The medicinal pill He Yu had accepted from Chen Fei helped him recover from the earlier fight easily enough. The ringing in his head had quickly subsided, and the pain in his ribs had eased but not completely healed. They still bothered him if he wasn’t careful, but Li Heng had assured him a breakthrough would take care of that. As far as he was concerned, reaching the Second Realm was now a given since Yan Shirong’s suggestion.
Li Heng had grumbled a bit but quickly relented. Come the morrow, the outer disciples would be fully in competition with one another. He Yu would need to be in good condition, but more importantly, a breakthrough would mean that he’d be better able to take care of himself. Without advancing, he’d be an easy victim for anyone looking to score some quick spoils.
Reaching Foundation would also allow the two of them to begin issuing challenges of their own. Li Heng had been planning for the end of the grace period for quite some time. He had a list of disciples that he wanted to challenge—whether because they possessed a particular combination of strength and wealth that made them easy yet profitable targets, or they’d simply given some insult over the past three months. Regardless of who Li Heng had painted a target on, he’d insisted that He Yu join in.
Besides, He Yu desperately wanted to reach Foundation. Despite Li Heng’s continued assurance that he’d acquitted himself well during their fight with Sha Xiang, he couldn’t help but feel as though he ought to have been able to do more. He was a real cultivator now. Shouldn’t he want to do more than weather a few blows to the head from a qi infused fist?
Besides the general increase in power he knew would come with advancement, he was eager to crack into the arts waiting for him once he reached Foundation. Most of the Second Realm disciples had been cultivating the White Mountain Body Art for some time now. During their waterfall training sessions, He Yu had come to learn firsthand just what the art was capable of. Chen Fei had taken to the art well. She stood a full head taller than most of the other girls in the outer sect and was stronger than anyone at her level of cultivation. She was nearly as tall as Li Heng, and Ren Huang’s physical lessons had only enhanced the gifts she’d begun with. Despite their difference in cultivation, she was on roughly the same level as Tan Xiaoling when it came to pure physical strength.
According to Chen Fei herself, it was all thanks to the White Mountain Body Art. He Yu had asked her about it when he’d noticed how much stronger she’d become after one of their sparring sessions. She’d told him the art cultivated a combination of metal and mountain qi. The first technique—the Eternal Mountain Root—was a refinement of the techniques Ren Huang had been teaching them up until that point. It made sense that he would be preparing the outer disciples to cultivate the sect’s signature body art. What had surprised him was just how much more effective the proper technique was.
However, the art he most wanted to begin cultivating was the Cloud Emperor’s Heavenly Palace. Dire warnings from Elder Cai aside, it seemed like just the thing he needed to propel him to where he felt he ought to be. He’d done a bit of digging, and while information about the art was sparse, it did exist.
The Cloud Emperor’s Heavenly Palace was an art out of legends. It formed the basis for the entire Way of a handful of immortals He Yu recognized from the stories that had enchanted him his whole life. Most records of the art were well over a thousand years old, and the most recent information he could find concerned something called the “Dawn Palace.” Whatever this palace was, it had been sealed by an unnamed—or unknown—cultivator who reputedly had mastered the art. That alone was enough to set He Yu’s imagination alight with possibility.
When the three of them returned to the training grounds with their spirit cores in hand, He Yu had managed to work himself nearly sick in his impatience. All he could think about was the elixir and his breakthrough. He didn’t even mind when the fifteen cores Li Heng, Yan Shirong, and himself had collected didn’t even get them into the top five groups.
Unsurprisingly, Chen Fei and Tan Xiaoling had come in first, and each was rewarded with a personal lesson from Ren Huang. It wasn’t fair, all things considered. Tan Xiaoling was by far the most powerful of the first-year disciples. She had the highest advancement and had the benefit of an entire kingdom’s worth of resources to fuel her cultivation before she’d even set foot in the Shrouded Peaks Sect.
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Moreover, despite Chen Fei’s reluctance to harm her fellow cultivators, she had become a capable combatant herself over the past three months. More than a few of the outer disciples shot angry or envious glares at the two girls as they graciously accepted their win.
Once released from their physical training, He Yu and Li Heng followed Yan Shirong to the sect market. Yan Shirong indicated the vendor with the elixir and then excused himself to prepare for the following day. A sense of quiet anticipation had settled over the first-year disciples, as more and more filtered into the outer sect market to spend excess spirit stones on any last-minute elixirs or talismans to ready themselves for the end of the grace. Obtaining the elixir was simple enough. Li Heng spent a few minutes haggling with the vendor so as to ease the burden on He Yu’s purse, and the elixir was his.
On the return walk to their shared home, he said, “You’ll be using that tonight.”
He Yu nodded. “Will it be that much of a difference? Breaking into Foundation?”
“I suppose after your match with Cui Bao such a question would be expected,” he answered. “It will. I don’t think you’ve really been on the receiving end of the difference yet. At least not truly. While I can’t speak for Chen Fei, I’ve been holding back considerably during our sparring.”
Thinking back to the one time Chen Fei hadn’t held back, He Yu absently rubbed at his injured ribs. “Mostly,” he mumbled.
Back at their home, He Yu excused himself to the cultivation chamber on his side of the courtyard. Taking the elixir, he settled into the sect’s basic cultivation technique, calming his thoughts and focusing on the surge of energy crackling in his dantian. Within moments, he’d slipped into a deep meditation.
Once again he stood atop a mountain. There were others, standing on distant peaks. Some he recognized as those he’d come to know in his time at the Shrouded Peaks Sect. He was connected to them by thin, almost invisible threads. Whether that was destiny or fate, he couldn’t say. He was connected to others, too. Some were foes, some were individuals unknown. A sense of relief settled in the back of his mind. He wasn’t alone.
The events of the day, the week, the month—it all came back to him in a rush. His time at the sect, his time before in Shulin. Zhang Lifen had lifted him up and brought him to the Shrouded Peaks. Li Heng had approved his dedication and had forged the first link in a chain that had since grown to more than an alliance of convenience. Chen Fei and Tan Xiaoling loomed in his thoughts, their friendship was something he’d come to envy without even realizing it.
Sha Xiang appeared before him, along with her coterie of followers. Much of her strength had been gained through the patronage of Xiao Jun. Another large measure of it was due to the support of Cui Bao and Qiao Xia. She had stood against He Yu and his companions, and it had taken the intervention of someone more than He Yu himself to finally overcome her.
The energy in his dantian had built to a storm. It was like his previous breakthroughs, but more. Part of it was due to the elixir, but the rest was the result of months of cultivation. Refining his cultivation of the White Mountain technique. Punishing daily training under Ren Huang’s watch. Hours listening to Elder Wen discuss the nature of cultivation and the intricacies of the spirit. It had all been leading to this.
As he’d learned in Elder Wen’s lessons, He Yu packed the qi churning in his dantian down as small as he could manage. The excess qi provided by the elixir coursing through his meridians was directed to his dantian as well, adding to the reserves he’d cultivated over the past months. Qi from the outside world, gathered by the formation script in the cultivation chamber itself, rushed into him at his call. All of it he cycled to his dantian, compressing it into an ever more compact point of crackling and pulsing pool of vital energy.
Then, he could hold it no longer. He let go. Qi surged through his meridians. It was all he could do to guide it and direct it to flow in an orderly fashion according to his cultivation technique. Pressure built in his entire body, pushing outwards. An instant later, the stench broke into his meditations. It was so overwhelming this time he nearly lost control.
He struggled not to gag, to keep his breathing locked to the rhythm of the White Mountain technique. His bones hardened, and his ribs knit themselves back together. A fog he’d not even noticed lifted from his thoughts as the damage he’d suffered from Sha Xiang’s blow to his head repaired itself. His breathing slowed and fell into the pattern of the White Mountain technique in a way that was somehow more right than it had been before. His meridians surged with power. His whole being—body, mind, and spirit—surged with power.
He Yu opened his eyes. He was covered in the black sludge he’d expelled from his body during his breakthrough. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. He’d done it.