The chamber itself had not changed.
The pale frost still coated the walls and floor in thick layers. The quiet hum of the array continued to fill the room with steady waves of Ice Qi, drifting like invisible currents through the air.
Occasionally, faint crackling sounds echoed as the cold condensed moisture into thin sheets of ice along the stone surfaces.
Han Yu remained seated exactly where he had begun.
His posture had not shifted even once.
From the outside, he looked almost like a statue carved from frost. His robes were stiff with frozen vapor, and his hair and eyebrows had long since turned white with accumulated ice crystals. Even his eyelashes carried tiny shards of frost that glittered faintly whenever the array pulsed.
By now he didn’t even bother blinking and gave up on it as it only distracted him.
Only the slow rhythm of his breathing proved that he was still alive.
Inside his body, however, things were changing.
Han Yu was starting to feel hungry.
It was not the overwhelming starvation that would weaken an ordinary mortal. Instead, it was a dull, persistent sensation that lingered at the edge of his awareness. A reminder from his body that ti had passed and nourishnt had not arrived.
But Han Yu ignored it.
Breaking his ditation now would be foolish.
He had endured too much to lose his progress at this stage. If he stood up and allowed his body to warm itself through movent or food, the delicate adaptation he had built over the past two weeks might collapse entirely.
Besides, he was not an ordinary person.
He was a cultivator at the peak of the Core Condensation Realm.
His body had long surpassed the limits of mortal physiology. Going without food for several weeks, or even months was not truly dangerous. Hunger was mostly an instinctive signal, a habit ford through years of eating regularly.
Eventually, the body would simply stop demanding it.
Han Yu had experienced sothing similar during his ti in the Harrow Mountains.
Back then, survival had forced him to endure long stretches without food. The first few days had always been unpleasant, but eventually the hunger faded into a dull background sensation.
He knew the sa thing would happen here.
So he ignored the feeling.
Instead, Han Yu turned his attention inward.
His spirit sense spread gently through his ridians, observing the changes that had been occurring over the past few days.
The difference was obvious.
At the beginning of his ditation, only a handful of Ice Qi wisps had appeared inside his body. They were faint and scattered, drifting aimlessly along the pathways of his ridians like loose leaves caught in a current.
Now there were hundreds.
Tiny strands of pale, cold energy floated through his ridian network, weaving through the mixed flow of neutral spirit Qi and Blood Qi that circulated naturally within him.
Han Yu examined them carefully.
They were still extrely weak.
If he gathered all of them together manually, he estimated that they would only amount to a few droplets of true Ice Spirit Qi.
But the Freezing Abyss Glacial Art did not allow that. The technique was very specific about its first stage. The cultivator was not supposed to manually condense the Ice Qi. It had to occur naturally.
The body itself had to accept the cold so thoroughly that the Ice Qi began to gather on its own. Only then would the resulting drop carry the correct properties for the cultivation technique.
For the first step, he needed only one drop.
Just one.
If even a single droplet ford naturally, it ant the body had successfully adapted to the environnt.
And that would allow him to begin the real cultivation process.
So Han Yu waited.
The Ice Qi wisps continued drifting through his ridians.
They flowed like leaves floating down a river, carried along by the current of his circulating spirit energy.
Hours passed.
Then night fell outside the mountain.
Inside Han Yu’s body, sothing subtle began to change.
As the wisps traveled through his ridians, they occasionally slowed when reaching the junction points where multiple channels intersected.
These nodes functioned like crossroads in the body’s energy network. When several streams of Qi t there, the flow beca turbulent. Just like leaves gathering near a rock in a flowing river, the Ice Qi wisps began accumulating at those points.
At first, the clusters were small.
A few wisps would gather briefly before being pulled away by the circulating Qi. But as more and more wisps drifted through his ridians, the clusters grew larger. The turbulence around the nodes created small eddies in the Qi flow.
And those eddies trapped the Ice Qi wisps more effectively.
Gradually, the wisps began clumping together.
Ten.
Twenty.
Fifty.
Nearly a hundred.
The cluster grew denser and denser until the energy inside it began compressing under its own pressure.
Then suddenly...
’Ugh...’ Han Yu felt a sharp ache inside one of his ridian nodes.
His spirit sense imdiately focused on the location. And what he saw made his heart surge with excitent. Within the stream of colorless spirit Qi, sothing new had appeared.
A droplet.
A single, perfectly condensed drop of Ice Spirit Qi.
It glowed faintly with pale blue light, standing out like a crystal bead among the flowing energy.
Han Yu had succeeded!
The first natural droplet had ford.
For a brief mont, his mind nearly burst with excitent.
He almost opened his eyes.
Almost jumped up in celebration.
But he forced himself to remain still.
This was only the beginning.
Suppressing his excitent, Han Yu imdiately began reciting the mnemonic of the Freezing Abyss Glacial Art.
His voice was barely more than a whisper.
"Cold beyond light, where silence devours the stars.
From the abyss of stillness, let frost claim the breath of life."
The mont the chant ended, a violent reaction erupted within his body.
His Qi surged suddenly, as if awakened by the invocation.
The newly ford droplet of Ice Spirit Qi was instantly dislodged from its resting place.
WHOOSH
User Comments
0 comments from readers