There's a saying that goes like this: Soul is the essence of a being, while Qi is the essence of the world. By cultivating, one uses the Qi to attune oneself to the world, bridging the gap between mortal and divine. By coming into contact with nature, one is that much closer to perfection.
It was how meditation was proven to be successful when paired alongside cultivation. Otherwise, any cultivator worth their salt could cultivate in any posture whatsoever. It would just be exceptionally slow and drawn out.
Su Yan sat inside the tree, feeling the flow of the Qi as it was pulled inside him and woven into existing Primal Fog. With his new cultivation manual, he could easily draw the stark contrast between it and his previous method. That barely allowed for a moat to form after a full month of arduous efforts. While he had barely cultivated for half a day, he could already feel a mote taking shape. If his goal were still to form 33 motes, he could easily break through to the next stage in a very short amount of time. Unfortunately, he was chasing after perfection now—a full 333 motes.
As Qi cycled within him, he could already feel the effects. Usually it would take around five minutes before one felt any difference about their existence. Yet a single mote had barely taken shape, and he was already feeling different. That didn't account for the fact that Qi gathering didn't even have any actual impact on the physique.
The more he cultivated, the greater his anticipation grew. He couldn't wait to tackle the next big step, which was the body transformation. Hours passed as he sat within the tree. He was so close to forming a single mote inside his dantian, and he could feel it.
By mid-noon, Su Yan felt beads of sweat growing on his forehead. His breathing was fast and shallow, and Qi rotated with overwhelming ferocity within his dantian. It grew so fast that it started taking the shape of a sphere. It was a very tiny sphere and seemed to emit a vague white mist. At last, the rotation stopped, and a rush of pure Qi emitted from this sphere.
"Successful." Su Yan opened his and felt satisfaction course through him. At last he had managed to take a step into the world of cultivation once again. Only this time his prospects were looking exceedingly better.
"It's a bit small, though." As he observed the mote, Su Yan noted the size of the mote to be smaller than previous ones. Yet as he probed further, he realized the Qi within was exceptionally pure and many times greater than before. It was weirdly conflicting, but that just went to show how much he lacked the knowledge.
Taking a look outside, he realized the sun had already reached its peak and half the day was over. He cursed under his breath and left in the direction he had set for beforehand.
Along the way he felt hunger creep back into him, but this time he felt another urge that he hadn't felt for quite some time. He needed to relieve the pressure building near his naval area.
Usually, body transformation carried with it multiple benefits, and one such perk was the ability to expel waste in the form of minute particles that could be expelled from the skin. Once past the first stage of body cultivation, though, one would hardly need any sustenance, so they barely had any need to expel the waste.
Nevertheless, so long as he couldn't start on his body-forging journey, he would have to put up with the discomfort of relieving himself in the bushes.
After finishing with the activity, Su Yan strolled through the forest at a leisurely pace. He was still traveling along the passage of water, though at some distance. It was around the time when the sun started to set that he saw the first trace of something that would indicate the presence of a human being.
"Horses passed through here." He looked at the depressions left in the ground by the hooves of the maned animals. He couldn't guess exactly how many, but judging by another straight line tracing through, they at least had a carriage with them. "A caravan?" Su Yan pondered.
If there really was something so deep in the forest, it was likely their destination lay somewhere in the Yu Clan domain. If so, he could hitch a ride along, or at least follow them at a distance. At least this way he would avoid the risk of getting lost.
Feeling confident, he started tracking the marks and moving deeper into the forest. The sun had set behind the horizon and plunged the world into darkness. What little light the canopies overhead allowed was barely enough for Su Yan to follow the traces.
When the dark had completely eclipsed the world, Su Yan felt frustration well up within him. Even after following such a long thread, he couldn't even find a single marker that would motivate him to follow through.
Shaking his head, he started to look for a place to rest in. For ten minutes he looked around in search of a cave or a hollow tree but came up short. In the end he had to settle for a wider branch on a tree.
Climbing was easy enough, and after securing his back against the bark, Su Yan was positively confident that he wouldn't fall. Taking a meditative posture, he decided to cultivate once more, but then stopped as a thought occurred to him.
"Even if I start cultivating now, I'm unlikely to make any progress considering my need for rest." As he thought up to there, he furrowed his brow and wondered if he should sleep early or cultivate anyway. "Wait a minute, didn't I still have that auxiliary cultivation method? I haven't read it in-depth yet."
Focusing on the misty glob in his mental realm, he connected with that particular wisp and beckoned it within him. At once the wisp heeded his call and shot forth, right into his mind.
Knowledge unraveled within his mind, enlightening him to the exact nature of the cultivation method.
"Yin-Yang Unification Art!"