benefits the blood aura provided him.

But as Leon exulted in the feeling of growing in strength, he focused solely on the fact that he didn’t transform into a demon.