That master would have some kind of enlightenment, or at the very least an inspiration, was obvious.

The Nascent Soul stage doesn’t have any sub-stages that would let one keep track of their progress. How well and how far a practitioner has come can be seen with a simple check on how closely the Nascent Soul, a kind of avatar that is created as a means of manifestation of the spirit, resembles the physical body.

A spirit and a body must have perfect rapport between them in order to achieve higher cultivation stages. Some backwater places consider cultivation speed as a measurement of one’s talent, I think it’s bullshit.

One needs to carefully refine every part of their cultivation and make a perfect foundation for future stages. Otherwise, immortality can only stay as a whimsical dream. Taking more time to cultivate at a certain stage is only natural and wise.

If those so-called geniuses from all over the place from the outskirts of the Galaxy don’t dream of becoming immortals, why do they even cultivate in the first place? The heavens gave them a very rare and a very unique opportunity to break out of the shackles of the ordinary and mundane and soar into a different world, both metaphorically and literally, why waste it?

I’ve seen many youngsters getting some kinds of “supreme heritages” that could give them some kind of edge over their peers. Most of them simply become indulgent in violence and carnal desire. Cultivators aren’t called monks and Daoist Priests for nothing. One must keep control of one’s own desires lest they fall on the road of cultivation.

I personally only ever used honest means of acquiring power and cultivation. The most common texts and guidebooks that have been roaming all over the Galaxy for centuries haven’t earned the right to be so popular if they didn’t contain infinite wisdom within them. All those fancy tricks in the so-called supreme inheritances aren’t worth a second of honest effort and honest work.

Master is the person who taught it all to me. He also uses the common path of cultivation and needs to think a lot for himself and seek inspiration everywhere.

This is the tough thing about the honest path. All the achievements you get belong to you and are earned through sweat and blood.

If I didn’t show master how meridians and the body and the seas interact, if I didn’t show him how everything is ultimately the same and that there’s unity of man and the universe, who knows how long it would take him to truly understand.

Acquiring superficial knowledge is easy, far too easy. But only seeing it, understanding it, letting it become a part of you counts. And it’s very hard to achieve.

I hope that this experience will be useful to him.

Now, since everything has been more or less tested, I think there won’t be any problem with me using this method to cultivate to the peak of the Qi Refinement stage.

All that is left if for master is to wake up and prepare the resources.

Before the regression, I was taken in by master at the age of 8 and it took me four years to reach the Foundation Building stage, and that’s because I tried to open as many meridians as I could. In the end, I was able to open 340 meridians and that was only because of my amazing spiritual roots. Honestly, I had a bit of a shadow in my heart because of it.

While the amount of meridians I opened was certainly above every other cultivator I have ever encountered, except for my Dao Partner who had two thousands of her potential six thousand meridians opened, but that was because she was a demon and her lifespan and methods of cultivation were different, and while the 340 meridians provided me with an amount of Qi and vitality that was far beyond what other people at the stages like mine had, I still could only imagine the potential of three thousand meridians.

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Most people lust for power. It’s not a bad thing. While I do believe that living by one’s own rules and principles is the right way, I never said that lusting for power can’t be a part of one’s own principles.

I don’t care much for my personal power as my Path is usually used in not direct confrontations but as an auxiliary method of controlling the battlefield, and after I left the Demon Dao, I’ve been avoiding violence in general, but even now I still am feeling quite thrilled about the wonders this much Qi can provide.

I think it’s where I have to tell what exactly Qi does.

I have mentioned before that Qi is refined by a cultivator as a way to harvest energy from the Aura between Heavens and Earth.

The most obvious and the first benefit that it provides is – a feeling of connection to the Aura. The more Qi one has, the better the feeling of connection. Places rich with Qi can help cultivators understand the Heavenly Way.

The second benefit is personal power. Qi is used as a kind of “fuel” for spells. There’re grades for QI at different stages, like the spiritual Qi for Core Formation cultivators and the Vital Qi for Foundation Building cultivators. There’re also grades within a single stage. There’s the so-called pure QI and there’re also impurities. How many spells and of what power those spells would depend on the grade of Qi, among other things. In general, if we take 1 Qi (Qi is also a unit of measurement for the amount of Qi) of pure Qi, it would be equivalent to about 100 Qi of average purity.

Well, pure Qi and impurities are all parts of outdated terminology that has been sticking around for long enough. Even after the Dark Era was all but forgotten, the belief in impurities persisted anyway. Before, people believed that when cultivating, Qi didn’t generate in the body through the meridians but that it was taken in from the outside and that meridians were like some kinds of suction cups that took the Qi in. And with Qi, cultivator supposedly took in impurities that tainted their Qi and kept it from being in its perfect state.

Well, it’s understandable why people believed it. There exists no technology or spell or technique to analyze the nature of Qi. It’s not a material object of microscopic scale and it’s not any kind of wave or anything that could be detected.

Qi is something that a cultivator simply needs to get a general feel for. It’s closely related to the spirit and the Divine sense is maybe the only trustworthy way of getting a feel for it.

But the Divine sense is a unique kind of sense that could not be described through the experiences of seeing or hearing alone. And the way it lets us “see” Qi is through awareness of its state and existence.

Well, it’s quite complicated.

In fact, there’re ways to measure Qi as it slightly distorts the Aura between Heavens and Earth when it’s in the calm state. By measuring the degree of distortion, we can approximate the amount of Qi one has.

Anyway, what is believed nowadays about pure and impure Qi is that the “purer” Qi is, the greater its density is.

And obviously, in order to achieve a pure state one needs huge amounts of Qi (the aforementioned conversion of 1 pure Qi = 100 average Qi is not very reliable as it increases with the amount of Qi).

Ordinary cultivators can’t even hold so much Qi but I can as my meridians are numerous enough.

My Dao Partner had two thousand meridians and her Qi was about 80% of perfect purity at every grade of Qi related to a cultivation stage. It gave her so much power that she was believed to be the most powerful cultivator in both the Human and the Demon Galaxies. In order to give you an idea of how powerful 80% is, there was an intergalactic war between humans and demons. Then she got bored and slapped some faces. Then there was no longer an intergalactic war.

The third benefit of Qi is lifespan.

I estimated that on average a cultivator with my amount of meridians at full potential would be able to live up to twenty times longer than the practitioners of the same stage, the aging process would be also slowed down accordingly.

That means that I can take my time and not care about growing too old when cultivating. Meaning that my foundation at each stage would be perfect, meaning that I would have a greater chance to overcome that terrible tribulation of ascension to Immortality and refine my Way further than I ever dreamed of.

I really am feeling quite excited right now.