CHAPTER 74: REACHING THE SECOND STAGE

Chapter 74: Reaching the Second Stage

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From that point on, negotiations with Old Han got much easier, and Zhu Rong eventually managed to convince him.

The rest of the week went by peacefully.

In the mornings, he attended classes at the academy.

In the afternoons, he spent a few hours at the pavilion crafting and putting talismans up for sale.

And in the evenings, he dedicated two hours to training the group of elf girls who had chosen to follow him.

Surprisingly, almost all of them had decided to stay and become his subordinates.

It didn’t take long for him to figure out why.

Apparently, many of them came from the same village, which had been destroyed during the raid by the hunters who had captured them, leaving them with no home to return to.

Only a few of them still had a place to go back to, and for those, he had decided to make arrangements to safely escort them back to the Elven Empire.

He spent a whole day with them, assessing their cultivation potential, affinity levels, which, needless to say, were quite high,

especially compared to humans, and then decided what each of them was more suited for.

Eventually, he split them into groups, assigning each one a different secondary profession he would personally train them in, with the goal of turning them into the future pillars of his commercial empire.

He also taught them various cultivation techniques based on their aptitudes,

and it didn’t take long before the first Cultivators began to emerge.

Elves had always had solid innate talent, which meant their cultivation progressed faster, especially in the early stages.

On top of that, Zhu Rong had spent a large amount of spirit stones to completely renovate the two story inn, turning it into a real base for the group of elves.

It had designated spaces for combat training, secondary profession development, and even a cultivation room with high spiritual Qi density,

which he had built himself, embedding several high grade formations to make the group’s cultivation smoother.

The fruits of all this were not long in coming, and after just the first week, not only did the first cultivators emerge, but also the first Adept ranks in the various secondary professions.

At one point, he had all of them register at the pavilion to get official licenses in their respective fields.

This way, they could finally start interacting with the business world and gain some real life experience.

Needless to say, this caused quite a stir at the pavilion.

The sight of so many beautiful elf girls walking in at once was enough to shake the hearts of everyone present.

Even the most stoic of men, those who’d sworn to dedicate themselves fully to their profession and avoid worldly distractions,

ended up coughing up blood just to suppress themselves.

Some experts even wondered if this was a despicable tactic by the Qinglan Empire to steal their masters away from them.

This entire mess, all sparked by a single man, was completely ignored by said man himself,

who couldn’t have cared less about something so trivial and just went on with his business.

Zhu Rong had been cultivating at night, allowing his body to rest while also reinforcing his cultivation base,

which had been stuck at the peak of the first stage for a while now.

During this time, he gradually started forming new elemental cores, beginning with the beast cores he had obtained from the semester end exams.

Within a week, he’d successfully forged three more, bringing the total elemental cores to four,

fire, water, air, and earth.

Out of those, the fire and earth cores had already reached the peak of the first stage, ready to break through.

Creating them hadn’t been a problem, but harmonizing them within his dantian had taken some time,

and now that he had finally managed to stabilize them all, he had decided it was time to break through.

In a specially made cultivation room beneath the inn, Zhu Rong sat at the center of a massive Qi gathering array.

This formation helped him rapidly absorb spiritual energy from the surrounding environment and channel it into his dantian.

Normally, this Qi would be distributed among his various cores, but today was different.

Inside his dantian, the four cores were floating in a circle, evenly spaced, glowing intensely.

Waves of spiritual energy started rippling outward, growing stronger by the second.

First the elemental cores lit up, then the dantian, then all his major meridians.

Soon, a powerful shockwave rippled through the room, making the entire room tremble and sending vibrations through the floor beneath the inn.

However, no damage occurred, as in the very next moment, several lines positioned throughout the area beneath the inn lit up.

They were part of a larger formation designed to absorb any kind of energy fluctuation, in this case, neutralizing the shockwaves from the breakthrough.

Inside the room, a thick white mist had spread, covering the entire space.

It was infused with dense Qi, which now began to converge toward a single point at the center of the training chamber.

Like a vortex, the mist was drawn into him in record time, leaving the room mostly empty, with only Zhu Rong still standing at its center.

He let out a soft breath and opened his eyes, which briefly shimmered with multiple colors before returning to normal.

He calmed the Qi within his body as he took note of his surroundings.

He didn’t need to move, everything around him was clear, as if he had eyes on the front and back of his head.

"Looks like I’ll need to upgrade the formations again," he muttered, already spotting several weak points caused by his breakthrough into the second stage.

With this advancement, Zhu Rong had finally formed his spiritual sense.

Thanks to his exceptional Qi control, even his initial spiritual sense was far stronger than a normal cultivator’s.

In fact, he could already rival those several stages above him.

It made sense, his spiritual sense wasn’t powered by just a dantian, but by four elemental cores, which greatly boosted its intensity and range.

With a single pulse of his spiritual sense, he enveloped the entire inn, seeing everything in perfect detail,

the position of every object, every action taken by each person inside the area.

No wall could block his view. Nothing could hide from him.

He could even see a few mature elf women who were currently in the middle of changi-

The author’s magic pen has erased 100 words of description here.

"Ahem, i didn’t see anything," he coughed, mumbling as he quickly pulled his spiritual sense back.

But just then, he noticed something else, and his expression quickly shifted into one of shock,

mixed with a hint of dread, as he stared in a specific direction.

" Sht. Why the hell is that thing here?!"