A fifteen-year-old boy sat on the cold stone floor of his courtyard, his legs crossed and eyes closed. A golden mist surrounded his body, and an icy chill stretched beyond, casting a slight frost upon everything within range.
A group of three women stood watching him with strange expressions. Each one held a different opinion as they discussed recent events.
"Do you think he's waiting for the Lady to return?" the youngest of the three women asked. Her wheat-colored hair stood out among them, and the other two shook their heads.
"Nonsense, there's only one reason he would be sitting like that." Another woman said with a smile. She shared similar features with the younger woman, but her hair was dark brown.
"Do you think that's why the Lady left? Does she think that by leaving him alone like this, he will grow up to be strong like his father?" the third woman asked. Her hair was graying with age, and wrinkles ran along her entire face.
"What kind of thought is that? How could she just leave without saying anything?" the younger woman questioned, but as soon as the words left her mouth, the middle-aged woman slapped the back of her head.
"Mother!?" She exclaimed with a shocked expression.
"Don't question the Lady's actions. Don't forget the life she has given us. If it weren't for her, we wouldn't have a roof over our heads, and if it weren't for General Li, then your stupid father would have died a long time ago." She sighed with frustration.
"I'm sorry." The younger woman hung her head in shame as the old woman laughed. "But if he's not waiting for the Lady to return, then why is he sitting there? He's been there the entire night."
"I believe young Master Li Jun has now become a martial artist." The middle-aged woman said with a proud look in her eyes.
The three of them continued to watch as Li Jun stood up and stretched his arms. There was no avoiding the aching in his bones each time he spent the entire night cultivating. Although he felt more refreshed than if he had slept instead.
"Young Master! Breakfast is ready!" Hu Mei, the youngest of the three maids, shouted.
Li Jun turned to see the other two had gone back to work. As he looked at Hu Mei, he could see a slight glow around her. All living things seemed to have the glow of spiritual energy around them. However, when he looked down at his own hands, the glow was much more intense.
He had spent the last two days reading through the book that Master Shen had gifted him. It seemed that martial arts and cultivation were inseparable from each other. Without martial arts, your strength as a cultivator was limited, and without cultivation, your martial arts wouldn't contain power.
Although a person who cultivated was generally called a martial artist, that was just a formal way to separate someone's social standing from people who didn't cultivate.
There were different ranks among martial artists too but unlike Li Jun had previously thought, it didn't depend on strength. It was Dependant on your cultivation stage. With this knowledge, it was like a whole new world had opened up before him.
Each martial artist started at the Body Refining stage, which was split into nine different minor stages. When a martial artist progressed through the minor stages and reached the ninth stage, it was said that they had reached the peak of the major stage and would have strength that was unmatched by someone at a lower minor stage.
The main purpose of the Body refining stage was to expand the spiritual core within your body by refining it with spiritual energy which in turn would strengthen your body. Giving you the power to crush rocks with your bare hands and the speed to dodge deadly attacks.
Only when you had reached the peak could you step into the next stage, which was known as the Core refining stage.
The purpose of core refining was to refine your spiritual core and strengthen it to resist attacks and force out any impurities within your body. Li Jun read that people at the core refining stage could use spiritual energy to shoot flames out of their hands, but he didn't know whether to believe it or not. It seemed a bit too exaggerated for him to blindly trust it.
The most important thing he read was that each time you advanced a minor stage, you would reach something known as a bottleneck. If your spiritual core didn't contain enough energy, it would resist you if you tried to forcefully step into the next stage.
That was what he felt when his spiritual core wouldn't allow him to step into the body refining stage. Upon drinking whatever tea Master Shen had given him, his spiritual core absorbed enough energy to let him step onto the path of martial arts.
Li Jun could only imagine what came after the core refining stage. The book seemed to only cover the basics. One thing that did stick out to him was a page about spirit stones. The book showed a diagram to identify spirit stones, which was meant to be accurate.
It showed two different spirit stones; one was smaller than his thumbnail, and the other was around the size of his index finger, a medium spirit stone. But the two hundred and ninety-nine spirit stones he had in his silver ring were each larger than his entire hand. Master Shen had called it a high-grade spirit stone.
Spirit stones served two purposes: they were used as currency for martial artists and contained high amounts of spiritual energy. If you cultivated while holding one, you could absorb the energy from it and become stronger, although Li Jun had yet to try it.
As Li Jun finished eating his bowl of porridge, a bell rang out in the courtyard. Someone had come to see him. But Li Jun wasn't expecting any visitors.