Back when Li Lang had just returned from his visit to Nightshade Valley, he immediately got back into his routine of training his students and more.
Having gotten his hands on Foundation Pills and Ascension Pills, there was no way to keep him from studying both pills.
He first started with the Ascension Pills to familiarize himself with the process of breakthrough and what it entailed. He was also curious to see how it differed from a traditional breakthrough.
To start his study, he let Ruby consume a pill without hesitation. The auto-analyzer told him about its composition while Nightmoon Valley had given the recipe, which included the steps of refining both pills.
These things weren’t a secret, especially in the Luminescent Domain. They were pills that the orthodox sects had created and were either unnecessary or made with orthodox cultivators in mind.
The tricky part of Li Lang’s research was finding willing participants. Most people living in Emberglow City worshipped demonic cultivation. While demonic cultivation didn’t rely on aptitude, it required its own type of talent. The various organizations within the domain deemed numerous people not to have the correct talent or character to be recruited. After all, resources were limited, so they couldn’t waste their time on those who likely wouldn’t make it far.
Even then, those who weren’t recruited still refused to partake in orthodox cultivation. It made the Ascension Pill unpopular as it would turn them into a useless orthodox cultivator.
However, that was just on the surface. Many people still made use of it. That was because everyone valued their lives. By consuming Ascension Pills and breaking through, they would effectively increase their lifespan. Foundation Establishment cultivators were said to be able to live up to five hundred years! It was six or seven times more than the average mortal.
To secure test subjects, Li Lang just had to tactfully appeal to the interested parties. He found several well-off people who were up there in age but weren’t exactly wealthy enough to outright buy what they wanted. Then he began his experiments.
Ascension Pills were continuously taken over time, allowing its users to grow in cultivation until they reached the Foundation Establishment Realm.
Li Lang carefully monitored his selected test subjects before and after they took the pill. He then got Long Yi plus several students with good observation skills to join him. They carefully inspected how the pill brought changes to its user, but there was only so much of what was happening within the subject’s body that they could observe. It caused them to each have their own theories.
“I think it’s similar to the Foundation Pill in that it creates a barrier to contain Qi within the body,” Wu San muttered. “It’s just that it also has a function to help its consumer gather the ambient Qi as well.”
He looked at his two mentors for approval. Long Yi stepped forward to give his own opinion.
“Hmm, I don’t think it’s anything that complicated. Instead, it’s probably more accurate to say it’s a special type of barrier. A barrier that allows Qi to pass through one way.”
“But that doesn’t explain why one could consume multiple pills to increase their speed. If what you said was true, the people taking the pill would all have to wait the same amount of time to allow the Qi to gather,” Shi Yan interjected. “I think each pill is imbued with a large amount of Qi that settles in whoever consumes it.”
“As the teachers say, each person is unique. It’s not surprising everyone needs a varying amount of pills. I don’t think it’s the pill that is supplying the Qi for cultivation, though. Eating additional pills only increases the speed slightly. The diminishing return is too severe for that to be true.”
“The truth shouldn’t be far from all of your predictions,” Li Lang declared. “Looking at only the objective facts, we know that the Ascension Pill causes its consumer’s body to accumulate Qi. Once it hits a saturation point, the Qi is then concentrated in the navel area, triggering the breakthrough process. It is not only forcefully started and completed, it is done without needing the user to do anything at all.”
“They may be able to break through, but they’re barely able to even use their Qi to do simple things like seeing in the dark, not to talk about doing anything useful,” Long Yi added.
“Yes, but remember? They can still practice various crafts, so they must be able to train their Qi manipulation to a degree.”
This type of discussion occasionally happened, as Li Lang slowly accumulated more data. He refined his theory with the information slowly but surely, until one day, he appeared confident with what he had.
As I thought, the key is in the saturation of Qi within a cultivator’s body. One must hone their control of their energy to increase the density of Qi in the body to the point of being able to cause a qualitative change, and an Ascension Pill provides a barrier or a forcefield to do just that.
Once that barrier is gone, it results in the user having broken through, but lacking the strength to control their Qi on their own. It’s like in video games where people get others to play on their account for them to achieve higher ranks. Once they’re done, the original owner’s skill level is still unchanged.
The reason why people of low aptitude have more issues with breakthroughs is likely due to their lack of spiritual roots. With more spiritual roots comes more access points Qi can come through. Having more of them means you have more power over your Qi, so you have more power to converge the energy into your navel area.
Those with only a few spiritual roots have trouble focusing enough Qi in the dantian to reach the required concentration of energy to evoke qualitative change.
Despite being confident about getting a handle on the root cause of why it was more difficult for people like him to break through, Li Lang still had to find plausible solutions and test them.
The solution wasn’t as simple as just strengthening your few spiritual roots, so they could absorb more Qi. That was part of what cultivation did. Just increasing the number of spiritual roots was something easier to be said than done, too. Li Lang had a gut feeling spiritual roots weren’t something people should casually mess with. He hadn’t even an inkling of how to interact with the enigmatic existence. Even if he could, he believed one wrong move could cripple someone for life.
Instead, the data he collected from his students’ everyday training gave him a clue as to how to proceed.
While he had made them hyperfocus on cultivation only, forgoing martial and Qi arts, they still practiced one or two techniques. The time he had brought them to the Bloodwave Conclave bazaar was just one instance where they got to browse through various techniques.
When his students practiced these techniques, he made them learn his Tracing Origin Art first. Then, they could show him how their energy flowed when using their techniques.
This allowed him to build a budding library of how techniques affected the flow of Qi within the meridians. It let him learn that numerous techniques couldn’t be used concurrently because they may cause this flow of energy to conflict, jamming their channels.
If I can create a set of techniques that can provoke the Qi in one’s body to flow in a certain way, in theory, it should help provide that extra bit of force to jam enough Qi into the navel area to reach the breaking point. However, it’ll have to be unique for each person, customized to how their meridian channels are shaped.
This train of thought caused Li Lang to be completely focused on the meridians and how techniques caused Qi to move as his main research topic.
Cultivation techniques allowed cultivators to draw in ambient Qi. Martial and Qi arts then taught how to control this energy to produce various effects. What he was aiming to do was similar to martial arts, in that it only manipulated the internal energy without ever releasing it outward. The only difference was that he was trying to get all that energy to forcefully converge on one point.
The result was painful and required a lot of determination and willpower. It was what every cultivator pursuing Foundation Establishment Realm had to go through. Developing a technique to accomplish the task offered the same advantages that inspired the creation of various martial and Qi arts—providing structured methods to achieve efficiency, mastery, and adaptability.
It simplified the movements, so it didn’t require constant conscious control. Instead of just freestyling, the cultivator could practice the same movement a thousand times, drilling into them how to masterfully execute them.
After two years of researching various techniques and studying his students’ meridians, all that was left was for them to reach the peak of Energy Gathering. Then, he could put the fruits of his labor to the test.