In order to see if what he designed into his foundation worked, he looked within himself to examine the life seed. He used his divine sense, as his eyes and other senses are incapable of such a thing.
As he examined the two life seeds, he discovered one good thing and two bad things. The good thing was about equal in effect and magnitude to the two bad things that he noticed, so they were essentially good and bad in equal proportion.
The good news was that the terminals were still present. The first bad thing that he noticed was that the terminals had become scattered.
When he had designed the terminals, he had fixed them in a tidy position, and there were just two, positive and negative. But after fusing with his life seeds, the two terminals have split into many portions and were also scattered all over the life seeds.
Right now, two terminals have become 12. If he is to combine the power of life seeds using the terminals, he must first couple the 12 terminals within a life seed.
Coupling the terminals is not much of a problem for him. He can do it easily by redirecting the flow of mana within the life seed so that mana flows in one direction in the pattern of the positive terminals to the negative terminals in one straight line.
But he won't be able to do this now because of the second piece of bad news. The bad news is that he can't activate all the terminals until the life seed is full of energy.
Only when the life seed is full of energy can he create a single flow of mana that reaches all of the terminals. So he will wait until he is about to reach the second mortal coil before he can combine the power of the life seed perfectly.
He sighed and said to himself, "This isn't so bad. At least, all I need to do is focus on cultivation. I don't need to struggle to combine the life seeds like others."
He has another option, which is to create a complicated map for the flow of mana within his life seed. But that's what other people do in order to combine the power of their life seeds.
If he does that, he will be going through the route of mastering the host technique. It will be easier for him to do since he already has terminals within his life seeds.
He can just create a map by using the terminals as compasses. It will make his work easier, but he doesn't want to do that at all.
He doesn't want to do hard work like other people. He doesn't believe that he created the terminals just to slave away like other people.
All he wants to do is use a single move to combine the power of his life seeds. His method to do so will be easier to initiate and even easier to maintain.
Once he creates the mana flow, electricity will instinctively flow from the positive to the negative terminal. He won't have to maintain a mental map of the flow of mana with his mind like everyone else.
So he decided to just wait until he filled up the life seeds before coupling the life seeds. From what he heard, it will take a lot of time for him to achieve the tenth transformation.
According to the norms, it usually takes up to 90 years to reach the peak of the third mortal coil. This is the time it takes talented people who try to cultivate the energy-refining path outside of sects.
An average of 10 years for each transformation is a long time for a talented person. But people with poor talent for energy refining will have to suffer for longer before they can see progress.
In his case, his talent has never been skewed towards energy refining. His talent for energy refining is 23%. So if he were a cultivator outside of the sect, cultivating the path of energy refining would have been a dead end for him.
The talent of his mind isn't so bad. It is at a whopping 56%. But the talent for spiritual acuity doesn't help much for energy refining. The nimbleness of his soul helps better with learning spells, casting spells, and controlling artifacts and armaments.
If he were to follow the normal way of grinding out mastery of the host technique by creating a mana map in his life seeds with his mind and then maintaining that mana map with his mind, his spiritual acuity talent would have been of great help.
But he is not going that laborious route to power. So the best thing that the talent of his spiritual acuity will help him do is learn and engrave formations because the best tool for a formation master is their mind.
Fortunately, he is a disciple of a sect, and a powerful one at that. He can go the extravagant route of using mana to grow his life seeds.
When he thought of this, he couldn't help but chuckle and say, "To think that the path of energy refining is the cheaper option. But the poor cultivators who need mana the most can't have this option."
The path of energy refining is supposed to be the cheap option because mana is free. One simply has to absorb it from the air.
Mana is like air, and cultivating the path of energy refining is supposed to be like breathing. Just like breathing is free, energy refining is also free.
Unfortunately, most of the free mana is being hoarded by a few groups of people, while the general populace has to settle for the scraps of mana that leak out of the secret realms in the region.
The lack of mana to fuel their cultivation of energy refining is why most cultivators outside of the sects choose to go the route of body refining. But the path of body refining isn't easy to cultivate because it is very expensive.