Tom had a clear game plan, he had to figure out a way to advance his core and create the meridians.

And he was going to give himself all the time he could need. As he wasn't going to exit this cave before he had maxed out his potential here. He had the drop on the gecko, but yet it still had almost won. He could only imagine how he would manage if he was the one being stalked.

Before he continued with his training, he said status, wanting to see just how much he had advanced.

___________________

Name: Tom Palmer

Awakened mind 7

Awakened body 5

Awakened core 3

__________________

"WHAT!" He was flabbergasted. His mind had advanced thanks to him forging his will into something better under the constant pressure had put it under, tiring it out constantly. As he understood it, the mind worked like a muscle, the more you used it, the more it advanced.

However, the thing he didn't understand, was how hadn't his body advanced. He had gotten multiple times stronger, but the number hadn't changed, making it seem like he had just imagined getting stronger.

After a short while of bathing in the disappointment, he concluded that the scale was nowhere as accurate an indicator of power as he had thought. "So it only progresses as one advances different body parts..." He quickly reasoned.

He could just imagine if he ever ran into some super-rich cultivator who was in the same realm as him how screwed he would be. If he was able to better himself this much without actually affecting his rank, then he was scared to find out what they could do when they had enough credits thrown at the problem until the problem itself drowned in the tidal wave of credits.

After he managed to get over his shock, he got back to the matter at the hand, the core and meridians.

"So I created the core with the pressure from the mana and my willpower. However, whenever I go deeper into the cave, it always fills up and starts to show signs of duress... What to do..."

Largening the core somehow, seemed like the logical first step to advance it or at least increase its capacity. But how could he do it, if the mana started to threaten to explode from within the moment he tried to repeat its creation progress?

"Did I do something wrong and trap myself with a faulty core... Or is it just too damaged at the moment?" He was full of questions with no answers.

However, Tom noticed something as he started studying his core more closely. The cracks it had suffered, were starting to heal. In other words, there was a new crystal surface growing, however little it was.

He immediately thought about all the things he had done over the last couple of days, and the only thing he could think of was that he had been constantly filling it up and emptying it almost immediately.

He wasn't sure what during the progress had exactly caused it, so he just patiently filled his core up and started looking at it closely, determined to repeat the progress while examining every step.

As he filled the core up, this time, he didn't immediately use the mana, instead, he kept it inside of the core, and observed it.

As the core was full of mana only under his control, he noticed how the foreign mana came under his control much easier, the combined pressure of all that mana forced it to bend to his will.

He also noticed, how even if the core felt full, it never stopped drawing in even more mana, nor did it feel like the pressure was increasing inside of the core. The mana was clearly disappearing somewhere.

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There was clearly something happening to his core. It seemed like what it needed was slow constant pressure, but Tom wasn't willing to drop his hopes of advancing at a reasonable pace before he had exhausted all of his ideas.

He focused all of his will to the inside of the core and squeezed all the mana inside of it together, trying to repeat the creation progress in much more favorable conditions. However, it felt like a fool's errand, even when he pushed with all of his might, there was no reaction whatsoever. But that took him to the logical next step, doing the same outside of the core. And he immediately did just that, pushing as much mana as he could keep under his control against the core's edges, trying to force it to crystalize and to his delight, he soon noticed how the cracks started slowly gaining new surface.

He started another long-winded progress of pushing until his willpower ran out and then taking short breaks until he could continue again. This continued for a day, during which time he had further polished the progress. Now he also kept the core full, pushing from both sides further increasing the crystallization speed, and the walls felt much more solid thanks to it.

While later, he had his first good news he had reached awakened core 4, but he didn't let it slow him down. However, now he noticed that the mana around him wasn't enough for him to quickly fill his core up and polish it.

So he got up and started making his way deeper, curious to see how far he could now go. As he started walking, he started toying with an idea he had cooked up during the last day. He reasoned that if he went with full core to just to the point where the pressure was almost treating to crack his core, he might be able to hang around the edge and support his core with his willpower, easing the burden from his mind by getting help from external pressure.

But before he went, he did something he knew he would need to do, to take advance of this electricity mana's properties, he created channels as the page had described into his body. As the electricity mana liked to take the path of least resistance so he might as well create the way for it, so it wouldn't rip his body to pieces and would only abuse the carefully crafted channels where there was nothing vital to lose. And if he got lucky, maybe this would help him to create his meridians.

The only place he stayed away from was his head. Not daring to go poking around in there.

He was also curious to reach deeper into the cave as he hadn't seen the gecko for almost a day, it had come from the hunt looking beaten up, running for its life-giving him a jump scare as its bloody frame rushed past him, not paying him any heed.

After that it was hard for him to focus for the next two hours, during which he was on the edge, scared that another creature that could beat the gecko up would come and chase it down, but apparently, the gecko had been fast enough and made it back to safety fast enough.

He proceeded as he had planned, slowly walking deeper into the cave. After he had gone through the painful process of slowly following the picture of meridians he had seen on the page, and burning them through his body. There were some points they called acupuncture points where he had to puncture his skin, and they were a saving grace and a curse at the same time, they allowed the electricity mana in the air to run through the channels keeping them open, but at the same time, they were keeping them open, burning the flesh around the channels, deep inside of his body turning his very existence into pure pain. His insides were constantly on fire like some sick bastard had switched all of his blood for hot oil.

The core was constantly drawing the mana toward itself, forcing the mana to follow the pre-created channels. Making sure that he got no respite from the pain. But at the same time, keeping itself under constant pressure speeding up the crystallization.

After half a day of being in constant pain and training his willpower, he was dead tired and just about to call it a day, even if it was only 7 pm. But the constant pressure was starting to get to him.

However, no one could say that his suffering was for nothing. He could feel how his core's growth speed had at least doubled, And to top it all off, it seemed like the meridians were starting to reach some kind of equilibrium. His body had found a point that was far enough from the rushing tide of mana, where it could actually heal his body, and it had started doing just that. While Tom had occasionally fed it mana as the pressure in his core had started to rise too high, and he could feel how the paths now had some kind of flesh around them that had been healed multiple times while saturated with ridiculous amounts of mana hardening its surface after each repetition. Oh, it still hurt like hell, but he could see that something was changing as he forced his body to adapt to its new circumstances.

Just as he had walked away from the point he had reached as his limit, where he could cultivate, and readied to log out, he saw a notification for the first time in a long while.

"The Olen's Have claimed the first neutral control point."

"Area controlled Humanity 3 % Olen 7%"

Tom watched the notification in horror, it had even been half a month since the secverse had been fully open to the whole population. Yet the Olen's already had over twice as many control points as humans. He had thought that this would be at least a somewhat fair fight. However, these numbers didn't install faith in him.

At the same time, a general map was released. On it, he saw a blob-like land mass that was divided into five equally sized sections. One of them was marked as human controlled area, one as Olen controlled area, and the last three were marked as neutral areas. The only topographical detail the map had was a great stone wall dividing the neutral areas from both factions' areas acting as a buffer between the two.

He was quite sure that the whole war business had disappeared from most people's minds, as how would anyone care about an enemy they hadn't even seen? Humans operated with the twenty-four-hour news cycle. No new developments, it was old news and didn't actually affect them.

But he could imagine how this would light some fire under their asses, forcing them to start to think about the bigger picture. As if this speed kept up there would be no resources to fight over among themselves. Nothing unites quite like a common enemy.

However, at the moment Tom was too tired to care about anything but sleep, after having tortured himself for almost half a day.

And as a single person, what could he do? The only reasonable path his tired mind could come up with was to push even harder. A single human could do nothing alone, but a thing that had transcended what human was supposed to be able to do, was its own thing altogether.

Tom went to sleep, and when he woke up the next morning, he got back into training, with new vigor, pushing his limits even harder, walking deeper and deeper into the cave, hanging between life and death, forging his body in fatigue and agony.

And after the first day, things started looking better, as the meridians walls started getting even harder, and the pain started to finally let up, allowing him once again to function as a normal human.

He put this freed mental power straight back to cultivation, determined to emerge as a new person once he had used this godsend cave to its full potential.