《Travels along the Astral Road》Failure
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Wu Guang only took a brief glance and after confirming that the roof and floor were similarly made of stone and the fact that there was nothing present in the room, walked towards the rune plate. The latter was pretty simple and only had four characters that would activate the corresponding functions of the runes. This characters were 'Start', 'Up', 'Down', and 'End'. With such simple controls indeed there was no need for instructions and so Wu Guang simply infused a bit of qi into the 'Start' character as the rune-plate was of the old style and so did not contain qi on its own, with the user being the one who infused enough for it to work.
After some moments a small amount of qi pressure became apparent. For Wu Guang, such was absolutely negligible and he had no need to even brace himself, not to mention use qi to counteract it. Still, Wu Guang stood for a few minutes to accustom his body to this light pressure before infusing qi into the 'Up' character.
Repeating the same process for a few tines Wu Guang reached a state in which his body was feeling the effect of the pressure and his inner qi started slowing down so he covered himself with an extremely light cover of qi and continued.
When Wu Guang reached the 31st use of the 'Up' he, at last, reached a state in which he would need to constantly circulate his qi and maintain a full armor-like cover to counteract the effect. Training the 'Flaming Armor' was indeed one of his objectives but after he thought about it, he decided to spend the first day trying to slowly advance to the maximum pressure he could resist. Actually, he wanted to reach the maximum possible, but he did not know what was the limit and so considered that from this moment he should advance slowly, only increasing the pressure when he felt that he was accustomed and would have no problems in resisting it.
***
When Wu Guang returned to the residence he had only an hour left before dinner and so in place of training another sense, he used it to recuperate the spent qi. Normally his natural gathering was enough for the amount he spent but the elder was right, the qi in the room was indeed far lower than outside and so by the end of the training and him reaching the 49th level of pressure as he decided to call them he had used up almost eight-tenths of his qi.
And if one considered that his qi capacity was at least double to a normal cultivator of the 4th spirit realm, it was indeed an enormous amount of spent qi.
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After recuperating, eating dinner, and spending some time talking with the team members about the undead mission that they would undertake, Wu Guang exited the residence and prepared himself to train his fifth sense, the sense of taste.
Thankfully the first level did not require him anything more except remembering different tastes and reciting a mantra to try to understand everything about it. Here one could ask why he would feel thankful for such, but if one learned about the fact that latter levels of the taste sense would require one to analyze poisons and such, he would easily understand.
As Wu Guang finished his training the time was nearing midnight and thought about what to do next. He could advance his cultivation a bit more now that he added another sense, but as the next night, he would take part in a challenge and would not be able to rest, spending this night sleeping was a better option. And so after quickly taking a bath and checking the state of his robes, he went to sleep.
***
The process of entering the Discipline Court was the same as the previous day but seemingly he was recognized and so he was not questioned about anything when entering it. Wu Guang did not have any need to linger around so he directly moved to cell number six and started his training.
At first, he wanted to use the day to simply continue tempering himself but it occurred to him that the qi sense exercises required the surrounding qi to change. After quickly running a pair of simulations in his mind he decided that indeed it was a viable thing to do and so mixed the previous day training and took a bit more time every five levels to recite the qi sense mantra.
The previous day Wu Guang had reached the 49th level of qi pressure or in other words, had activated 'Up' 48 times. It not only took him almost the full ten hours but also was the limit that he could resist, but as this time he was far more prepared and could remember the strength increase that came from each activation of the character, Wu Guang did not stop except for the sense training and so in less than 2 hours he reached the same level of pressure.
Resisting such pressure required Wu Guang to not only fully cover himself with qi but also to constantly circulate qi as to not let it be slowed down. After all, if such occurred, Wu Guang could not maintain the qi cover and so possibly will be wounded or even worse by the pressure that he sensed to be equivalent to the aura of an intermediate Soul realm cultivator.
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In any case today he could resist it better as he was prepared and only required to spend the minimum of qi while reaching it, so he decided to increase it to the 50th level.
As the character glowed to indicate that enough qi was supplied for the activation, Wu Guang prepared for the increased pressure, and as expected it came. And it came as an increase in almost a full minor realm as Wu Guang's defensive methods were practically crushed and he found himself starting to kneel from it. "This isn't right! Every increase before was by far smaller than a single level of cultivation, but this... It almost feels like the pressure from a Sage realm expert!" Wu Guang's thoughts were a bit rushed and emotional as he could not maintain his usual calmness and bearing while being suppressed by the pressure. When he felt this, he tried to extend his hand to decrease the level but stopped midway after noticing that the 'Up' character had changed color, indicating that it could not be activated again.
This fact helped Wu Guang regain his usual composure as it meant that he had reached the maximum pressure possible. "So this is the maximum... If it's so, then I simply need to force myself to resist it and when I manage to resist it easily, my main objective for the training will be reached" With such thoughts, he slowly and carefully changed his posture and sat down. It did require an enormous amount of qi to let his body move as the cover that previously let him do so was by far not enough and was constantly destroyed, requiring him to rebuild and strengthen it. Still, in the end, he managed to sit down and after some tries to create a cover that resisted the pressure, albeit moving would be impossible and the qi expense was about four times bigger than the one he had on the previous level.
Thankfully his reserves were enough for him to sustain such expenditure for four or five hours and during that time he would at least somewhat accustomed himself to the pressure - lessening the amount of protection he needed.
And indeed, it happened as expected. And truthfully even more quickly than he calculated at first as the qi sense that he has been training was already usable enough to understand the main direction of the pressure and so he could reinforce only that respective points. At least until he moved.
When the time spent inside the room reached nine hours and a half, Wu Guang had accustomed himself to the pressure enough to move and only require a small thin cover, like the one he used during the previous level. Circulating constantly was also required, but this could not be overcome by any means before awakening one soul when pressure could be countered by reinforcing one's aura. His secondary objective of training the qi sense also was completed and although the training and mantra had served him well, the biggest contributor to the process was actually his usage of it during all the time he tried to defend from the 50th level of pressure.
After confirming that he had some time left and that his overall qi reserve had a bit over a quarter full, Wu Guang decided to try and activate the 'Flaming Armor'. And for the first time from the moment he took over the body, he failed entirely.
First, he failed to cover himself with the required cover of qi that would then be ignited as without full control over the qi than an awakened consciousness would give him, his current control was not enough to stop the cover protecting him from the pressure consume the newly created one. Granted he could resolve it by using the consciousness he brought over into the body, but that would expend a great deal of it and he did not really know how much of it he could restore before breaking through and fusing it, so he had to discard the option.
After solving that issue by insulating the covers from each other by using something like a third one that would be eroded by both and did not let them reach each other, the second problem arose. This second problem was that when he ignited the qi and so activated the technique, he had to briefly stop his main circulation, which in turn led to the qi starting to slow down and failing the martial circulation required for the technique. He also solved it by using his experience during fusing and so managed to ignite the qi.
And... when the qi ignited it did not only create a 'Flaming Armor' around him but also destroyed the two qi covers on it. Normally such would be not a problem, but his mastery of the technique came only from mental training and so he could not calculate the amount of qi it would use to do so.
Thankfully he managed to stop it in time and not lose more than half of his remaining qi, but that did not save him from the matter of being left defenseless against the surrounding pressure. And so when Wu Guang left the room after the 10 hours, he was in a pretty sorry state.
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