38 Cultivating the Beast Core!

When Xiao Ling had quickly finished the rest of her food, she had to watch in dissatisfaction Tie Zhu and Bing Meifeng were eating the rest of their meal. She somewhat regretted not taking more time to savor it properly, however that thought was quickly discarded as she quickly ran her breathing exercises to cultivate the abundant pure spiritual essence within her body.

"Fwsshh"

It had only been around 15 minutes, however in that span of time she had unexpectedly broken through to the 9th step of Qi Condensation. That alone was enough to shock her deeply as she had previously been stuck in the 8th step for over almost decade, however she could still sense that there was still excess spiritual essence within her body. Setting her shock aside, she once again continued cultivating at a speed that had been unimaginable to her.

By the time she had reached the 9th step of Qi conddnsation, Tie Zhu and Bing Meifeng had also finished their meals. Similar to Xiao Ling, they had also felt the abundance of spiritual essence within their body. While Bing Meifeng immediately began running her breathing exercises, Tie Zhu took his time as he tried to comprehend the Primordial Heavenly Devouring technique.

Because the Spiritual Essence was already flowing through his body, there was no need for him to absorb it from his skin. However, despite this it was still many times more difficult than the previous technique he had used. A large part of this was due to the fact that instead of diverting spiritual essence to his Dantian, he had to direct it towards his Primordial dragon beast core instead.

This was one of the biggest reasons why other races could not practice such a technique no matter how they studied the technique. Although Tie Zhu did not completely understand the complexity of the technique, he had felt that he had somehow managed to grasp a greater insight into it when compared to yesterday due to his transformation.

As he recalled the excruciatingly painful transformation process in his mind, with particular emphasis on when the boundless spiritual essence was making its way to his beast core he suddenly felt as if he gained a crucial insight into understanding an important part of the technique. After spending another 20 minutes on comprehending some of the basic principles he finally attempted to cultivate the rich spiritual essence within his body.

One of the reasons why the technique was so complex was that rather than absorbing the spiritual essence directly in its pure form, he instead had to perform an elemental transformation on the spiritual essence. He remembered yesterday that the spiritual essence within his body had been so rich that he had shone through his skin, glowing in a beautiful rainbow colour, and it was largely because of that, was his beast for able to rapidly absorb the Qi.

Although he was not sure exactly what elements were contained within the Qi, he knew that it must meant that he had an affinity for more than one element. However because it had happened automatically he was not able to recall how it had happened.

Because the manual of the technique had mentioned how to create elemental threads as part of the preparation, Tie Zhu had some idea of what to do. Following the instructions in the manual, he carefully slowed down the flow of spiritual essence within his body before attempting to transform it into strands of elemental threads like he had seen yesterday.

Since it was only his first time doing such a thing he tried focusing his mind on one small strand of spiritual essence to make it easier to control. As if trying to replicate the colourful spiritual essence from yesterday he tried to form elemental threads from all the basic elements that had been described in the manual before absorbing it into his beast core. However no matter how hard he tried he could not form a stable elemental thread like he had seen yesterday.

Within the strands he had tried to create he could always easily form a thick fire elemental thread, however the others were mediocre at best, with the water thread being almost nonexistent. Because of this imbalance, the thread quickly became unstable, dissipating into nothingness. The reason for this was not because of Tie Zhu had a greater affinity for fire, but because the meat that he had eaten was from a creature that specialised in fire, that he was not aware of.

Although Tie Zhu was a bit disheartened about not being able to form a colourful elemental thread, he did not want to let anything else go to waste. The Primordial Heavenly Devouring Technique did not specify that the elemental thread had to be more than one element, so without wasting any more spiritual essence Tie Zhu finally decided to absorb it purely as a fire thread. After forming a small pure thread of fire he finally directed it towards his beast core as a slightly burning sensation flowed through his body.

Although it was painful, it was much less than yesterday and had somehow many him feel alive as it was greedily absorbed by the Beast core in an instant. 'Huh, is that it? How come I don't feel any different?' Tie Zhu questioned himself as he noticed no change in his body. 'Maybe that amount was too small, I barely absorbed one percent of the Spiritual essence' He thought as he tried to comfort hinself.

Seeing that it was not as difficult as he thought transforming the Spiritual Essence, he quickly created thick threads of fire within his body. So much so that his body was actually glowing with a slightly red tinge. As he felt his meridians sear with a ferocious burning pain he quickly directed the abundant threads of fire into his beast core. Like a black hole, it once again instabtly absorbed everything that Tie Zhu had directed to it before giving of a slightly red glow before dimming once again.

'WHAT! That was more than half of the essence in my body!' He exclaimed to himself as he still did not notice any significant change in the Beast core. The reason why it had shocked him was because from what he could tell, the Spiritual Essence from that meat was comparable to the essence within the spirit bottle that had been enough for him to advance into the path of cultivation. Yet, sof ar his beast core had absorbed everything with no progress at all. A

After resigning himself to this lack of progress he quickly transformed the rest of the spiritual essence within his body into threads of fire before absorbing it into his beast core. As expected apart from the scalding pain within his body he felt no different at all... 'What is wrong with me!' he thought to himself in sadness as he opened his eyes.

In fact, what he did not notice was that while his Dantian was at the 3rd step of Qi condensation, his beast core was still stuck in the 1st step and had barely made any progress. While his beast core would not face any bottlenecks or barriers to progress what it required instead was resources. A lot of resources.

When Tie Zhu opened his eyes he saw that Bing Meifeng and her mother were actually still cultivating. 'They still arnt done?' he thought to himself as he remembered that he had even spent 20 minutes before he had even started absorbing the Spiritual Essence. In fact the time it had taken to absorb the last 99% of the essence had taken him less than 30 seconds. If anyone knew that he was such a monster their Jaws would have dropped to the floor.

As Tie Zhu looked around the room he saw that the time was already 7:40 am. 'Ah! I lost track of time, I'm already late for school, I haven't even got changed yet!' he thought as he once again looked towards Bing Meifeng who was immersed in cultivation.