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And yet I could tell that just as she earlier divided mortal cultivation into three phases, now that we started to talk about the second step of it, this was going to change and do so in a hurry.

"This stage is all about taking the spiritual energy you\'ve gathered, condensed and then refined… and then condensing it again, beyond the limits of what you thought or felt possible before."

The noise of Claire\'s steps once again reached my ears, signifying she had resumed her stroll around me in this dojo-like part of the living room.

"If we extend the example from before when you first condense your spiritual power, you turn it from a gas into a liquid. Then, when you are at the fifth stage, you condense that liquid into a proper solid."

Claire\'s steps stopped.

"Then again, this comparison is a simplification of such degree, it is hardly any different from a lie at this point, so be careful with applying that sort of understanding too directly."

Claire went back to walking around me, pushing just one question to my head.

\'Is there any sort of significance to when she moves and when she stays still?\'

"Once you properly condense your spiritual energy into a basic core, you enter the next step, the sixth stage of core establishment," the noise of Claire\'s steps stopped, "which, as I stated before, is a foreign territory for me, so I need you to decrease your trust in my words even further from now on."

Her steps resumed once again.

\'Could it be…\'

"According to what I\'ve heard, as a sixth-stage cultivator, your goal is to properly establish your spiritual core as the basis of your cultivation. In a certain sense, it\'s only at the sixth stage that one gains the ability to draw strength from their spiritual core, as opposed to just diffusing parts of it and unleashing it as the spiritual energy of lower ranks."

\'Is she stopping whenever she inserts a caveat or off-thought, walking only as she concentrates on the core of the lecture?\' I thought, believing to finally crack the mystery of Claire\'s pacing.

"So, to sum it up, while fifth stage cultivators use their spiritual core as a sort of a central storage of their energy, a storage much greater than what their flesh can hold thanks to how condensed the spiritual energy is within it, once reaching the sixth rank, it literally becomes the centerpiece of one\'s whole cultivation."

Claire\'s steps stopped, giving me the opportunity to verify my guess.

"Now, any questions so far?" she asked, unknowingly making me bring my eyebrows closer in a slight confusion.

\'Wait, so it\'s not just tangents but questions too?\' I thought while forcing a small, relaxed smile on my lips and raising my face… but remaining sane enough not to open my eyes.

"I think I do follow you, so let\'s keep going."

For a moment, there was no sound indicating Claire picked up her pace, making it seem as if she was just standing there and staring me down…

"Good. Then, next comes the seventh step, the core expansion stage where one spreads the influence of their centerpiece throughout their body. Just like we…" Claire\'s voice cut off for a second as she noticed her mistake, only to quickly correct herself, "Well, you didn\'t exactly go through this process, so I can\'t talk about us going through it but…"

This time, it was a sight that marked yet another stop to Claire\'s pace, putting her in a position just a few steps behind my back. Yet, when she moved again, something was different.

"I can\'t really explain it in words, so I\'m going to show you how it works instead."

Soon, I figured out what was different about the sound of her steps, as short as it was. And it was all thanks… to the gentle yet slightly cold touch of her fingers that blessed my back roughly at the mid-point of my spine.

I wasn\'t really sure what Claire was trying to do at first, especially when she suddenly dug her fingernail into my skin brutally enough to actually cut it open… An uncertainty that vanished when I felt her own energy suddenly invade my own system.

At first… it simply diffused throughout my body, like the Qi I would inherently absorb from the air while meditating. Then, once the process established itself well enough for me to recognize it… Her energy suddenly started to radiate towards itself.

One whiff of her energy would move towards the other, while the next one would rush to join with the one after that. Soon enough, a small bout of her spiritual force now condensed to the point where I could hardly sense its presence while remaining fully aware of the weight of the power hiding behind it.

"Since I\'ve already purified my Qi, I can\'t really showcase that step, so let\'s just assume it happened and move on," Claire explained out loud, only to then nearly send me fainting when she unleashed a storm of her energy directly into my system.

This time, however, rather than doing anything new… she simply diffused the same, concentrated energy that I felt condensing before throughout my flesh… before actually infusing the spiritual power into the physical aspect of my body.

\'Flesh-Qi balance, I guess?\' I thought, trying my best to figure out what was going on before she would feel the need to explain it out loud.

As for how she knew whether I understood the part of the lesson or not… I honestly had no idea.

But it was also the very next thing that happened that drew my attention, as the whole process suddenly felt… vaguely familiar.

Claire\'s spiritual energy within my flesh suddenly… collapsed, as if its structure could no longer handle its weight. Bit by bit, starting with the tips of my fingers, her energy would recede, all falling into the center of its spiritual weight…

Right where I could feel my own energy radiating out into my body.

"That\'s the fifth step," Claire didn\'t say but whispered instead, making use of the close proximity of our bodies. "As for how the next step looks like, I can only give you my idea rather than an outright solution…"

Claire didn\'t finish her sentence. Instead, the ball of her condensed energy suddenly started to grow unstable, as if the energy suddenly decided it no longer wanted to exist within a singular point of her body and tried to reverse the process of founding the core, spreading its influence all the way back to all the areas of my flesh that her spiritual power was infused into before.

A process that continued for quite some time… but never reached its proper finish, leaving my soul and mind in a state of weird confusion and disarray.

"I\'m sorry, but that\'s the limit of how far I can…"

Before Claire could finish her words, I caved in to what felt like merely my instincts. And instead of trying to stretch the influence of the fake core of her energy back to parts of my flesh it previously visited without upsetting the balance of said core in the process…

I just skipped the stretching part altogether, allowing its influence to simply manifest in the areas I wanted!

\'No, that\'s not right either,\' I thought as I grew numb to Claire\'s touch and deaf to her words, too focused on the riddle in front of my mind\'s eye to pay attention to anything else.

Sure, manifesting the power of Claire\'s fake core and even my own power was certainly possible. A fact I proved when I first succeeded at doing so…

But it was a process so unstable, that it simply couldn\'t be right.

\'I refuse to believe this is the right way to go about things, not if it forever burdens you with this constant need to keep the core\'s balance.\'

I took in a full breath, filling my lungs all the way to their brim… and then holding the air in within my pumped-out chest, as if threatening myself not to take another breath until I solved this puzzle.

Seconds passed, soon turning into fractions of a minute before becoming a proper, full minute.

But I didn\'t stop there.

A minute after minute passed, and while the feeling of suffocating started to ring the alarm bells in my mind, I just kept going, relying on the improvements to my flesh introduced by this very spiritual power.

\'Wait…\'

All of a sudden, I allowed all the exhausted air to escape from my lungs before taking another, hurried breath.

\'Why am I even trying all that hard? Isn\'t my gimmick to rely on the modern technology?\'

With this thought, all the messy ideas that stacked up on each other in my mind suddenly vanished, replaced with a neatly organized list of potential solutions to the problem that I translated into a less mystical and more practical dimension.

Rather than thinking about using my core, spiritual energy, and Qi… I switched to imagining circuits, roads, canals, and the like.

\'Gateways…\'

What if I could construct a set of mental pathways and gates for the spiritual energy to flow through, forcibly keeping the core stable with all the gates closed and allowing it to return back to its chaotic state when one of them opened up, simultaneously giving it a way to release the energy that excess pressure that destabilizes it, to begin with?

Like a set of valves attached to a pressurized tank, allowing one to exploit this very pressure to direct the tank\'s content wherever they desire?

\'No, that would be just as much strain on the brain as trying to do it manually.\'

\'How about pulsating it out? Like the trick they employ when using just a few cables to light up a huge number of diodes in any configuration one could desire?\'

Because some diodes would come with a delay between the moment the energy cuts off and their light properly vanishes, by circulating those signals at a rate faster than the delay, one could use a set of just a few cables to light up pretty much any number of diodes in any setting they wanted. A feat that seemed impossible without the prior knowledge of this quality of the diodes.

\'No, this idea is far too complicated. And how do I even go about choosing which places should the pulses be attracted to go to… !!!\'

It failed idea… that finally guided me in the right direction.

\'What if I just make a set of points all over my body that on their own serve to discharge the excess pressure and moderate the chaotic state of the core, feeding energy into the rest of my body in the process?\'