'Huh?'
Opening her eyes, Claire suddenly found herself in a foreign, extremely cramped room.
It consisted of a bed, a small desk with a stool for a chair, and… pretty much it. Even with so little furniture, there was only about one, one and a half meters of spare room on the floor, currently occupied by some stranger…
'Wait, no, it's not a stranger, it's Tim,' the girl corrected herself as the fog started to lift from her weary mind.
Cultivation was never an easy task. It was the process of guiding the mana in the air with the use of an extremely specific method and through an extremely specific path, all in a bid to develop one's inner world to the peak of the stage they were currently at.
For the girl to claim herself to be a genius would be nothing short of pure arrogance. But that didn't mean she lacked talent and potential when compared to her peers.
Most, by the age of twenty-two, would merely enter the stage of flesh-qi balance, only starting on the perilous path of expelling all the imperfections and toxins from their bodies so that they could embark on the task of building up a core in the future.
Claire, however, has long since accomplished that goal, boasting the beauty deprived of all the small downsides that all the mortals below her stage had no other choice but to accept.
But what she thought to be a great achievement, her first step into the realm of true, core-based cultivation, or in ancient terms - dantian-based cultivation, only served to make the girl realize just how small she was when compared to the true giants of the mystical world.
Her growth rate slowed down pretty much to a crawl. Her meditation, from just a nice boon, turned into an absolutely indispensable element of her training. And the resources she had at hand suddenly proved to be useless.
No matter how many Qi-condensing formations the girl stacked, she simply couldn't infuse the air with Qi dense enough to make a dent in the enormous task ahead of her.
And so, for the last year, Claire was stuck on the core foundation stage, otherwise known as the true condensation stage, feeling as if the hours upon hours of her daily training and meditation were all for naught.
That is, all of it was true up until the moment when Tim opened up the doors to his room, flooding the girl's senses with mana as rich as when her father splurged on her twenty-third birthday and offered her with a damned elixir!
Unable to stop herself, when faced with such rich Qi, Claire just went ahead and started to cultivate without the slightest care in the world. And by the time she woke up, for the first time since her birthday… she actually moved forward! And as if this wasn't enough, back when using the elixir in the most efficient way possible, while surrounded by formations and in a state of perfect meditation, she merely managed to form three strands of solidified qi inside of her. But now?
After merely meditating for what felt like a short while? Not only did she gain three more strands but actually threaded them together, creating what could very likely be the seed of the core!
'Wait, is it just me or… is the density of qi in the air about to return back to how it was when he opened the door?' Startled, Claire took a moment to confirm her thought… Only to realize that her feeling was right on the money! And the culprit for this wondrous effect just… sat on Tim's table, rapidly sucking in the thin mana from the air only to gradually dispel extremely condensed Qi at regular intervals!
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
'No, it's not that device that's behind this, it's…' Claire's eyes finally moved over to the host of the place, the alleged creator of the wondrous device…
Who completely ignored her beauty and fully focused on fiddling with some of the toys she brought over more as a joke than in a bid to actually help him out.
'What is he…' Claire thought as she first straightened out her legs - tired after all the time she spent meditating in a lotus position, only to fall forward on all fours as she silently crept up to the bed's edge before taking a quick look over the young man's broad shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Claire asked in a neutral voice, silent enough not to startle the man but loud enough to ensure he actually heard her…
But as if she didn't exist, Tim continued to fiddle with what looked like an alchemist set for kids up to six years old, too focused to pay her any mind.
'Wait, is he meditating?' the girl thought before turning her eyes over to the ceramic pot around which Tim's hands danced. And then, her face contorted even more than when she saw the nicely-looking, finished device sitting atop his desk.
"Is this a damned elixir?!" Unable to stop herself, Claire screamed out in shock, recognizing the pattern of dancing lights within the liquid that only ever took place when the potion reached the grade of an actual elixir.
The shine was small, barely noticeable in fact… But it was far denser than anything she saw in her life, with the sole exception of the treasures that sometimes would go up on an auction!
And as if that still wasn't enough…
"Don't tell me you crafted it from those piss-worth ingredients?!"
Freaking out of her mind, Claire reached out for Tim's shoulder and shook it… But to no avail.
Just like she was unresponsive to the world around her before, while stuck deep into her meditation limbo while trying to work out the rich Qi energy in the air into her system, Tim didn't seem to be aware of his surroundings or his own actions to boot, not even when Claire actively tried to get his attention!
"Such focus…" she muttered, her eyes turning wide as she quickly started to connect the dots.
Back when he first visited, he merely possessed a single whisk of mana, just barely enough to pass through the barrier of the cultivation district, less than enough for anyone to actually consider him a cultivator. During his second visit, however, his Qi reserves grew so considerably, that Clarie would have no qualms about attributing him to the Qi-gathering stage, the first realm of cultivation where one could truly adopt the name of a practitioner.
But now?
'It wouldn't be weird to claim he's already reached the Qi condensation stage, even though I can't see him trying to condense it at all!
There were precise steps to growing one's cultivation, a step-by-step process that humans researched since the first mystical era before ancient times, mastered during the restoration era, and then perfected with the touch of modern thought and scientific methods in modern times.
A path that everyone had to follow simply because it was the most optimal one. But it was also a path that defined the general frame of how powerful one could get in each of those stages, with only the greatest screw-ups and mightiest geniuses breaking free from those constraints.
And yet, here he was, a man who didn't seem to follow any rule or stipulation of cultivation and reaching heights comparable to the third stage of Qi refinement… And all of that, just by the benefit of absorbing the dense Qi in the air.
Just in case all of it wasn't yet enough, he was doing all of that… not only without noticing it himself but also while performing a deep meditation, a feat supposedly only achievable by those who cleared the Flesh-Qi balance stage!
'To think that he asked for my help with cultivation…' Claire thought, bitting down at her bottom lip… only to crawl just a little bit further up the bed and wrap her arms around the young man's shoulders before hiding her face in the corner between his neck and shoulder only to close her eyes, synchronize her breathing with Tim's… And then bite through the thin, sensitive skin of her lip before doing the same and lightly biting down into the man's neck, just enough for a single drop of blood to ooze out of his vein.
A process that she then completed by taking a deep breath and pressing her own wounded flesh against Tim's, uniting with the man in the least intimate way possible before focusing on the inner flow of his Qi.
'He didn't lie to me, after all,' she then thought when, without even a shred of doubt, she realized that just like this man claimed, his inner world was perfectly pure, devoid of any form or sense that a cultivation method would bestow it with.