32 - (Spoiler in title)

As Su Tao sensed what was happening to his bottleneck within his body, a crazy thought appeared in his mind.

'Could it be?

Could it be that this merging is increasing my potential?' He could not help wondering.

After all, he felt that when the black blood merged with his bottleneck, he felt some part of him become stronger, but he had no clue what it could be.

He realized when he got the black blood that it was not so simple to increase his potential. Otherwise, it would have been increased the moment he got his eyes or the black heart within his body. If it had, he would have already long ago broken through to the silver rank.

This had been the trait dragging him down ever since he got his eyes. His potential had been leagues behind his other traits, but now, he felt that the black blood might be increasing his potential.

If this was true, then he would be able to reach the silver rank several times faster!

However, he dared not test it right now while the black blood was still merging into the bottleneck.

However, the next moment, he was just confused when he sensed what was happening to the black blood.

He realized that not only was the black blood seeping into the bottleneck, it was actually passing through the barrier to the other side, albeit slowly.

The other side of the bottleneck to the silver rank was the dantian, the place where inner energy was stored.

The dantian was something that every single person had, but one had to break through to the silver rank just to access it, and inner energy, inner breath, and similar things were stored there.

As the black blood seeped into the dim and empty dantian, Su Tao once again felt the feeling of an unknown quality of him getting stronger, but it was much stronger this time.

The black blood of his black heart had seeped through the bottleneck to the silver rank, entered into the dantian, and was now merging into the dantian, strengthening it in the same way that Su Tao's body had been strengthened by the black blood.

After a few minutes, Su Tao felt like his dantian and the bottleneck had both become much stronger and more durable, and he could not help being happy. He felt like this was most likely his potential increasing, and he seemed to understand something at this moment.

'So that's how it is. The potential of the body is not something that can be improved, and it's not easy to even access. Potential is likely how durable the bottlenecks and the dantian are and how much they can take before being damaged.

This would explain why if you went past the limit of your potential, it would crack your bottleneck and damage the dantian. But if you have a higher potential, it means that your bottlenecks and dantian are more rigid, and they can take more pressure and more grinding without cracking.

No wonder my potential didn't increase right away. Even the black blood would not be able to access the dantian yet since it couldn't seep all the way through the bottleneck. This was why it only happened at 25%.' He thought to himself in glee as he figured it all out.

What the general public knew of potential was nothing like what he had just figured out. It all boiled down to durability. Those born with high potential had a higher durability and therefore a higher ability to climb the ranks. At least, this is what he thought. He had no way of confirming it.

If a bottleneck could be said to be a wine bottle and the barrier in it was a cork, you could grind away at the cork to get rid of it, but you had to be careful in doing so to not break the glass. However, those with high potential had a metal bottle, and they could use much more strength and much more speed to grind away the cork because they didn't have to worry about damaging the bottle.

Both could get rid of the cork at the same speed, and this was talent, whereas the one with lower potential could not match the speed of someone with high potential because they had to be careful at how they grinded away whereas the one with high potential could just grind it at full speed without worry. This was why having only talent was useless, and you also needed potential.

After a while, the process of the black blood seeping into his dantian stabilized, and it eventually stopped entirely. Now, both the dantian and the bottleneck to the silver rank had a gray hue to them, and they were more durable and stronger, just like how the black blood had strengthened his body.

As Su Tao sensed that the change was over, he tried to summon the maximum amount of Qi that his talent would allow.

Instantly, a constant flow of golden Qi floated into Su Tao's body, going directly to the barrier in the bottleneck within his body.

Instantly, it started to grind full force at the barrier to the silver rank. Su Tao was happy when he sensed that there was much less damage compared to before when he would cultivate with all his Qi.

After experimenting for an hour, he was extremely happy to find that he could progress about .5% per day with no damage, which was five times as fast as before!

He was extremely excited by this, and he could not help but look forward to what would happen in the future. His eyes had surprised him again and again, but this was the first time that his black heart had given him such a surprise. Even the black barrier it made could not compare to this.

He had to admit that the buff to his body and his sensitivity to auras was a good surprise that had served him well, but that was still not much compared to increasing his potential. Such a thing was simply unheard of.

Like this, he spent another two days cultivating to get to 26% before he wanted to go get some more resources to cultivate with. He thought that his foundation was most likely strong. However, he wanted to be sure by grinding 10% of the barrier away before using resources again.

He did not know exactly what foundation was, but he knew that it could be messed up if you used too many resources, and you had to go a certain period of time without using resources before using them again in order to not disturb your foundation.

He knew it had something to do with energy in the resources clashing with your own inner energy later on if you used too many, but that was the limit of his knowledge.

Now, he went to find some resources of the water element that he could cultivate with. He obviously did not stop cultivating while doing so, and it ended up taking him a week to find another round of resources.

Then, he found a tree and sat down, cultivating. Using the resources, his speed was twice as fast, allowing him to go at a staggering 1% per day, which was an incredible speed.

He then cultivated for another twenty days with those resources, reaching 49.5% of the way through the barrier.

After another half day cultivating with water element resources, Su Tao had grinded through 50% of the barrier.

At this moment, Su Tao once again felt the black blood in his body go towards the bottleneck, seeping into it and through the barrier into the dantian, increasing his potential further. He was completely overjoyed when he sensed this, because this meant that he would be able to make much more progress every day.

When the process of merging was over, Su Tao was completely overjoyed to find that he could now cultivate at 1% per day. This was the speed he originally had when he didn't know about the cracks and cultivated without worrying about his limit.

He could now utilize half of his talent, which was incredible. This meant that half of the amount of Qi he could summon went into cultivating now.

When he started grinding the barrier to the silver rank, he was using his full talent, but it was only this fast due to a base limit that couldn't be passed even as he was cracking his bottleneck and damaging his dantian.

But now, Su Tao figured that if he used all the Qi he could summon, then he would be able to cultivate at 2% per day, which was the same as the city master's daughter. However, he obviously wouldn't do this since it would damage the bottleneck and the dantian.

But Su Tao found something after trying to cultivate with the resources. They had almost completely lost their effect. He found this weird, but after he thought about it, he was not surprised.

These resources were not of particularly high level, and their limit of help was probably to cultivate at 1% per day, which was now Su Tao's base speed. After all, these resources were of low level and did not contain nearly as much energy as something like the water moon lotus.

Su Tao figured that he might be able to absorb tons of these resources at the same time to boost his speed a bit, but he decided against this since he thought it might hurt his foundation. After all, he knew nothing about that.

As such, he then scattered the water elemental resources all around since he no longer needed them and didn't want to be tracked via them.

After that, he used the black blood to dissolve the aura of the resources on his entire body.

As this took the rest of the day, he just went to sleep after doing this.

Then, in the morning, Su Tao started to cultivate again. But he never let down his guard. He was still always watching his surroundings and making sure that he had no trackable aura.

Title in next chapter.