The Twin’s Progress

Empyrean Sun Sect….

Himora was practicing with a sword on top of a pavilion. 

She performed basic swords strikes over and over. 

Stab, swipe, thrust, chop, sweep. Stab, thrust, chop, sweep.

The weird thing was, she performed every move extremely slow, so slow that even the slowest slug or turtle could move ten times faster. Even while moving so slow, she was as steady as a lifeless lake in the spring time. 

She trained so much in the sword, she constantly entered the state of enlightenment. This was also due to her stainless mind.

She even reached the fabled realm of sword intent, and upon doing so she also reached the great success realm of the [Clear Heart Sword Art]. The benefit of reaching this level in her famous sword technique was the [Demon Hunting] Sword skill that came with the technique. 

If Horo knew she had sword intent in this world, that probably didn't even have such a concept, he would be extremely surprised and excited.

She even began working on a sword technique of her on, hence the ridiculously slow movements.

She also leveled up all of her skills by a lot of levels, and even evolved some skills. 

She made progress in her soul cultivation technique [ Elemental Spirit Technique ] but needed to decide what element to feed the technique to continue, she decided to wait until she activated the [Empyrean Sun Technique] because she knew it would give birth to special flames according to what Felix told her. 

She comprehended the technique completely, but never actually practiced it because she was being watched. She chose to keep it a secret from Felix, as she guessed he planned to use her to progress further in his technique by devouring her future Empyrean Sun. This was the same reason she was still in the foundation stage. 

Her Trial was the same as Horo's, she had to practice a main technique of this world. 

Her main growth was in her core. She has been constantly cultivating nonstop and even unlocked passive energy circulation similar to Horo. She was not far from reaching the golden core realm, the true golden core at that. Her core didn't follow the core progression path of azure moon, but weirdly enough her fairy, Myriad, had one that did.

Suddenly she activated her Advanced skill [Stainless Aura Zone] and [Sword Intent].

She sat in a lotus position and a loud crack sound was heard, only by her though. She was using those two skills to restrict everything from exiting her immediate area, which was a radius of 30 meters. It would take someone much much stronger than her to actively be scanning the area to discover what was going on, and they had no reason to. It would be a different story if it had anything to do with the Empyrean Sun Technique because every user of that technique could sense others use of it. 

The crack sound came from her core. It was cracking more and more, and as it did an extremely bright light tinged with gold was shining through the cracked core. The cracks spread and spread, until the cracked pieces fell off as if shedding, to reveal a beautiful, daimond like, transparent core tinged with gold. When this happened, her body began floating while in the lotus position. 

As the energy from this new "True Golden Core" spread throughout her body every cell, phenomena, Myriad, and even her weak soul fed on it. She was the first to completely break the core progression scale in Azure Moon, Skipping the blue and purple core to reach the legendary gold core. This alone made her grow beyond any one below the lord stage. 

She even gained the ability of flight, she knew from Crystal that in the world of cultivation this was granted to one who reached the golden core realm. 

Suddenly when she opened her eyes she was….. In Space. 

All she saw was multiple beautiful constellations, things she only ever saw through the memories of her inherited module. Suddenly a crack appeared in the space above her, revealing a pitch black void. After a couple of breaths, flames so hot they were white, spilled from the crack and swallowed her whole. 

....

Horo was in a well secured training room located in a special building within the Pure Cloud Palace. 

He had no upper garments or clothes covering his chest. There was white runes forged from real clouds moving on his chest as if they were alive. It took Horo nearly two months to forge these runes successfully, He ran into multiple problems but eventually completed them with advice from Elder May. Then he had trouble putting them in the exact order and connecting them accordingly, while trying to imbue the signature aspect or aspects of his choosing, into them simultaneously to form the his true cloud mark. 

He kept having trouble and kept trying to imbue the aspect he decided on, which was karma, but it was done to no avail. 

Before he could try one last time, the Tree of Tragedy sent in the purest negative energy it could muster directly into the runes, unbeknownst to Horo. 

Before he knew it, an endless amount of clouds began to enter a cloud mark that was forming on his chest, only this cloud mark wasn't white but pitch black as if it was a black hole. 

Before he could look down and inspect the picture black mark, his vision went pitch black.