It had already been two weeks after Akira had broken through to the fourth stage of the qi refinement realm. Right now, he was just about to break through to the fifth stage. Garglich looked from a distance as Akira cultivated. Akira had used this time to practice his skills and even develop new ones as well.
'Yes! This is it! Finally, I am going to break through!' Akira thought as he was finally about to break farther than the halfway mark of the qi refinement stage. Throughout these two weeks, Akira had come close to breaking through multiple times but for some reason, each time he was on the brink of breaking through, all of his qi disappeared from his core, completely wasting all of his progress.
Akira had tried many things like slaying many weak beast realm beasts to obtain their core and waiting long periods of time to let the energy vein heal up to its qi but no matter what he did, nothing had worked. Today however Akira had an epiphany. What if the reason why the qi all dissipated when he was about to break through was that his core was simply not strong enough to hold all of the qi.
From seeing how the weak outer layer of his core always cracked to form an even stronger one, Akira thought that there was no need for himself to strengthen it as well, but it seemed that in fact, that was not the case. This time, however, Akira focused on strengthening his core while accumulating qi at the same time. It was a flawless execution thus far, and finally, Akira had broken through into the fifth stage of the qi refinement realm. "Yes! Finally!" Akira yelled out loud. "Well done master!" Garglich yelled from a distance.
'Now that I'm in the 5th stage of the qi refinement realm, It will take me most likely about a week to move onto the next realm, and that's only if I don't encounter any failures, so I will have to gather much more beast cores in order to have enough qi to breakthrough.' Akira thought to himself.
Deciding on this Akira set out to hunt for beast cores, it was necessary. Akira had been hunting weaker stages of beasts because he was afraid that something bad might happen to him, but now he was willing to test out his power against even a fifth-stage beast-realm beast.
Because his speed had also increased greatly due to breaking through so many stages and his vision skill, it didn't take long for Akira to check many places before finding a beast in the 5th beast-realm. He spotted a Blitz Wolf on the 5th stage beast-realm and decided that he was going to target it.
The wolf seemed to have already sensed Akira, due to it also having the vision skill because it had broken through the fourth stage of the beast-realm. it turned around and faced Akira. It knew that Akira was a goblin, but also could sense the immense power coming from him, he clearly was not to be toyed with. Akira immediately summoned multiple blades of wind and shot them at the wolf, but this wolf's specialty was speed, it easily dodged the wind blades that definitely weren't slow and released a flurry of wind attacks itself.
Multiple quick balls of wind flew at Akira, however, these wind balls were simply child's play to Akira at this point. Akira decided to now use some of the new skills he had been practicing in developing. 'Ground Lock!' Akira shouted in his head as he easily dodged the wind balls and ran towards the wolf.
The wolf was slightly confused as to why the goblin would try to close the distance, it seemed that distance was its only advantage right now, the wolf tried to lunge at Akira but noticed that it couldn't move. Looking down, it saw that its legs were completely bound by the ground. Hard, concrete-like dirt had enveloped around its legs, completely immobilizing it.
Before it could even look back up to face Akira, the wolf felt a sharp object pierce its neck. Blood splattered all over Akira's face. "Nice! This beast core has a great amount of qi. More of these and ill be set for a while!" Akira said. He had already realized that life and death were only simple things that needed to be taken and given for him to succeed.
After this, Akira spent the day slaying as many fifth and even sixth-stage beasts-realm beasts, gathering a total of 20 beast cores. While slaying beasts, he couldn't help but notice how loud his attacks were. His wind blade made loud booms from time to time and his other skills also made large amounts of noise that attracted other beasts nearby to come to him as well.
Although this was a good thing for hunting multiple beasts, after going into the human world, alerting anyone would be a bad thing. So, Akira decided to try and create a new skill that could kill quickly and silently. He thought of nylon strings back on earth. A type of string that was extremely thin, barely visible to the human eye but could cut something very easily in the blink of an eye. He first formed a long line of wind and compressed it all as small as he could to form a long line of string, however, the line combusted into a line of fire that started to burn its surroundings quickly. Akira had created quite a good skill but it was not exactly what he was looking for. He continued to try out more ways to create this string.
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After trying a couple of things, Akira finally came up with a good solution. He noticed how quickly something would become hot if it was condensed, using this theory, Akira used water to be his string. Condensed water would be extremely hot but not combust into a flame. It would slice through anything due to its immense heat and be quite easy to control.
Akira had already learned to create water using his basic knowledge of chemistry. He needed to add two portions of hydrogen and fuse it with the oxygen that were both found in the air and water would be autonomously created. It was more complicated to create than the other elements but it was worth the trouble.
Akira tested his theory and it worked! He created a flexible string that could barely be seen. He decided to test it out on some boulders and trees and the results were magnificent. The string melted through both wood and stone like butter. 'Haha, Nice!' Akira thought to himself.
After creating this skill, Akira quickly went back to the energy vein to cultivate. His main priority, for now, was to break through into the foundation establishment realm and go into the human world. He wanted to join one of the great sects so that he could obtain resources that could help him cultivate much faster, he wouldn't settle for anything less. Although this was true, he also had a slight problem, how was he supposed to go into the human world as a goblin? He would surely be killed on the spot. He decided to ask the ring.
"What?!" Akira was baffled. It seemed that he couldn't ever transform into a human, but into something else. He needed to know what, otherwise he couldn't make the decision of going into the human world or not. If he couldn't ever transform into a human or something similar looking to it, he would have to scratch all of the planning he had done thus far, this was crucial information that he needed to know. "What can I transform into then?" Akira questioned.
"Huh!? How stupid is that?" Akira said.
<...>
There was no reply from the ring. After a little bit of time, the ring responded.
"Huh? Well alright, I'll trust you then." Akira had nothing left to say or do but trust the ring and continue to prepare as if nothing had happened. He quickly arrived at the energy vein and started to cultivate.