Five months passed like a whisper in the fabric of the world.
For the city, they were weeks of celebrations, courtesy dinners, and praise exchanged among the five families. Yun Xiang's name echoed throughout—not just as a prodigy, but as a symbol of luck and prestige for the Yun clan. Gifts, invitations, and marriage promises disguised as business alliances filled the elders' tables.
For Jun Tian, the months passed night after night, the same candle, the same rock top, the same Lotus spinning in the spiritual sea. While the people reveled in the lights and festivities, he walked at night to Lone Cloud Peak, ascended in silence, and let the mountain swallow him in its calm. The city, by day, saw him as always: a young man with a restrained smile and average talent—the green chip the elders recorded in their books.
But the truth, hidden in the folds of time and spirit, was different.
Jun Tian began visiting the ancestral library with increasing frequency. By the light of the lamps, he leafed through dusty texts, notes from local masters, records of ancient advances—anything that could make sense of what he felt. He didn't seek common formulas. He looked for gaps: veiled mentions of "thresholds," brief accounts of geniuses who had "seen beyond" and returned without understanding. Between yellowed pages, the word that emerged, rare and almost faded, seemed to whisper to him: pseudo-realm.
In common practice, the Qi Condensation Realm had its ten layers—2.1 through 2.10. 2.10 was the pinnacle of what traditional lessons taught: a perfectly stable initial core, a point where Qi acquired sufficient density to sustain form and technique. Never, in the public records, had anything beyond this appeared without the cultivator already possessing resources incompatible with the lower world.
Jun Tian learned what the ancient texts didn't say in large print: there were accounts of anomalies—souls who silently discovered stages "between" the layers; "pockets" of understanding that didn't appear to ordinary measurements; breakthroughs that unfolded internally, without external outbursts.
It was through practice and observation that Jun Tian found the first clue. One fine morning, while the city slept, he felt a pressure point in his dantian that didn't match any known description. The Lotus, both guide and guardian, vibrated differently—its petals didn't spin, but pulsed like distant drums. He leaned deeper into the Breathing Path of Ascending Eternity and saw—not with his eyes, but with his soul's vision—a lilac threshold emerging beyond 2.10: a narrow crevice of understanding that shimmered like ancient ice.
"What is this?" he asked silently.
The Lotus didn't speak right away. When he spoke, his voice came like wind tearing through a curtain.
"I never expected it to exist here."
"No... not in a realm so unexplored."
Jun Tian noticed, for the first time, a tremor of emotion in the flower—something between surprise and fear. She had accepted that secrets existed, but not many: a 2.11 was impossible in the world's tables. And yet, there it was.
He spent entire nights testing. Each attempt was an exercise in patience. Rushing up a false level would mean fractures: drowning meridians, corroding heat, a soul bleeding energy. The Lotus patiently taught him an adjustment: not to rush, not to force the dantian to "fit" the Qi, but to understand the space the new threshold occupied—a mental framework, a different arrangement of the internal runes.
When Jun Tian finally confirmed the 2.11 itself, it felt like a new petal opening in the soul. Small, thin, a color the world's eyes couldn't grasp—a translucent lilac-blue that pulsated like a distant bell. The Lotus exhaled, and for the first time uttered words that sounded like some ancient lament:
"This is dangerous. This piece of the Dao doesn't belong on the safe paths. It's a fragment of something that repeats itself—layers that multiply like echoes of the void."
He could have stopped there. He considered. Remaining in 2.11 would mean powerful gains, but also greater atomic visibility: small ripples propagate like circles in water; even with the Lotus's seal, the universe has ways of listening.
Jun Tian chose to follow, but with a caution that made the Lotus herself hesitate. Not out of blind trust, but out of the curiosity of someone who had always been driven by questions.
The days dragged on. The breakthrough to 2.12 came after a week of fine-tuning: a night of profound silence, then a morning of light that seemed to wash the skin. 2.12 was clearer than 2.11, a layer of understanding that reordered how Qi interacted with thought—not just storing it, but weaving its qualities into the fabric of being. The Lotus, which until then had only guided, now fell silent and observed. In its radiance was respect and a fear that was not its own: fear of what another power
could feel when he realized that.
When 2.13 presented itself, it was not with an explosion, but with the sound of a thousand small doors opening from the inside out. Jun Tian felt the dantian like a chamber growing inside him; as if the core were multiplying in thin layers, like onions that did not break themselves apart, but added dimensions. It was a breakthrough that changed not only the quantity of Qi, but the quality of the space that contained it.
Upon reaching 2.13, Jun Tian stood motionless for a time that seemed to stretch the thread of the world. The Lotus, enveloped in a glow that deepened her tones, spoke with piercing calm:
"I did not know this was possible without external intervention. Not even I... was made for this."
"Jun Tian, there are echoes in the folds of the Dao that watch you. You have advanced where there are no records because your being is not completely of this pattern. This... this will change your foundation in a way that no manual predicts."
He understood what was said without the technical vocabulary of the elders: this sequence of pseudo-realms was not just a numerical progression. It was something that reconfigured the basis on which the Formation was built. If, before, the foundation was built like a castle of stones laid in known layers, now it seemed that someone had added cavities, passages, and internal curves—a form that, when consolidated, could generate unprecedented phenomena in the structure of the core.
Jun Tian did not seek fame. He closed himself off in deeper silence. He learned not to celebrate or doubt. He began to meditate more in libraries, studying lines that spoke of "anomalies" and "broken cycles." He understood, with a sweet strangeness, that the universe offered rare shortcuts—shortcuts that are not trivial gifts, but forks in the road of destiny.
Lotus asked him to keep it a secret. Not out of vanity, but out of prudence: the fewer eyes that knew, the less likely it was that something that had pursued him before would sense him. Jun Tian nodded. Every advance from there required climbing the mountain, the silent night, measured breathing, and methods that falsified the dantian's signature outward. It was a game of masks with the cosmos itself.
When, after weeks, he returned to the city on the day the people celebrated Yun Xiang, the contrast was almost cruel: the city was filled with songs and banquets; Jun Tian walked with calm steps, like someone who keeps a secret too big for words. No one suspected what had changed. The record remained green in the records. The Lotus, nestled as always in the spiritual sea, spun with less surprise and more maternal respect.
Deep down, however, Jun Tian felt the tremor of a growing responsibility. He did not yet know how the formation would change in the future, nor what kind of impact it would have on the Spiritual Foundation he would one day need to form—but he felt, as if the wind whispered, that the architecture of his soul had already become something new.
He smiled to himself—not a smile of triumph, but of someone who finds a road that no one else sees. And as the city's fireworks lit up that night, the young man walking toward Lone Cloud Peak repeated in a low voice, almost like a prayer:
"I will walk slowly. I will grow in the shadows. When the day demands it, I will not be a surprise—I will be the end of an ancient mistake."
The Lotus, spinning just below the surface of his spirit, touched his consciousness like a finger of light.
"Then we will walk together, Jun Tian. But remember: there are voices that do not forgive the curious. Go forward, but do not draw the attention of what you should not name."
And so, between parties in the city and nights on the mountain, Jun Tian continued. The 2.13 rested within him like a secret of amber, warm and ancient. He did not yet know the price this secret would exact—nor the ways in which the foundation of his soul would transform in the future—but he knew the only truth that matters to a cultivator: to grow is to accept the unknown and carry fear as strength, not as an end.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)