The group of four proceeded carefully into the purple miasma. It was much less dense in an area about a hundred feet wide around Sage, but they all knew that this miasma was not completely empty.

While they stayed on guard, Sage tested out the poisonous miasma. Once his Blood of the Nine Pits brought it to his Poison Dantian it took only a few moments for it to be refined and incorporated. With so much poison miasma around, he continued to absorb it and on a whim he started to condense it, creating a crude imitation of a Qi Condensation cultivation technique. Seeing that it worked, he closed his eyes for a moment and a dozen cultivation techniques entered his head, courtesy of his Soul Clone studying in the library. Sage followed each of their initial circulation paths through his Poison Meridians and the Soul Clone studied the results before Sage picked out one of the cultivation techniques and started to use it with his Poison Meridians.

The technique actually turned out to be the slowest of those he’d tried, but the cultivation seemed to be a success. Sage wasn’t a Fire Bellied Cobra with only one set of meridians. The meridians were the energy channels of the body, the type and also the route of energy in the body had to match up in order to create a proper cultivation technique. Unless a Fire Bellied Cobra ran into a large quantity of a specific type of poison, they were destined to never increase their strength.

Sage had specifically created another set of meridians for this reason, having one set to use for his own cultivation and another to manipulate and also protect from poisons. He altered the Fire Bellied Cobra’s ancestral poison cultivation technique into the ‘Blood of the Nine Pits’ to partition his dantian into nine smaller areas so he could have access to multiple poisons at all times. His modification took only the basics of poison collection and creation while ditching any possibility of advancement.

Yet at this moment, Sage had found a huge source of poisonous energy. Even more importantly, the purple cloud of miasma seemed to be some sort of spirit type medium and passed right through his physical body without much impediment. So, not only was there a massive quantity, but it was also easily absorbable. It was an opportunity he didn’t wish to give up, so he had the Soul Clone start studying.

While they’d only been traveling in the miasma for half an hour, the Soul Clone had already performed two weeks of testing before finding a cultivation technique compatible with the Blood of the Nine Pits and the Poison Miasma. It turned out that the only technique that was compatible was an obscure partially finished cultivation technique found in the Timeless Master’s Library. It wasn’t part of any of the ‘sets’ of cultivation techniques and instead something that was developed to allow someone that was crippled to cultivate again. Instead of leveraging the complicated and diverse meridian system by using as much of it as possible, this art aimed to use as little of it as possible. Not only that, but it had a dozen different training paths to account for all sorts of battered or injured bodies. It was even developed in such a way that parts of the meridian system could be closed off and it would still function.

It seemed to be a way to turn the meridian system into a set of parallel circuits, and also spent a lot of time strengthening the meridians in such a way that it could work with any type of energy. Of course, these two factors meant it was dreadfully inefficient and very weak in comparison to other cultivation techniques, but it’s name ‘Death Sparing Manual’ was quite apt. It was made for those who would rather die than give up cultivation, and no matter how horribly maimed a person was, they needed only a single meridian to practice it.

Sage’s second set of meridians were not as detailed and complicated as a normal set. While he’d tried to copy them, he could only create a pale imitation and so he was never crazy enough to try and cultivate two cores. Yet, now he’d found an ample source of energy that was perfectly suited to his second set of meridians and with the advantage of time, he had found a path.

There was a wide smile on his face, but he couldn’t stop to cultivate in the miasma at this moment. Instead, there was a sudden noise and the four of them closed ranks, standing back to back to focus upon the area around them. They heard a soft hissing sound and saw movement to their front. There was a foot wide crack in the ground and a purple shape rose up from it. Once it stopped moving they could more clearly make out its body. It had a long worm-like body with a wide flat flared neck, and a pair of large fangs. A cobra. A purple cobra that had soft segmented flesh like a worm, rather than hard scales like other snakes. To make things weirder, it seemed to have a face upon its hood, drawn with black lines and red eyes with a yellow iris. A classic example of an animal having a huge face on it to make it seem much more threatening to predators.

Wait, is that number 24?

Sage ignored how close it looked to a certain creature from a popular game about monsters in pockets and carefully examined the creature’s most terrifying feature: a roiling purple mist that seemed to be constantly spraying from its pores, surrounding it in a dark cloud.

“A Seething Purple Cobra. They’re the most dangerous part about the poison miasma. They hunt in Icefire Valley and nothing can really go after them in the miasma. Looks like we found one of their dens. It also means we’re on the right track.”

Usually, it was quite difficult to maintain a sense of direction in the poison miasma, where their vision could only reach a few feet and their spiritual sense could only extend a little further. Many people had perished on the way into the valley by getting lost in the poison miasma. They had even brought a few devices to help them keep track of their direction, but they were quite happy to not have to need them yet.

Elder Meng motioned for them all to retreat, his normally sleepy eyes had shot wide open and were locked upon the Seething Purple Cobra in front of them. The group slowly backed away, but the Cobra did not seem to wish to let them go. It slid out of its den and then stopped. It seemed they were going to retreat successfully, but right when they seemed to cross that dividing line of dense miasma, there was a flurry of sound and motion. Sage frowned and poured more energy out into the Law of Corruption and expanded the area they could see. The Seething Purple Cobra had turned into a trio, and more purple heads had poked up from the crack in the ground.