After I jumped onto the branch to people watch, no one disturbed me for the rest of the night, leaving me to my own devices. This meant that as the night went on, I was getting increasingly bored while not doing anything. Thankfully, I had an inventory full of cultivation technique copies to go through, so I at least had something to fill my now-empty time.

  With that thought going through my brain, I pulled out one of the higher-ranking technique copies to read through.

  Eventually, I found myself flipping through my third book with one of my legs hanging off the branch and my tails zily swinging about as I wrote down in what was becoming my little cultivation journal with my off hand. Most of what I was writing about were a few minor observations and key things that were being touched on while occasionally marking outright incorrect statements in the technique’s copy. Besides that, I was beginning to notice a major difference with the next realm of cultivation compared to the previous two.

  The main thing about the previous two realms was that every level was simir to the previous ones, with only a slight difference between levels during the body tempering stage. As for the Qi Gathering stage, it was almost exactly like the name with only a slight difficulty when one needed to expand their core. It only got slightly more complicated when one wanted to add ws or attributes to their cultivation during these stages, but even then, it was not that much more difficult. At least for any of those with a decent spiritual root. Other than that, with enough expnation or a good enough understanding, anyone would be able to cultivate through these two stages.

  This next stage was fairly different when it came to complexity and would be a clear delineation between those with no talent and those with at least a modicum of cultivation ability. There were a few ways around this, like with my Gaia Awakening technique, but none of them would make up for a ck of understanding or, as some people would call it, comprehension. The reason for this was that the foundation establishment stage required the cultivator to form a foundation using a variety of different “energy” sources. There was a variety of different ways to do this as well.

  The first and most common method was to crystalize the Qi that one had gathered during the previous stage to build the foundation. Most of them used one type of Qi to do this, thus causing the person to become aspected towards that specific element. The rarer and more powerful techniques even required a person to carve one or more symbols into this foundation to empower it with the ws of those elements as well, though this was honestly meaningless for a few reasons. The main one being that these symbols only applied the ws based of off the intention of the person carving them, so the foundation would still have the same effect if you just infused the intent into the foundation while forming it. Aside from that, the more simpler methods only required someone to form the foundation with any Qi that they had.

  The Second method was to use the ws to build the ptforms without any Qi being used. However, this method was very obviously a more difficult choice than the previous one, and many would not choose to take this path given the perceived difficulty. Of course, there is a reason why I used those two words instead of referencing the actual challenge. This was because what was actually used to create the foundation was a concept and not the ws themselves. These concepts are the precursor form of ws that a person comprehends during the ter stages of cultivation. It still required a decent level of comprehension to create, but at least it was not at the level of ws.

  Besides all of this, there was the third and final method, which utilized some of the principles of the previous stage by drawing in new Qi to crystalize and form the new foundations. All the other parts of this method were effectively the same as the first one, with only a few differences to take into account the way the foundations were constructed. Ocasionally, there were a few differences in the way each one of these was carried out, but they pretty much fell into each of these categories.

  At this point, one of my legs was starting to fall asleep, so I quickly got up and jumped over to the top of one of the covered wagons and sat down on the edge with both of my legs swinging around beneath me. I then continued summarizing some of my thoughts. It was mainly surrounding how to merge the second and third methods as they had the best parts while the first method was made useless. Of course, I would not be able to do anything with this yet, but it was good to summarize this before continuing research anyways.

  The research mentioned ended up sting the rest of the night, with me switching pces four more times and one small little jaunt into the forest for a midnight snack.

  Sadly, my “little” wolf friend that I found did not want to stay the rest of the night with me.

  Vulthurtoor