230 Bottlenecks And Impossibly Talented Humans

For about six hours, within the Profound River there only existed two distinct sounds. The first made up the flowing water which crashed against Elizabeth, pushing her away from the Waterfall of Insight.

The noise wasn't at all loud as even without anything else to contrast it, it took a bit of concentration from Elizabeth to even notice it. However, there was something there to contrast it, after all. Namely, Elizabeth's footsteps as she ran across its surface.

After the sixty-kilometer mark, the pre-established notions Elizabeth had about the Profound River changed. First, the bottom of the River began lowering at a much faster, nigh-exponential, rate. Second, she was no longer limited to traversing underwater.

So long as she kept the soles of her feet in contact with the river, she was allowed to roam to the extent of her abilities. Thus, she occasionally ran across the surface of the water as she made progress in furthering her Understanding of Water. Though, the majority of the time was spent underwater in meditation.

Spirit Realm Cultivators, even those treading the Path of Extreme Perfection like Elizabeth, still weren't above basic needs such as food, water, and shelter. However, the limits of their tolerance all but suggested otherwise as Elizabeth could easily train for days underwater with just a single breath of air. The True Qi within her body autonomously recycled the carbon dioxide into usable oxygen to keep her alive and without discomfort.

Six hours did not mean a lot to her after spending nearly a fortnight getting her Understanding of Water to a value of 55% at the Rudimentary level, but the gobsmacking rate of progress definitely was.

She still didn't have a proper Cultivation Method for Water Energies, yet with only a Movement Skill, she saw levels of improvement beyond what her Divine Cultivation method of Ice and Fire did during her stay at the Cloudsnow Sector.

An hour in and her Understanding of Water rose by 5%. Another two hours and her overall Understanding threatened to break 70%. Every percent correlated to a kilometer along the Profound River, so by that point, she conducted her meditation sessions under pressure, at a depth of several hundred meters underwater.

Elizabeth spent nearly a third of all the time allotted to her for the Water Substation Trial before she would make it to the seventy-five-kilometer mark and find a third Water Tablet Shard. The third fragment of the Water Tablet of Flow was appraised by Elizabeth's Status Functions as the Water Tablet Shard of Dissonance.

To the Elizabeth of six hours prior, the idea that Dissonance as a concept had anything to do with the Laws of Water might have caused her to cringe and look at the proponent of that idea as if they were mentally ill. But with her current Understanding, not only did she not think it to be odd, she actively studied the contents of the third Water Tablet Shard as if it concealed the very reason for life itself.

"Holy fuck!" She couldn't stop a curse of appreciation escape as she continued, "This has to be how the progenitors of Cultivation felt when they were discovering the applicable use of insights…"

She remained glued to her spot, sitting in a meditative posture studying all that she could from the Water Tablet Shard of Dissonance for an additional three hours before everything she could gain had been attained. Like her past experience with the Water Tablet Shard of Strength, though, her Seamless Water Steps experienced a bit of an evolution at that point.

[Skills:

Water Art: Seamless Water Steps

Level 25

Spirit Grade: D

…

Primary Effect: Increases Speed by 25%.

Secondary Effect: The effects of all forms of friction on the user's body decrease by 62.5%

Tertiary Effect: The effects of water resistance on the user's body decrease by 125%

Quaternary Effect: The effects of air resistance on the user's body decrease by 250%]

"Now, I'm getting scary fast," Elizabeth muttered before getting back to the Trial at hand.

With only about thirteen hours left, she would be glad if she could make it through the length of the Profound River. Scaling the Waterfall of Insight wasn't possible even for her.

Though that wasn't to say that she had done poorly. Far from it, in fact.

At her current level, forget Transcendent Foundation Stage Cultivators, the majority of Cultivators in the Foundation Collapse Stage couldn't claim to be on par with her Understanding of Water. Only the average Water-majoring Cultivators a full Stage ahead of her, could. But with over half a day remaining, it was anybody's guess as to how high her Understanding would reach.

Another hour passed, putting Elizabeth at half a day of training in the Water Substation. With the insights of the Water Tablet Shard and the river waters intensifying, her explosive growth only grew further still. At the end of the hour she was at the seventy-nine-kilometer mark.

Whenever she practiced the Seamless Water Steps, deep within her pupils one could see the mysteries of Water flow through energy with enough concentration. Sometimes, she would tread across the surface of the river without so much as causing a ripple to its natural flowing state and other times, the slightest movement would cause reverberations in the water that propelled it dozens of meters into the air.

Another six hours passed before Elizabeth came across what she considered to be her first bottleneck at the ninety-kilometer mark.

Though the complexity of the mysteries she studied had gradually been increasing, she had been able to make up for her lack of Cultivation Method with her Seamless Water Steps. But that could only work for so long as Skills, unlike Cultivation Methods, would only use a portion of any Law.

Speed, Strength, and Dissonance were all concepts she could derive Understanding from, by practicing the Seamless Water Steps. But, the scope of the Water Laws, even at a rudimentary level, covered far more concepts than just those three.

Thus, the ninety-kilometer mark put Elizabeth much closer to her state while in the Cloudrain Sector, albeit not nearly as helpless.

…

In the Ancient Redvile Temple, Liam, Sun, Jiuu and Kirun were locked in a grand battle against dozens of Yang-powered Golems.

Suddenly Sun's eyes narrowed dangerously as he fired a Pure Yang Beam a couple degrees higher than he needed to hit Liam's position. Deciding to fire the beam, aiming it, and returning to the overall conflict, took him a tenth of a second at most.

Boom!

"Thanks," Liam said in response to Sun annihilating a Golem before it could land a sneak attack.

They had only moved up one instance in the Trial of Yang, from the Cloudsun Sector, to venture on the first floor of the Ancient Redvile Temple and already Liam was struggling to not die.

Unlike Sun, Liam did not Major in Yang even though they were both Cultivators traversing the Path of Extreme Physicality. Before meeting Elizabeth, he had already set Space and Earth as the only two Energies he would put his all into understanding. Thus, at a Legacy Trial for Yang, it was inevitable for him to struggle against Sun. However, struggling or not, he was improving remarkably.

After the wave of Golems was cleared for the umpteenth time, the group took a moment to break. Kirun broke the silence that had followed since they had divided their groups up by asking, "I might be a little late in asking this, but, are all of the humans where you come from this talented?"

To him, and perhaps most if not all the other Agrians, it was already impressive for both Elizabeth and Sun to be Extreme Path Human Cultivators. But then, Elizabeth casually rounded up another two highly talented Cultivators in Liam and Jane? It was disheartening to relatively normal Cultivators, to say the least.

"It's, um… complicated," Sun said, not knowing how to explain that the Earth where they came from was in the middle of a spiritual revolution.

He quickly followed up by adding, "Though, for Liam, here, I think he's just talented because of that Keter blood running in his veins."

It was easy for most people to dismiss Liam on Earth as his affiliation to the Keter Family was a heavily classified secret. But it couldn't be stressed enough how ridiculously talented a descendant of the Keter family was, even before the Dimensional Upgrade.

To be born from a father that had made it to the Spirit Realm in a spiritually inert environment put his talent at such a level that, if Elizabeth appraised his Affinities, she wouldn't be surprised to see Consummate or even Eternal Tier compatibility.

"Nah," Liam dismissed Sun's theory to suggest his own, "We're probably only this talented because we hang around Ellie. Don't you remember, you were stronger than me at the Martial Tournament?"

"But, I'm only seventeen and you're fourteen," Sun said, seriously.

"Yeah? Well, I didn't have my Dantian crippled until just a couple months ago. The four years it took me to reach this level, are a joke compared to you going from crippled Mortal to Spirit Realm Cultivator in a fraction of that time," Liam returned his own seriously look.

As Liam and Sun were vying for the title of "most humble," their companions were listening with palpable disbelief.

"Whoa, wait, wait… You two are seventeen and fourteen? As in a less than a hundred years old?" Jiuu, who had been quiet since introducing herself to Elizabeth, asked.

"Right, Miss Jiuu," Sun said, "But, be that as it may, we only got to be this powerful by luck." A day didn't pass where Sun didn't wonder how different his life would be had he not met Elizabeth.

She had been the one to repair his Dantian, the one who saved him from a life of mediocrity, the one who propelled him to the ranks of Extreme Path Cultivator, and even if he didn't know it yet, because of her very existence, he had a portion of a God's soul at the recesses of his Spiritual Sea.

"Luck?" Jiuu smirked, "Luck can only be capitalized on by people with great talent and ability. What do you think happened to the lucky bastard that found this place, first?"

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Answering for him, she explained, "He naturally didn't have the talent or ability to acquire the legacy of the Temple Master as have the thousands and tens of thousands of Cultivators that have come to test their talents throughout dozens of centuries."

"If you two really are that young…" Jiu paused as she concluded an internal judgment, "You might really be able to make it the farthest up this Yang Trial."

It had only been around a day and the group had battled waves of the Golems over and over again until Sun and Liam could fight without additional assistance. If this kind of improvement remained, it might even be possible for one of them to make it to the top of the Temple and claim the Temple Master's legacy.