Alex drew another Summoning circle on the ground in his room, before drawing in some qi, and forming a strand with three times the standard purity and fed it to the circle. From it a spirit made of pure electricity with a vague bird shape apeared. Spirits wern't limited to one particular shape, but most tended to chose one that they developed as they grew. Just like the demon, the spirit a half step third rate spirit, equivalent to a half step foundation building cultivator. "Human, why have you summoned me?"
Smiling Alex said "I would like to make a trade. I will give you 5 standard size strands of lightning qi at 5 times the standard purity, for one piece of high purity lighting spirit energy. This trade can be re-done as many times as you wish. If the spirit energy if purer then standed I will give higher purity strands. Deal?"
Looking at the weak human infront of it, and the circle around it, the spirit realised that this human most likely had some way of protecting itself. And seeing as there was no apparent downside to this deal. Nodded its head before forming out a small piece of floating paper from seemingly thin air, and adding a small amount of its qi into it forming a contract with the same terms alex had stated, and placed its signature using qi. Alex did the same, forming his own signature. After that the paper glowed for a moment before vanishing. Alex then un-summoned the lighting spirit.
"This is why I prefer working with spirits, there so much more reasonable compared to demons. Alright, time to form the rest of the qi strands, according to records, the max amount of strands one can form is 10. with thr limit on purity and size being unknown if there is any. but size has little effect on future developments anyway. Alright, Let's get started on forming those strands and see how many I can make."
Sitting down Alex activated his elemental circuits and began to draw in the surounding qi, filtering the elemnts he could use from the elements he could not. In 10 minutes he had formed another strand, at 5 time the standard purity. 80 minutes later he had reached the so called 'limit', but he could feel he was far from his own limit. 12 hours later Alex had formed a total of 81 strands of elemental qi, and could feel that this was as many as his meridians could handle "so this is is my limit. Not to bad, now let's get to refining."
The process of purifying strands of qi was just taking out the lower quality parts. 'Low quality' being less potent qi or elements that he coulden't use. This process would naturally decrease the size of the strand, but increase its power. The cultivator would then draw in more qi to grow the strand and repeat the process for all strand untill the desired purity was reached.
Alex had some cheat codes when it came to this, one of the sign in rewards that was almost guaranteed from his room in the mountain top residence was 5 perfect qi purification pills. What these pills did was automatically absorbe all non useable elements from the qi strands and turned it into raw energy to empower the remaining qi. And due to its perfect quality there where no pill toxins or decrease in effect from continued use. The second cheat was the newly acquired lighting tribulation refinment which would passively increase the power of his qi strands by increasing the potency of the qi.
Taking out one of the qi purification pills he swallowed it and began to guide its effects though his 108 meridians using his inner qi. The medicinal effects of the pill did not effect his inner qi so he could use it to speed up the refinment process. The pills energy flowed through his meridians, running into his qi strands. As it did so it would peal a off a large amout of the qi with elements he did not have circuits for yet. Once it had pulled off all the qi it could, it began to ignite the pealed off qi and use it to empower the remaining qi strands. This took about 5 minutes and decreased all 81 qi strands by 25% in size but increased them by 50% in power.
Taking a minute to regrow the strands he took another pill, and five minutes later the process had repeated. He did this 100 time in total before he ran out of pills. By the end his 81 strands of qi where practically compleatly made of only elements he had circuits for and at around 230x the standard qi purity level while still about 5 meters in length and 30 center meters in width. All 81 strands flowed through his 108 meridans and many bridges, strengthening and expanding them. His meridians where now roughly the size of large beach balls and the bridges where 50 center meters wide. Big enough to fit one qi rope on each bridge, and a duzon or so in each meridian. Not that he needed to worry about capacity for a while.
As for body cultivation, bone forging was difren't to blood and marrow refining. During the later two, raw inner qi would be used to refine them, which was viable considering blood was easily replaced with regeneration and marrow was nourished by the blood so long as nutrients were available, so any damage could be swiftly repaired so long as the user didn't go overboard. But for bone forging, they took quite a bit longer to heal and could heal incorrectly. And as such needed to be treated with more care compared to the first two.
For bone forging, inner qi would be brought to the marrow useing the blood, and filtered to the bone through the marrow. The now 'gentler' inner qi would flow through, reforging them slowly so as to not damage them while still increasing their strength. This also increasing their healing time as the bones could handle inner qi more, alowing it to repair them. This filtration process was very important for the later stages and as such, was used compeatly from hear on out unless stated otherwise.
The level of forging on a bone could be measured baced on there color. And as a body a body cultivation practitioner gained inner sight at the end of marrow refining they could 'see' their bones to check.
normal human bones where actually white to yellowish in color, and during bime forging, the bones would become compleatly white all over. and as such the level of whiteness could be used to measure the level of progress. Alex assumed that once all his bones became pure white, they would move into a new color for the 'bonus stage'.
But that wouldn't be important for quite a while, as bone forging was one of the slowest stages in bkdy forging, as all 206 bones needed to be slowly and methodically refined on their own.
"Alright then, time for my third sign in for today."
[Sign in location: purple dawn sect mountain residence. Sign in rewards: low grade enlightenment fruit*1]
"That's it? Thers usually more. Guess I shouldn't judge untill I've seen what it does."