After taking a long, freezing bath in the lake, Su Wen finally felt his mind clear. The chaos of the day, the teasing from Grandma, the shock on Du Yue's face, and the Little Sparrow's relentless chirping all washed away with the cold water.
He sat on a smooth rock at the lake's edge, drying his hair with a towel and watching the ripples settle across the water. Evening clouds reflected faintly on the surface, and the air was calm.
It was time to think about his own cultivation. He closed his eyes, focusing inward.
Right now, he was at the peak of Qi Refinement. One small step more and he could attempt the breakthrough to Foundation Establishment, if he prepared properly.
In this world, there are three distinct paths to immortality: the Body, the Spirit, and the Soul.
Most cultivators followed the Spirit Path.
This path relies on refining and storing the Spiritual Qi of Heaven and Earth within the dantian, turning that energy into a controlled cycle through one's meridians. A proper cultivation technique is needed, one mistake, and the qi would backlash, damaging the meridians instead of strengthening them.
Spirit cultivators use the spiritual qi stored in their dantian to reinforce both their body and soul, just enough to handle the pressure of the high density spiritual qi stored in their body.
But even so, their tempered bodies are nothing compared to true body cultivators, and their souls are far from reaching the heights of soul cultivators.
The Soul Path is… dangerous.
Soul cultivators refines the Heaven and Earth qi into Soul Qi, storing it directly into their consciousness. This strengthens their soul, giving them terrifying soul attack abilities, but their physical bodies will be incredibly fragile in the early stages.
Later on, when their soul becomes powerful enough, they can abandon their physical body altogether and shape a new, illusory one purely from the soul power.
However, surviving long enough to reach that stage was another matter entirely.
Lastly, the Body Path.
Straightforward in theory, monstrously difficult in practice. Body cultivators refine the spiritual energy into Vital Qi, which is stored in their heart, using it to break the natural limits of the mortal body. Their strength in close combat is monstrous, when it comes to fists, blades, and brute force, they are unmatched. But their soul power is weak, so weak that a skilled soul cultivator can knock them unconscious without touching them. Formations and long-range techniques are almost unusable for them, simply because they lack the soul strength to control them.
Still, body cultivators aren't helpless. They use Vital Qi to shield their souls and Soul cultivators use Soul Qi to reinforce their fragile bodies.
In real combat, the balance between them comes down to experience, talent, law comprehension, reaction speed, and countless tiny factors.
Spirit cultivators, meanwhile, walks the balanced road, manipulating the spiritual qi with techniques, strengthening body and soul together, though never to the extreme mastery of the other two paths.
Their advantage is control, flexibility and balance.
However, Su Wen's situation was completely different. The reason he was still in the Qi Refinement Realm wasn't because he lacked talent, or because he didn't cultivate hard enough.
It was because he was cultivating all three paths at the same time: Body, Soul, and Spirit, and pushing each of them to the absolute extreme.
Cultivating even one path required absurd amounts of resources. Cultivating all three simultaneously was something only lunatics or monsters would attempt. But Su Wen never cared. If he wanted, he could've broken through to Foundation Establishment at age fifteen. Instead, he chose the difficult road.
The first three realms were the foundation for the entire immortal path. If that foundation was weak, the future would collapse like sand. So Su Wen didn't care if his cultivation was slow or if others raced ahead of him. He walked his own path, on his own terms, stubborn, unbending, and completely uninterested in comparing himself to anyone else.
He had been at the peak of Qi Refinement for a whole year now, not because he couldn't break through, but because he was tempering his foundation to perfection. Whether people mocked him or pitied him didn't matter. The journey to immortality was something a person ultimately walked alone. Unless you were the young master of some major clan who needed quick power to survive, rushing ahead was pointless.
Except for his teachers at the academy, no one knew the truth about his cultivation.
To everyone else, he was a 'late bloomer,' a 'waste, a 'nobody.'
Su Wen found that convenient. The less people paid attention to him, the less they would bother him. At the end of the day, Su Wen didn't want fame, glory, or recognition.
He just wanted to enjoy his life quietly, without a single care in the world.
Su Wen's current soul cultivation was at the Instinct Realm, a stage where one could vaguely sense danger, sharpen intuition, and use a faint form of Mental Sense. His next breakthrough would take him to the Soul Awakening Realm, the soul-cultivation equivalent of the Foundation Establishment stage for spiritual cultivators.
Once he reaches the Soul Awakening Realm, he will have strengthened consciousness and will awaken the unconscious Pure Soul, which resided on the forehead between the eyebrows and will allow him to enhance his Mental Sense into Soul Sense. His perception, awareness, and mental strength would rise to a completely different level.
The body cultivation path, however, didn't follow a clean realm-based system in the early stages. It was all pain, patience, and refinement.
He had to temper his body layer by layer: Skin & Muscles, Bones, Blood & Organs, Heart and Brain.
Once completed, his physical strength would rival that of a Peak-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator. Refining the Brain strengthened the pure soul's vessel, allowing the consciousness to grow stronger. Refining the Heart allowed one to store Vital Qi, just like how spiritual cultivators stored Spiritual Qi in their dantian.
As for the Spirit Path, breaking through from Qi Refinement to Foundation Establishment required condensing the gaseous Spiritual Qi inside the dantian into liquid form. Once the liquid sea formed, the cultivator's control over qi increased dramatically, allowing their strength to take a huge leap.