Path Of The Dragon (A Dark Fantasy Cultivation Wuxia Xianxia Progression Series)

Chapter 22 Heavenly Moon Pills

Ming wouldn't stop nagging her about getting some rest, but she finally convinced him it was too early for her to sleep and they were just wasting time.

"Why don't you tell me exactly what these heavenly moon pills do?" Jie asked, holding up the bottle she'd taken from The Crimson Vault.

Ming coiled up like a snake as he often did before lecturing her. "They contain a dense amount of Essence. When you take one, you need to focus every fiber of your being on absorbing and cultivating all you can without sacrificing the quality of your qi," he said.

Jie opened the bottle of pills. A sweet, tantalizing scent filled the air, and it gave off waves of Essence.

She took one of the bright white pills and placed it on her tongue. It melted and poured down her throat like ice-cold water, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

It rushed down her body, through her meridians, and into her dantian.

She gasped. So much Essence!

She clenched her fists and gritted her teeth as she set to refining it as fast as she could while not letting her quality slip. Sweat ran down her face, and bright white Essence steamed off her skin.

A black ooze bubbled out of her pores as her body shifted, removing impurities.

Jie kept her focus on greedily absorbing the pill. Explosions rippled through her dantian as she refined one strand of dragon lightning qi after another.

Her bones ached, and her teeth rattled from the raging storm within her dantian, but her cultivation base soared faster than it had since arriving in this world.

She sat still and absorbed the pill like a greedy sponge for hours and the lightning qi inside her dantian swelled up until it was half again as big as it was when she started.

She felt her strength skyrocket as she broke through beyond the ninth star of the Disciple rank and into the first star of the Adept rank. She finally began to understand what Ming had meant about the gap between the ranks being far larger than the gap between stars, even when the difference between them was a single star.

Finally, she absorbed the last shred of Essence and let out a heavy sigh. She felt as though she were bursting with strength despite the pain of her cultivation technique.

"Wow! That was amazing! I want another one!" Jie said with a bright smile on her face.

Ming smiled. "You're a natural, kiddo, but now you need to stabilize your cultivation by sparring and practicing your martial skills. If you don't, you could injure yourself. Cultivation resources are excellent, but overusing them can destabilize your cultivation," he said, "Now, wash that muck off yourself, and let's see what their Training Hall is like.

Jie nodded. "I'll go do that then!" she said.

She leaped to her feet, scrubbed the muck off her skin, and dashed out of her home in a flash.

Ming shook his head. "To absorb so much of her very first pill... most Elementalists can't even do that... what kind of monster did I bring to this world?" he muttered.

Jie rushed off through the night and went into The Training Hall.

Even at this time of night, it was filled with other students battling each other or facing humanoid constructs made of stone and earth with glowing green eyes and energy suffusing their bodies in one of the many arenas. Some of the sparring arenas were raised above floor level, and others were more like pits that sank into the earth.

In them, youths sparred against each other or against the earthen constructs.

Some merely chatted among themselves, others watched the other students spar, and a few sat in quiet cultivation.