Chapter 144
The next morning, Baek-cheong opened her eyes in a bleary squint.
After spending the night sunk into the Profound Jade Bed, her whole body felt languid and loose.
For the past five days, day and night had blurred together.
She had been chasing forum fodder about Buddhist cultivators, Dao traces, and anything else worth clicking, catching sleep only in snatches.
“Ugh, just a little longer…”
Just as she was about to close her eyes again, wrapped tightly in her blanket…
Her fingertips brushed the Storage Platform, and something she had utterly forgotten flashed through her mind.
“Oh, right. The cloud spirit Pearl!”
Baek-cheong shot upright.
While she had been absorbed in the forum, she had completely forgotten the territory lord even existed.
Why had she asked for an Eastern Region on a cloud-covered peak in the first place?
She let the cloud spirit Pearl, starving inside her Storage Platform, gorge itself on clouds.
And yet she had spent five straight days doing nothing but foruming, forgetting the whole point.
“What am I even doing after getting an Eastern Region specially made for this?”
In a flurry, she rummaged through the Storage Platform and took out the cloud spirit Pearl.
A tiny bead rolled onto her palm.
This was the territory lord that had remained asleep ever since she left the Cloud Sea Secret Realm.
After so long without seeing the light, the cloud spirit Pearl somehow looked a little gaunt.
She had starved it for days on end, so that was only natural.
“I’ll let you eat your fill now.”
Baek-cheong gripped the cloud spirit Pearl and stepped out of the annex.
As soon as she entered the courtyard, the belt of clouds wrapped around the peak’s waist came into view.
The clouds were so close she felt she could catch them if she simply reached out.
This much seemed more than enough for the famished cloud spirit Pearl’s meal.
Feeling pleased, she poured spiritual energy into the cloud spirit Pearl.
The sleeping cloud spirit Pearl gave off a faint tremor, as if answering her.
The next instant, clouds were sucked toward the cloud spirit Pearl from every direction.
The clouds surrounding the peak vanished as if they had never been there.
The pale, hazy view cleared in a blink, revealing a bright blue sky.
It all happened in the time it took to blink.
“Huh?”
Baek-cheong blinked at the unexpected turn.
Back in the Cloud Sea Secret Realm, this bead could drink in clouds endlessly and never run out.
But clouds drifting through the sky could not begin to compare to the cloud sea.
If the secret realm had been an ocean full of clouds, the thing hanging around this peak would have been no more than a thin, shallow belt.
The cloud spirit Pearl had inhaled every nearby cloud and now sat there feigning innocence.
The problem came next.
Now that the clouds covering the peak had disappeared all at once, there was no way it looked normal from the outside.
“Oops.”
Baek-cheong carefully looked down from the peak.
Far, far below, the clan head’s hall and the Pavilions lay spread out in miniature.
If someone happened to raise their head and look up at the peak…
They would see the peak, usually hidden by clouds, exposed, completely bare.
'If someone sees this, they’re obviously going to think something’s wrong!’
Father had certainly said the terrain was so wondrous that no one could peer inside.
But father’s assurance only applied to the inside of the peak.
It did not cover the sight of the clouds wrapping the peak and scattering in a single instant.
If someone thought it was an anomaly and came up to investigate, things would get troublesome.
At this rate, she was going to get questioned on the sixth day of her closed-door training, all because she had happily fed it some clouds.
“Spit them out! Hurry up and spit them back out!”
In a panic, Baek-cheong blew spiritual energy into the cloud spirit Pearl.
The cloud spirit Pearl began to heave out the clouds it had been holding.
It was not as instantaneous as it had been when it had swallowed them.
Still, clouds bloomed in soft puffs and wrapped around the peak’s waist once more.
They looked brazenly natural, as if they had been there all along.
Even after restoring the clouds, Baek-cheong stood guard in the courtyard for a long while, watching below.
Her heart stayed tight with worry that someone might come up.
Thankfully, the peak remained quiet.
Even after a full mealtime had passed, she did not sense a single presence.
It seemed the whole thing had happened too quickly for anyone to notice.
Only then did Baek-cheong pat down her small chest in relief.
“Phew, that could have been bad.”
She stared down at the cloud spirit Pearl in her palm.
Perhaps because it had even eaten a little cloud, it was giving off a much clearer light than before.
To be honest, feeding it clouds was something she could do anytime if she put her mind to it.
'It’s not great for cost-effectiveness, but I can always make clouds with the escape technique and feed it those.’
The real problem was that there was no controlling the cloud spirit Pearl’s appetite.
When she fed it spiritual energy, the cloud spirit Pearl sucked in clouds; when she told it to stop, it stopped. That was the extent of it.
She could not control things like how much it ate or how far it sucked in clouds.
It was still a half-baked territory lord that had not undergone proper refinement.
At most, it had accepted a faint trace of her spiritual energy and been imprinted by it.
Whether she meant to keep it at her side and use it, or to use it one day to create a Blessed Land of the Eastern Heaven, was unclear.
If she wanted to tame it into anything useful, proper refinement had to come first.
“But to refine it…”
When her thoughts reached that point, Baek-cheong smacked her lips.
There was no way refinement came for free.
Coaxing the territory lord and gathering its power all required spiritual energy.
If she rashly tried to handle it now, there was a high chance it would simply drain the spiritual energy she had so painstakingly saved up.
First, she needed to reach artifact forging, 8th level, and use the spiritual energy she had accumulated there.
In the end, after going around in circles, the answer came back to one thing.
“Sigh. Training again.”
Baek-cheong stuck out her lips in a long pout.
If she had her way, she would have ignored the cloud spirit Pearl and everything else and gone right back to lying down and foruming.
But if she wanted to tame the cloud spirit Pearl, she had no choice but to raise her realm first.
She stored the cloud spirit Pearl back in the Storage Platform and entered the Training Room deeper inside the Eastern Region.
The moment she opened the door, she felt spiritual energy hanging as thick as fog.
This was the Training Room laid with a Spirit Gathering Formation directly connected to the spiritual vein.
However, because the transplanted spiritual vein had not been in place long, it had yet to exert its full power.
Even so, the energy emitted by a near-second-tier spiritual vein was anything but ordinary.
With the Spirit Gathering Formation added on top, the room was no different from water made of spiritual energy.
Just standing still, she could feel spiritual energy forcing its way into every pore.
For an ordinary Qi Condensation Cultivator to rashly attempt Qi Absorption in a place like this…
The concentration was high enough that it would not be strange for their meridians to be torn to shreds.
'I don’t have much choice.’
But that did not apply to her.
Her meridians had been trained by the inscribed spirit gathering pill and were solid enough to easily withstand this much spiritual energy.
Taking a deep breath, she climbed onto the Jade Flat Platform.
She assumed the lotus position and slowly began Qi Absorption; spiritual energy surged in like a burst dam.
The pouring energy filled her Dantian without loss.
There was no strain at all, as expected of meridians tempered by the inscribed spirit gathering pill.
But she could not relax completely.
The spiritual energy rushing in was so fierce that her ocean-ocean-ocean-ocean-ocean-ocean-ocean-sized Dantian was visibly filling.
If she let her guard down for even a moment and the energy flow went awry, she could suffer qi deviation or have her blood and qi twist out of alignment.
“…”
Baek-cheong shook off her stray thoughts and focused her mind on controlling the flow.
She guided the pouring energy and piled it up within her Dantian.
How much time passed like that?
Only the awareness of accepting spiritual energy remained, and the outside world slipped from her mind.
Before she knew it, she had unknowingly fallen into a trance.
* * *
Hunger wormed its way into her consciousness long afterward.
Grrrgle.
With that loud sound, Baek-cheong was released from her trance.
When she cautiously opened her eyes, her empty stomach felt as if it were plastered to her spine.
She had prepared plenty of Fasting pills, but she had been so immersed in Qi Absorption that she had not even put one in her mouth.
When she thought back and counted the days, a hollow laugh escaped her.
A full seven days had passed while she was absorbed in training.
“A whole week?”
Her surprise lasted only a moment before she checked her Dantian.
Her Dantian, which had barely been half full, had grown by roughly one-tenth.
Four more Trances of this level would be more than enough to enter artifact forging, 8th level.
The problem was that if she went through that much Qi Absorption, turbid qi would just as surely pile up.
For as much spiritual energy as one accepted, residue was bound to remain.
Consolidating her realm and expelling turbid qi could not be put off any more than Qi Absorption could.
In fact, after doing nothing but Qi Absorption for seven days, quite a bit of turbid qi had built up inside her.
It seemed it would take three or four full days to expel it all.
So, when she calculated it, filling her Dantian meant ten days for every one-tenth.
“Heavens!!! Why me!!!”
If an ordinary Qi Condensation Cultivator had trained like this in the Eastern Region for seven days…
They would have filled their Dantian long ago and even raised their realm on top of that.
But for her, it was only one-tenth. Of course she felt wronged.
Still, she quickly pulled herself together and shook her head.
'Well, I’m basically a 5,000-Spirit-Root, so.’
She had to pour in five times as much spiritual energy as someone with a heavenly spirit root just to take a single step.
But filling that enormous Dantian by a whole one-tenth was impressive, if she did say so herself.
Once her thoughts reached that point, her dissatisfaction faded and the corners of her mouth crept upward.
Besides, she had devoted herself to nothing but training for seven whole days, so she had done more than enough.
After all that, she had more than earned the right to take a short breather.
“I trained hard for a whole week. Just for a second. Seriously, just for one second.”
Driven by the need to reward herself, she left the Training Room and headed for the bedroom.
Then, as if reluctantly yielding to temptation, she flopped onto the Profound Jade Bed.
Her empty stomach could be soothed well enough with a single Fasting pill.
They were expensive Fasting pills, so they tasted better than most.
Munching on the Fasting pill in her mouth, she moved her Divine Sense.
“Now this is what I call the true joy of training.”
In an exceedingly pleased mood, Baek-cheong connected to the Nameless Forum.
And though she had sworn it would be only for a moment, she continued foruming inside a moment whose end no one could know.