The journey away from the border city and to the clan's land was much less exciting than I ever expected it to be.
Save for the initial fear of how well I or Claire would take the most likely bumpy drive while we were pretty damn unstable ourselves, the entire trip was so lacking in terms of interesting facts about it, it actually turned boring.
At first, we simply drove out of the city to one of the many fields situated on its other side, compared to the continental barrier that separated the modern world from the spiritual one. We didn't stop there, however, but started to go up the likely single hill in the whole area, given how I couldn't see a single other incline in the ground whenever looking out of the window.
It took me a good ten minutes to realize that what I took for an attempt to climb the hill's side was actually the rising period for the sky-carriage. A process that pretty much explained just how this carriage was different from the ones driven by the roads of the modern world roughly a hundred years prior.
So it works in pretty much the same way as that flying bus, huh? I thought, once I looked out of the window again, only to see nothing but clear skies all around us.
Just like the winged bus produced its own sky path to ride over, the sky-carriage created its very own path for its horses to tread upon and for the carriage itself to ride on.
From there on, however, the rest of the ride turned so unbearably boring, I actually closed my eyes and focused on my inner state. And while I couldn't really cultivate while in this kind of vehicle—lest I wanted for it to malfunction and plummet down from the skies—I could still take my time just observing the flows of spiritual energy within my core.
At its very essence, it wasn't all that much different from what I already figured out back when I was still just a seventh-stage, core-expansion cultivator. My core still existed within every cell, every fiber of my flesh, with seemingly random streaks of spiritual energy discharging from one anchor to the other.
Right now, however, as opposed to how it was back on the sixth stage, every single cell of my body became the chaotic nucleus of cultivation, chaotically driving small bits of my spirituality, only to then shoot it out into one of the many thousands of anchors in my flesh, turning it into just another burning nucleus that would then repeat the process.
In a sense, that was the closest to what I could understand as the condensation of my cultivation, which was the process supposedly taking place during the advancement to the eighth stage of cultivation.
That's how my core was likely supposed to work in theory, yet when it came to practice...
It keeps getting those random injections of spirituality, doesn't it?
No matter how hard I looked, how much I focused, and how deeply I thought, the processes taking place within the core of my entire body simply didn't match the equations I came up with.
The math wasn't mathing. Two plus two no longer made four, but five, six, or a quadrillion. For a hundred discharges happening in a single second, I could observe a thousand or just a few of my anchors turning into the new chaotic nucleus, only for those thousands of nuclei to only create a hundred offshoots, while those few were easily capable of spawning millions of more chaotic cores.
Claire squinted her eyes, only to suddenly relax her entire face as she pulled back, away from my shoulder, and put on a smirk.
Find adventures at empire
"Isn't that what the scientists of the modern world did in the past? Assuming certain principles even if they didn't have enough knowledge to properly explain them? Just like... Ugh, I don't know..."
As Claire hesitated, I recalled a certain, extremely minor detail of some random science-historical show I once watched. A show that I couldn't even tell if it had anything to do with one of history's greatest inventors, or if he was merely brought up as an example for whatever topic they were trying to explore.
Either way, the figure of that scientist of the early modern era appeared in my head along with the conclusion he drew from one of his experiments—experiments that were bound to fail due to the gross imperfection of the measuring tools the man used.
"The light has to move either instantly or at speeds hidden within the margin of a human reaction..." I muttered, too enchanted by this sudden idea to even realize I opened my mouth.
"What's that?" Not missing a single beat, Claire quickly dug deeper into what I just said.
"Just a sentence that's believed to be said some three hundred years before anyone actually ventured to properly study the qualities of light," I answered with a small smile. "A sentence said by someone who lacked the proper instruments to make anything above just an educated guess."
I breathed out, feeling a strange sense of relief overtake my entire mind as I realized that my continued attempts to figure my cultivation out... were all doomed to fail from the very beginning.
Right now, I had no proper instruments to measure just where the error in my equations came from. Yet, rather than just arrogantly assuming it was an error to begin with, all I had to do was step back, put myself at a distance from all that I'd seen, and then just accept whatever behavior I would observe for the one and only thing that actually mattered—the actual results that couldn't care less whether or not I could figure out the rules behind said results!
And just like that, I fucking figured it out.
"All I needed was to take a step back..." I thought while feeling a strange kind of satisfaction well up in my soul... Only to then immediately suppress it, recognizing it for what it truly was.
Another breakthrough?! I thought, holding this sensation down as I held my breath, fully aware that the rapid unleashing of my spiritual energy related to me breaking my current limits would spell doom to the carriage and everyone on it.
After a few moments, I finally managed to suppress the urge to grow even stronger than before, finally able to breathe out before taking a fresh breath in.
"I think I've got it," I allowed myself to utter just those few words as I slid down my seat and heavily breathed out again. "And all I needed to do was to step back and... collapse my entire cultivation from how I'd seen it before, into something I can no longer fully perceive!"