The morning light crawled across the floor of Su Lantian's room at the Azure Rest, marking the start of his final push. He sat in the center of the bed, his back straight, his breathing long and deliberate. He had adjusted his routine, stretching his meditation sessions to three hours each. He knew he was racing against the clock—and against his own environment.
In the bustling Southern Marketplace, the spiritual energy in the air was thin, diluted by the sheer number of people and the lack of high-level spiritual landmarks. It was a stark contrast to the North District he had visited, where even the alleyways felt charged with a vibrant, electric hum. Su knew that to truly thrive, he needed to get out of this inn and rent a private courtyard in the North, a place where the concentration of energy would support faster growth. But courtyard rentals required more than just the spirit stones he had left; they required a steady income.
"I will rent a courtyard there after atleast reaching the third stage of Qi Cultivation," Su whispered to the quiet room. "Then, I can really accelerate my progress with cultivation."
For the next three days, he remained a recluse. He ignored the tempting sounds of the marketplace outside—the calls of food vendors, the arguments of merchants, and the distant roar of demon beasts. He stayed indoors, pushing his meridians to their limits, slowly increasing the duration of his cultivation with each passing day. He was building the "hardware" of his body to handle the "software" of the Five-Phase Revolving Sutra.
By the afternoon of the third day, the atmosphere in the room felt heavy, as if the air itself were pressing against his skin. Su Lantian sat cross-legged, a single milky-white spirit stone clutched in his palm.
Su Lantian was randomly reading the Alchemy introduction book when he sensed a breakthrough and he immediately sat cross legged and started cultivating.
Internally, he was navigating a complex map of energy. The multicolored threads of the Five-Phase Qi were circulating through his meridians with the speed of a rushing river. He had completed cycle after cycle, pushing the energy through the recursive loops of his technique. Each pass polished his meridians, making them wider, tougher, and more resilient.
Suddenly, during the final cycle of the evening, Su felt a sensation like a glass wall shattering inside his chest. The resistance that had been holding his energy back simply vanished. A flood of warmth erupted from his lower abdomen, surging through his limbs with the force of a tidal wave. For a split second, he felt a strange illusion of unstoppable strength—as if he could reach out and crush the obsidian walls of the town with his bare hands.
He gasped, his eyes snapping open. The air in the room rippled for a moment, then settled.
"I've finally reached the second stage," he said, his voice filled with a quiet, profound delight.
He immediately closed his eyes again, turning his inner gaze toward his Dantian to audit his new "specs." The vortex of energy had expanded significantly. In the center, the Black Cube remained anchored, slowly rotating and pulsing with a deep blue light every few seconds.
"I have roughly thirty percent more energy than I did at the peak of the first stage," Su analyzed. "And as I stabilize this level and approach the peak of the second, that capacity should nearly double."
He felt a surge of excitement. According to the records in Elder Han's jade slip, the path of a Qi cultivator had major "checkpoints" at the fourth and seventh stages. At the fourth stage, the very quality of the energy changed, becoming denser and more potent.
"If I can reach the fourth stage," Su mused, his mind racing through the possibilities, "I'll have enough of a buffer to truly experiment with the Cube. Alchemy won't just be a struggle; it'll be a breeze. I can run full simulations without worrying about a total system crash."
He shook his head to clear the wandering thoughts. He wasn't at the fourth stage yet. He was a second-stage novice with a powerful tool, and it was time to put that tool to work. His next goal was logical: Optimization.
"The current version of the Five-Phase Sutra is good," Su thought, "but it's not perfect. It was written for a different era, for a different mind. Let's see if we can debug the code one more time."
Su Lantian with his last three experiments with the cube came to the conclusion that his thoughts at the time of activating the cube was what decided the type of mode he was going to use the cube for. As far as he observed there were accelerated thought mode and the improvement mode which he used. And going further he really needs to explore what other things the cube really offered.
For now he sat back into his meditation posture, calming his heart. He felt the Black Cube in his gut, waiting for its command. This time, he was careful. He didn't want to be left unconscious on the floor again. He slowly fed a stream of his new, expanded Qi into the artifact, while holding a single, sharp intent in his mind: Improve the efficiency of the cultivation cycle.He slowly came to the conclusion that his intent when feeding the spiritual qi to the cube is what decided the mode he was going to be using the cube for. As after that he couldn't control his thoughts much.
The Cube pulsed.
HANDSHAKE INITIATED. This was the message the cube relayed to him.
Su Lantian's consciousness was instantly pulled into the accelerated "God-mode." The world outside became a frozen frame. Within his mind, the Five-Phase Revolving Sutra appeared as a complex, glowing blueprint of intersecting lines and elemental ratios. The Cube acted as a high-speed debugger, scanning the pathways he had been using. It identified points of "friction" where his energy slowed down and areas of "leakage" where the five elements didn't balance perfectly.
The Cube didn't rewrite the technique entirely—it wasn't powerful enough for that yet—but it suggested dozens of micro-adjustments. Shift the breath here. Delay the Fire-element transition by a millisecond there. Use the Earth-element as a dampener for the Metal-element surge.
Su watched the "code" rewrite itself in real-time. Before the drain on his energy reached the critical "shutdown" point, Su forcibly cut the supply.
The world snapped back into focus.
Su slumped forward, his hands flying to his temples. A sharp, rhythmic throbbing hammered behind his eyes, and his stomach felt like it had been turned inside out.
"I am really... not used to this feeling," he groaned, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
However, as he checked his Dantian, he noticed a victory. Because he had cut the connection early, he wasn't sucked dry. He still had a small reserve of Qi left—the "emergency power" he had planned for. He sat quietly for thirty minutes, letting the mental fog clear and the headache fade into a dull ache.
When he finally felt stable, he decided to test the new "update." He began to circulate his Qi using the improved version of the Five-Phase Sutra.
He watched the results with the critical eye of a technician. After a few cycles, he nodded to himself. "The improvement is a bit less than I imagined, but it's there."
The math was clear: the new version was roughly fifteen percent more efficient than the original scroll he had found in the cave, and about five percent better than his last attempt at optimization. It was a marginal gain, but in the world of cultivation, a five percent increase in speed compounded over weeks and months was the difference between life and death.
"I could have pushed for another half-second," Su mused, wiping sweat from his fair skin. "Maybe I could have squeezed out another percent or two of efficiency. But the cost isn't worth it yet."
He realized that he didn't need to do everything at once. He could wait a week or two for his body to fully stabilize at the second stage, or he could slowly improve the technique bit by bit every day. It was better to have a stable, functioning system than a high-performance one that crashed every time he used it.
He stood up, his legs feeling stronger and more coordinated. He walked to the window and looked out over the obsidian walls toward the North District. He stood there for the next ten minutes quietly enjoying the scenary and then came back to the bed and sat down.
Looking at the cauldron in the corner and the jade bottle of pills he had made earlier and the two sets of Qi Gathering Pill materials. "I still have more than 40 spirit stones, which I can use to buy raw materias for Qi Gathering Pill that one bottle isn't even enough for my needs not to talk about sales." Su Lantian then got ready to head out to the marketplace.