CHAPTER 145: BREAKTHROUGH, CORE FORMATION! 1

｢Infinite Slaughter System

Owner: Li Ling

Status: Healthy

Age: 20/350

Slaughter Points: 243,214

Qi Cultivation Base: Foundation Establishment Perfection (0/5000)

Qi Cultivation Technique: One Line Chaos Art

Body Refinement Level: Body Foundation Perfection. (0/1000)

Body Refinement Technique: Blood Asura Descent.

Mind Power Realm: Acolyte Realm Level 1 (0/2)

Mind Power Technique: Expanding Mind Sequence

Daoist Arts:

1. Fire Stream Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

2. Mana Regressing Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

3. Dao Seeing Eye – Entry (0/1500)

4. Heavenly Network – Entry (0/5000)

5. Spirit Sense Control – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

6. Earth Tunneling Art – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

7. Golden Blockade Technique – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

8. Restoration Spell – Entry (0/200)

9. Spirit Isolation Mantra – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

10. Yin-Yang Reversal Art – Expert (0/1500)

11. The Meteor Spell – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

12. Dao Soldier Technique – Entry (0/5000)

13. Memory Archive Extraction – Entry (0/250)

14. Blessed Augury – Perfection (Cannot be Limit Broken, Insufficient Realm.)

15. Tai Xu Mysterious Method – Advanced (0/5000)

16. Nine Heights Pagoda - Level 6 (0/60)

Non Daoist Techniques:

1. Li Family Spear Technique – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

2. Disguise Art – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

3. Swift Swallow Step – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

4. Sky Rending Palm – Perfection (Can be Limit Broken, 0/50)

5. Hidden Sleeve Art – Mastery (0/4).｣

That’s right, he had accumulated nearly a quarter of a million in Slaughter Points, quite possibly his biggest haul since he began his rampage with the Infinite Slaughter System not just in terms of mere numbers, but in terms of the rate at which he earned it versus the cost it required of him in terms of effort.

At first, earning 19 Slaughter Points in the Hunting Encampment forest had excited him, then the 2000 or so he obtained after ’bombing’ the number 5 Joyous market.

No matter what, his earnings would increase in scale with each harvest as his power grew, but so too would his demands for expenditure in the number of arts, and the quality of them.

So Li Ling actually did not feel that much excitement or glee. Rather, his mind locked into his arts and abilities, first deliberating whether to advance his body refinement or his qi cultivation.

After all, this was one of the rare situations where he had an art or technique for both that could be continued to the next realm, making him spoiled for choice.

In the end, he chose to go with his cultivation base as usual since that was the mainstream for the Tian Ming Continent. Not to mention that this breakthrough would also affect his body refinement slightly and make things much smoother all around for him.

As such, Li Ling made sure he was in a good state before breathing out and selecting to break through with the One Line Chaos Art into the third realm, the realm of Core Formation!

But before the actual breakthrough occurred, some major changes were being effected on his body in places that could not be seen with the naked eye. The One Line Chaos Art was a pinnacle technique that had its own demands for the ’quality’ of its user, which was why it was priced so heavily and was hardly used.

The first and most demanding was the requirement of the spirit root, in which one had to have not just one heavenly spirit root, but all five basic elements as heavenly roots. This was an achievement even harder to accomplish than ascending into immortality, but luckily for cultivators of Firmament Heaven, the demand for this was not natal.

In other words, you didn’t need to be born with a heavenly spirit root, but could acquire them postnatally through heavenly blessings, seizing others, or cultivating it oneself.

But for Li Ling, his mind was dragged down to a deep introspection state as he glimpsed his very familiar spirit root. It was the same ginseng-like plant with one thick root and four shriveled and emaciated ones, where even the thick root looked choked with a lot of glowing ’dirt’.

Before Li Ling could admire his trash talent once again, a surge of energy befell his roots and a great change occurred. The thick root didn’t change, but its internals were completely ’washed’ clean of the glowing ’dirt’, becoming pristine.

On the other side, the four shriveled roots were like flat tires being filled with air, quickly becoming full and lush, expelling some black impurities that lay within them, all of which came hurtling out of Li Ling’s mouth as he coughed violently.

Li Ling glanced cautiously at the mass of material he spat out, using his Spirit Sense Control to filter the glowing ’dirt’ from his healthy earth spirit root from the impurities of the other four. The glowing ’dirt’ he stored immediately in a bottle and placed in his Void Space, as it could be turned into pills that could help a Dao Integration cultivator master the earth element and were extremely highly sought after.

As for the rest, he also stored it separately, for this stuff could be used to poison someone and ruin their cultivation without actually striking at them. After all, there were many parties Li Ling could not outright kill no matter how much he wished, like Tang Huo, but poisoning them would not trigger any alarms.

It was now he had time to pay attention to his breakthrough status, only to find that it had paused when he took his attention away. This made his face change greatly, marveling at the near-absolute power of the Infinite Slaughter System, for breakthroughs could not be stopped halfway; either they were completed or they failed.

After his cultivation qualifications had been ’fixed’ by the Infinite Slaughter System, now it was time to actually break through to the next realm.

Core Formation, formerly called Golden Core in the ancient cultivation era, was the third realm of Qi cultivation, and its main theme was to merge the dantian and spirit roots together, compressing them inwardly to form a spherical-shaped ’core’ that would store the newly elevated form of energy discovered by cultivators.

In the beginning, there was spiritual energy between the heaven and earth in its raw state, only passively used by cultivators and mortals to enhance their health and grant some basic longevity until the first cultivators found how to absorb it and refine it.

These fellows warred for a time, then came together to seek the way forward and developed the Foundation Building Realm, now called Foundation Establishment, through developing the spirit sense, using the spirit sense to locate the spirit root, and then distilling refined spiritual qi of the first realm to form the superior Magic Power.

Naturally, after a period of more warring, many top cultivators and powers of that far ancient era looked at each other and wondered how to take that next step. So, following the actions of their predecessors, they once again came together and freely traded insights, eventually realizing that ’distilling’ again would not change anything.

Magic Power was already pure enough; there was nothing ’purer’ than it. However, this did not mean that the road ended here, because no matter the world or situation, there would always be those crazy pioneers who sought the way forward at any cost, experimenting on themselves if necessary.

These powerhouses realized that in order to move forward, they needed to change the storage container itself and effect a permanent change of some sort on their dantians and spirit roots. This idea was crazy and extremely dangerous, because one misstep and your best outcome was crippling yourself.

So they all tried what they felt was best. Some split their dantians apart, some burned their dantians, some froze them, some tried to crush them into paste and mix with natural treasures, and some even extracted their dantians to ’temper’ as if they were ores.

However, they only found the way forward through the failed attempts when one party revealed that, in his attempt to seek a way forward, he tried to turn his dantian into a pill. That party claimed that pills were things that cultivators often used to break through, so why not become a pill in and of itself?

Even though it was wacky, initial attempts showed that, indeed, it was the right way forward. While the ’pill’ theory was widely accepted during that era, it had long been researched and proven by the Tian Shu Institute to be unrelated to the connection to a pill and more due to the spherical shape, which was the perfect container under heaven.

Even more so, the compression of the dantian along with the spirit roots removed the need for manual refinement and caused a very significant change to occur to the energy stored within due to compression, elevating the high-quality Magic Power into something dubbed Dharma Power.

And Dharma Power was special for one major reason: it contained the unique imprint of the cultivator in question, containing a part of their ’dharma’!