"...and that's about it," Emma said before she took a deep breath. She had just finished explaining the basics of cultivation to me.
"Now, be a good little boy, pick out a beginner cultivation method, and reach the first Stage of the Saturation Realm. Without at least that level of strength, you'd just be tempting death if you went out on the field to hunt Demonic Beasts," Emma concluded before she left me alone in the compound.
It'd been a couple hours and both Ji and Wattson had left to hunt for the day. Emma would be joining them shortly while I picked out from the very limited selection of cultivation methods in the Sect's archives.
Apparently, due to the nascent state of the Harbinger Sect, the only cultivation methods available were "ancient" and as basic as can be. They were the most widespread and comprehensive methods that anyone of any status could pick up for dirt cheap. But that was fine for me.
"Let's see, here," I mumbled as I skimmed over the introduction of a couple books.
"Seizing Size Sutra: Size is power, so follow in the steps of the Towering Wrath Buddha and seize your own heavenly body!"
"Lithe Perfection Method: Strive for speed, for speed is everything! Speed is strength, speed is defense, speed is the ultimate!"
"Path of the Archfiend: The slow but certain method to invincible godly power! Focus on one's foundation and both Immortality and understanding will come with time."
'I'm not sure why everyone is so disdainful of these cultivation methods,' I hummed in thought as I continued reading. 'From what Emma told me, cultivation methods have caps with regards to how far a person can cultivate them, but all of these so-called beginner methods insinuate on being able to take people to the Immortal Realm.'
Resolving to ask her about it the next time we meet, I put the book I was reading down and picked up the Path of the Archfiend Cultivation Method. It's introduction and gaudy name had impressed me the most out of the dozen or so books I'd checked, so I opted to keep reading a bit more before deciding whether or not to pick it.
"...Fools of man have tried time and time again to test the heavens by expediting the process of cultivation. It leaves them unprepared, immature, and far too vulnerable at the time of their tribulation. Thus, I created this cultivation method to ensure perfection, to guarantee success for even the lowliest of talents..."
Wow, sounds like the author doesn't care much for other cultivation methods.
"...I devised the method to emulate the ever-perfect Deva and Shural Archfiends. Those heavenly demons are perfect for a reason and it has everything to do with their ridiculously long incubation times. Of course, humans would die long before even a tenth of the time needed to incubate an Archfiend came to pass. But, then again, we are more malleable and adaptable..."
Whoa, did this guy become an Immortal? How else could he have lived long enough to find out how long these Archfiend things take to incubate? Whatever the case, this book had the totality of my attention.
"...And so, the process starts with the saturation of energy in one's body. The Saturation Realm, as it has been unanimously accepted by the cultivation community, follows the rigorous process of priming the million million bodies we all hold within ourselves with the Heavenly Air that permeates all of creation.
"All cultivation methods use this Heavenly Air for the same purpose, but our Path of the Archfiend values completion above all else. Quality and quantity of total Heavenly Air used are entirely negligible, for only the number of primed bodies within us dictates the success of our cultivation in this Realm."
Uh… the more I read, the more I think these "bodies" the book mentions is an archaic form of describing cells.
"... And at Grand Completion, the Tenth Stage of the Saturation Realm, over two dozen million million bodies will have been primed. Then and only then, can a true practitioner of the Path of the Archfiend advance onto the Second Realm..."
Yeah, that sounds about right. An adult human has thirty trillion cells.
"Now to start, I have to close my eyes and meditate… like this?" I mumbled to myself as I tried to emulate the cultivation method's description of proper cultivation.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in… Hold… Breathe out… Hold…
As my heart rate slowed, I closed my eyes and felt like my hearing was expanding. The silence of the compound was paradoxically pounding in my ears from how loud it felt. It was unsettling, to put it mildly.
Eventually, though, I relaxed and subconsciously released my Umbra Spirit when I let out the breath I'd been holding.
Ztztztztz…
A low buzzing caught me off guard as I felt my Nameless Umbra Spirit spread around in a meter about me, picking up and feeling all the dust particles in the air. Only… apart from dust, I could distinctly tell my Umbra Spirit was interacting with the fabled Heavenly Air that somehow existed everywhere.
Oh? I could actually use the dust my Umbra Spirit carried to push Heavenly Air? That seemed useful, so I continued breathing in the rhythmic pattern described in the book while trying to make use of my apparently not-so-useless Umbra Spirit.
"Gah!" I breathed in a bit of the dust, since my control with supernatural elements was unsurprisingly horrible. This was practically the first time I tried to do something more than make dust float in front of me.
But, apparently, the mistake of breathing in dust, turned out to be a blessing in disguise as I could still feel and control it while it was inside my body.
Now, I don't know if it is because my body has Affinity with Dust due to my Umbra Spirit, or if everyone's body in the weird world are just ultra resilient, but the dust that was now inside me was neither uncomfortable nor distressing. It actually felt quite nice as it squeezed and slipped all over the place; through organs and cel—
"Holy… These dust particles can actually fit between my cells? Wait a second..."
I drove the meager specks of dust inside me over to my lungs. There, through some miracle, I could actually feel through the dust which of my cells had already started getting primed with Heavenly Air.
Naturally, it would spread from my lungs to the rest of my body. However, according to the text I had read, people weren't normally capable of actually knowing to such a degree how well their cultivation was going. I could literally probe through every single cell, but, more impressively…
A speck of dust I'd been controlling collided with a seperate speck of Heavenly Air and pushed it into entering one of my unprimed lung cells…
"This… this has got to be cheating," I grinned to myself as I opened my eyes and scanned the room for more dust to consume.
Given the shabby state of the Harbinger Sect compound, there was no shortage of dust for me to make use of. In fact, I'm sure Ji and the others would be happy to see the place a smidge cleaner.
So, I took it upon myself to temporarily stop my cultivation and walk around the room with my Umbra Spirit active to pick up all the dust. A minute or so later, I sat back down with a hazy mist of gray hovering around me.
I closed my eyes, slightly apprehensive of the potential negative consequences of ingesting more dust into my body, before I threw caution to the wind and resumed my cultivation. I breathed in about a third of the total dust I collected, while leaving the rest outside to push more Heavenly Air in my direction.
"This… It really does feel like cheating," I mused to myself as I thought back to the amount of time the Path of the Archfiend estimated it's practitioners would take to complete each Stage in the first Realm.
To reach the first Stage, I'd need to prime around a billion cells, which sounded like a lot until you considered that a person breathes in over two sextillion molecules of air every time they take a breath. Of course, Heavenly Air and regular air aren't exactly equal for one to one comparisons.
For one, I could actually feel my dust interact with Heavenly Air and not regular air. But, the point stands, as it leaves Heavenly Air comparable to dust, which I'm guessing a person can breathe a surprising amount of, over the course of a day.
That said, I don't think it'll even take a full day to reach the first Stage at the rate I'm going; nevermind a full week. Moreover, if I continued to practice using my Umbra Spirit for this, it would only get easier.
It's only been a couple hours since I started and already I can feel my control, my efficiency… the range of my Umbra Spirit slightly increase. If I'm lucky, I might even get to surprise the others when they come back; whenever that is...