Many years ago, Sage had trained in the Sunfire Pagoda to push him out of mediocrity and into the third rank. Compared to where he was now, it felt like many lifetimes ago. He had to struggle so hard to accumulate enough points in the Sect to pay for his training time and even then he’d only managed to move from the level of a common soldier to that of an elite soldier. Unlike that time so long ago, he no longer had to struggle to gather enough money to use the Sunfire Pagoda. The secret steam weapon projects he’d introduced to the Holy Flame Sect were enough to earn him many contribution points and that was without considering his earning power from his high level Professions or selling goods from the Inner World.

Sage had two goals in the Sunfire Pagoda. First, he planned to train his body with the Violent Sun Body Instruction. Second, and most importantly, he was going to see which of the training methods in the Sunfire Pagoda was most effective. More specifically, he intended to use the Sunfire Pagoda to design a training regimen and then develop equipment to reproduce its effects. Then, with the new equipment he would have a new development path for the clan. Some people were simply not very talented when it came to Qi Cultivation, but since they all had Mantis bodies, they would have an advantage over normal humans when it came to body cultivation.

The Sunfire Pagoda had a total of 99 floors. These floors were split up into eleven different types of training, with nine floors each. In the past, Sage had never really gone past the fifth floor of any of these different types of training. Not only was it expensive, but he was also too weak for it at the time. This time he planned to not only try out every one of the 99 floors, but he also planned to move back and forth between levels to test out how effective it was to switch between them rapidly.

Eight of the eleven types of training seemed to correspond to the eight trigrams, which was somewhat odd since Sage hadn’t really seen any other direct references to that taoist concept. There were plenty of little bits and pieces used in formations and cultivation that matched up with the small amount he knew of taoism, but it was all somewhat circumstantial stuff. Of the eleven types of training, Sage started with the two that were somewhat related to methods he’d already seen mentioned in the Violent Sun Body Instruction. Heat Tempering, for Fire, and Cold Tempering, for Water. Unfortunately, as he tried them out, they were more focused upon the extremely high or low temperature and Sage found out that this body cultivation technique really was very focused upon high pressure.

On the plus side, two of the training types were actually very beneficial. The ‘Ground’ training made him feel extremely heavy and he guessed it was some sort of gravity related effect. It was not something he’d experienced much in other places, so he paid special attention to the materials and the arrays on those floors. He did his best to try and decipher their mysteries, but there was too much hidden from him to reverse engineer them that simply. Along with this gravity effect, the ‘Lake’ levels were almost an exact match for one of the Violent Sun Body Instruction’s training methods. The nine levels were actually combined into one giant lake and the closer one moved to the center and the deeper one dove actually signified the different levels of training rather than requiring a move to another floor of the pagoda.

In the manual, a cultivator could head down into the deep sea to experience high pressure, but they would also have to resist the cold, and avoid aquatic beasts at the same time. The Lake levels skipped those downsides while still offering a place to train under high pressure. The ‘Wind’ levels were not very useful as the vicious wind tempests were aimed toward agility training and not a high pressure zone. There were also the ‘Heaven’ levels that were like a more dangerous version of the Wind levels, where the air was full of flying metal blades instead of just ones made of wind. The ‘Thunder’ levels were about as useful as the Fire and Water levels, as it mainly consisted of being struck by increasingly powerful lightning bolts to temper the body. The ‘Mountain’ levels were actually the opposite of what he was looking for as they were another combined level that consisted of climbing a small mountain with harsher conditions as you got higher. The most rough of which was the extremely low air pressure and temperature.

The final three types of training were called Breath, Mind, and Essence. Essence was one he frequented many times in the past, as it drained a Cultivator’s Qi, adding a sort of resistance to Qi cultivation to help break past limits. Mind training created a sort of pressure upon Spiritual Sense, which was another useful exercise, but it didn’t really assist his body cultivation. Lastly, ‘Breath’ was quite strange as it consisted of battling with endless waves of puppets. These levels were very popular, but they were mostly used by those wanting to increase their combat experience and become more familiar with their fighting techniques.

In addition to swapping between the different levels that he found to be effective he also tried to combine them with the Violent Sun Body Instruction’s techniques. More specifically, he brought out a giant cauldron from the Inner World and used it on the ‘Fire’ levels. He sealed the door from the inside and let the high heat of the floor heat it up. This cauldron was actually more of a giant pressure cooker, but unfortunately using the Sunfire Pagoda wasn’t really any better than any other source of high intensity heat. After that failure there was a success, as he found the cauldron method was improved when used in unison with the high gravity of the ‘Ground’ levels.

He also spent some time on the ninth level of the Spiritual Sense training, but after a few months he stopped seeing improvement. His Spiritual Sense had been awakened early by the Seed of Life and had always been improving along with his cultivation so he assumed he’d already reached the peak that the Sunfire Pagoda could push him to in that area.

Sage met with Peak Master Lupeng and Peak Master Zhen in order to acquire the method to create his own gravity chamber. He offered up the sizable balance of his Holy Flame Sect points, but that wouldn’t directly benefit the two Peak Masters so they didn’t agree. The two of them were experienced masters so they weren’t crass enough to demand more, but Sage could understand their position and he brought out many of the higher level materials from the Inner World to sweeten the deal. Each of the Peak Master’s had their own Profession and good materials were worth far more to them than Spirit Stones. In order to win them over he even had to offer something more unique and he included a few Psionic Crystals from the Hidden Domain. Thankfully that was enough and Sage finally got the plans to construct his own gravity chamber which he immediately started work on in the Inner World. He used Spirit Stones to buy the materials he needed which weren’t present on the Inner World not only for the gravity chamber but many other things.

Once he was stocked up on materials he finally left the Holy Flame Sect more than five years after he’d returned.