645 The Hellish Struggle To Create A Dantian

Once I said, the humans started working. One by one, they consumed the potions in order.

It seemed there was a certain order to take these potions. First they consumed three, with faint colours of pale pink, green, and blue.

Then they went to the altar, and stood at the spacious platform of it. They sat down cross legged, closed their eyes while the other six potions lied in their laps.

“What now?” I waited for almost half an hour without anything else happening. They sat there, motionless, regulating their breathing as if they were cultivating.

But nothing else happened. I thought once they’d sit the altars would start shining and showing a change.

I imagined the altars releasing massive energy waves, helping them to start their cultivation journey.

“Shush… They need another half an hour,” from the side, Lily whispered to me as if my voice was enough to disturb them. “They haven’t started cultivating yet. So they are hearing everything and might get disturbed easily.”

She kept whispering, even leaning closer to me to feel her warm breaths over my ears. Damn! That air… It made my body slightly tremble out of control..

In a reflex, I distanced myself from her with a metre or so. “Ok,” I nodded, saying in the same whispering way as her.

She gave me a weird look for a second, hesitating to say something before dropping the matter.

I turned my attention fully towards the ones sitting on the altars. I wanted to see what was going to happen soon, ignoring Lily by my side for now.

Half an hour passed without any change. I was growing impatient when one of the five thousand humans here opened his eyes and stood up.

“What…” I was going to ask about what he was going to do but she stopped me by placing a finger over her lips.

Then she pointed in the direction of that human, and I saw him starting to climb the altar as if he was ascending a ladder.

And with each step he took, he emptied one potion in his mouth.

Each altar got five levels, each looking like a step my human boy had to climb.

The first two steps were easy, but the next three… It looked like he was struggling much to get higher, to climb to the top.

It was weird. The steps were there, and there was nothing stopping him from getting to the top.

But just the final step took him almost ten minutes and six failed attempts before he finally got there.

“He shouldn’t stop, he shouldn’t rest,” Lily whispered in a low tone. I looked at her then at the human who was lying on his back, drenched up in his profuse sweat.

I didn’t know what was needed for him to do next, but he looked too wasted in my eyes.

“Yes, stand up, that’s right,” but the next moment, I saw that human youth try to stand up, firmly leaning on his two fists to push his all shaking body up.

Slowly he stood up, and once he did, he swayed right and left giving me the impression he wouldn’t last standing for much longer.

“Crush it! Crush it now!” from the side, I heard the anxious low tone of Lily. it gave me the impression that she was the one who was doing this trial, not my human!

And what was with what she just said?! Crush it? Shouldn’t he swallow the potion or what?

That dude used eight potions so far, with only one left. It was the biggest, filled with pale white liquid.

Just as that dude swayed, this close from falling down again, he raised his fist holding the last potion and slammed it with all his might to the ground.

*Rumble!*

It was a simple potion made out of fragile material like glass getting smashed on the ground. But the effects it created was really mind blowing for me.

First the altar itself changed! The altar that stood all silent and cold all this time started to tremble. Every single ore there shone in bright light, making a myriad of colours coming from that altar.

The light was intense from the start. In the span of few breaths, the colours merged together to form a pale white light that started to gush out of the altar, going up towards the sky, getting more intense and width the more it got higher.

It looked majestic even from such a distance away! And the rumble it came started from the altar, and kept coming in rhythm like heart beats or something.

Then the next big change happened to my dude. He crushed the potion on the ground. And once he did, a gush of vapour appeared out of nowhere.

The potion got liquid, but once it got crushed, it turned into such a thick wave of pale white mist.

The dude got enveloped by this mist for a few seconds before it started to fade away. Just when that happened, I got to see the silhouette of that youth.

He wasn’t down on the ground as I expected. Instead, it felt like his body got controlled by some sort of power, forcing his body to stand erect like it was a hammered nail over the top of that pillar.

“The mist… Is it the liquid effect?!” I turned to express my doubts to her. She nodded as she motioned to her lips again.

“Lower your voice, or else you’ll disturb others.”

“That… With all this chaos and noise, they didn’t get disturbed yet?”

“These noises are only heard outside the range of the altar cluster,” she shrugged, keeping her tone low, “and yes. That mist is the true form of the last potion. Or to be more precise, it’s the result of the potion liquid interacting with the pillar and combining all the effects of the other eight potions inside the body of that human kid.”

She pointed at the direction of the altar before adding:

“He now has to experience waves of pain while the eight potions are fusing together inside his body. The altar is like the fire baptising him, making the potions form into one thing.”

“What?”

“A dantian,” she said in a serious tone, “they will form a dantian inside their bodies. Then a few meridians will open next. How much I dunno. All depends on each person’s abilities and talents.”