CHAPTER 114: SIXTH CORE

Chapter 114: Sixth Core

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Right now, before him, lay three smooth green elemental cores, shining under the light of the room.

Two of them came from third stage beasts, while the one in the middle, visibly larger and more vivid in color, came from the fourth stage.

He smiled as he admired them, then, without wasting time, sat down to cultivate, beginning to draw out the elemental energy within them.

The three cores trembled slightly, and little by little, as if lifted by an invisible hand, they rose into the air, moving in a circle around Zhu Rong.

As they did, the spiritual energy inside them began to leak out and flow into his body, traveling through his meridians before gathering in his dantian, where Zhu Rong was using it to form his sixth elemental core.

Unlike in the beginning, when it had taken him nearly a whole day and night to form his fire core, as time passed the formation of each successive core had become faster.

From dozens of hours it had gone down to just a few, and right now, the way the wood elemental Qi was swirling inside his dantian, it looked like the process would be even faster.

At least, that’s how it should have been, but Zhu Rong had other plans.

Normally, one would create the basic structure of the core, then slowly elevate it stage by stage until it adjusted to the new levels of power and reached the desired cultivation level.

But after having created several elemental cores in the past months, Zhu Rong had discovered that the process could be sped up to a certain extent without consequences.

More precisely, instead of forming the core at its most basic stage and raising it little by little, he could directly create a structure strong enough to bring it straight to the third stage, consolidate it there, and continue from that point onward.

That would save him a great deal of time and effort.

Normally, trying something like this would be pointless and even dangerous in some cases, since a core, though it might look simple, was anything but.

The higher its level, the more complex its structure became.

If not for the experiences of both his past and present lives in creating elemental cores, Zhu Rong wouldn’t have had the confidence to attempt forming the base structure of a third stage core directly.

He immersed himself in the creation of the core, carefully guiding the circulation of wood elemental Qi inside his dantian, forming the first layer of the core.

He continued building it, and before he knew it, three hours had passed, though for him, it felt like less than thirty minutes.

He was too focused, isolating himself completely from the outside world.

It was a delicate process, one that left no room for mistakes.

And since it was his first attempt, the risk of mistakes was even higher.

More than once, he nearly ruined the base structure, but after facing several such situations, he finally got a better grasp and managed to complete it.

Now, inside his dantian, six radiant cores were suspended, shining like suns in the void.

Among them, five were connected by an invisible link, while the newest one still floated as if isolated.

Zhu Rong did not rush things and let it stay like that for now.

He needed to take a short break to recover his mental strength before continuing.

He had finished creating the core at the third stage, but now he had to solidify it and raise it to the fourth.

After a few minutes of rest, he resumed cultivating, and so, while the first day of the competition ended and the second began, Zhu Rong remained inside the cultivation room of the pavilion, undisturbed.

Since he had already secured a spot for the next round, he didn’t bother going to watch today’s matches and continued undisturbed with his cultivation.

He may have been fast in forming a third stage wood elemental core, but now that he had to raise it to the fourth and form within it the first layer of a golden core, it was going to take several hours.

He had been preparing to cultivate the next elemental cores for a long time, especially the rarer ones.

In the end, during these past two months, aside from the lightning element, for which he hadn’t managed to get his hands on any cultivation resources,

he had managed to acquire resources for some of the others: wood and ice.

For the wood element, he had been lucky enough to obtain high grade beast cores, but for the ice element, things hadn’t been so easy.

In fact, even after spending a considerable sum of high grade spirit stones, he was only able to obtain a low grade ice elemental crystal.

An ice crystal was an elemental crystal, a mineral formed in places with an extremely high concentration of spiritual Qi of a particular element.

Just like spirit stones which contained pure spiritual energy, these crystals were concentrates of spiritual energy of a certain type of element.

Needless to say, places with such a high concentration of ice elemental energy were rare and often dangerous, so getting one of these crystals was anything but easy.

Just one low grade ice elemental crystal had cost him ten high grade spirit stones. And that was for a single low grade one.

Ten high grade spirit stones were about what he could earn in a single day, but considering the costs of labor and materials, that sum went down to five.

Of course, his business was still growing, and so his daily profits were steadily increasing, but even so, he couldn’t afford to recklessly throw around such large amounts of spirit stones.

If it weren’t for the fact that he currently couldn’t go searching on his own for natural sources of the ice element he knew about, he would never have spent such a sum on a mere low grade crystal.

But with few options available, he settled for it. And perhaps it was better this way, at least with the energy inside it, he could be sure of being able to form the basic ice core.

After that, all he needed was patience while he slowly cultivated it.

Needless to say, the process was going to be very slow. Even with his Elemental Extremes of Dao Technique, which allowed him to cultivate this element faster than normal, it was still going to take time, most likely an entire day just to form the core, not to mention raising it through the later stages.

He already had a huge amount of Qi stored in his body thanks to the red mist, which made things a little faster, but he would still have to transform that spiritual energy into ice elemental Qi before he could actually use it to cultivate the ice core, and that would take time.

For now, there was nothing more he could do about it.

He suppressed his frustration and turned his focus to cultivating his next core.

Meanwhile, as he cultivated, the second day of the tournament ended, and the third finally arrived,

the day when the third year students would face off.

Unlike the first two years, which together totaled just over four hundred participants, the third years were fewer than one hundred.

And this wasn’t because they failed to meet the basic requirements for entering the tournament, but because many of them knew that with so few spots available, there was no way most of them could secure one.

Especially those stuck at the peak of the second stage or the beginning of the third.

They made up the majority of the third years, and as such, they understood they had little chance against the true talents of their year.

Of course, this didn’t stop everyone, and many still joined in to try their luck, raising the number to nearly one hundred participants.

The battles between the third years were bound to be more intense and would naturally take more time.

For this reason, the method applied here was the same as that used for the first and second year students,

they were divided into ten groups, from which only one from each could advance.

This method was harsher and stricter than in the lower years, but it ensured that the strongest talents of each group would be chosen, leaving, at the end of the matches, the ten most powerful third year students.

In the eyes of many, the five who would have the chance to claim the five slots in the group heading to the secret realm would almost certainly all come from this group of ten.

And that wasn’t surprising, after all, they weren’t only stronger than the students of the previous years, but their cultivation level was at least the third stage, practically eliminating 99% of the competition from the other two years.

If not for the academy’s policy of considering the talents of students from all years, they would have simply skipped straight to picking the strongest third years.

But the academy knew that monstrous talents capable of fighting above their stages existed, and in a place like Qingyun Academy, renowned for the high caliber of its students, such talents were not lacking.

Which was why even the first and second years had been allowed to participate.