As Xi Shen reached the gate of his courtyard, he couldn’t help but let out a sigh of relief.
“Screw those arrogant brats and their pompous attitude. Staring at me as if it concerns them whether I’m here in their dumb Sword Division. Do they think I wanted to be here, resulting in me having to deal with their condescending stares? If I was to behave like those snob nose brats I served in my past life, who viewed everyone with a veil of arrogance over their eyes just because they were the Gods' Apostles, I would have had my father make a decree for anyone who looked at me like that to be executed via disembodiment. Having their soul ripped out of their physical body and tortured would surely make them regret looking at their second prince like that...”
As Xi Shen was rambling on about gruesome torture methods like any normal crazy old man would, he stepped through his large courtyard’s front gate, but suddenly he paused and then glance in the direction of Yang Su’s room deep within the mansion.
Even from here, he could feel faint fluctuations of the Fire Qi in the surroundings, flowing towards the room.
After sensing that Yang Su was reaching the point of being able to enter the 2nd stage of the Qi Condensation Realm already, he nodded his head in approval before he turn and went to his own room.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room, Xi Shen closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm his thoughts and get in a mood of full concentration.
After several breaths of time, Xi Shen released his Divine Will into his surroundings but only to about two meters from his body.
Within that two meters of space, his Divine Will seemed to seep into the fabric of the universe, and soon after several dark particles appeared. Looking at these particles, a normal person would suddenly get the feeling that they were aging rapidly, but getting younger at the same time as well. It was a strange and profound feeling.
These small particles that suddenly appeared within Xi Shen’s Divine Sense were Time Qi. Though after some time, more of these particles started appearing until they formed several streams that rushed towards Xi Shen’s dantian.
Xi Shen observed the Time Qi within his dantian, trying to create the best way to absorb it so it doesn’t interfere with his days of old cultivation, but instead, find a balance or even empower it.
With his knowledge about the two cultivation systems, it didn’t take him long to create a suitable cultivation method that could get him through the Four Physical Realms. Though when he starts cultivating in the incoming days and months he might have to make a few tweaks here and there. But for now, he had the basics down to completely cultivate through the Four Physical Realms, which are the Qi Condensation Realm, the Blood Purifying Realm, the Bone Reconstruction Realm, and the Meridian Opening Realm.
From the name alone one could tell that these realms involve improving the entire body through the use of Qi, hence the name of the realm.
Progressing through these four cultivation realms, one could also see how internal cultivation and external cultivation are closely intertwined with each other even in the early stages of cultivation. In the future, it would become even more so.
How one progresses through these realms, is that after gathering and condensing their Qi Element into their dantian and reaching the ninth and final stage of the Qi Condensation Realm, a person would use a portion of that Qi to completely purify their blood as well as their internal organs, of all the impurities that had accumulated from birth, and thus entering the Blood Purifying Realm.
After fully purifying their blood, one would enter the Bone Reconstruction Realm. In this realm, one would have to do the same thing as the previous realm but this time it involves cleansing their entire skeletal structure of impurities using their Qi, and fully reconstructing it into something that resembles steel. This, as you can imagine would give the person inhuman strength and speed beyond anything they could have achieved before.
The final realm, the Meridian Opening Realm, was possibly the most delicate and important step out of the Four Physical Realms. Using their Qi, one would have to open their meridians and the acupoints along their paths.
The other realms come with extreme risks and danger, but by making a mistake when opening a meridian there was a chance that someone could lose their life. At least in the previous realms if one made a mistake, at most they would feel exhausted or become crippled, but making a mistake in the Meridian Realm could cause death because the meridians was a structure in the human body that was connected to the most important organs such as the heart and lungs.
And the worst thing of all about this realm is one would find it difficult to receive help like in the other realms. If one used the Fire Qi to open their first meridians and acupoints, that was the only type of Qi they could use for the rest of the process.
Even if a powerful cultivator had the same Qi Element as you, if they try to open your meridians and acupoints with their abundant and strong Qi flow, and they made a slight inaccuracy in their judgment, it would instantly lead to your death.
Only by using your own not-so-strong Spiritual Qi, would be the wises way to cultivate through the Meridian Opening Realm.
Xi Shen was planning to solve the imbalance of his Heavenly Physique and Spiritual Qi Physique by reconstructing his body during his cultivation of the Four Physical Realms,
Within the room, as Xi Shen began cultivating Time Qi using the cultivation method he created, it took little to no time for him to start releasing the Qi pressure of someone in the 1st stage of the Qi Condensation Realm. This was a sign of him entering the first realm of the Four Physical Realms, the Qi Condensation Realm, and his first step onto the path of the Qi Cultivation System created from his past life’s research.
But it didn’t end there, as Xi Shen’s Divine Will continued to draw the Time Qi from the void, his entire body was obscured by the dark Time Qi particles which formed streams as it quickly entered Xi Shen’s gluttonous dantian.
About forty minutes after entering the 1st level of the Qi Condensation Realm, amazingly Xi Shen suddenly broke through to the 2nd stage!
If someone was here to see Xi Shen breaking through to the 2nd stage of the Qi Condensation Realm in less than an hour after starting his cultivation, their jaws would drop to the floor in shock. Then, after it sank in that even for geniuses like his brother, it had taken them around two to three days, they would look at Xi Shen with horror.
But of course, this feat from Xi Shen wouldn’t have been that shocking if not for the fact that after an hour and a half of cultivating, his aura suddenly increased again as he broke through to the 3rd stage Qi Condensation Realm!
After another four more hours, Xi Shen broke through once again and entered the 4th stage.
In just a few hours, Xi Shen had broken through four stages! A shocking cultivation speed that will go unknown by everyone.
However, this was where Xi Shen chose to pause his cultivation, as he realized each time he broke through it took a lot longer, if he wanted to break through to the next stage it would take over a dozen hours and he had other things to focus on before he decided to rest for the day.
The dark Time Qi particles slowly faded back into their obscurity but profound existence in the void, as Xi Shen retracted his Divine Will.
Looking at Xi Shen’s immediate surroundings where the Time Qi was previously, one could see that the ground aged by several years. The three meters of space surrounding Xi Shen also felt strange, but this was the only thing low-level cultivators would feel from it. But if a high-level cultivator used his Divine Sense to scan the area, he would become baffled by the anomaly of this space being… older?- than the rest of the room.
Although it won’t last for long, the fact that just cultivating the Time Qi caused such drastic changes to occur in the environment goes to show how powerful it would be when Xi Shen becomes stronger and used techniques and spells with his Time Qi.
‘Hmm, I wonder if I could combine my Time Qi with Soul Arts. There isn’t a rule that said Soul Cultivators couldn’t cultivate Qi, in fact, no Soul Cultivator would forsake cultivating Qi unless they were physically unable to do so. So I wonder how powerful Soul Arts with my Time Qi added to the mix would become then?’
As Xi Shen thought that, he glanced around his surroundings and seeing the effects that cultivating Time Qi caused, he reaffirm the fact that he couldn’t reveal that he could cultivate something as profound as -Time- to anyone.
Also, asides from the ground and the surrounding space, another thing that was affected by the Time Qi was Xi Shen's clothes, which he had to change. They had gotten so old that they resembled nothing more than decaying dregs.
‘Maybe I should make Yang Su take a blood oath after all, just to be safe. As I am now, if some almighty cultivator who reached a high cultivation realm in my Spiritual Qi System, even if it was because of me that he could even cultivate to that level of strength in the first place, he or she wouldn’t hesitate to demand my secrets with greed filled eyes.’
After thinking that, Xi Shen hold out his arm and the broken zither Spirit Weapon appeared in his hand from his storage ring.
It was time for him to fix this decrepit-looking zither and try out those Soul Arts.