As Sage spent more time with Guan Zhenyan he started to think the man wasn’t as bad as he seemed. He acted like a stingy miser, but his business deals were quite fair. Given their relative levels, Guan Zhenyan could have completely taken advantage of Sage many times already. Instead, the man seemed to make trades as if they were nearly on equal grounds. Or at least, this was what he was thinking when he received two Jade Tablets from him and took a glance at the contents.

In the Timeless Master’s Library, Sage had seen a technique set for both Soul, Spirit, and even Body Cultivation. He’d always had too many things to do and not enough time to do them. Even so, it gave him something to compare against and so when he saw the Spirit Cultivation Technique that Guan Zhenyan passed to him this time, he was amazed. This technique was likely many times more profound and powerful than what he saw before. While they made up a full set, those sets of techniques in the Timeless Master’s Library were not very powerful, just like the Wood natured techniques that Sage had stopped using a while ago. Yes, he was hiding his identity, but they also had a limit to their strength. Of course, Sage had always known that before he started learning them, but that was why he chose the group of techniques that had the most utility. In fact, the remodeling of the Inner World he planned to do soon would likely make use of them.

The second Jade Tablet was even more astounding than the first. It contained something that many cultivators the world over would kill for: a path towards the sixth rank. From what he’d seen, Nascent Soul rank cultivators existed all over the world. Attaining that level of strength would put someone within the top hundred or so people within a Kingdom and usually gave someone the qualifications to rule a whole province. Even so, the actual path towards that rank was not common knowledge. The only commonly accepted belief was that it required understanding of the laws. With only that little bit to guide them, only a lucky occurrence or the greatest geniuses ever reached it.

The existence of the information on this Jade Tablet finally confirmed it for Sage that this wasn’t unknown knowledge, but actually just strictly controlled information. Those in power didn’t want the masses to threaten them, so instead only the strongest and luckiest few could take leadership roles. As Sage started to read, Guan Zhenyan seemed to recognize his look and explained further: the resources in the world were limited. For some reason, their world had a sort of ceiling on the resources it produced. The natural treasures and materials for those above rank 5 were drastically less than those rank 5 and lower. With such a drought of resources, they could only heavily limit the rate of advancement. Otherwise, the limitation of resources would merely encourage wars to break out over them.

Sage wasn’t sure whether that was propaganda or not, but he wasn’t planning on leading any revolutions anytime soon so he didn’t say anything about it. Putting those thoughts aside, he read through the information and realized that it wasn’t actually very detailed either. After confirming with Guan Zhenyan he learned that this path towards the higher ranks was already something mysterious, and this guide he had was still quite vague. He knew in the past that one needed to learn about the ‘laws of the world’ to advance. Many studied the mysteries of nature and somehow their prowess increased. Sage had also tried to do this in the past, but he hadn’t made any significant improvement.

The Jade Tablet had mainly two very important pieces of information. First, certain Cultivation or Qi Techniques could actually allow a cultivator to systematically become proficient in certain laws merely by learning them. Second, a bit of enlightenment on just exactly what the ‘laws of the world’ were by outlining the Nascent Soul realm. At rank 5, a Cultivator forms a ‘Golden Core’ in their dantian and the soul moves from the Spiritual Sea to inhabit it. Before this rank, the Dantian is like a power converter and battery, pulling the energy of the heavens and earth from the outside world, carefully refining, and then storing that energy. Once the Golden Core forms it no longer has to be a battery, instead the core constantly refines and creates energy giving the Cultivator a comparatively unlimited supply.

For the sixth rank, Nascent Soul, the Golden Core actually fuses with the soul housed within it. The soul returns to its origin, returning to an infant state. At this level, the state of one’s physical body is no longer related to their life or death. A Nascent Soul cultivator, with enough time, can completely rebuild their whole body from nothing. A Core Formation Cultivator is differentiated by their core’s constant production of energy, while a Nascent Soul Cultivator is notable for their control over external energy.

That’s it! The key to it all!

The fifth rank is the pinnacle of creating internal Qi. The different methods to create the ‘Golden Core’ lead to many levels of power, but the key point is that it is the ultimate end to the path of gathering and storing Qi within the dantian. The next step is not to refine the energy of the heavens and earth and then store it in the body, it is to instead control the energy outside the body. Using energy without absorbing it first. If Qi were air, then low rank cultivators carefully blew up a balloon, storing it and letting it out when they needed it. By the fifth rank they plugged in their own air compressor, but the sixth rank was like having a giant fan. They didn’t bother to collect energy anymore, directly manipulating the energy that already existed in the world.

One specific tidbit caught his eye: to control the energy of the outside world, one’s own energy had to match it. Sage guessed this was something along the lines of a resonant frequency or something like it. Even so, it drastically narrowed down where he would look in the future to improve. It wasn’t a road to walk on, but at least he’d seen the destination and had a compass pointing the way.

After reading the two techniques a few times over, he stored them and sent a mental message, “Thank you, Sir. When do we start with the remodeling of my Inner World?”

“Relax. It will take some time for the materials to arrive. In the meantime, study those techniques. Well, that is after you step outside. Time for another poison.”

“Certainly that can wait a few days… right?”

A few minutes later, Sage was lying on the ground, his limbs curled up into strange and twisted shapes. His fingers were bent in crooked directions and his joints kept giving out soft creaking noises like he was a ship bending from the stress of the seas. Guan Zhenyan was leaning over him and chuckling, “Wow, Twisted Red Tendons has quite the effect when it doesn’t immediately kill. Very interesting!”