Chapter 30 Stage 6

The wind wolves were hunting.

The alpha was in the center of the formation, in the later stages of Qi Condensation, slow pulse that anchored the pack’s movement. Two flankers ranging ahead, lighter and faster, their Qi flickering with the quick aggression of younger hunters. Three more trailing at various distances, filling gaps, covering angles.

At Stage 5, he couldn’t sense them from this distance, but he had an entire world’s scientific advancement behind him. His binoculars had range that allowed him to spy on the pack without them noticing him. He had mapped their territory through tracks and the behavioral patterns of smaller beasts, because his perception hadn’t been sharp enough to map them directly.

At Stage 5, he wasn’t confident in dealing with the pack. Even with better equipment, he gave himself a 30-70 chance with it being in their favor.

Stage 6 was different.

The breakthrough had come three hours ago, in the quiet Yuantian’s early morning, and his body was still settling into the new architecture.

The last couple days, he could tell he was nearing an advancement. He had prepared a breakthrough catalyst in advance. This time, he was able to purchase the catalyst from the Jade Exchange. The transaction went smoothly. However, he realized after the fact that the catalyst purchase gave Wei Lian another data point about him. It alerted her of when he was close to a breakthrough. He was already coming up with counter information tactics. He would continue purchasing the catalyst from her, but also from other stores. It would give the Jade Exchange a misleading data point of how fast he was advancing.

His meridians hummed at a frequency they hadn’t reached before, the Qi flowing through wider channels with less resistance, each cycle depositing a trace more density into his foundation than the previous one.

Stage 3 to Stage 6 in approximately three and a half months.

Normally, that progression took a Grade C cultivator four to five years — and most plateaued somewhere around Stage 5, their root grade’s environmental ceiling pressing down on their advancement like a hand on a lid. The ones who pushed through to Stage 6 did it on the back of expensive synthetic catalysts and corporate cultivation programs and still ended up with foundations that felt, to his enhanced perception, like walls built from mismatched bricks. Functional. Stable. Uninspired.

His foundation did not feel uninspired.

He turned his perception inward, the way he did after every breakthrough, and examined what the advancement had built. The new architecture was layered — each stage’s contribution distinct but integrated, natural-Qi breakthroughs stacking like floors in a building where every level strengthened the ones below it. His meridians at Stage 6 were likely wider than a typical Stage 8’s. His dantian capacity, already outsized at Stage 5, had expanded again, the interior space deepening into something that felt less like a reservoir and more like a well fed by an underground current. The foundation quality was, by any honest assessment, approaching the threshold where Grade classifications stopped meaning anything.

He let the self-assessment pass without lingering on it. Data collected. Implications noted. Time to move on.

The problem was not power. The problem was space.

He realized it on his second circuit of the mapped territory that morning, moving through the collection routes he had walked dozens of times. The Three-Leaf Ginseng cluster in the eastern meadow — forty plants when he had first documented it, his most reliable and valuable harvest site — was showing signs of strain. The outer ring of plants had been picked three times too many. Their regrowth was thinner, the leaves smaller, the Qi density in each specimen down perhaps fifteen percent from the first harvest. The inner ring was healthier, but the growth pattern had shifted. The plants were spacing themselves further apart, the root systems competing for the available nutrients in a way that suggested the local soil’s Qi content was being drawn down faster than it recovered.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He was over-harvesting.

The realization landed with the quiet, clinical weight of a maintenance report flagging a furnace approaching tolerance limits. Not a crisis. Not yet. But a trend line that pointed, with mathematical certainty, toward a future where his most productive collection site degraded from exceptional to adequate to depleted — and he could not afford adequate, let alone depleted, when his advancement and his commercial operations and his entire strategic position depended on materials that didn’t exist anywhere else in his accessible world.