Arriving at the tall establishment, Su Yan, along with his companion, stepped down from the carriage. He held her arm as they walked in, drawing few gazes but ignoring them all. He walked toward the receptionist and put on a smile. "Good afternoon, I booked a room earlier; would you hand over the key to our room?"
"One moment, sir." The receptionist, a young lady, answered. "Please state your name."
"Su Yan."
"Yes, here it is." She noted down and pulled out a large silver coin. "And here you go."
Su Yan looked down at the key and read the number '0606' and left. They climbed the stairs and found their room easily enough. As he opened the door and walked in, Xie Lian let out a surprised gasp.
"This must've cost quite a lot," she said. "For how long did you book it?"
"Fifteen days," he answered.
She raised a brow but didn't follow. Su Yan let her get the feel of the environment while he moved toward the area where a single silk mat was placed. It was large enough for three people to sleep on comfortably, but its use lay in an entirely different direction. Cultivation.
There was nothing magical about this except for it being an area separate from the rest, for the sole purpose of cultivation. He had been looking forward to enjoying an uninterrupted session of cultivation after so long. Back at the clan, he would sometimes hole himself up in his room for days and sometimes even weeks.
From what he had seen and heard, the stronger a cultivator, the higher the need for longer cultivation sessions. For example, the clan head usually spent months or years in seclusion in his favored grounds. It was only on occasion that they saw the man, and Su Yan himself had only seen him once in his entire life.
After finishing her tour of the place, Xie Lian arrived back at the main hall. "So, we are going to be cultivating for fifteen days straight?"
"That's right." He responded.
After helping her get into motion, Su Yan sat on his side of the mat and focused on his breathing. His single mote of Qi revolved slowly and got progressively faster. His breathing evened out, and Qi was pulled out of the air, passing through his meridians and into his dantian.
He had been getting closer to forging his second mote, and it took him half an hour to accomplish just that. Breathing out, he felt the size of the mote being similar to the previous one. With this he had effectively doubled his reserves of Qi. But he was far from being done.
For a while now, he had only focused on Qi cultivation, despite holding the perfect art for body cultivation. The reason for that was because the act of bodily transformation was intense and required a closed-door environment.
True Primordial Essence Art focused on forging the body using Primordial Essence. If he was curious about where he was getting that before, the question had been answered when he began cultivating his Qi.
As his mind interfaced with the gray cloud of mist, he welcomed it within him. Much like before, nothing much happened. And then he felt a throb, a prickle of pain stabbing somewhere deep within. It started out as a mild chill, and then it expanded.
Su Yan barely had the time to react when he felt his whole body be engulfed in a huge amount of pain. He doubled down, his back tearing open. His bones cracked, and he finally wasn't able to keep his voice down, shrieking from the inhuman torture he was experiencing.
His cry woke Xie Lian, who looked to see a gory mess writhing on the ground before her. "Oh heavens! What happened to you?!"
She tried to move her hands to help him, but he held a hand to stop her. "D-Don't..." He uttered with difficulty, feeling his throat on the verge of exploding. "Move..."
Just as he finished speaking, the sound of bones breaking was heard, and his whole body went limp. He lay there like a gory mush of flesh with broken bones and blood sprayed all around. Mixed in with those fleshy bits were spots of gray and black impurities.
Then a gray mist started wafting from his near-unconscious form. He lay there whimpering and barely breathing. Xie Lian watched on from the side with a horrified expression etched on her face.
Su Yan found his vision spotty, his body numb, and his breathing growing weaker by the second. Even under that torturous amount of pain, he could feel the presence of that mist, the weight it held. It was the reason for his predicament, and he understood why.
When he had absorbed the True Primordial Essence Art, he had gained the knowledge regarding the cultivation technique. According to it, the Primordial Essence was the quintessence of the universe and that very few beings could bear the weight of it. What he had been offered was paltry in comparison, and it had almost crushed him.
On its own, the gray mist that was the Primordial Essence was harmful to the extreme. But with the help of the cultivation art, he was able to direct it. Circulate it. The path it moved through was destroyed, broken, and left in a mess. But with that destruction came an opportunity to forge it better. To build it from the beginning.
The very first step of True Primordial Essence Art, the Mist Forge bound the body of its user with the Primordial Essence on a fundamental level. Although his body looked like a mess from the outside, it was nothing in comparison to the destruction wrecked on a molecular level. The only thing holding it together was this Primordial Essence.
As the gray mist finished its bonding, his bones started mending. If someone was capable of looking within his body, they would see a soft metallic texture to his bones. The same went for his flesh and veins. Even his meridians were forged into something stronger.
And just like that he had completed all the stages of the body transformation.