Strangeness abounded all over the Enlightenment Locale. Essence here was so thick and ever-present, so close it felt as though it could be touched with no effort whatsoever. Rieren had chosen a position under one of the strange trees—that people had begun calling Ironburners—near one of the floating black streams.
Before Rieren had begun her cultivation, she first had to make some important purchases with all the Credits she had acquired. It was a source of immense satisfaction that her spending power had improved by a great degree after that last battle.
Selling the A-Grade Arisen’s Beast Core flooded her with over seven hundred Credits. For a single monster, that was an incredible amount. If only she’d found its body.
Focusing for a moment, Rieren quickly filtered through the gargantuan list. It didn’t take her long to find all that she needed. Pills for accelerating her cultivation by several orders of magnitude, incense to draw in even more Essence to her localized area, some ginseng to boost her bodily functions, and some other odds and ends.
Rieren quickly went through everything she had gathered, not paying attention to how many Credits she’d had to spend. All of them were essential in optimizing her cultivation to the highest degree of efficiency.
The Thunderous Fissure pills were necessary to let her draw in a great deal of Essence, basically granting her a great number of virtual meridians to pull in more of the world’s natural energy. She also needed the pills to widen her existing meridians. The Essence here was thick and powerful, almost bruising in its consistency. Her meridians needed some reinforcement to handle it.
Well, maybe she didn’t really need the Incandescent incense. The little burning sticks were supposed to pull a great amount of Essence into the area, allowing Rieren to draw it all in.
The most important ingredient was the ginseng. Apparently, Ascetic’s Cerebrum was a liquid that mimicked the cranial fluid from intelligent people, which was, frankly, quite disgusting. But such was cultivation.
One had to bear many things in order to get to the greatest heights possible.
What mattered was that the ginseng boosted all the functions within her body. This included physical things like metabolism, breathing, heart rate, and even digestion, waste processing, and the like. For regular people who had depend on food, this would have made needing to relieve themselves at greater frequency an annoying necessity.
Thankfully, Rieren had advanced far enough that she could subsist off Essence entirely. Who needed food when there was the natural energy of the world to fill the coffers of stamina?
The important thing was that it would also boost the mental processes within her brain. Cultivating in the Enlightened realm was all about greater understanding and comprehension, essentially attaining the eponymous “enlightenment”. As such, the ginseng would help greatly in that regard.
Another intriguing little thing Rieren had discovered in her later life was the surprising benefits a unique acupuncture process could have. One of the non-necessities she had bought was a few dozen special needles. These were actually the thinnest of tubes that ended at a puncturing point, forged with Essence so that they could aid in the drawing of Essence as well.
Before Rieren began, she carefully pricked herself with the needles. It was a slow, careful process. Acupuncture had to be done so that it put the needles through the skin without drawing blood.
Unfortunately, Rieren wasn’t the best at it. She held back her little grimaces and winces when she hurt herself, ignoring the looks Elder Olg threw her.
Eventually, when Rieren was finally done, she set the incense burning and swallowed a pill and some of the ginseng. There. Now she was ready to pull in the Essence of the world around her.
“Well, almost ready,” she muttered.
Of course, all of those enhancements came with some drawbacks to balance things out.
For instance, the ginseng needed her to be as still as possible. Ironically, for a liquid that supposedly improved the physical processes within her body, it reduced vastly in efficiency when the subject moved too much. In its case, too much turned out to be even minute motions of limbs or even turns of the head. As such, Rieren had to ideally hold herself as still as a statue.
Similarly, the virtual meridians opened by Thunderous Fissure pills were quite volatile. If Rieren didn’t focus and finely control the exact motion of the Essence through them, they were likely to explode. That would not go well for her body at all.
Thus, it was that Rieren had to labour under certain drawbacks to enjoy the benefits provided by the various resources. Just another part of being a cultivator.
At least she wasn’t drugged up like she had been with the Elderblood pill back at Lionshard Sect.
Rieren began cultivating. The initial stage of it was no different from regular channelling of Essence. She drew in the natural energy of the world, not overly worried about the Aspect it came in, and processed it through all her meridians. All her enhancements allowed her to draw in and control a far greater amount than normal. She would have to continue for a long while.
The exact process of advancing through the Enlightenment realm, in the jargon of cultivators, was by channelling a vast amount of Essence in Enlightenment Locales. This extremely concentrated Essence bore with it vital signatures of the natural world.
These signatures, called Vital Essence, were what Rieren and other cultivators at the same realm would have to absorb into themselves. Only through this absorption, which was often accompanied by moments of transcendent comprehension that mimicked the advancement through stages of a realm, would they progress.
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Unfortunately, despite the concentrated nature of the Essence, it still only bore trace amounts of the vital signature needed. As such, one had to channel a tremendous amount before enough of the Vital Essence had been absorbed to cause that enlightenment to occur.
This was where progressing through the Enlightened realm could take up a great deal of time.
Well, Rieren had prepared herself to let it take however long it needed. Minutes turned to hours turned to days, the days turning over in endless cycles of nightly darkness and brilliant sunlight.
Through it all, Rieren did her best to focus on more than just gathering the energy of the land. She was also pouring some of the great Essence she was channelling into expanding her elixir field, though the expansion soon grew limited after a few days. Breakthroughs in that expansion would only occur when she broke through to the next stage of her current realm.
As such, for the moment, the outer bound of her elixir field was mostly limited to just beneath her skin.
While she cultivated, Elder Olg and Batcat roamed around the area. As the passage of time started to lose meaning while Rieren cultivated as much as she could, she found herself unable to tell when they were with her and when they were not.
But at the back of her mind, it felt as though they were more often next to her when it grew dark, such as during nightfall.
She was thankful for their presence when they were nearby, and when they did leave her, she found that they brought tidbits of news or little things they had discovered.
“We have found four separate individuals in the Locale,” Elder Olg was saying on one such occasion. “At least two of whom look interested in approaching us.”
“I am not sure I want to meet them,” Rieren said.
“I never suggested meeting them. Unfortunately, if they decided to take it upon themselves to do so, there isn’t much any of us can do.”
“I could always kill them.”
“I do suggest against killing other cultivators simply because they annoy you, Rieren.”
Rieren rolled her eyes and continued focusing on her cultivation.
A few days later, Elder Olg started reporting about the oddities around the Locale. He had taken to investigating the physical expressions of weirdness caused by overwhelming use of Essence by the ancient cultivators in the area.
“Fascinating how the bark is made of pure metal,” he was saying, situated right next to the tree Rieren was cultivating under. “If you look closely, you can see that it doesn’t resemble sheets of metal that you might be familiar with.”
“I am, in truth, not familiar with any forms of metal at all except whatever shape they take when they are weaponized.”
“You see the striations on the bark, so to speak? The pattern of lines? These resemble wood exactly. However.” He butted his head against the tree, producing a solid ringing sound. Like metal. “Wood is a specific substance produced by the tiny internal structures that make up the tree. But instead of that specific substance, they make something resembling iron.”
“And the… leaves?” Rieren asked conversationally.
“If you look closely, the branches still sprout little twigs and smaller branches. Those are where the leaves should have come from. But these trees do not live off of sunlight. Instead, I believe their roots draw in something more volatile from the depths of the earth, and processing that to useful nutrients requires the excess draw to be burned off, producing these fiery leaves.”
Rieren had to admit distantly that she was rather impressed by Elder Olg’s investigations. “Do you truly intend to pass the time through the art of plant biology?”
“Unfortunately, I lack a horde of options thanks to being a mere head. I am also well past the Enlightened realm, thank you very much. Shouldn’t you be appreciating my presence right now?”
She smiled. This was why she actually appreciated Elder Olg more than anything else. He wasn’t a stuffy rule-stickler who only interacted with others how decorum and propriety dictated. Elder Olg knew how to be friendly. Rieren would never not appreciate that.
“I am very grateful, Elder,” she said.
He granted her a brief grin. “As you should be.”
Rieren was curious about his true motives and intentions, but as with the little teleporting act he had displayed in the ruins, something told her he preferred to remain mum about it for now. She wouldn’t bother him about it. He had earned her trust several times over, and he deserved to hold the right to tell her things when he felt it was time.
It took some time longer before Rieren began to feel the first signs that she was closing in on the first enlightenment. The vital signatures that the concentrated Essence had bore with it something akin to the memories she could obtain from Batcat.
What it meant in practical terms was that Rieren was often looking through strange visions instead of at the real world. The area around her shifted and cavorted as though it was some sort of transitory space, unmoored from the Mortal Realm and unbound by its laws. Instead, the only thing it obeyed were the recollections of its past.
She saw a time when this land had been normal. When the trees had barks of plain grey wood, and leaves that turned more gold than sunlight before the onset of winter. When streams of water had cut merry brooks over the land. When, instead of white sand, there had been grass carpeting the Locale in a blanket of green and brown and bright yellow.
When it had represented the truth of this world.
Every Enlightenment Locale had a specific truth that needed to be comprehended by those seeking to advance through the Enlightened realm. These truths had a lot to do with the Locale itself.
For instance, Rieren’s current Locale bore the truth of what truly occurred on the surface of the world on multiple levels. The memories she was currently viewing involved imparting to her the knowledge and cumulative experience of what this location’s—and by extension, the world’s—natural state would have been.
Trees of leaves that changed as the seasons passed, foxes hunting rabbits, both of which changed coats to white when the snows of winter began falling, herds of roaming deer that would stop by the stream, birdsong floating melodiously through the land.
And at the centre of it all, in a deceptively large cave, a Spirit Beast tending to its own business.
But was only the first layer of truth that Rieren had to understand. She couldn’t very well experience it first-hand, what with the state of the Locale, but the Vital Essence did allow her to relive the memories quite intensely.
Rieren could nod her head to the birds’ calls, their pleasant thrum tingling right inside her head. The flowers’ sweet scent was carried everywhere by the soft breeze rustling her hair. At times, she thought she was staring straight into the soul of a deer or a dove that had caught her eye. It was all unfathomably peaceful.
And not at all real.
The strange illusion brought on by the very land’s recollection wasn’t broken harshly. They didn’t shatter, plunging Rieren back into reality.
Instead, she experienced the passage of time as though she was some sort of observer of a story. Seasons turned to mere blinks, long decades summarized to mere breaths. And eventually, there came the time for the Locale’s doom.
The introduction of the humans.
It wasn’t enough that the mortals pilfered the land for its bounty. They hunted the animals that called it home, cut down the trees to build their own homes, and tried to turn over the land for their own farming, but all that paled in the face of the true horror that the cultivators brought.
Battles raged and mighty conflicts blasted the Locale. It all culminated in the one, final fight between the powerful cultivators who had turned the area into what it was currently.
Who had made it into an Enlightenment Locale.
Unfortunately, Rieren didn’t get to view it just yet. The pages of the land’s history turned with agonizing slowness. Even if, in her transitory state, she was removed from the local effects of the passage of time, she could feel how day after day passed by her.
Even worse, on one such day, Rieren was interrupted by one of her fellow cultivators deciding to come in and accost her.