Body Cultivation.

After he woke up, he didn't know what time it was, but he guessed it was far closer to noon than it was to sunrise. An at this moment he had more pressing concerns, he was cold, he was hungry, he was thirsty, and he had to pee. Of those four concerns, needing to pee was the most bothersome. Because tombs don't have bathrooms, and it meant he would have to get fully dressed and exit the tomb to pee on a tree in the cold air. 

Getting dressed wasn't hard he learned from the first time he was here and packed several sets of clothes before he left home. This time he wouldn't leave the tomb as a gross fowl smelling abomination no one wanted to get within a mile of. 

After getting dressed he popped a ration ball into his mouth and immediately looked ill. Ration balls were made for martial artists to eat on missions, they had everything needed to make a person feel full and energized for most of the day but tasted like the arm pit of a sweaty man who hadn't bathed for a week. This younger body of his had many advantages, but it lacked his old self's tolerances for pain, differences of hot and cold, and ability to eat anything and everything no matter the taste. 

By the time he had reached the outer door of the tomb he no longer looked sick. The outer door shuts itself after ten minutes of being opened and is easy to open from the inside but limits the time he could spend outside without bringing his dagger, and he had to stay within fifty feet of the tomb unless he used the same trick he used to get there or could control the ghosts of the defensive array.

Ten seconds, he had to walk through the tomb and up ten flights of stairs to take a ten second pee, then back down ten flights of stairs and back through the tomb. He always found it a waste of time. But making a mess in the inheritance room wasn't something he wanted to do since he was planning to stay there for the next several days.

Xavier stripped off his clothes when he returned to the inheritance room. He should have done it yesterday before he started but got caught up in thinking about how things were going to change now that he started forty years earlier than last time and forgot. While what he was planning to do wasn't going to be as bad as yesterday, he only owned a few sets of clothes and didn't want to make them all stink before he left.

Today he was going to use one of the inheritances from the other two branches of the Soul Controlling Sect, the body cultivator branch. It used soul energy to restructure the physical body, his bones would break and quickly heal, his muscles would rip and tear before quickly mending themselves. This process would not be as painful as yesterday, but it would far from pleasant. The first stage of body cultivation would take most of the day and be the longest till he broke through to Foundation Establishment and returned to the sect on the mainland.

The rainbow-mist entered his body and the cold feeling it gave numbed his body so when his bones broke and his muscles tore, it was a dull aching pain instead of an extremely painful experience. The first bone to break was his upper right arm, it felt like he had been hit in the arm hard. The first muscle to tear was in his middle-left toe and although it was healed almost instantaneously, it still hurt. The longer he cultivated the quicker his bones broke, after an hour his breaking bones sounded like fire popped popcorn. 

Yesterday he was in so much pain he wanted to scream, today the pain was far more dulled, but it made him want to vomit. Each bone boke and each muscle tore dozens or hundreds of times only to be repaired within moments with the pure soul energy, slowly transforming the damaged areas and its surroundings into something far more than what it was.

Those of the sect's body cultivating branch all went through this process but being within the sect they had pills and elixirs that made it painless or even pleasurable. They become faster, stronger, and far harder to kill. He had seen body cultivators walk through barrages of spells without injury and tear apart their enemies with their bare hands. He had even seen one of them regrow and arm within minutes. Depending on how far he wanted to go, he could alter his body to become less human and more... monstrous. There were plenty of body cultivators with extra arms, extra eyes, fangs, or bones spikes all over there body. Then there were those who transformed parts or their entire bodies to resemble monsters.

The most radical transformation Xaiver did to his body was restructure one of his eyes after he lost the other in battle to an attack he couldn't see. His restructured eye did give him an ominous look, but the Soul Controlling Sect wasn't filled with people that believed in justice and kindness, it was a place filled with the cruel and vicious. Xavier knew that some of the evilest people in the sect didn't necessarily look like monsters, some of them looked very normal and would massacre an entire town just for fun.

The most painful bone breaks in his skull, and the first several times it happened he almost became distracted enough to stop cultivating. Things like this were best done all at once for the most effectiveness at the beginning. 

The popping noise increased to the point it was hard to tell the individual pops before beginning to slow down. Well into the night the last pop sounded from his body. It was done and as much as Xavier would like to put his clothes on and climb into his cloak, he couldn't move his body. He had just spent the day traumatizing his body, and it refused to do as he asked. The best he could do was slightly lean back and let gravity pull him into laying down on the floor.

The cool stone of the floor felt good on his body. He wanted to fall asleep like he did last night, but the dull aching of his entire body kept that from happening. Forcing him to stare up at the ceiling, and his thoughts drifted into thinking about had completed the first step of body cultivating. But he knew that this first step was the first of ten and the other nine would feel like his bones and muscles were being stretched beyond what they could endure while being bent in ways they shouldn't be. Then after he broke through to the Foundation Establishment stage, he would have to cultivate the next stage of body cultivation. His skin would feel like it was on fire and his insides would feel like they were being ripped apart. 

Xavier really didn't like to cause himself unnecessary pain and misery, he wasn't like those freaks that would practice those cultivation techniques that seemed more like torture techniques and could only be practiced by those who love pain. Transforming his body and body cultivation were the closest to that he inflicted on himself on purpose. 

The last thoughts he had before finally getting to sleep was about him starting to cultivate tomorrow now that his foundations had been set and the progress he would see.