In the training room.
Xu Wuyi sat cross-legged on the mat, a Source Essence Crystal in his right hand and his left hand resting palm-up on his knee. Golden roots flowed quietly through his body, from his fingertips to the soles of his feet, from the crown of his head to his back. Every inch of tissue was slowly working.
He closed his eyes and sank his consciousness deep into his sea of consciousness. The Inner Landscape Tree stood within that dark mental space. Its trunk was visibly thicker than before he had killed François, and dozens more leaves had appeared in its canopy. The golden patterns on every leaf glimmered faintly.
Most of the order fragments absorbed from François's core fragments had already been transformed. Only a small portion still flickered slowly at the edges of the leaves. Those were the deepest fragments, involving the core combat experience a third-step lord had accumulated over tens of thousands of years. They would take longer to fully absorb.
He slowed his breathing even further. With every inhale, the light on the Inner Landscape Tree brightened a little; with every exhale, that light flowed down the trunk and spread through his body via the root network. The process advanced again and again. He felt the temperature of his body gradually rising, as though an extremely thin warm current were spreading from within to without.
The roots within him began to produce new branches. The root network that had originally covered his entire body was already complete, but new, finer rootlets were growing from the sides of those main roots, like an ancient tree that had sprawled underground for years and continued to drive its roots deeper.
These new rootlets grew far more slowly than when the main roots had first covered his