Chương 6: Breakthrough

Lucius walked into the classroom the next day, sitting down and almost immediately asking his questions in a flurry. Acacia was surprised for a moment but smiled simply and explained.

"To explain that, we have to begin with the different realms in this universe. There are 7 major realms, with many minor realms but those aren't important for now. A realm in this context is a part of the universe that can encompass many planets, stars and galaxies. The 7 major realms are named after those who rule over that realm, the realms are: Basil realm, Lazarus realm, Human realm, Animillia realm, Spirit realm, Hell realm and finally the Heaven realm. I'm sure you can imagine the inhabitants of the first three, the Heaven and Hell realms are inhabited by all races but it depends on their nature, those prim and proper live in the heavens while those vulgar and wild go to the hells. The Spirit realm is inhabited by all things spiritual, whether it be ghosts, phantoms, reapers or spirit animals/beasts. The Animillia realm is the only realm of the other five to rival the Basil or Lazarus realms but it is divided into multiple different clans. These clans are the divine five and the dragon clan. The divine five are: the divine fire phoenix, the divine water spirit turtle, the divine metal tigers, the divine earth elephants and the divine wood bears. The dragon clan are as powerful as all of the divine five combined because the dragons are able to cultivate like humanoids, being able to utilise and cultivate all elements and techniques, and they have the natural ability of body refinement. Just by breathing, eating and drinking they train their bodies. Although the phoenixes can rival the dragons with there near immortality, the phoenix birth rate is too low and the pregnancy phase is too long so their population is too small to rival the promiscuous dragon clan. Actually the Basilian and Lazarite pregnancy is also longer then humans and normal beasts, 10 years long to be exact. I had to carry you around for 10 years you know, you should be grateful. "

Lucius sat there nodding along, absorbing all this information and marvelling at the vastness of the world. The more he thought through it the more he realised the responsibility on his shoulders as the crown prince of the Basil realm. However, even that realisation and that feeling of responsibility was just the tip of the ice burg, it would take Lucius centuries to realise just what it meant to be the ruler of an entire realm.

With that explanation and introduction to the many realms his mother began to change his curriculum, adding foreign language to it. He would have to learn the various languages of the various races and about their traits and customs. Just when Lucius was done with literature he was plunged into literature in a different language. Linguistics is easiest to learn as a child but it was still quite boring, although his complete memory did help a lot in this process.

Because of his talks about the various realms with his parents he had a renewed vigour towards his training. That evening he pushed himself hard and began to breakthrough into the qi refining realm. Qi gathering was the very basics of energy cultivation and it was the simplest part of cultivation, you simply had to absorb and accumulate the qi that was on the surface of your body until you had a ball of qi the size of a basketball. Human cultivators that were always quite vain and exaggerative called this the qi ocean. The next step, qi refining, was to refine that qi ocean into a qi sea, from a basketball to a tennis ball. This cannot be mistaken with qi condensation though as you aren't compacting and condensing the basketball into a tennis ball but instead refining or purifying your basketball, getting rid of enough of the impurities to the stage of a qi sea from a qi ocean. Most lower level cultivators overlooked these parts and rushed these realms, creating an unstable foundation as the purity of their qi was lacklustre which isn't obvious in the lower stages but becomes extremely important in later realms, inhibiting techniques from reaching their potential and even creating bottlenecks in further cultivation.

The Cosmological Art had an extremely high requirement for the purity of qi and had actually wanted him to refine the qi from a qi ocean to a qi lake instead of a qi sea. This meant that he would have extremely pure qi and would benefit him greatly when it came to utilising techniques as he could smoothly and swiftly use his qi. All the things he trained in had mutually benefitted each other, he trained his body which increased his qi quantity and quality which in turn helped him when he trained his body as it helped alleviate the fatigue and muscle pains from such intense work outs. His sewing would help control his qi and in turn his qi could help him focus for longer and focus harder so he could sew even better. However, in the end to achieve the standards of the Cosmological Art it would take a very long time to cultivate but this could be easily circumvented by pills and qi dense areas of high purity for cultivation. There would probably be only one or two Cultivation environments as good as the Garden of Eden, attesting to it's extremely high qi density and purity, plus the formation that Lucius sat on every day could take the place of a pill, it simply hadn't been activated yet.

Seeing that Lucius was attempting a break through Orion activated the formation and immediately a refreshing feeling spilled through his body making it easier for him to manipulate his qi. According to the methods of the Cosmological Art Lucius took control over the very first qi strand he had gathered all those months ago. He picked this one because it was the smallest and of the lowest quality since he had been constantly improving but his past gatherings had not been improved with it. It was now that he would refine and homogenize his qi purity and density. He took that small strand of qi and split it into a further two with his trained control, and then he smashed them into each other. There wasn't much of a change, only on an exceptionally small scale as some of the qi had compressed into the qi around it. He continued this, splitting it into 4 instead and repeating, then into 8 and when he had reached 64 tiny strands and collided them, a small spark was created. He felt an immeasurable pain within his stomach but he wasn't deterred, he continued on and split it further into 128 strands and collided them. This time the sparks created reverberated throughout his entire body, like a shot of electricity that pierced him through to his soul. He persevered and recombined the 128 strands without letting them scatter and in the end he found that they combined into a strand half the size of the original size. Without knowing that process had actually taken him 5 hours, he was concentrating so hard on his control that he had split each strand with care and finesse. He had officially broken through to qi refining but he only felt tired. He stumbled back to the nursery and collapsed onto the bed, falling asleep instantly