The instant An Fei's consciousness resurfaced from its unusual slumber, a dull headache slammed directly onto the young girl's mind.
The young girl squeezed her eyes in agony, her hands reaching upwards to tenderly massage her temples.
Her head felt as if it were on the verge of splitting apart, and a faint metallic and raucous odor drifted into her nose, causing her eyes to water in pain.
The combination of the strange but perplexing odor and the piercing headache forced the young girl to rouse from her daze, her body lurching forwards to escape the miserable situation.
When An Fei surmised that her position was no longer unstable, she removed her hands from her temples and opened her eyes.
As she hoped, she was in the Sanctum, nestled deeply within the comfortable blankets of the boudoir.
The sheen of dull mirrors waved towards her countenance from numerous angles, faintly obscured by the thin drooping bedcurtains.
She… was in the Sanctum, but perhaps not in the right circumstance.
The bedsheets seemed to have… taken on an unusual filament of scarlet dye on its surface.
The comfortable fabric had congealed and dried to each other, and the uncomfortable odor struck An Fei's nose for the second time.
A faint, metallic odor with the tinge of rust and humid, and slightly… rancid, almost with a fishy tinge.
The young girl raised her hands to cover her mouth, her dazzling countenance displaying a horrified expression.
"…blood…" An Fei whispered, her gaze roaming throughout the blood-soaked bedsheets with a flinching gaze.
"There's too much blood… what happened while I was in that dream?"
The blankets were thoroughly soaked with dense blood, the scarlet hue imbued directly into the threads of the fabric.
When An Fei explored the now-soiled sheets with probatory fingers, the young girl could feel some moist, cool, and fleshy material hidden among the sheets.
"AH!?"
The young girl screeched in terror, leaping directly out of the bed to fall onto the crystalline ground. An Fei unsteadily rose to her feet, only to have her expression morph once again.
Her body… didn't seem to feel quite right.
When she hurriedly checked for her reflection in a nearby mirror, the young girl discovered that her stature and appearance had not changed since her mysterious dream of the infinite void.
Her countenance retained its feeble appearance, delicate and tender to the tolerable limits of flesh.
She was still the young girl whose countenance could terrify even herself. It was just that… An Fei felt that her body was different.
Just yesterday, her body did not possess an exuberant vitality that surged through her blood vessels, energizing her by numerous folds.
Just from her leap, An Fei had noticed that her physique had improved by a massive margin, a realm unattainable by her constantly repeated exercise routines.
Her strength, speed, and physical ability… all seemed to have exceeded the tolerable limits of a human being. With each breath, a refreshing surge swept through her meridians, cleansing her turbid consciousness and allowing her agitated heart to regain its breath.
"What's… going on?" the young girl stared at her hands, her lips pursed in thought.
"The bedsheets are soaked with blood… and my physique improved by such a margin?"
The young girl's mouth hung slightly open as her gaze twisted and turned around the boudoir, observing her surroundings with a tinge of suspicion.
Other than the catastrophic disaster on the surface of the bed, the bedchamber truly had not changed a single bit.
The mirrors were in the right orientations and positions, and the linen coat hung from the back end of a chair, causally tossed onto the piece of furniture as though a dead rag.
Without any other choice, An Fei slumped into the chair, resting her back against the linen coat as she tapped her chin.
The young girl closed her eyes, attempting to visualize the faithful mental projection of her body.
Her consciousness groaned as it conjured a realistic depiction of the bones, tissue, fluids, and internal components of her body, assembling them one component at a time.
Faint threads of spiritual essence assisted her mind in exerting to establish the visualization of the internal structure of her physique, accentuating the visual clarity and focus many times over.
The young girl dove deep into her sea of perception, her consciousness reviewing each region of her body with great detail and interest.
The heart, brain, inner organs, and even the tiny glands failed to escape her notice, placed under divine scrutiny in the form of a piercing glare.
"Ah…"
Sure enough, the mental visualization of her body immediately presented to An Fei the crux of her dilemma.
Within the internal structures of her body that revealed a dazzling golden radiance following the baptism of spiritual essence obtained from the Sanctum, were eight different colored branches.
The branches twisted and expanded throughout her entire body, constructing a dense network that connected the entirety of her meridians into a single, unified mechanism.
Furthermore, the frequencies of fluctuation in the eight channels' radiance differed from that of the rest of the structures in her body, garnering the young girl's interest in a manner of seconds.
Upon close examination, An Fei could only conclude that her meridians had changed in an inexplicable, yet outrageous way.
The eight meridians that differed from the rest appeared to resemble not that of a standard system of human meridians, but that of… living animals.
The pulses were sometimes even, other times odd – akin to the pace of breathing in a human body.
Furthermore, with each passing of time, An Fei discovered that the eight unique channels distributed colored light throughout her meridians and blood vessels, introducing a light hue of color into the golden sea.
At the same time the visualization presented to her the fluctuation, the young girl could feel a faint energy course through her body.
The sensation incurred from the mysterious energy flowing through her cells was rejuvenating, almost as if she was receiving a supreme massage.
A faint warmth not unlike that generated from spiritual essence could be felt throbbing in her body, and An Fei could feel eight different whispers tug at her heart.
To relax and laze around, to work oneself into a frenzy, to seek passionate interaction, to squeeze and wring a person's vitality out of their body, to seek physical nourishment…
"…go away."
The whispers were exceedingly subtle, causing An Fei to doubt that she had heard them in the first place. Furthermore, with just her verbal dissent, the whispers had ceased, eight different flavors of warmth tickling her heart from all directions.
An Fei sighed in resignation, standing from the wooden chair and stretching her limbs.
With a sullen expression gracing her countenance, the young girl marched towards the bed, wrenching forth a pile of bedsheets and blankets that had been soiled with her own blood and meridians…
–
"Fifteen pillars of Foundation Establishment of mortal cultivation…" a weary voice reverberated in a platform of sky-blue crystal.
The speaker was a young girl no more than the age of fourteen years old, and she read from a book larger than her own torso.
The young girl was bathed from a golden radiance that emanated from the floor, illuminating her vicinity to generate a dim, comfortable atmosphere.
"Pillars of mortal cultivation establish the doctrine in which the worldly spiritual qi circulates throughout the practitioner's body. In the realm of Foundation Establishment, a practitioner designates fifteen distinct meridians to serve as the body's primary reserves of spiritual essence…"
Crunch!
An Fei read in a dull voice, her hands rhythmically procuring a shred of mixed vegetable from a bowl seated directly next to her lap. The young girl chewed on a piece of sliced carrot, her countenance beaming with bliss as a tantalizing flavor struck her delicate tongue.
Mm.
Tasty indeed, as expected of the Sanctum's superb ingredients.
"Meridians selected to serve as the primary reserves of spiritual essence must be the most compatible with the practitioner's physique," the young girl read.
"The accumulated spiritual essence is stored in liquid form within the tubular structures, establishing an unceasing flow throughout the body. Many mortal cultivation techniques endow the utility of the dantian as the primary module of storage… but is neither efficient nor safe in the practice of mortal cultivation."
An Fei carefully set down the book onto the crystalline ground after reading the passage. Drawing her knees to her chest, the young girl leaned against the side of the bed, her head lowered in thought.
The mortal cultivation's Foundation Establishment possessed fifteen pillars… fifteen pillars.
Each pillar in a realm of mortal cultivation represented a primary element; a node that served as the driving impetus to advance a practitioner's cultivation.
The advancement in the number of pillars accentuated within a realm of cultivation represented the practitioner's general strength and their abilities.
For example, the Foundation Establishment Realm was divided into three general categories obtained by achieving five pillars each: early, middle, and late…
An Fei's head suddenly shot up, the pair of scarlet irises revealing a discerning look of surprise.
The visualization of her body had revealed eight abnormalities within the complex system of meridians.
If those eight meridians represented a pillar in the realm of Foundation Establishment…
Heavens!
Did she leap from the fourth pillar of Body Tempering to the middle stages of the Foundation Establishment Realm without becoming aware of it!?
When did that happen?