Alex and Emily walked out of the train station at around 2 pm in the afternoon on a Saturday. Alex had a new suitcase with him that he had bought to carry all the prizes and souvenirs he had got from the trip.
Sarah was waiting outside the station for the two of them. When she saw the two of them coming, she walked up to them.
However, before she got close, she stopped. Alex and Emily saw her and walked up to her.
"Hey! did you have to wait for long?" Emily asked.
Sarah didn't answer and instead said, "Something feels wrong. Did something happen on the trip?"
Emily blushed a little but also excitedly said, "Alex asked me out."
Sarah's eyes went wide. "What?" she turned towards Alex, who nodded.
"And you accepted?" Sarah asked.
"Of course," Emily said.
"Wow, finally. Congratulations to you both. Let's get a cake or something for a little celebration," Sarah said with exaggerated expressions.
"Alright, no need to overreact. Let's just go back home. I'm really tired," Emily said. They got in the car and went back.
Hannah was pretty stoked to find out about the news too. She prepared some lunch for the two of them which they ate quite happily.
Once they were done, Alex went to the room to freshen up. Once he got out, he decided to log back into the game.
He opened his eyes back in the formation that was still active. According to Zexi, the formation would last for somewhere between 30 and 40 days, so he still had about 3 weeks of time he had to spend in the formation.
'Did no one really come to find me?' he wondered.
Pearl appeared next to him. After seeing him not move for 3 whole days, he was happy to finally see him walk around again.
"Hey, little guy. Were you bored?"
Alex squatted and started rubbing Pearl's neck with both of his hands. Pearl meowed multiple times in response to Alex's questions.
"You wanna fight?" he asked and started hiding his cultivation base. Then, the two of them fought.
Pearl was getting really good at fighting and so was Alex. He was already good when fighting with techniques, but normal attacks were still a little awkward.
However, the constant fighting without techniques was helping him improve at a tremendous rate.
"Alright, let's stop," he said after 3 hours of constant fighting. He sent Pearl away to do whatever he wanted to. Alex on the other hand fell into thought.
'It's been 4 days since I broke through. Normally, I would've broken through once again, but can I do that now?' he wondered. He hadn't practiced or fought in 3 days so he decided to wait a day more before he broke through to the Meridian Realm.
For now, he would just practice.
"Hm…" he thought. Once the cultivation base came back, he realized that there wasn't any discomfort from his cultivation.
"Now that I think about it, my body is good enough to do a lot of things. It can digest all sorts of Qi, can digest monster cores, and can even digest poisons. So is it really possible that such a body would have the same faults as the other bodies have?" he wondered.
He had been spending time in between breakthroughs because that was what he was taught. However, his masters didn't know about his body.
"Hmm… I do remember being significantly weaker during the time when I had to fight that one snake. Didn't I break through like crazy then? I was in a higher realm than the snake, but we were at the same strength."
"So the thing about stable cultivation base needing to have a high level of strength is true… but would it apply for a single breakthrough though?" he wondered.
He wanted to open up his status page and hit breakthrough to check, but before he even opened the status page, he stopped.
"Wait, I can't mess around at such an important breakthrough. What if I do something that negatively impacts my meridians. Let's wait after I do a normal breakthrough this turn," Alex said.
He took out a sword and started practicing. He sent out attacks everywhere and was very well trained in the different techniques.
It came to the point that he was having diminishing returns from the training.
'The techniques have reached the highest they can without noticeable improvements coming forward. So, I should do something else for now,' he thought.
He looked at the sword in his hand and remembered how good Du Yuhan was with it. The Sword Intent and Sword Qi that he used had blown away Alex.
'Can I be like him?' he wondered. 'I might not have had the time to learn all of that… but maybe I can cheat a little with my talent.'
So, starting today, he decided to simply learn the sword without any techniques. He didn't know how to start with learning about Intents, so he blindly swung his sword around.
After realizing that was fruitless, he stopped and thought of what his master had told him.
'Sword Intent appears when you master the sword to such a high level, that you start imagining the sword as part of your body,' Alex thought.
'Part of my body, huh? That means I need to know just by intuition where the sword is at all times, how fast it is moving, how sharp it is, how much force I'm putting into it, and such.'
He closed his eyes and started moving the sword in his hand. He tried to feel the balance of the sword by measuring its height and weight using his mind as a scale.
He took back any and all Qi and spiritual sense and solely focused his normal 5 senses on the sword. He felt the weight of the sword through the hilt he was holding, he felt the changes in the air every time the sword moved around.
He heard the air being sliced apart by the sword, the minute hint of air whistling past the sharp edge.
He was starting to get attuned to the sword.