Ling Tian and Hua Min'er continued cultivating in the cold pool. Ling Tian could now dive to a depth of twelve hundred meters, yet still had not reached the bottom. He was intensely curious and thought that he had to find out just how deep the pool was. He now understood why his spiritual sense could only extend a dozen meters or so underwater: the pool's chill was a kind of energy, and spiritual sense was energy too. The cold could naturally block its reach.
Time raced forward once more. In the blink of an eye, another six months passed, and the major competition drew ever closer. It was now less than half a year away.
Over these six months, Ling Tian's cultivation finally slowed. He could no longer improve by one level in a single day as he had before. Six months had only taken him from the first level of the Qi Solidification Stage to the eighteenth. At his heart, eighteen grains of solidified spiritual energy, each the size of a soybean, revolved.
Hua Min'er had only reached the twenty-seventh level of the Qi Solidification Stage. In these eleven-odd months, she had advanced from the twelfth level to the twenty-seventh. Her rate of cultivation was truly astonishing.
Still, Hua Min'er wasn't proud. Ling Tian had reached the eighteenth level of the Qi Solidification Stage in less than a year. With that abnormal fellow chasing after her, she didn't dare slack off for even a moment. Otherwise, who knew when he might overtake her?
By the time Ling Tian reached the eighteenth level of the Qi Solidification Stage, he could dive more than two thousand meters into the pool. Yet the cold pool was like a bottomless pit, and there was still no sign of its floor. His desire