"Six layers of astral qi now. Just a little short of perfection."
After his battle with the Heavenly Baleful Demon King above the clouds, Hong Yuan had chosen a direction at random and raced hundreds of miles without stopping, reaching the shore.
He watched the waves rise and fall. As his thoughts shifted, a lustrous glow shone over his skin, his astral qi circulating smoothly like the radiance surrounding a god or Buddha.
"This method of cultivating the true dharma spirit aperture is far more marvelous than I originally imagined."
Hong Yuan sank his awareness inward, letting his spiritual consciousness flow through the nine spirit apertures within him. The first few he had cultivated-the void aperture, yellow springs aperture, mysterious sea aperture, and others-were already brimming with spiritually vibrant true qi. With a single thought, it could burst out of his body and become astral qi.
But this was not what held Hong Yuan's attention.
Wherever his spiritual consciousness reached, he saw portions of flesh around the five filled spirit apertures glimmering with spiritual light, flickering in and out of sight, seemingly both illusory and substantial.
Spirit apertures were structures of half energy and half flesh, opened within the body by drawing numinous energy into it.
They already possessed an element of transformation into the insubstantial.
During his earlier battle with the Heavenly Baleful Demon King, Hong Yuan had used the power of all nine spirit apertures, uniting six layers of astral qi and adding the [Dragon Vein True-Form Astral Art] to charge into Heavenly Baleful's body. Even then, there had been faint traces of the wondrous ability to shift between the substantial and insubstantial.
This was an ability the Orthodox Dharma cultivators of Great Xuan did not possess. Even the Xuan Emperor, who had perfected eight layers of astral