Cultivating in Solitude

When Ren Li started his solitary cultivation he was actually excited! When training his body it was mostly him half dying to the pain while Alchemy transformed his body, but now it was actually him cultivating! While his daily schedule was supposed to take 3 hours of sleep ( cultivators at his stage already could go without sleep for days, but it was made to relax the state of mind ) followed by 12 hours of meditation then another 8 hours of learning 'the basics of Alchemy' and finally one hour of taking care of the Garden or just relaxation if its not needed.

It was schedule made by his Master! He as a kid couldnt go against this. Thanks to basic resources given to him as a inner disciple reaching second stage wouldnt be difficult. However when he started reading jade slips randomly just to check their content he got shocked!! Each one had a thick book inside filled with thousands of pages and the amout of words on them couldnt compare to mortal books! And whats worse a lot of them described some random rocks or plants properties which was incredibly boring!!

While medidation was actually kind of semi awake state where time was passing way faster it was still boring as well... While increase of his cultivation step by step filled him with happiness everything else turned his mood more and more gloomy. During the first year his Master didnt come even once! He felt beyong lonely which in turn made him talk to the plants in the garden as if they were his friends... Cultivating was becoming more and more difficult to bear as he wasnt a monk with endless patience. While breaking through to the second stage was close, the time he spent on reading was mostly killing his childish spirit.

No matter what said and done he turned from spirit young kid into gloomy person that didnt see any joy in life. After around one and half a year he managed to reach second stage of fundation - dantian establishment! While this stage was the fastest one to break through as one only needed to use gathered QI in their bodies to unlock their Dantian and nourish it with QI this was incredibly important! As a cultivator with Dantian full of QI had several more times QI than cultivator who simply stored energy in their bodies and meridians.

No matter how lonely and dispirited Ren Li become, he felt joy for the first time when he reached third stage - Qi accumlation. In this stage person had to fill their dantian with QI, then transform it into liquid form and finally into the solid form. This was the nightmare stage of every fundation establishment cultivator and when talent of the body mattered the most! While fiiling the Dantian with QI wasnt difficult, the sheer amout they had to absorb, process and transform to achieve solid form was insane! If saying that one needed a drop to fill their dantian, they needed 10 drops to complete liquid form and 100 to complete solid!!

The benefit of doing so was immense as they could turn solid QI into their natural form any time they wanted which in turn allowed them to have huge amout of reserves. While in short combat there was no diffrence between cultivator that only reached this phase and one that achieved next one, one had less than 5% of the total QI compared to the other one!

Also there was incredibly benefit, once dantian was full of solid QI it will achieve natural crystalization making transformation process natural and boosting natural QI gathering prowess to maxium to allow the used QI to recover.

Ren at the end of the third year finally found something interesting! While learning most stuff was boring, there were some really fun to read parts. Like beasts - not only it desrcibed a lot of exotic beasts in detail, the interesting part was about their use in alchemy! Like how penis of some mutated Apes was the best incrediment to create 7th Elixir Yin Tears - which in turn would made any female full of charm, their skin forever shinny and soft, boost their natural Yin and vital energy increasing their natural talent in some aspects!

While another fun thing was about 'predatory plants'. In short this described plants that hunted living beings, mostly humans and beasts. Their describtion went as far as to how they lured their victims, how they killed and ate also their behavior! While it may not be the most fun to read, compared to boring describtions of rocks it was indeed fun..

Just like this over 7 years passed!