Staring into the black abyss of nothingness inside the item she now knew to be a helmet was extremely boring for a while. It eventually develops a yellow dot in the bottom left of her vision, which stays as the only discernible feature of the darkness. A bright dot next to impenetrable blackness. Nothing changes for a good thirty seconds.

Then, the dot extends upward and becomes a thin line. It continues doing nothing after that.

Since absolutely no results were forthcoming from simply staring, Puran Ning closes her eyes to try and use other senses. Maybe the helmet was going to use her hearing to allow for the energy to flow through her easily or something. Apparently one was supposed to be able to feel it, but she had never managed to get that to happen. She did the right thing, going up the mountain to where the energy was supposed to flow, to let it rush past her while meditating, but unlike people with money she had to work with her family to survive. Demon Sect territory boasts a higher quality of life for the less powerful, and an incredibly low standard to enter the outer compound and begin gaining resources. Thanks to controlling all of the usable farmland of the continent, everyone in the territory would have enough fuel to make their way to rank one and be accepted to the sect where more powerful resources could be acquired based on their talent.

Puren Ning wouldn't have enough talent to get very high in the sect hierarchy, but an average martial warrior is incomparable to a rank zero commoner. The farm manager was a rank three, and was probably going to live to be three hundred years old, assuming he didn't break through to another rank. Another rank probably wouldn't add very much at this point, but that was just how the energy worked. The younger you advance, the older you can get in the end.

Through the helmet, Puren Ning could almost hear speaking from outside. Somewhat impressive, considering the metal surrounding her head and the fact there was an entire building around the rest of her as well. No sound of energy though. She was hoping for a whoosh, or a bell, or some kind of explosion or something. Nothing.

Opening her eyes again, the yellow line had transformed. Rather than a splinter of light, it had fattened to a streak of color across the darkness. Watching the farthest side of the bar, she sees that it slightly grows, a jump in width by the tiniest fraction. That was apparently a thing that was happening.

On one side of the issue, nothing has actually changed in regards to visibility. On the other side, advancement of anything but pitch black was progress of a sort. Puren Ning decided to accept the events taking place on her head as an achievement brought about solely from her own good judgement and strength of character.

With that observation of her own prowess, the yellow finishes stretching across the entire expanse and grows to fill her vision. It brightens until everything is white, then dissipates into a view of the room with one slight difference. She can see tendrils of purple floating through the air. Stifling a gasp, Puren Ning reaches out to touch one of the glowing ribbons, only to have her hand go right through it. Apparently seeing the Energy of the Heavens wasn’t enough to let her start manipulating it immediately. There was one thing that everyone could do to force motion into the energy though, even without reaching the first rank. Meditation brings the Energy of the Heaven to rest within a person’s body, and they use it to refine themselves until they become a strong enough vessel for the energy to reside in permanently. Puren Ning had gotten through the Muscle, Heart, and Lung Refining stages, but it was incredibly slow. Before she could grow even the tiniest bit stronger, she would need to meditate for five shi chen. Her family expected her to work for another shi chen, and if she slept for four, that only left seven in the day altogether. Considering how boring it was to meditate, she was lucky if she could get any actual progress done most days, since that would require her to be perfectly still and thoughtless for most of the day, and working or training for the rest of her time. There was also slacking off to do, and there was no way she was going to cut that out of her schedule.

No use putting it off now. There was a good deal of noise now, and it seemed like the helmet was actually making her sense more powerful. If she wanted to see what happens to the Energy of the Heavens when meditating, she would need to do it before people started actually getting done with the work day and coming home. She almost closes her eyes before remembering that she was going to watch what happens.

That would have been a dumb way to waste five minutes.

Trying to think of absolutely nothing to become a container the Energy of the Heavens would gravitate toward, while not having anything blocking her senses, was probably going to be much more difficult than normal mediation, and that was hard enough. Staring at the floating ribbon in front of a nondescript wall, she specifically did not try to will it toward her. Neither did she wonder what it tasted like. She definitely did not think about how great it was going to be when she had the ability to punch a tree and have it fly forty meters.

However, she was definitely distracted by the beast smashing through the wall she was staring at, flying across the room, and smashing through the other wall.