"What if I had Nine Apertures?"
Jiang Yan countered.
Cheng Wu froze for a moment, then burst into laughter. Wiping away his tears, he explained with a grin, "Brother Jiang, stop joking around. You already opened an aperture in the Acquired Realm. How could you possibly have Nine Apertures?"
Jiang Yan stared quietly at Cheng Wu. "I said, what if?"
"Uh..." Cheng Wu scratched his head, unable to understand why Jiang Yan was asking such a question, but he still answered honestly. "If you really had Nine Apertures, Brother Jiang, you'd have to spend an enormous amount of time and resources refining them, like leveling them up one by one."
"The more apertures you refine, the firmer your foundation becomes. That's why martial artists who open many apertures often remain in the Mysterious Aperture Realm for a long time. Otherwise, they would have broken through to the Spirit Platform Realm long ago."
"Of course, some martial artists are eager for quick success and directly skip over the Mysterious Aperture Realm to enter the Spirit Platform Realm. The consequence is the destruction of their martial path—they'll amount to nothing for the rest of their lives."
"Refining apertures requires vast quantities of spiritual herbs and precious medicines. The consumption for each aperture is terrifying. Generally speaking, those gifted geniuses with no backing but many opened apertures will be fought over by major factions. Those factions provide them with cultivation resources, and once they grow stronger, they repay the faction in turn."
Jiang Yan understood Cheng Wu's meaning. Simply put, the Mysterious Aperture Realm was about developing the body's apertures. Once they had all been developed, breaking through to the Spirit Platform Realm would be as natural as water flowing into a channel.
Of course, that only applied to martial artists with cultivation