The massive black stone door completely shut out everything from the outside world.
This was the most heavily guarded secret chamber in the Miteer Auction House. Now, it had become Su Chen's secluded cultivation room.
The mountains of gold coins, enough to make even a Dou Wang's breathing quicken, had disappeared.
In their place were nearly a hundred jade bottles arranged neatly on the floor, along with a scroll of high-grade Huang-tier cultivation art that radiated an ancient aura—the Burning Wave Art.
This was the foundation purchased with one million, three hundred and fifty thousand gold coins: the cornerstone of his path to becoming a powerhouse.
Su Chen sat cross-legged in the center of the secret chamber.
Before him, Dou Qi shook the stopper from a jade bottle. A crimson Qi Gathering Pill rolled into his palm, and without the slightest hesitation, he swallowed it whole.
Boom!
A surge of violent medicinal energy erupted in his stomach like a volcano set ablaze.
The scorching torrent of energy savagely coursed through every fragile meridian in his body.
A tearing pain instantly spread throughout him.
Sweat beaded on his forehead, soon soaking the black hair at his temples.
Su Chen's body trembled faintly. His teeth were clenched, yet he didn't let out so much as a groan.
He was no longer the newcomer who had once feared pain like a tiger.
If he wanted power, he had to pay the price.
He understood that better than anyone.
The cultivation method of the Burning Wave Art raced through his mind.
Under his guidance, the Dou Qi stirred up by the medicinal energy began following an intricate route, flushing through his meridians again and again.
It was a tedious and painful process.
One day.
Two days.
Five days.
By the time the medicinal energy of the tenth Qi Gathering Pill had been completely used up, the Dou Qi in Su Chen's body, once no more than a trickling stream, had grown more than twice as strong.
He could clearly sense the barrier of the bottleneck.
"Break!"
A low cry rose from his soul.
He gathered all the Dou Qi in his body into a single sharp cone and slammed it hard against the invisible barrier!
Pop.
A faint sound, like a bubble bursting.
Seventh Stage of Dou Qi—achieved!
Su Chen didn't stop.
He opened another jade bottle, swallowed another pill, and began another round of breakthroughs.
Time lost all meaning inside the secret chamber.
Eighth Stage of Dou Qi!
Ninth Stage of Dou Qi!
The peak of the Ninth Stage of Dou Qi!
When the medicinal energy of the final pill had also merged into his Dou Qi, which had grown as strong as it could, Su Chen's cultivation had settled firmly just short of the threshold of a Dou Zhe.
The Dou Qi in his body had become astonishingly potent—several times more condensed than that of an ordinary cultivator at the Ninth Stage of Dou Qi.
This was the most extravagant foundation imaginable, built up through a mountain of gold coins.
Now, only the final step remained.
And it was the hardest one.
Condense the Qi into a vortex!
Su Chen didn't immediately attempt the breakthrough.
He sat quietly for a full day and night, bringing his body, mind, and spirit to their peak.
Then he opened his eyes.
Beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat, his gaze had lost all its usual calm. In its place was grim resolve.
The breakthrough began!
Driven by his will, the ceaseless torrent of Dou Qi in his body surged madly toward the Qi Sea in his lower abdomen.
If his previous cultivation had been like widening a river channel,
then what he had to do now was create, at the end of that channel, a gigantic vortex capable of holding rivers and seas!
It was a process of defying the heavens.
The vast Dou Qi squeezed and collided violently in his lower abdomen.
An indescribable pressure threatened to burst his body apart.
Su Chen's face turned deathly pale.
Beads of sweat rolled down his ashen cheeks, soon pooling in a small puddle on the black rock floor beneath him.
He could clearly feel his meridians groaning under the terrifying pressure, on the verge of collapse.
No!
It still wasn't enough!
He hadn't compressed it enough!
He had to compress all his gaseous Dou Qi into the first drop of liquid before it could become the core of a vortex!
"Condense... for me!"
A hoarse growl forced its way from Su Chen's throat.
He marshaled every last bit of his mental strength, bearing down on the violent mass of energy.
Hiss...
A faint tearing sound came from inside him.
The inner wall of one of his main meridians finally gave way under the pressure, splitting open with a tiny crack.
Pain, like the sharpest knife, plunged into his nerves.
Su Chen's body jolted.
The pressure he had struggled to maintain loosened in an instant.
Boom!
The forcibly compressed Dou Qi burst free like a beast escaping its cage, rebounding with a roar!
A violent surge of energy rampaged through his body.
Pfft!
Unable to hold it back any longer, Su Chen spat out a mouthful of blood. It splashed onto the floor before him, a shocking sight.
His first attempt had failed.
Su Chen didn't lose heart.
He calmly wiped the blood from his lips, swallowed a healing pill, and silently repaired his damaged meridians.
As soon as his injuries had eased a little, he immediately began his second attempt.
Failure.
The third attempt.
Failure again!
Every failure brought torn meridians and the agony of the backlash.
By the fifth failure, his meridians were covered in fine cracks, as fragile as a spiderweb.
One more attempt, and perhaps his entire Qi Sea would be burst apart by the rampant Dou Qi, leaving him a cripple.
Faced with such a situation, most people would have long since given up.
But amid this unbearable pain, Su Chen grew ever calmer.
His consciousness didn't sink into the agony of his body.
Instead, it sank into the absolute Void Space that belonged to him alone, a place he could control completely.
That was his greatest advantage.
A soul perception far stronger than others at his level—stronger, even, than that of many alchemists!
Using brute force to compress the energy was the least effective and most foolish method.
It was like forging iron: hammering at random ten thousand times was no match for striking once in the right place, along the grain.
What he had to do was use his soul perception to find that "grain"!
The sixth attempt began.
This time, Su Chen didn't focus all his attention on forcibly compressing the Dou Qi.
He devoted half his soul power to it, spreading it like an invisible net over the violent mass of energy in his Qi Sea.
In his world of perception,
the mass of Dou Qi was no longer a chaotic blur.
It was a vast gaseous nebula made up of countless tiny points of energy.
They collided at high speed, without any pattern.
Su Chen's soul perception was like the most precise instrument, searching through that chaotic nebula for the one-in-ten-thousand "singularity."
A "point of gravity" that could trigger a chain reaction, drawing all the chaotic energy into a single direction of rotation!
At that moment, time seemed to slow to a crawl.
The pain outside and the roar within faded away.
All that remained in his world was the nebula of colliding energy.
There!
At the very heart of the energy storm, a strange node, thousands of times brighter than the other points, flickered in his perception and vanished.
Now!
All of Su Chen's mental strength erupted at once!
He ignored the violent Dou Qi swirling around the edges. Instead, he focused all his will into an invisible needle and precisely touched the fleeting "singularity"!
Hum!
Like the first vibration at the birth of the universe.
The "singularity" he had touched shuddered!
In the next instant, an indescribable force of attraction burst from it!
The Dou Qi that had been crashing about wildly and running rampant in every direction seemed to have found its king.
The chaos stilled. Centered on the "singularity," the energy began to rotate slowly, orderly, and steadily!
One rotation.
Ten rotations.
A hundred rotations!
It spun faster and faster!
As the vast gaseous nebula whirled at high speed, it compressed inward, its volume shrinking rapidly.
Its color, meanwhile, deepened and grew more concentrated, changing from the pale white it had been at first.
At last, when the nebula had been compressed to the size of a fist,
a quantitative change triggered a qualitative one!
A drop of milky-white liquid Dou Qi, shimmering with a precious light, quietly formed at the very center of the vortex!
Rumble!
The birth of that first drop of liquid Dou Qi was like a ten-thousand-ton boulder crashing into a tranquil lake!
The entire vortex stabilized in an instant!
The surging Dou Qi, like a flood that had found an outlet, poured madly into the small vortex. It was refined and compressed, becoming drop after drop of even purer liquid Dou Qi.
A perfect Dou Qi vortex, radiating a faint glow, took shape with a roar in the dantian of his lower abdomen!
One-star Dou Zhe!
He had done it!
All the pain ebbed away like a receding tide.
A feeling of power, fuller and greater than anything he had ever known, flowed from the vortex in his dantian and spread throughout his body!
Su Chen could clearly feel that the Dou Qi within him had undergone a qualitative transformation.
If his former Dou Qi had been loose cotton,
then the Dou Qi in his body now was tempered steel!
Its quality and power were worlds apart!
He slowly rose to his feet.
His bones crackled in a series of sharp pops.
He clenched his fist.
A surging power gathered in his palm.
He even felt that he could now kill ten versions of himself from before his seclusion with a single punch!
This was power that truly belonged to him.
This was what he needed to survive in this continent where the strong ruled!
Wealth and schemes were ultimately external things.
Only one's own strength was eternal.
Su Chen slowly raised his head and looked toward the massive stone door that had remained shut for nearly a month.
Beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat, his eyes shone brilliantly.
The upheavals in Wutan City were only the beginning.
A wider world was waiting for him.
He stepped forward, reached out, and gently pushed open the door to a new world.
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