Although all his cultivation tools had been confiscated, that did not hinder his cultivation; he had long since committed the cultivation method to memory, taking pills now would be too wasteful, and he had nowhere to use Spirit Stones...
He was now gathering qi with all his strength. According to the Dao Register's account of this stage, it should take between one and five years. Now that his aptitude for cultivation had suddenly opened up, was he a genius or a fool? Or merely ordinary?
Time was pressing, and he dared not slack off. Whatever his aptitude, if he followed every step in order and kept rigidly to the rules, he would never catch up with the others.
A human life was limited to a few short decades; subtract the ignorance of youth and the befuddlement of old age, and there were no more than forty years truly available for cultivation. Reckoned that way, the urgency of reaching Profound Connection, where one began extending one's lifespan, was easy to imagine.
Most cultivators would remain in the three realms of Foundation Cultivation, Grain Avoidance, and Bridge Linking. They either spent their days nurturing body and spirit and enjoying their allotted years, entrusting their feelings to mountains and rivers like the Daoists of Anhe, or entered court service like the demonic cultivators of Shan Kingdom, wearing away their lives amid elaborate formalities.
He was twenty-three this year, in the prime of his youth, but in the cultivation world, someone his age who had only just entered Qi Gathering was an old man. He had yet to join the Quanzhen Demonic Sect, but if he really managed to get in and all their Qi Gathering disciples were gathered together, his venerable self would count as exceptionally long-lived.
He needed to find a way to speed things up!
One should not harbor thoughts of quick success when cultivating the Dao, but history told him that there truly were a rare few whose talents swept all before them, who saw the realms as a level road!
He hoped he was one of them. At the very least, shouldn't he try?
He was hardly alone in thinking this way. Almost everyone who entered the Dao had the same mindset, believing themselves the one and only in this world. Never mind that cultivation history offered such precedents-even without them, nothing could stop cultivators from pursuing it.
There were many conceivable shortcuts, with pills being the most common. So long as one had ample wealth and plentiful resources, such a shortcut was something one could hope for, something real.
But he knew that road was closed to him. He had neither elders nor an affiliation, and even if he joined the Demonic Sect, he would still be at the bottom. Why would anyone supply him with such vast quantities of resources?
Besides, that road did not really count as a shortcut, merely a somewhat shorter route-and only somewhat, because every pill carried poison. Medicine had to be used cautiously; taking too much of the stuff also had its drawbacks.
Very few paths were available to him, so he could only search among the few things at hand. Since he could not count on Spirit Stones or pills, that left only the three Daoist books.
By the simplest reasoning, wouldn't practicing two cultivation methods at once make him twice as fast? Wouldn't practicing three make him three times as fast?
This was an ignorant notion. Had someone been guiding him, an elder would have told him that the body's inner mysteries had a limit, one that could not be overcome simply by practicing more cultivation methods or spending more time.
But the problem was that no one was guiding him now. Trying it would not kill him, so why not?
Chongling had given him three qi-gathering daoyin techniques. The one he practiced was Dragon-Tiger Convergence, which began from the Lower Dantian. Now he naturally wondered whether adding a method for the Middle Dantian would make things faster.
Between Joining the Same, Tracing the Source and Supreme Lord Daoyin, he chose Joining the Same, Tracing the Source because he felt it suited him better. With nothing to do all day lately, this was what he had been tinkering with.
He was not the first in the cultivation world to do this, nor would he be the last. In fact, tens of thousands of cultivators had tried it, and some had even included the Upper Dantian, cultivating all three Dantians together;
The cultivation world never lacked people courting death or daring souls, but without exception, these attempts of theirs had failed.
Because of the peculiar structure of the human body's inner mysteries.
The human body had three Dantians: upper, middle, and lower. Between those three Dantians lay two other mysterious places: the Twelve-Storey Tower between the Upper Dantian and Middle Dantian, and the Purple Mansion between the Middle Dantian and Lower Dantian!
For these recklessly audacious people, their attempts ended there, because the Purple Mansion's existence prevented the two Dantians from being cultivated simultaneously; they hindered one another. This situation could only change after reaching Profound Connection, whereupon they would inevitably become caught in the next entanglement, that of the Twelve-Storey Tower.
These matters were often mentioned in the Dao Register's basic overview, too. It was not that Hou Niao did not know; but even knowing could not stop him from trying. Humans were like that: their hearts would not give up until they reached the Yellow River, and they would shed no tears until they saw the coffin.
Many had died, and even more had shed tears, yet after making such an attempt, he had actually not died? Nor had he shed tears?
He discovered that cultivating two Dantians simultaneously caused no conflict! At least, there was no impediment in his case. The effect simply did not double his speed as he had imagined, instead increasing it by only a few tenths. Where had the other few tenths gone?
He had clearly absorbed that spiritual energy himself, so where had it gone? If it had remodeled his body, he should have been able to feel it, yet now it had vanished without a trace?
Energy had to be conserved; it could not disappear for no reason. Perhaps it had merely gone somewhere he could not yet understand?
He was a rational, levelheaded man and had never believed in perpetually flourishing luck. Connecting everything that had happened to him recently, he arrived at a rough deduction.
Something must have happened on the Sacrificial Altar, when his Soul Root left his body! It had both relieved the difficulty in gathering qi that had always plagued him and made his path of Dantian cultivation different from everyone else's.
This was good, a tremendously good thing, but misfortune lurked beneath good fortune. There was no such thing in this world as reaping benefits without paying a price!
Then where was his misfortune?
Anyone with even a little ambition would not abandon their good fortune merely because misfortune might follow! When soldiers came, meet them with generals; when water came, dam it with earth. He would deal with things as they came. There was no reason to retreat.
Under these circumstances, his path of Qi Gathering began to grow smoother. Changes occurred at a speed almost visible to the naked eye as vast quantities of spiritual energy from heaven and earth surged madly into his body, beginning to remodel his muscles, flesh, bones, and skin.
This was also a painful process, like a snake shedding its skin or a cicada being born anew. He spent his entire day in a state of unbearable itching from head to toe, his muscles aching, swollen, and painful, his growing bones pressing from within, his internal organs undergoing renewal... throughout his entire body, inside and out, there was not a single place free of discomfort.
Every cultivator experienced this during Qi Gathering, which was why Qi Gathering was also called the Cultivation Hardship Stage. It was not particularly difficult, but it was tremendously painful.
Yet in the history of cultivation, there had never been a cultivator who gave up for fear of pain. With longevity as the goal ahead, anything could be endured!
The pain Hou Niao suffered was particularly great because he progressed faster than others. If an ordinary person took five years to complete the same bodily remodeling, completing it in one year meant enduring five times as much pain. He could not hope to escape the slightest bit.
It also taught him what a so-called genius was. Behind every legend of a genius lay sweat and effort! There was silent endurance, and one could not even speak of it, but had to act as unconcerned as everyone else, while secretly having already clenched one's steel teeth to pieces!
No success came easily; others simply could not see it.
Endure the agony of ten thousand ants burrowing through the heart, and cultivate the art of thick skin and tough flesh.