Amaranth sat down in the building, watching the Scorpion Road. Guard outposts like these were common here, since this trade-route guaranteed the flow of trade through the Golden-Devil Sect and its affiliated cities. After all, the wealth of spirit stones from the mines meant a lot less if it couldn't be traded, so it was vitally important to keep this passage safe and secure from the myriad bandits who wanted the wealth the merchants carried and the hungry spirit beasts and other dangerous creatures that sought to kill them. That way, people kept on coming, and the Golden Devils benefited.
As for the small-scale, Amaranth was taking a mission as a guard now for three main reasons. One, it paid fairly well in contribution points, which were always useful. Two, because it was a job where he could have a reliable source of foes to kill, to feed his body. Three, and most importantly in his view, from time to time it got him really good fights, where he was pushed to the edge of his ability. Combat was one of the great joys of his life, after all. (The other being eating good food, of course. One of the side-benefits of killing spirit beasts often is that you'd have fairly good meat to sell if he made the kill clean enough, and he had been making some forays into the field himself, considering how much free time he had. At the moment, he was pretty much a novice, though.)
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on one's perspective, while the poor luck of his Clan often meant that the Scorpion Road was more dangerous than it should be, often the major tides of misfortune struck elsewhere, and even the few difficult fights were beginning to dry up.
He could still remember the last one. It was one of the Organ Meat Desert's classic Sand Worms that had decided that it would try to gobble up the caravan. Unusually stealthy even for a Sand-Worm, they hadn't realized it was poised to strike even when it was barely a cart-length away. Even with the help of the other guards, without his Fist of the Hungering Beast, he'd surely have been a goner.
Though he tried to dodge, he had ended up taking some bad wounds from its opening strike. His hand hovered over his left side, healed at this point, and he winced in reminiscence. Without the Qi he stole he wouldn't have been able to ablate enough of the Worm's dying attack to keep him alive, or at least not heavily injured.
All of that being said, it still had been years since a fight of that level, and he was starting to grow antsy. He itched to sink his fists into an opponent of power once more instead of the myriad chaff that attacked the roads, and other than that...
Well, he noted as a general tendency, the stronger a spirit beast was, the richer the flavor of their flesh would be. It was a side effect of the sheer spiritual energy permeating and perfecting their form, he thought.
That wasn't to say all spiritual beasts were delicious, of course. That Worm wasn't exactly palatable after being cooked, though to be fair that could just have been a matter of his personal dislike for its texture. He had heard from rumors that people from far off, near the Third Sea, ate the limbs of a strange creature called a squid that lived in the waters. It was a chewy, rubbery dish, and he thought that the gigantic spirit worm that he ate pieces of might have had a similar mouthfeel.
Of course, all of that was simple speculation to say the least. He'd never even seen the Third Sea in his life beyond pictures, after all. Anyways, while that may have not been to his taste, there was that wonderful Spirit Ostrich a few years even before the Worm that he did enjoy.
It was a blazingly fast beast, with wind-aspected qi naturally permeating through its feathers, pushing air aside and behind into jets to hasten its pace. The guards had worked together to hold it off despite its vastly superior speed. The power of formations really was something else. It was bleeding badly, and looked like it was going to get taken out quietly, but then it vanished. His next feeling was a stab of pain as it speared straight through his shoulder with its talon. At the time, he hadn't blinked an eye, since the rush of battle-thirst through his body had been so eager that even as his wound leaked crimson, he emptied his other arm to fell it with a Hungering Strike.
To an average person, this situation might seem peculiar. Normally, Spirit Ostriches weren't aggressive to the caravans that crossed the Scorpion Road, since they'd usually content themselves with the spirit lizards and insects that wandered across the desert without caring enough about the caravans to make such an attack, so one might wonder what happened.
That time, things had been different. A foolish traveler had decided that stealing the Ostrich's eggs straight out of its nest for breakfast would be a smart idea, and he failed to consider the fact that their mother might come looking back to check for them.
Worse yet, the traveler had already started to scramble one of the eggs into a gigantic omelet when the ostrich arrived to attack, so there wasn't even the possibility of avoiding the conflict entirely.
Either way, at the end, it turned out fine. Amaranth and the other guards demanded an egg each in recompense for the traveler's mistake, and he acquiesced.
With one of the remaining eggs and some chopped cooked pieces of the ostrich's meat, some stored pepper and salt, as well as some boiled cactus leaves, Amaranth made himself an omelette the next day. It was pretty rough in shape considering he didn't have much experience with eggs of this size, but while the appearance can matter, in this situation the actual taste mattered a whole lot more. Amaranth loved it, and he fondly thought of that omelet in his days ahead. It was too bad he didn't see an ostrich of that level since. That probably meant his memory of that omelet likely was slightly exaggerated by longing and nostalgia, but he firmly still believed that it probably was mostly as good as he remembered it like.
As he relaxed and watched the latest passing caravan, a sudden pressure descended upon the area. It was the aura of a vast amount of Qi of incredible density, guided into a point by a single unswerving ideal. In other words, it was the aura of a Core Formation expert releasing the power of their cultivation base. Amaranth jerked up in alarm, and rushed alongside the other guards to see what was happening.
There wasn't one Core Formation Cultivator. There were two. One was a woman with the unmistakable bronze of the Golden Devil Clan holding a sword of spirit-forged bronze, and the other seemed to be a man in the clothes of someone from the Turtle-World. They both seemed to have taken quite a bit of damage at this point, and their reserves felt like they were half-eaten away despite their might. The fight was looking like it'd close out in an hour now, which Amaranth knew to mean it'd end soon, considering the duration Core Formation fights normally took.
Worse, Amaranth didn't know who would win. If the bandit won, Amaranth and the rest of the Qi Condensation guards would be absolutely slaughtered. That couldn't be allowed. But what could they do? It's not like they could contribute directly to the fight, after all. A Qi Condensation level cultivator would get wiped out easier than swatting a fly by this foe. Something felt off about that thought. No, there definitely was something that he could do. He started to search his memories when a guard shouted out.
"Channel power to the Qi-Pooling Formation!"
At this point, the numerous guards from this outpost and the ones that were relatively close had gathered, forming a crowd that watched the fight in front. Most were wary, some were vaguely excited to have something cut up their tedium, but there certainly was an undercurrent of fear running through.
That being said, they were members of the Golden Devil Clan. They wouldn't break so easily. The cultivators poured their Qi into the Formation, which shot an invisible beam of energy to the Clan Core Formation Expert. Immediately, the flagging reserves of the Core Formation Expert was bolstered, and rose up. Taking advantage of the increase of Qi, the woman poured more power into her techniques. The gleaming Sword Qi that blasted with each stroke of her blade started emerging with greater force and speed, and the bandit found it difficult to cope, as exhausted as he was. The sword weaved a maze of cutting force which was rapidly but barely dodged.
Finally, the bandit made a misstep. When a blast from below was dodged by leaping above, the bandit lined up in the path of a blast that bisected his head and shoulders right off his body. Stunned, the bandit didn't move in time to prevent the rest of his body from being roughly chopped into pieces by the incoming sword intent. Blood spewed out from the remains of his body, a significant amount launched at the nearby crowd as an aftershock of the attack.
Amaranth was focusing his whole mind on giving Qi to the Clan Cultivator, so he didn't notice the stream of blood aimed in his general direction until it nearly hit. He turned, but his speed wasn't nearly sufficient to get out of the way. The blood completely drenched his clothes, his face, and the rest of his body.
For a second, his constitution was just in shocked awe. Even though the Core Formation bandit was exhausted, its blood was a source of powerful Qi that far surpassed anything it had consumed in the past. The moment of shock didn't last long, though.
The hunger of his constitution had been fully awakened, and the entirety of his skin flashed grey. The crimson fluid streamed into his body at a rapid pace as if it turned into a vortex, and grey sparks danced across his skin as impurities were pushed out and vaporized. The rich Qi of Core Formation was on a completely different level, and the boundaries that kept him in the Fifth Heavenstage were being shattered open. He had been trying his best to open Meridians in this stage, but it was a time-consuming process. However, the impurities in his meridians were nothing compared to the sheer electric force that this Qi possessed, and were wiped away like it with the ease of someone flicking their sleeve. In seconds, the channels that he had spent so long trying to laboriously open were completely unblocked, and his Qi rushed straight through, bringing Amaranth to the Sixth Heavenstage. The power soon rapidly thickened and deepened, bringing him to the Seventh, and then the Eight. At this point, Amaranth was just feeling utter euphoria. But then, he remembered something, and his thoughts came down to earth.
The Eighth Heavenstage was infamous for being a barrier to many a Qi Condensation cultivator in terms of preventing advancement to the Foundation Establishment stage. The Dantian had to be carefully shaped and expanded so it would be able to fit Dao Pillars in the first place, and then further so the traditional set of Seven could be fit so breaking through to Core Formation would be a possibility in the future.
It was well known among the Golden Devils that if one took the laborious path to make Eight Dao-Pillars, the so-called True Dao Pillars, one's future breakthroughs would be eased and the holder would even get a much coveted boost to their luck, which was a rare thing for the Golden Devils indeed. Amaranth had long resolved to take this path, as he wanted to seize advantages to prevent a situation where he's inherently at a disadvantage compared to the others from occurring again. However, the current issue was that the sheer amount of power rushing through his body right now wasn't exactly good for the precise control that it took to shape the Dantian.
He gathered his will, and clamped it as best as he could onto the Qi. If it was any other circumstance, this Qi would have probably thrown him off as easily as a stallion would throw off a baby trying to ride it. However, the fact that this Qi had been processed by his body gave him some level of authority over it. Not enough to completely bring it to a stop, but enough to guide the process. He carefully circulated the power evenly throughout the edges of his Dantian in the traditional technique of the Golden Devils.
Normally, this'd be a much slower process, but that wouldn't be possible in the current situation. He felt flares of pain as he tried to make his dantian adapt to becoming larger at a much faster rate than it should, like a pressure in his chest. To be honest, he was surprised that he hadn't torn it apart by now, but unbeknownst to him, that too was a feature of the Bloodsoaked Bronze Body. It'd be awfully bad at assimilating power if the wielder's spiritual organs couldn't deal with an influx like this, after all.
That being said, it wasn't omnipotent, and trying to assimilate power two great stages above in a safe manner was difficult, to say the least. Holding the Qi felt like he was trying to chain lightning, and although somehow, paradoxically, it was working right now, it was beginning to slip from his grasp. Blasts of Qi started irregularly coming from the jagged, twisting mass, and his dantian started stretching dangerously, alongside a piercing pain like if someone stabbed him in the heart. Amaranth's eyes widened in shock, and pulled the power away. He used what remained to bring him to the Ninth Heavenstage, fortifying his Dantian, but even that made it feel like it was about to creak.
Amaranth grimaced. While this was a fortuitous encounter for sure, that mistake would make his cultivation unsteady. Maintaining this level would take effort on its own, and properly stabilizing it enough to make a breakthrough might take him multiple decades longer than expected. Oh well, he thought. He did have to establish and refine a proper Dao before breaking through to Foundation Establishment, so he had the time for that. While this did complicate his hope for breaking through to the 10th Heavenstage for his body cultivation, and maybe even trying for the 13th, the years in advance that this opportunity had bought were still valuable, even if overall his advancement speed would still be average since he'd be stalled out at the 9th while others would be advancing towards it.
There were also some more immediately relevant benefits of this. The combat power of the 9th Heavenstage would serve him very well in defending his life during the next time the Sects from the Fifth Sea invaded for their so-called Trials.
Besides, he was excited to see what sort of Spirit Beasts that he could challenge now. That Ostrich that took a team of cultivators his level back then could probably be slain by just himself this point. What a grand thought that was, really.
Still, there's a long road to go, and Qi Condensation is a small step in the long run.
The Clan Core Formation Expert had seen all of this happening, and was intrigued. With her powerful spiritual sense, the phenomenon was clear to see. She had just rummaged through the bandit's valuables in his bag of holding, and found a lifesaving treasure suitable for the Qi Condensation stage. The treasure was useless for the bandit himself, so he must have stolen it comparatively recently. No matter. This kid seemed sort of interesting, so might as well pass it over to him. Good Seeds got wiped out too often in this Clan, which wreaked havoc on the Golden Devil's ability to sustain power and grow, so helping prevent that sounded good to her.
"Hey, you! Take this." She tossed over what looked to be a pendant of some sort to Amaranth. "It'll save your life once when you're in trouble."
"Thank you! Could I ask you for your name—" And the Clan cultivator flew away. Well, he guessed that as a Core Formation-tier cultivator, she must be quite busy since there weren't that many in the whole Clan. Amaranth looked at the pendant. He could sense a variety of qi aspects on it, but he couldn't discern their overall purpose. He was never a item-crafter anyway, so that was expected. He placed it over his neck. Well, this should be quite useful to protect him from those Trials in sixty years. Good to be careful, especially against cultivators who were inherently better than others within their Heavenstage after all. Well, time to just relax into the sect-mission life and solidify his Dao.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
40 years later.
Amaranth was still in the 9th Heavenstage. At this point, this just rankled. He knew that he'd need to recover from his error years ago, but this was just kind of excessive. He had went on many sect-missions throughout the years, and now even had a pair of magic Toad Boots that let him take great leaps and land safely. They were quite useful, and had helped him on many different occasions. The utility of being able to reach high places, especially for a Qi Condenser who naturally has no flight capabilities, is something that's applicable to a surprising amount of tasks. Outside of the utility, in combat the degree of three-dimensional motion that it allowed made evasion possible in situations where he'd otherwise be completely surrounded. To say the least, he was quite grateful for finding it inside that Toad he killed so long ago.
However, at the moment, he wasn't really thinking about that, but his poor cultivation progress. Over the last four decades, he had solidified his Dao. He had decided to take on the path of the Devourer, since that's what he did to the power of his foes with his primary technique as well as his constitution. A Dao that synergized with that would be quite useful. That being said, Amaranth may have still considered a different Dao, due to the uncomfortable connection it had to the Blood Path, if it wasn't his more innocent expression of a facet of Dao through his love of delicious food. On the Dao end of things, he was feeling pretty confident. The primary issue was the bottleneck he was stuck at right now. At this current pace, even the 10th Heavenstage would be a risky move to make.
Giving up on that just felt wrong. So, Amaranth researched, and researched, when he found a book speaking of a secret Realm that could be visited for great opportunity, but also great peril. It could be entered through a magic doorway that the Qiguai Clan held. Normally, he'd have never taken such a risk, but with this pendant, things were more uncertain.
He held the pendant up to his sight. It might actually be possible to gain something that would let him power through his bottleneck.
It was also possible that he'd get permanently crippled. However, if he didn't take this chance, he'd almost certainly have to break into Foundation Building from the 9th Heavenstage, with 10th being the best he'd be able to reach. Without seizing those advantages, it'd be guaranteed he'd be inferior despite his efforts, just as he was before. No.
He'd do it. No matter what happened, Amaranth swore that he'd not languish in the well-trodden route, even if it meant death would be the alternative.
AN: I'd like to take a Lifesaving Treasure as my omake bonus for this turn,
@occipitallobe, and try out the Qiguai Secret Realm. Ofc, I'll write it in the Google Sheets as well.
This'll probably end up with him getting crippled, since I doubt the lucky streak will continue, but that might be fun to write about too.
(I'm looking this over, and wow, my characterization sucks. Well, that's how practice goes I guess.)
