A few months later, about one year before the summit, Yasenia was cross-legged in her cultivation room, practicing her Spiritual Path.
Thanks to what happened during the creation of her Body Path technique, she received a boost to her cultivation, which pushed her to be close to the half-step.
Hence, after working hard, she finally reached the limits of the ninth level of the Unification Realm.
The progress was quick, and the only thing left was to understand how to break through.
For the Half-step of the Unification Realm, what a cultivator needed to do was spiritualize their dantian. It was the preparation step for the next realm.
Moving energy around her body and feeling the saturation and inability to improve her strength further, Yasenia began attacking the bottleneck while meditating about it.
'Spiritualize the Dantian… The Dantian is the organ that creates, absorbs, stores, transforms, and releases the energy around the body via meridians. It is an organ three fingers-width below the navel. For women, it is very close to the position of the uterus.'
Yasenia placed the fingers horizontally right below her belly button and pressed them; she could feel the pressure deeply, moving her inner organs gently and pushing against the uterus and Dantian. 'Hm… How can I move the Dantian into my soul? The theory says that you need to try to materialize the soul and surround it, creating channels to connect the physical meridians with the soul's Dantian.'
'This step is something that only happens in the Spiritual Path. Even the Soul Path doesn't do something like this.'
Yasenia pondered. 'But why? Shouldn't the Soul Path also do this?' It was a common question for those who studied both paths. 'From what I read, Soul Cultivators don't move the Dantian because they need nourishment for their relatively weaker bodies, and having a physical dantian helps. Then, Body Cultivators don't focus on the soul as much, so a similar situation occurs. Only Spiritual Cultivators, who are all-rounders, chose to do this step so that there is a tighter connection between soul and body.'
Yasenia accepted the explanation, even if it appeared a bit loose. After all, wouldn't the other two paths also benefit from connecting the soul and body?
However, after revising the information once more in-depth, she realized that she had forgotten one thing. 'Balance. All things between Heaven and Earth need to be balanced so that there aren't problems. Even if both the other methods are extreme paths that focus on one thing only, they need their bodies to stay balanced so that they don't crumble. The Dantian is a perfect anchor for that. Meanwhile, spiritual cultivators always keep a good balance between everything, so instead of an anchor, they need a connection.'
Yasenia nodded, convinced.
Having caught the essence of this step, she restarted her efforts while using the index, middle, and ring fingers of both hands to press on the Dantian. 'Let's start slowly. I've already informed my dears so that I can take my time.'
First, she cut off all her senses toward the outside and even made her spiritual sense disappear.
After closing her eyes, her other senses started to sharpen. Then, using her energy, she cut off her sense of hearing for outside sounds and her sense of taste, she dimmed her skin's sense of touch, and she also closed her sense of smell.
Her body slowly lost connection with the outside, leaving only herself in her mind.
This was the main reason why cultivators needed a safe space to practice. Now, even a mortal would be able to sneak up on Yasenia. Still, the dragoness was calm, her heart beating at a constant rhythm.
The feeling of her blood moving, her energy gently rotating around her, and slow and deep breathing further relaxed her mind.
After two minutes, all her senses were fully internalized, and she disconnected from the outside World.
Reaching this state in such a short time was nothing but miraculous, as an average cultivator of her level would need about an hour or so to reach her current concentration level.
Then, she began practicing the energy movements of [Convergence of the Celestial Bodies] to push against the bottleneck.
One rotation, two rotations…
Slowly, Yasenia began gathering the required energy to move her soul and spiritualize the dantian.
Not knowing how long it had gone by, Yasenia finally gathered enough energy inside of her.
Then, her will connected with her soul, and she slowly and gently began materializing it around her fingertips, touching the flesh on top of the Dantian.
An ethereal and transparent energy seeped inside her and reached the Dantian. With utmost care and patience, the dragoness continued to summon her Soul inside her body.
Thanks to the previous steps in the Unification Realm, body, and soul were already connected as one, and the only thing left was this last step.
As said before, to connect all mind, body, soul, and Dantian, the cultivator first needed to connect everything else, and then, when spiritualizing the Dantian, because of the previous connection made, everything would click into place like the final puzzle piece.
Time went by, and after constant efforts, Yasenia manifested 100% of her soul and concentrated it around the Dantian. Following that, she moved the previously gathered energy and surrounded the Dantian and the main Meridians connected with it.
As energy surrounded the organ, the soul around it began fusing with it. However, if done this way, the soul would be the one materialized instead of the opposite. Hence, when the process was about to end, Yasenia reversed the flow, creating a chain reaction.
This reaction created an enormous fluctuation of energy that spread all around the sect.
Every creature with a fourth realm strength and above turned their heads simultaneously toward Yasenia's cultivation cave.
Meanwhile, Yasenia controlled every minute energy strand and saw how the organ became blurry, slowly melding into her soul, together with the end strands of the meridians connecting to it.
Spreading her energy thinner along the meridians to make them go from fully spiritualized to physical in a gradual manner, Yasenia finally managed to reach the final step.
The remaining energy left in her began speeding up, moving across her entire body at high speeds, and the meridians around her entire body tensed as they were all filled with it.
When she filled her entire body with energy, Yasenia used her entire being and compressed everything.
Every single inch of her body tensed, and all the energy got squished, creating a higher concentrated energy flow. As she pressed, the sound of an invisible barrier shattering sounded inside Yasenia's head, and an enormous surge that came from her Dantian area spread all around her body.
The sturdy floor around Yasenia cracked from the pressure she emitted as torrents of energy rushed into her cultivation room from the outside.
The waves of energy were absorbed by her ravenously, nourishing herself and constantly increasing her strength.
The vitality of her cells, her marrow, her organs, everything was enveloped in enormous quantities of energy, and she finally broke through.
As if all the energy concentrated in her couldn't hold on anymore, Yasenia opened her closed eyes, revealing a pair of glowing golden eyes, and her aura exploded.
BOOOM!
The entire mountain quaked as a monstrous presence descended on all beings. The weaker ones couldn't help but hold their breaths, afraid of angering the creature by releasing such terrifying pressure.
The dragoness slowly and elegantly stood up, pushing her body up with her tail, and she gently slid one foot forward, lightly bending her knees.
With one arm stretched forward and the other bent and close to her body, she prepared to punch forward. Yasenia used her entire strength and moved.
Her clenched fist harshly compressed the air before it. Rotating her waist in perfect synchrony, all her muscles worked in harmony, beautifully completing the motion.
BANG!
The air before Yasenia exploded as if an enormous explosion had occurred, making her hair wave behind her together with her dress and creating a forward shockwave that slammed on the wall more than a kilometer ahead, denting it very lightly.
Yasenia maintained her position, taking in all the information, and her spiritual sense spread outward.
100 meters… 300 meters… 800 meters… 1200 meters…
It pushed outward exponentially faster, and it finally stopped at 4000 meters or four kilometers.
Compared to her previous 1000 meters, the difference was enormous.
Yasenia returned to a relaxed position, her tail gently swishing behind her, and she smirked. "Good."
Her increase of strength when she reached the 10th level of the Fusion Core beast had been very large. However, the jump from level nine to half-step of the Unification Realm was even bigger.
Right now, Yasenia was confident in fighting ten of her previous selves without becoming tired. She smiled wryly. "If I had broken through before my tribulation, I wouldn't have needed to lose that life-saving treasure. I didn't expect the increase in strength to be so high. Were the tribulation clouds taking into account my growth?"
Curious, she retrieved [Draconic Sword] and unleashed [Draconic Sunrise].
BOOM!
A massive heat wave followed a golden flash, smashing against the recovered wall in the distance and creating a large gash.
Yasenia widened her eyes momentarily and muttered. "I couldn't even scratch that wall in the past from here…"
You must remember that the stronger someone is, the bigger the difference between levels and realms.
While a cultivator got, let's say, a 3x strength increase after breaking through, Yasenia's 3x and an average cultivator's 3x were not the same.
From 3 to 9 is not the same as from 30 to 90.
Yasenia pondered and walked outside her cultivation room, calling Tengliu. "Come, I want to spar with you."
Tengliu was relaxing as she moved with ethereal grace and beauty in one of the cultivation areas, prepared for the leaders who joined the Astral Sky Alliance. When she heard that, her silver eyebrows raised, her movements not stopping. "Really? You couldn't last 5 seconds one the last time we fought."
Yasenia smiled. "Just come."
Tengliu laughed. "Sure. I'll be there. I can't lose a chance to be together with little Yasenia~."
Yasenia used her movement technique, and she pierced through the sect like a beam of light, appearing in the fighting arena prepared for high-level cultivators.
Tatyana, who had been extending her spiritual sense around Yasenia's cultivation room, felt surprised. 'So fast?' Then, she burst into laughter. 'Maybe reaching the strength limit of this World will be much easier for Little Treasure than I thought.'
Yasenia arrived at the arena, and while she used her movement technique, many ideas on how to continue to explore this technique appeared in her mind. As one of the strongest movement techniques in the Sky Continent, specially prepared by Tatyana for herself, it naturally didn't end in just [Pegasus Gallop].
There were many levels for it, each as strong, if not stronger, than the most basic acceleration burst called [Pegasus Gallop].
[Pegasus Gallop] was the first sky, and there were another 8, with a total of 9 Techniques within the Skill.
For now, though, Yasenia could only use the first one. However, after this breakthrough, she could feel that unlocking the second sky, called [Ursa's Grasp], was a matter of time.
By names they were called like this: [First Sky: Pegasus Gallop], [Second Sky: Ursa's Grasp], [Third Sky: Orion's Shield], [Fourth Sky: Lyra's Harmony], [Fifth Sky: Aquarius's Rain], [Sixth Sky: Draco's Descent], [Seventh Sky: Artemis's Arrow], [Eight Sky: Andromeda's Embrace], and finally, [Ninth Sky: Ara's Awakening].
Each had different and complex effects, drawing upon the mysterious power of the stars and allowing a cultivator's movement to create many phenomena.
From what she had read about the technique, the number of stars didn't directly represent the number of stars in the sky, but the complexity. Each extra star was a step increase in difficulty.
More or less, each constellation had a certain number of "steps" and "stars" that needed to be summoned. For example, Pegasus needs 14 stars to be wholly summoned, showing that Yasenia has perfect control over it.
Ursa was a simple seven-star sky, and the others went like this. Orion used 19 stars, Lyra 27 stars, Aquarius 38 stars, Draco 46 stars, Artemis 61 stars, Andromeda 86 stars, and Ara 99 stars.
Then, Yasenia looked at the technique and saw that there was still some hidden knowledge that she couldn't look at. However, she didn't bother much about it.