Alex was in his room, looking at his status. It had been over a week since he had broken through, and although it was probably a little too fast to break through once again, it just felt right to him.

His cultivation base was fully stabilized thanks to the two sessions of intense training he had gone over with Du Yuhan. Not only was his cultivation base stabilizing, but even his Sword Intent was also starting to be stable as well.

There had been moments where his Sword Intent came to be during the fights even when he wasn’t consciously minding his intentions.

If he could proceed to do everything subconsciously without ever having to make sure his intentions were on point while using the sword, he would advance to the rank of Weapon Intent users as the ones he saw in the competition in 2 months ago.

His face was unable to stop a smile from forming the same way he was unable to keep his excitement under check.

He took a deep breath and brought his hands forward to click on the button.

The moment he touched the button, he felt a rush of Qi swarm his body, going through all the meridians without stopping and finally into this mind. Once there, the Qi then rushed back down through his body once more, decreasing in amount the whole time.

By the time the Qi was gone, he could feel his cultivation base increase to a level he had never before felt.

He broke through.

“Woah!” he thought as he remembered the experience. He was surprised how well he could feel the Qi during his breakthrough nowadays. And it was only getting more and more pronounced.

‘Did it always originate from my lower stomach when I broke through in the earlier realms as well?’ he wondered. The only reason he even knew it originated there, despite not feeling it was because he knew for a fact that his Qi was stored in that area back from when he ate those pears in the Forbidden Fields.

“I wonder if there is a reason why only I think that? There doesn’t seem to be any public information regarding this knowledge,” he thought.

Alex was sure that he was correct about it though. There was no doubt. It wasn’t only what he felt in the Forbidden Forest though, it was as if knowing that single piece of knowledge unlocked another part of the information in his brain regarding some medical knowledge.

Alex soon forgot about that since it had nothing to do with what he was doing right now. Since he had broken through, he started feeling his Qi.

His Qi was much denser once more and he could feel his strength reach quite high. “8th mind tempering realm?” he assumed. It was quite hard to quantify his increase in strength to a single cultivation realm.

He had never seen or fought anyone in that realm, so whatever he thought his strength was, that would have some amount of falsehood to them.

“Should be enough,” he thought and went on to check the other few things. The one thing he was mostly looking forward to was to see the increase in his spiritual sea.

He released his spiritual sense and stretched it as far as he could without straining himself.

“Wait, over 34 meters?” He looked at his divine sense in shock. He thought of something and tried remembering.

The first increase when he entered the Mind Tempering 1st realm was from 22 meters to 25 meters, which was 3 meters increase.

Then it went from that to 28-29 meters, which was a bit more than 4 meters in increment. While it had increased, he hadn’t thought about anything at the time.

However, now that it went from that to over 34 meters with an increase of over 5 meters at once, he started to get confused. “Why is it increasing so much?” he thought.

He now had about the same distance of spiritual sense as he did when originally had it and stretched to the fullest.

Now, if he stretched as much as he could, he could surely reach more than 55 meters in distance.

Alex was happy, very much in fact. However, he soon reeled in his happiness for there was something else he needed to do right now.

Alex reached into his bag and brought out a single pill bottle. He removed the stopper from the top and dropped a single pill onto his hands.

This was the Mind Elating pill, a pill of his creation. He knew this pill would increase his mental ability again, but wasn’t sure by what amount.

He looked at the 54% harmony pill on his hands, one of the 3 he had prepared to eat, and without any hesitation, popped it into his mouth.

Even as he swallowed the pill, he could feel nothing, truly nothing. There was no information about him eating a pill, nor was there anything he could feel was happening in his stomach.

“A dud?” he wondered for a second. Abruptly, a rush of Qi, similar to when he broke through ran up to his mind and started rushing through all over it.

Alex could only feel a cool sensation around his skull, and some sudden bursts of heat. Neither of which hurt him at all.

He endured the happenings in his head for a while and soon they disappeared.

‘Is it over?’ he wondered. Just to be safe, he decided to wait for a few more minutes more. Once he was sure it was all over, he released his spiritual sense once more.

It slowly spread outwards and soon reached a point that made Alex’s eyes go wide in surprise.

“So far,” he thought and immediately reeled back his sense. His eyes were still stunned as he muttered a single word. “40.”

40 meters was what his spiritual sense had extended to. At best, he had expected it to extend to around 37 or 38 meters, but he had never expected it been reached such a high 40 meters mark.

“Is this pill supposed to be this good?” he wondered. That could only be the explanation to the current happenings, for the other explanation of there being something different about him was not something he was looking forward to hearing.

“Okay, good. I got 40 meters mark, that’s great. Let’s cultivate now,” he said. He wanted to quickly move away from whatever he was thinking of at the moment and called out Pearl.

He sat him down next to him and soon the two of them started cultivating. Alex too started breathing in and out slowly and before he realized it, he had fallen asleep.

******

Alex logged back into the game after returning from his second last day at the university. He now only needed to go to his classes for a single more day before his exams would start.

After that, he was going to drop out of the university for sure. He was still thinking about how to break the news to his parents.

While he was surely earning a lot of money, he was also missing out on learning stuff that would be helpful in his life. As long as he could persuade them that he could easily learn later, but not earn as easily, he could likely get away with dropping out.

His storage bag was buzzing a lot, but he ignored that entirely. The thing that took his attention immediately event though he had already felt it already was his True Qi.

“50%,” he said quietly. That was the percentage of Qi in his meridians that hard turned to True Qi.

This was happening way too fast for him right now. From 5% to 20% to now 50%, the amount at which his True Qi was increasing per breakthrough was astounding.

However, this also came with a simple worry for him. If he kept on going like this, by 5th Mind tempering realm, he was likely to turn all 100% of his Qi into True Qi. What would he do after that?

As far as normal cultivation progress went, once someone converted all 100% of their Qi to True Qi, and were left with not a single hint of Common Qi, they could then, and only then, breakthrough to the True realms.

“Does that mean that when I get 100% True Qi at 5th Mind Tempering realm, then I too would directly go to the True realms?” he wondered. He just couldn’t see how else it would work.

He worried that his advantage of having a high cultivation strength while having a low cultivation base was soon going to disappear.

“Urghh! Why did it have to be like this?” he worried. He moved around his hands in frustration, not sure if punch something or pull out his hair.

Finally, he managed to calm down and took a deep breath. He took a few more deep breaths and opened his eyes to look at his storage bag that was relentlessly buzzing for the last few minutes.

“What is it?” he thought and opened his bag to take out the thing that was buzzing. It was his badge.

“Oh, did they decide to come back—”

He suddenly stopped when he remembered. So many things had happened with his cultivation base and his spiritual sense that he forgot about the reason he had broken through in the first place.

He looked at the badge and saw what was written on it. Alex couldn’t help but snicker at the words.

-Number 45 has challenged Number 3-