Chapter 260 – Unforgiven (I)

Chapter 260

Unforgiven (I)

“Aah, fine, we’ll go…”

Those were the resolutely resounding words of our chief alchemist as he fell under the spell of peer pressure. Or, well, hardly peer as it was kid pressure. Is that a thing? I’m fairly certain it actually is.

I remember when Myra, my niece, once walked up to me and said, ‘Mom says you can eat an entire cake all by yourself! Is it true?!’ and I balked. I looked over at my sister, and she was about an inch away from losing it, but the way that little kid looked at me so expectantly… was I going to say no?

Of course not.

Thus, I ate an entire cake, all by myself, in front of her, and she looked at me like I’ve conquered the world or something. Was it worth the fact that I was sick for the next eight days and couldn’t even look at any sweets for over a month?

… not really, to be honest.

So, even if you live for hundreds of years, it turns out, the kids can still pressure you into doing some wild things. Good to know.

We moved slowly and not directly toward the ‘voice’ since, well, there wasn’t really a direct route. Each time it would sound out, it’d be from a different place. Same general direction, which was further north, but from different corners of it.

As such, what we started doing was, as soon as we’d hear it, we’d go in that direction for about an hour and stop, resting (well, cultivating, really) until it would sound out again, and then rinse and repeat.

Three days passed by, and we established a bit of a routine and noticed a bit of a pattern.

What I approximated to be at night, we’d be attacked by the ever-increasing number of beasts, though they were still individually quite weak. The further in we went, the more frequent the attacks became, though the numbers never crossed sixty or so.

There have also been some breakthroughs in the meantime–Dai Xiu reached the late Foundation Establishment, Xi Zhao was at the peak of the middle stage, Wan Lan was at the peak of the Foundation Establishment (and feeling quite restless, based on her window, as the kids were catching up to her), while Light reached the 11th stage.

I’d kind of expected this, as there was a lot of ‘layering’ in the past few months in terms of their speed of cultivating, though I also suspect they’ll plateau for a while. One thing I discovered sort of passively was that none of the kids were rushing through the stages; whether it was Long Tao warning them or them knowing so instinctively, they all took their time (at least until this small boon).

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I suspect that none, except maybe Wan Lan, will reach the Spirit Manifestation Realm before we leave the forest.

As for Long Tao… I don’t know, honestly. I mean, he was at the peak of the Spirit Manifestation Realm, but he’s been sitting there for a little while, unmoving. He was probably consolidating his foundation, but it wasn’t like I had to worry about him.

I had to worry about me.

The good news is, I managed to do one revolutionary cycle–which means I’m now at the Second Cycle of the Revolving Core Realm, still a long way off from its peak.

The bottleneck wasn’t the physical cycling of Qi, but figuring out how to automate the core’s rotation. As far as I understand it, it’s sort of like a puzzle–right now, the core resides within my dantian, suspended at the center of it, unmoving. When I start cultivating, it begins to spin (and quite fast, if I may say so myself). When I first started doing it, I actually had to do several revolutions of Qi through my meridians to get it to spin, but now, I only need to do one.