After the dragoness got Soluna's hint, she walked out to speak with the girls. It didn't take long to gather everyone.
Yasenia sat on one of the couches with Aurelia between her legs, Dawn and Skye at her sides, and Katarina perched on her shoulders. The phoenix dragon would sometimes lower her head to playfully bite Yasenia's hair.
Kali asked while caressing Dianna's fur. "What's wrong?"
Yasenia smiled. "I finally discovered how to break through. Well, it was thanks to Soluna pointing out the obvious."
Evelyn raised an eyebrow. "So, what's the answer?"
The dragoness laughed, a bit embarrassed. "I was trying to convert everything at once, but that didn't work because of the specialness of my Dantian. So, I'll just do it slowly. This should work, right?"
Tatyana laughed while caressing Estrella's hair. "You finally realized." Tatyana clicked her tongue. "I lost a bet because of your dorkiness, love."
Yasenia blinked and saw Mirrory appearing with a victorious grin. "I won~. Intelligent people are sometimes easily predicted."
The dragoness laughed. "You actually made a bet? What's the content?"
Tatyana sighed. "I'll let Mirrory take a tour around my Underworld Empire unimpeded."
Yasenia chuckled. "What if you won?"
Tatyana sighed longer. "I would be able to ask her one question about cultivation and have it answered to the best of her abilities."
The dragoness winced. "Sorry. I should've been a bit quicker realizing."
Mirrory grinned. "Betting with me was a mistake in the first place."
Tatyana snorted. "As if you haven't lost to me before."
Mirrory smiled smugly. "Perhaps I am losing on purpose to win on the big bets~."
Tatyana blinked a few times and looked at Mirrory incredulously. "You aren't doing that."
Mirrory raised her eyebrow. "Who knows~." Then, she vanished.
Andrea laughed. "Tatyana, you might want to stop betting with her."
The Death Empress snorted. "As if! She will regret today's words!"
Angel poked Yasenia's side and asked. "So, why did you gather us?"
"Well, two things." Yasenia raised two fingers with a smile. "First one is… I just wanted to spend a bit of quality time with the whole family."
Evelyn smirked. "Cheesy~."
The dragoness answered back with a raised eyebrow. "It is, and you all love it~." Then, she lifted her second finger and explained, giving off a reluctant vibe. "I gathered all of you to tell you that I am going into closed-door cultivation for this one level. The amount of concentration I need to perform a controlled conversion is too high to interrupt the sessions just after a few hours."
"Ouch." Katarina bit down firmly, so Yasenia reacted. "Why did you bite me, love?"
Katarina spoke very slowly, trying to force her vocal cords to make human sounds. "Mommy… leave… unhappy."
Cecile blinked a few times. "Um… Were those her first words?"
Even the dragoness was stunned. "Oh, baby, did you just speak?"
Katarina humphed. "Very… badly…" Her tone was clearly somewhat embarrassed. Katarina's voice was very strained and hard to understand. After all, she was still developing the human vocal cords. This made her sound less than pleasant.
Yasenia moved Aurelia out of her lap, using her tail to caress her head, and then grabbed her little daughter. "Oh, my precious baby. Even if you take one hour per word, Mommy would listen to you read an entire book!"
Katarina buried herself in Yasenia's arms. She was not small, but the dragoness's embrace was as welcoming as when she could be cradled between the dragoness's arms. Moreover, if Katarina wanted to be engulfed by her Mommy or Mama, she just needed to ask them to transform. Then, forget about hugging; she would be smaller than a single one of Yasenia's scales.
For Katarina, this was the opposite of terrifying. Because Yasenia was her biological mother, her mountainous size only gave her an incredible sense of security.
Cecile approached after Katarina buried herself in Yasenia's arms, unwilling to talk more. The Moon Phoenix woman crouched before her. She smiled gently, a facial expression that, a few decades ago, the girls would've never imagined her doing. "Little Feather, speak with Mama then and practice, okay? When you feel like you are good enough, then you will talk to Mommy. What do you think?"
Katarina looked at Cecile and shifted around, running into Cecile's arms this time. The Moon Phoenix's large wings naturally spread and cocooned her little one, leaving the cute draconic head out. She looked like a little bundled dragonling, extremely adorable.
Katarina looked at Yasenia, and the dragoness pondered. "Okay, how about Mommy stays out for another week, I play with all of you, and then I go? What do you think, Katarina?" She looked around. "And what about the rest of you?"
Skye was fast to jump into the conversation. "One month!"
Yasenia burst into laughter. "No can do, love."
Skye pouted and looked at Katarina. "Little Sister Katarina, do as we practiced!"
Katarina nodded and then looked at Yasenia; when the dragoness looked over, she put on a sad face, making even her pupils enlarge. Yasenia almost had a heart attack. 'My daughter is just too cute!'
Still, she really needed to do this, so she commented. "Okay, all of you, come here."
Kali and Tatyana patted their daughter's butts, and both of them approached. Cecile also kissed Katarina's head, and she placed them down, letting her run over to her Mommy.
Yasenia asked. "Is Mommy strong?"
The children blinked, confused. Aurelia was quick to answer, though. "Very strong. Even Little Mommy can give us a lot of trouble. So Mommy is naturally very strong."
The dragoness nodded. "But, even then, many people can beat Mommy, right?"
The children didn't want to admit it, but they still nodded. The girls had taught them honesty from a young age.
Then, Mama Dragon said. "So, Mommy needs to become stronger so that she can protect all of you, right?"
The children nodded again, but their expressions were clearly disappointed. The dragoness kissed each of their foreheads, and she said. "That's why Mommy will be with all of you for a week, and then, I'll go to closed-door cultivation."
Dawn asked. "Mommy, my birthday is in one month… Will you be able to make it?"
Yasenia rubbed her face with her pretty daughter and sighed. "Sorry, love, perhaps I won't make it. What Mommy is doing takes time, and if I do it wrong, Mommy will be really hurt. Then, I might lose not only one birthday but many. Would my pretty Dawn want that?"
Dawn shook her head and spoke, a bit sad. "Okay, Mommy. I understand."
Yasenia gave her a little kiss on the nose and smiled. "Good girl." She looked at the rest and asked. "How about all of you?"
They all nodded and answered. "We understand…"
The dragoness laughed, showing them an exceptionally beautiful smile that dazed them. "Thank you, babies."
The following week passed quickly, and eventually, Yasenia entered her cultivation room to tackle the energy condensation problem.
Once inside, she activated all the formations and even took a few pills, contrary to her usual practice. The dragoness liked being as natural as possible with her Cultivation, so she very rarely used pills to aid her progress.
It was a strange thing to be somewhat of a purist about, but nobody said anything.
This time, though, she would need horrendous amounts of energy, so she decided to make an exception. 'I'll see how this goes, and taking in this experience, I should be able to tackle the transformation from liquid to solid by myself.'
After she sunk her conscience into her Dantian, her Solar System Dantian welcomed her. The nebula-like energy was surging and moving around in waves, showing tremendous power and potential.
Then, she further focused and grasped a few particles of the entire thing with her spiritual sense. Compared to her entire energy pool, it didn't even reach 0.01 percent of the whole, but it was enough to do a small test.
She first drew energy from the surroundings, and she filled the limited space with more gaseous energy. As the pressure inside the solid sphere increased, the energy started being repelled and resisting Yasenia's attempt.
Energy tended toward an immaterial form. Therefore, the act of squeezing it together into liquid or even a solid went against the natural order. It was a cultivator's way of challenging the heavens.
Cultivation was, in the end, a mortal defying the heavens by stealing part of its powers for themselves.
Yasenia muttered. 'Okay, everything is going smoothly for now. Let's see what happens when I form the first droplets of liquid energy.'
After feeling that she could draw much more gaseous energy into the sphere she contained with her Spiritual Sense, she took in a deep breath and then compressed the sphere. 'Transform.'
A profound wave of energy pulsed outward from Yasenia's body. The energy was slowly arriving at its condensation point.
Then, the dragoness circulated both her Spiritual and Body techniques, and she used all of her strength.
The sphere quickly shrunk in size.
An instant after the critical point arrived, Yasenia felt an unstoppable force explode outward, accompanied by a torrential wave of pure energy.
Her spiritual sense was blasted outward, causing her a piercing pain directly into her mind and cutting off her "sight" from the place where it happened.
The dragoness sighed. "This will be quite a long one…"
She quickly spotted the super-concentrated energy spot when she looked inside her Dantian again. 'Hm… Is that liquid energy?'
There was a fluid that was sliding through an invisible wall. While the imagery of her Dantian was that of an endless cosmos, it was naturally not endless in nature. So, there were "walls" around everything.
Of course, as a [Spiritualized] Dantian, even these walls couldn't really be called as such.
Regardless, the liquid drops she created gently rolled down like jelly instead of a fluid. 'Hmm… pretty.'
The energy was bluish-purple, similar to the colors of the Celestial Energy Star but less pure. While it appeared like a colloid, the consistency was undoubtedly that of a fluid.
The dragoness looked at the rest of the energy floating around her Dantian and sighed. 'Is this really the only way? I'll take at least three years to do it this way.'
Her brain spun around, and she tried not to overlook the most straightforward solutions this time. While the problem seemed complex, in essence, she just wanted to constrict the liquid faster.
'How to do this…?' Suddenly, the dragoness looked at the few droplets of liquid energy and blinked. 'My treasures were forcibly fed when I compressed energy around them… What about you?'
Her spiritual sense captured the liquid energy, and she created a sphere again. From the sides of this sphere, Yasenia poured gas energy into it. As the energy compressed again, the dragoness's lips arched because the tiny droplet of liquid energy was getting bigger.
The pace was certainly slow, but it was accelerating. 'Hoho~, so the mental pain I received was because I entered some kind of "half-step" state. I had a small backlash because my body was not completely accustomed to the power behind the liquid energy. Thankfully, I tried it with a tiny amount at first.
Yasenia continued pouring her gas energy into the droplet, and it quickly rose in size. As it became bigger, its own qualities as a higher-quality energy began pulling in gas energy by itself. It was not the fastest, but the pace was certainly exponential.
Yasenia smirked. 'I hope not much time has passed outside. Keeping track of time when doing these things is really difficult.'
After the last bit of gaseous energy became liquid, her aura condensed and increased in depth. There was no violent explosion. Now, her aura was like a bottomless ocean.
Yasenia had fully entered the fourth level of the Dantian Spiritualization Realm.