Bang

For once that sound, when associated with Ares, was not the result of an explosion! What it was the sweet sweet sound of, was liberation! Liberation from this damned cultivation room! He'd done it. Ares had ascended to mental accumulation, 8th stage, and the bang was proof that his body had ascended. He wouldn't spend much time on this stage, however, as it was trailblazing time! Each of the stalks would raise him up by one stage and he had three so 9th stage would be a breeze, 10th would be a walk in the park, and then climbing to the 1st stage of the next realm would be a piece of cake. Ares was looking forward to eating the trailblazers, actually, because he was curious to know what kind of taste and texture they were packing. It's not everyday you get to eat a rare ingredient after all. Nobody throughout history had probably ever wasted a trailblazer and cooked it for a dish and, although Ares was very tempted, he was not going to be the first to do it either. The trailblazers were simply too valuable to waste in such a manner... But man did he really want to!

Ares left the room and headed over to the kitchen. It seemed like Aejaz was home alone as everyone else had gone on a shopping spree. Where they got this stardust Ares didn't know but he wanted some damnit! As for the origin of the money, it was actually from a furry feline who'd also gone along on the shopping trip to get some cans of tuna for himself as a reward for his hard work! Leo had been working overtime as chief mouser for the Heaven's path sect as of late as the farmers needed a bodyguard of sorts to protect their crops. A species of rats that invaded farmland had been cropping up and Leo was the perfect solution so, a while back, Yulo had asked for a hand... Or paw, in this case, and offered to pay Leo a respectable wage for his time. The tiny tiger, equipped with Mini-Pillie Commander and various speed boosting pills, got to work quickly and effectively. He was a silent and deadly killer of vermin who scoured the wheat, roughly four times taller than him, for any signs of infestation.

Ah but don't get it twisted, this wasn't an easy job. The rats were not standard rats, no, they were almost the size of a chubby house cat. Leo had been sparring with theses rodents en masse and his own cultivation had been increasing as a result. The wild treetop tiger clawed countless creatures and cultivated via captivating combat. Plus he could change sizes somewhat now, thanks to the ever-shifting core Ares found way back when, so he wasn't as outclassed as things might have sounded. His wind-guided fire was excellent for avoiding any damage to the crops whilst burning alive the ratty scoundrels attempting to partake in the goods the farmers had been growing. It was actually quite common to see Leo on the prowl over by that area and he'd been there on the day Ares went, it's just that he was on the other side of the field so Ares had missed him. After getting paid for his hard work, Leo decided to treat the people that took him in and brought everyone out for a day on the town. Allie in particular was his favourite human so he was going to spoil her rotten a bit. Leo was a bitchy tiger usually but he did have a soft spot that could come out from time to time... Not for guys though. Other than Ares but that was because Ares could talk to him directly, took him in, and could cook delicious food so Leo made an exception. Everyone other guy though? Bleugh. He was like a shitty unicorn or something, apparently. This was why Aejaz had been unceremoniously been left behind. Ah but it should also be noted that Charity was also an exception to this rule, just in reverse. She was on the no-no list with every other male in existence.

Ares went into the kitchen and got a strainer out because the instructions he'd received from Veteran included boiling the trailblazers for a week straight. With the Primordial Blade's fast forwarding of time feature Ares could do this in no time flat... If he hadn't already done it! Foresight had led Ares to boiling the trailblazers back when he first started work on the Prisms. They'd been done for a while now and just kind of simmering in his pocket dimension so, after whipping them out, all he needed to do was drain off some of the excess liquid and chomp on them. Even that wasn't really necessary as he could do almost whatever he wanted with them, even blending the stalks into a smoothie. The cooking method couldn't be altered but the consumption method could if you really fancied some spice of life. Still, Ares wasn't going to do that either because it was a waste of time. Doing it would just make him regret not messing around with the trailblazers more and who knows how long it would be until he found more of this stuff? It wasn't exactly the kind of thing you could grow in your back garden. They were highly, highly valued and people like Coronos and Davey would kill for these things on sight. Ares coming up with hundred of ideas for the trailblazers but never being able to act on them would be torture in its own right so he didn't play with them even though his mind was craving it.

Ares eyed up the three stalks, as did Aejaz who was nosily poking his head around the corner but promptly ran away when Ares flicked a Shock Bead at him, and lifted stalk number one to his lips. He gently took a whiff of the crimson red grass and was almost blown away by the pungent spice that numbed his nose. He leaned back and blinked repeatedly as tears formed in his eyes and his nose became runny. His sinuses had just been thoroughly cleansed, like those of a man who rubbed a literal ton of nasal ointment on his nose and then sat in a heated room with the power of a thousand saunas. Ares almost couldn't believe how empty his nose felt. He had to feel around on his face to make sure the thing was still there! Was it a nose? Was it a wind tunnel? Ares didn't know anymore but what he did know was that those trailblazers were packing some serious heat... Ares wanted to make a curry with one! Hehehe, think of all the mouths I could burn! Mako's reaction would be worth it... Yes, he was genuinely considered using this legendary treasure to prank Mako, that was just how Ares operated though so it wasn't actually that surprising. Even though he wasn't going to do it, Ares' mind was already planning out the intricacies of the op and figuring out how best to go about it. Mako would never eat something Ares randomly gave him out of the blue so he decided the best option would be to use the Nyxian Prowler, sneak into Mako's room, and drop the trailblazer in his soup. The more he thought about it the more he really wanted to do it but, alas, down his hatch the first stalk went. Ares was smart about this as he'd prepared himself for any potential risks by activating annihilation enhancement ahead of time. He could protect his mouth, throat, and innards with the layer of pressure but that wasn't his only measure. He had a carton of milk at the ready, waiting to flush down the scorching grass should it flare up his throat.

Fortunately the trailblazers didn't go on a rampage at all and the whole ordeal was more calm than Ares had initially predicted. His body warmed up and his body temperature rose. He was sweating a bit and he felt parched but it didn't feel like he was burning to death or about to become a smouldering corpse so, all in all, he was feeling good. It was more like wearing a sweater in thirty degree heat than jumping into a volcano and Ares was very grateful for that considering some of the nonsense he'd been put through as of late. Or rather stuff he'd put himself through but it was all for the greater good and he couldn't just not do any of it.

The trailblazer blazed a trail through his gut and the heat permeated outwards from his core, spreading to every inch of his body like a warm blanket hugging his flesh. From head to toe Ares had become a little red, and there was even a bit of steam coming off him, but that was about fix itself as Ares could feel the culmination of this process coming up next. He was right too as he felt his cultivation start soaring, unprompted by anything Ares was doing right now. He wasn't cultivating but he could feel his body ascending again. It was almost as if he'd set fire to his cultivation and it was trying to flee the burning house that was Ares' body by moving 'up'. That or maybe it was because heat rose and Ares' cultivation was basically on fire right now. Either way, his cultivation was busting through the fire door and into the 9th stage of mental accumulation. Ares pointed some finger guns at the ceiling and mouthed the word 'bang' in tandem with his body unleashing a small air wave that cooled him down. This signified the effect of his the trailblazer was done and that the user's cultivation had risen.

Ares could feel his surge in power but he checked inwardly regardless to make sure everything was functioning as it should. After a brief but cautious check-up, he determined all was well and he was good to keep on keeping on. His body temperature had risen rapidly but it also cooled down just as quickly when everything was over so there were no anomalies in Ares' current state. There was no drawback to taking multiple trailblazers in a row so down the hatch the second one went. As Ares swallowed, he did wonder to himself what exactly would happen if he shoved all three in at once. He knew sequentially downing them was fine but what about shoving them all down his throat in one fell swoop? Surely that would be disastrous, right? Ares didn't need to be an expert in stoichiometry to know there was no way he wouldn't turn into a hot air balloon and just burst on the spot so, wisely, he chose to not do that!

The same scene played out in the kitchen as Ares increased his stage yet again from 9th to 10th stage and now he was at the peak of mental accumulation. the irony of being at the peak of mental accumulation and not having accumulated any form of intelligence throughout this whole realm was not lost on dumb dog Ares but he didn't care! He'd built his mental realm passively over the course of his stay here and that was good enough. He really didn't need to do anything as it was a simple procedure. Just cultivating through the stages lay the foundation and set him up to defend against mental attacks in a basic way. He was lucky not have come across any mental attacks as of yet, excluding Aejaz', but that could change at a moment's notice. Now of course he had his disintegration magic ready to go, and completely solve and dissolve that type of issue, but having the mental realm would give him more time to do it so it wasn't pointless or anything. It's just that most mental realms were pretty uninspiring early until you found treasures, resources, or medicines to spruce up the place a little. By default, everyone's mental realm was just a bog standard maze that could be freely re-arranged as long as nobody was poking around in it. If they were then you would have to make do with mental attacks to prevent the attack or the person from reaching the end which was when things would hit the fan and get ugly. Treasures, resources, and medicines would allow the cultivator to include some traps, maybe a guardian or two, and even change the overall layout. You could get really funky with these mental realms but the kind of treasures that affected them were not common. Mental arts in general were considered niche by the large majority of cultivators. Enyo was apparently working on some under the pleasure pillar but that was more of a problem for Ares than anyone else. He had no idea how they would even benefit her as she already had the ability to make him horny on demand, what more did she need?! But that was just Enyo being Enyo so Ares ignored it and let his future self deal with that whenever it became relevant.

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Now it was time for the third and final trailblazer, the one that would push Ares into a new realm. This one would have to work overtime and put some more effort in because skipping over a realm was a much bigger ask than skipping over a stage. How this would affect Ares he didn't yet know but he could hazard a guess. It was going to get really hot inside his body and reach extremely unpleasant temperatures. In order to prevent anything from going awry, Ares took the milk and left the kitchen to head over to the bathroom. He'd joked that Enyo should take a cold shower the other day but now he was, ironically enough, going to be in dire need of one himself. It would be a small release from the burning sensation that was headed his way so there was no reason not to make things as easy for himself as he could. Plus he'd been planning on getting washed anyway as sitting around in the dusty cultivation room, which he needed to clean now that he thought about it, made him a little messy.

Being at the peak of mental accumulation Ares didn't exactly need to clean himself often but it was still a force of habit from before his cultivation had risen to this point. A lot of cultivators never quite got used to their newfound bodily functions and a lot of them still ate, slept, and washed regularly just because of how weird it felt skipping these basic daily odd-jobs. Brushing teeth, your five a day, washing your face etc... All stuff no cultivator needed to do often and yet the amount of cultivators who did it anyway were over half of all cultivators in the world. Really the only ones who didn't where those who'd experience what it was like to be a hermit and cultivate for thousands, if not millions, of years at a time as they were already very familiar with the lack of consequences for their inconsistent hygiene routine. After you locked yourself in a room for eons, multiple times over, and came out smelling like a rose it sorted of tended to dawn on you that maybe certain aspects of your daily life weren't necessary anymore. As most cultivators didn't reach that kind of point, or made it a habit to interrupt their long cultivation sessions, it was a relatively uncommon phenomenon. It also didn't help that a lot of restaurants, medical and beauty businesses, and house builders came together to create multiple ad campaigns singing the praises of such activities so they could make bank off of entirely irrelevant nonsense to the majority of cultivators. These people would go out of business real fast if everyone just stopped caring about such things so the business cabal made a great effort to alter public consciousness on the aforementioned matters. That being said, there were a lot of reasons to eat, wash, etc on a daily basis provided you were in a very specific group of elites who could afford rare luxuries. Some food simply tasted too divine to ignore and some actually came with cultivation benefits and were worth going out of your way for. Some people had also found shower treasures that could cleanse impurities from the body as well as paints that could be used to coat a room and give it passive benefits. Not everything related to daily mundane tasks was a scam but you had to have a keen eye to discern what was actually worth the cost of doing business and what existed solely to part you from your hard-earned stardust, the majority of which fell into the latter category.

Ares took his clothes off and hopped into the shower, turned it on, and swallowed the last trailblazer as a familiar tingle of heat assailed him all over his body. For the first, give or take, minute things were smooth sailing and roughly the exact same as they had been before. Unlike last time, however, his cultivation, during its ascent, felt like it smacked headfirst into a brick wall and Ares felt concussed by the collision. His head was heating up so he lodged it under the shower nozzle and took deep breaths.

Wham.

Wham.

Wham.

Again and again his cultivation kept ramming the bottleneck, giving Ares a serious headache and making him wonder if cultivating past this realm normally would have been a better option. Using the trailblazer to go up a realm was not a simple task, as it turned out, and he wasn't in a any particular rush to reach sensory enhancement. It's not like being at mental accumulation would bite him in the ass during the next match because it was just another group of nobodies he could beat with one arm tied behind his back. Actually, with annihilation enhancement, he could tie both hands behind his back and still win with his eyes closed so it really wasn't a contest. He could have very well cultivated to the next realm normally and then used the trailblazer to just skip another stage after. Still, Ares both A; wanted the experience so he knew what to expect should he ever do this again and, B; ascending to a new realm took a lot longer than going up a stage via normal cultivation. Yes he could cultivate and achieve the same result normally but doing so took up an amount of time Ares didn't need to waste right now. Delaying his cultivation progress by a couple of days just so he didn't have to go through this miserable experience was childish and he could handle it annoying though it was. Headache? Heartburn? Numbed body? He'd been through a lot worse recently so tolerating this for a few minutes was 'easy' in comparison. The shower and the milk, which he'd just taken a swig of, were also useful in their own right and massively aided Ares during the absorption of this resource... Resource... Ares had taken a cultivation resource for once! He'd almost completely forgotten this was an issue that had been plaguing him this whole time! Ares didn't have time to be moping over the difficulty of swallowing the trailblazers because he should have been celebrating the fact that he even had a chance to swallow them in the first place! This was practically a gift from God at this point...

That line of thinking managed to distract Ares throughout the somewhat painful but mostly un-tumultuous process. He treated the bubbles of flames in his stomach like celebratory fireworks, congratulating him on his acquisition of cultivation goods for the first time! The milk he swallowed to soothe his insides was totally champagne! His body was a raving party and not a bubbling cauldron right now! There were limits to Ares imagination but, thankfully, the whole shebang came to an end shortly before Ares' delusions did with one final, and considerable, BANG rippling throughout Ares flesh. It was possible to see his skin jump that was how momentous his improvement was. Going up two stages and a realm in the span of a few minutes, no more than ten total, was a feat that would have the average Sheryashkan implode in jealousy. In the lower realms such a spontaneous rise in cultivation was hard to come across and could be a defining moment for any cultivator worth their salt. How quickly you rose through the ranks compared to everyone else in your age group could very well determine how much support you received from those looking to sponsor you in the long run. people were always looking for talented youngsters to take under their wing so a shift in tempo, regarding cultivation, as major as the one Ares had just experienced would single-handedly shape a person's future under the right circumstance. Now of course Ares' future was shaped a long time ago and he needed no such support but that was precisely why others would be jealous of him. With all the advantages he had gaining even more like this was just unfair! How was anyone who was Ares' age supposed to compete with this freak? The only silver lining before today was that his cultivation was generally really quite low but, since the last match, which was the last time anyone outside the sect had seen him, he'd gone up four stages! He'd even snuck his way into sensory enhancement! It would be painfully apparent, the next time he debuted, that he'd gorged on some kind of amazing treasure and that would just fuel everyone's envy even more than his very existence already did.

But that was enough about that. Random strangers and their opinions meant nothing to Ares who was already pondering how to go about achieving divine sense. He wasn't in a rush but he wanted to get it over and done with before the next match so he could streamline his to do list and have all the miscellaneous stuff squared away. In order to find out how he was supposed to even start with divine sense, Ares had a couple options. He could ask someone who was in or above the realm. He could read a book, of which their would inevitably be many that were written about this very common subject in the library, or he could just wing it and potentially end up doing something pointless like jabbing himself in the eye again.

The first option was the easiest but also the one that would take Ares the longest as he didn't know where anyone who could help him was right now. The matriarchs all resided... Somewhere? Honestly Ares had no clue where they were staying but it had to be a fancy place so he could narrow it down if he really tried. it would still take forever and then some to locate them properly though so it was a no-go overall. The elders in the sect would all likely be too busy to entertain Ares and even those that weren't might be hard to track down as elders aren't always glued to one spot. Aejaz was in the next room over but he was kind of useless in many ways and asking him for precise instructions was... Not going to happen! Everyone else was out shopping and Ares didn't want to bother his neighbours when they were resting at home. Sadie could work... But she would haggle! She'd already been eyeing up his spare plates the night before and she would demand some in return for her aid! She might have also left the sect as today was a Sunday and she didn't work on Sundays because... She was lazy? Ares didn't actually know why. Other elders did... Of course being a decorated and prestigious cultivator meant she could take a day off and no one would stop her but where was the work ethic with this woman?! If Ares wanted to seek help, there was only one viable option and there was no chance in hell he was going to go and ask Rud! No! Never! Also, as a side note, Ares was forbidden from hanging around Alaine when Enyo wasn't around so he couldn't even seek instruction from his tier leader! Every option was problematic for one reason or another which meant that external aid route wasn't looking likely.

The second option had the least obstacles attached to it as paying the library a visit would take a few minutes and that would be it... But which book should Ares check out? There would be hundreds on the topic and decoding which one was the most up to date, had the most useful information for someone like Ares, and could provide clear instructions... That would take days of combing through everything just to have a rough idea... It's not like a book could do what a human being with knowledge could do and assess Ares' uniqueness before giving him appropriate advice, Ares would need to do all that himself. This would take an amount of time Ares didn't want to throw away pointlessly right now which could only mean one thing... It was time to do silly crap again and see what worked!