Nine days had passed since I moved into my new house. Between working on my backlog of orders, teaching my apprentices and other employees, and training my body I did not find any time to check on my cultivation.

Which meant I told my apprentices to stay home for today, and my clerks to close the shop. I needed to know what changed, what I could do now, and what I couldn't. My newly furnished meditation room welcomed me in its unused glory.

I focused on myself, my dantian and the core within. With all the liquid qi I had in my dantian before my breakthrough now compressed into a solid, crystal core. The crystalline structure was absolutely fascinating, far more complex than any of my own crystal meridians.

It wasn't as small as core seed implied though. A seed had a few millimetres diameter at best, but my crystal core held nearly half a centimetre in diameter.

I did a little mental math, and compared the quantity of liquid qi I had before my breakthrough to the size of my core. Well, damn. The requirement to get solid qi from liquid qi more than doubled. Reaching a state of solid took about four hundred seventeen times as much liquid qi actually. Well, now that I had a core, growing it should be easy enough, just allowing liquid qi to fall into it should work.

I’d test the capabilities of my core later. For now, my gaze moved outwards, leaving the black hole in my meridian. I had not cultivated over the last month, so the liquid qi held inside my own meridian was negligible. It still existed though, as my meridians and aura continued cultivating qi for me even when I didn't.

I tried coaxing the liquid qi to leave my dantian through one of the wormholes. And it did. Perfect. Now I had access to liquid qi for all my needs. Perhaps filling my dantian with a black hole wasn't all that smart? I could still burn the qi inside, using it to directly manipulate gravity, but not move it outside.

Well, that ship had sailed long ago, so no reason to worry about it now.

Anyways.

With liquid qi starting to move along my meridians, instead of the gaseous qi from before, I hoped it wouldn't take all that long for liquid qi to naturally appear in my body - if it didn't, I’d just have to flood it with gaseous qi until it naturally transformed. Qi wasn't actual matter, but there were similarities. And from my observation liquid qi was far less prone to moving than gaseous qi was.

So I would make for a far better type of structural qi. If the trend continued, solid qi would be even better structural qi, but even for me, something like that was in the far future.

Finished with my dantian, I moved my gaze outwards again, into my whole body. Unlike the creation of liquid qi, solid qi did not seem to have changed anything. Well, I did create it in my dantian, thus my soul. A soul which I lacked any real perception of, but would need to develop perception for if I wanted to advance in the future.

Seeing as nothing changed, my body was in perfect health, I moved on again.

I extended my aura to its full radius, before taking control of it. Instead of just compressing it, I moved my aura upwards, into the air, shrinking the radius at the same time. As the cylinder around me grew, I could feel the qi inside my aura decrease minimally. Furthermore, the farther the end of my aura extended past my natural limit, the harder controlling it got, and the denser I needed to make it. By the time my aura’s radius decreased to three hundred metres my aura extended up for about seven hundred metres, instead of nearly the kilometre it should’ve. I continued on regardless, seeing as doing this would allow me to use all of my aura to cultivate, and should skyrocket the amount of qi I gathered at all times.

In the end, my aura had a radius of about fifty metres around me house, and extended upwards for nearly two kilometres. Nearly good enough. I shrank my aura down a little more, until it’s radius was about thirty metres, and its height around a kilometre and a fifth.

Now I just had to keep this up for the rest of the day. And then week, month and year. While a part of my mind kept concentrating on keeping my aura in its current shape. The rest of me concentrated on my aura, and I changed it again. My previous aura had only taking in qi, and slowly circled it in the center, something that could still work, but needed some adjustments. With my aura now being a cylinder, instead of a half sphere, I would need to complicate things a bit.

I concentrated on my aura, and imagined all qi inside of it slowly circling ever inwards. Right up until it reached about a metre radius, where it suddenly accelerated downwards,towards me. I felt my aura change, and soon enough the qi inside of it changed its route. Perfect. Now I just had to use a small part of myself to keep my aura in that shape, and my passive cultivation would increase significantly.

I got up, and made myself some food, watching the ocean as time drifted past. It really was a gorgeous ocean. A shame I wouldn't be allowed use it anytime soon, if the tales were to be believed.

Now, techniques. I needed some, which meant I needed to use my qi and aura to force ambient qi to do something for me. What though? How far could I take this?

First, directly increasing someone’s gravity to force them on the ground. Wait! Why didn't I do that with myself? If I just increased my own gravity while training, then my training should increase in speed significantly. Something to try tomorrow, today was my day off after all.

I went down in the cellar, and got myself some string, before moving back in my living room, binding a small pebble from the beach to the string, and hanging both from the ceiling.

With a part of my mind still keeping my aura in shape, the rest of me concentrated on the gravity of the pebble right in front of me. I burnt my qi, but instead of trying to affect gravity directly, I tried forcing the qi around me to do so.

I imagined qi, not mine, burning up, increasing the planet’s pull on my target - the pebble. It took quite the effort not to affect gravity like I used to, affecting the ambient qi instead, but I managed. Just.

I saw the string go a little more taunt for a moment, before snapping back up. Not enough qi then. I repeated my previous experiment, trying to affect more qi this time. I managed, barely. Still, the string grew taunt for nearly ten seconds before snapping back up. How much of my qi did I need to use to affect ambient qi?

This was going to take a while.

Still, I managed to keep my aura in shape all this time, so perhaps I should try something else first? How much of my, apparently far expanded self did I need to control my aura, do my daily tasks, and experiment?

Multitasking was a skill I could really use right now, but never bothered to try - true multitasking was impossible for normal humans after all. The best they could manage was switching between tasks fast enough it seemed like multitasking.

But I left baseline humanity behind me more than a decade ago. And I distinctly remembered both experimenting, and keeping my aura in shape all the time. Perhaps I should use the rest of the day to find out what my mind was capable of, how much things I didn't do because I lacked critical knowledge about myself.

I spend the second half of the day going through my memories, searching for stuff I didn't think about. I also went over my plans, controlled my aura, and started cultivating at the same time.

Doing anything more was not yet possible, but I didn't feel all that far from doing a fifth thing. I also tried several more things, like doing some mentally challenging work - which only allowed me to do two things at once, and one of those was controlling my aura, a skill I had honed ever since finding out about it, and could do while sleeping.

Which probably meant I had been multitasking ever since discovering I could control my aura. Well, good to know. Still, as I went through all the conversations about cultivators and cultivation I could remember, I came to a realisation. While cultivators stored most of their qi in their dantian and near their kidneys, and all the stupid things they did, their mind was their scariest asset.

The ability to unconsciously delegate things to themselves - like techniques - was a scary thing. Learning things also came easier and faster to me, and I assumed other cultivators as well. It was time to revise my plans with the addition of two new things I could do at the same time.

One would have to be either cultivating, or developing techniques. The other would learn techniques or read and think on my book about arrays, while the last would work and teach.

Perhaps I should do some aura sweeps over the town, to get myself a cat. Because I still wanted that cat, and searching my surroundings every other hour wouldn't cost much.