Chapter 197: Night Visit [PART 1]
Turning his attention to his other attributes, Xiang Yu noticed that many of them had increased dramatically in just a single day. Most of this explosive growth could be attributed to the rebirth pill he had received from his junior sister.
Looking at his body refining cultivation, the progression was almost absurd. The rebirth pill had provided him a thousand points, then the bloodline stimulation had contributed another two thousand. After the system’s doubling effect, he now sat at six thousand points total. He only needed to earn one thousand more points before the next reset to break through to the fifteenth layer. It had only been a day since his last breakthrough, yet he would already advance again at the next reset. He was practically speedrunning through the body refining stages at this point.
As for his qi cultivation, he had some thoughts on it. Previously, he had always considered body refining to be the most crucial aspect of his development, since it consistently provided tangible benefits with each breakthrough. While he still believed this to be true, he could no longer afford to look down on qi cultivation, especially given the system’s remarkable ability to pursue absolute limits in everything.
These thoughts had formed mostly because of what had transpired earlier when the soul clone attacked him. The encounter had shown him that raw physical power still had its limits and there were some things he couldn’t bruteforce by just being physically stronger. Even if he continued pushing his body cultivation higher and higher, would he ever be able to defeat a soul with just physical strength?
This problem had been somewhat addressed when he received the soul attack technique from his junior sister, but there were still fundamental limitations that couldn’t simply be solved by possessing the right technique. After thoroughly studying the Soul Spike manual, he could see that the technique demanded quite a substantial amount of soul energy to execute properly. If he possessed true qi instead of his current refined spiritual energy, the soul energy requirements would decrease considerably.
This led him to wonder: if he managed to reach the Core Formation realm, would the qi quality in his body finally achieve true qi levels? It didn’t necessarily have to reach true qi status directly. Since the quality was already comparable to that of a Golden Core cultivator, it just needed to advance to Nascent Soul cultivator levels. Then he could use his soul infant to slowly refine his spiritual energy into true qi—that was the standard process, after all. Nascent Soul cultivators typically used their souls to transform their refined qi into the superior true qi in order to breakthrough into the Soul Formation realm.
After the massive increase in soul experience points, his connection to the soul infant had deepened considerably. The infant had already attempted this refinement process but had failed completely. He wasn’t sure if the failure occurred because it was still just an infant rather than a fully developed nascent soul, or because his qi simply hadn’t reached the necessary quality threshold yet.
This is all getting too confusing. Let’s move on.
Still, he made a mental note to pay much more attention to his qi cultivation going forward.
Speaking of the soul infant, he had always wondered why it seemed so fundamentally different from himself, but after the recent experience point increase, he finally began to understand what was happening. At the Nascent Soul stage, a cultivator’s soul and consciousness(mind) were typically in perfect synchronization. This meant that when someone entered their spiritual sea, they would appear exactly as their soul manifested.
However, since his infant wasn’t fully developed yet, it couldn’t achieve complete synchronization with his consciousness, causing him to materialize in his spiritual sea as his consciousness and the infant as a standalone entity.
The memories it possessed from him were just the very basics. Although it could receive new information in real time, what it could actually store and retain was quite limited. But as it continued to grow and mature, it would be able to store more and more until they would finally achieve perfect synchronization.
He smiled. Since it was essentially just another version of himself, it didn’t really matter if he overworked it a little bit, right? He suddenly caught sight of his own menacing smile reflected in the surface of the spirit water and quickly composed himself, returning his expression to its normal state.
Moving on to his other stats, his Transcendent Dao Body had exploded in experience points and was finally beginning to show genuine possibility of advancement. At the current rate of improvement, he estimated it would take at most five days before it advanced to the second level. He could hardly wait to see what changes that transformation would bring.
Still, he found it strange that he wasn’t feeling any gradual changes occurring in his body yet. It seemed that he would only experience all the benefits when the physique completely leveled up, rather than feeling incremental improvements along the way.
Regarding his secondary professions, the recent battle had disrupted his usual systematic practice routine, but they had still managed to improve in their own ways. Since he had relied most heavily on alchemy during the conflict, it had overtaken the rest and become the highest-ranked profession below cooking and appraisal.
His medicine skill had also improved considerably, entering the seventh grade after the reset and bringing with it a huge amount of medical insights that he was eager to experiment with.
As for his combat techniques, he hadn’t had the luxury of dedicated practice time and had only managed to work on them randomly throughout the day. Consequently, the experience gains weren’t as impressive as his previous training sessions. Still, they were progressing at a respectable pace.
He waved his hand dismissively, closing the reset screen interface as he prepared to enter his spiritual sea and test his enhanced combat capabilities in the battle simulation. Just as he was about to begin this process, he felt someone probing his formations.
Extending his divine sense to investigate, he immediately recognized it as his junior sister. He wondered what could possibly bring her here at this late hour.
"A night visit?"
Quickly rising from the spirit spring, he hastily put on his clothes and rushed toward the formation. He needed to open the barrier for her before she decided to break through it again. The last thing he wanted was to spend tomorrow morning repairing his carefully crafted formations once more.
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Author’s Corner
I hope this answers some of the questions you were having about the soul and him looking like different entities. I spoke too much and sometimes it came out jumbled and I had to rewrite it, tell me if there is something you don’t understand.
As for the spiritual root, yes, it does increase the qi he gains. But remember that xiang yu barely practices qi cultivation and mostly gets it from the spirit food. Usually, he gains 500 per day. This time, he gained 600. Ik the difference is a little small but it’s mostly because the 500 is when he eats both lunch and dinner. This time, it was just dinner. If he takes lunch too, it will be 700. I think this is a good number as it’s not too big or too small. What do you guys think?