Xan continued reading the notebook for the next few hours.

The notebook was a handful of notes without cohesion between them, so he needed to go back and forth continuously when he found any term he needed help understanding.

Even with those difficulties, he read and understood it entirely in less than eight hours.

When he finished it, he had many ideas and things to test and didn't know where to start.

He had read the explanation of a few basic martial arts he wanted to test, and he also had to learn how to use the many elemental energies and discover which one fitted him better.

Not only that, but he had to continue cultivating, as he needed a stronger sea of consciousness to have sharper control over the energy and cultivate more efficiently.

He wanted to make his dantian advance, as it would increase his energy reserves and could even increase the purity and quality of his energy.

There were also all those things about spells, but they seemed more complex, so he prepared to focus on mastering some martial arts before asking Rad for guidance.

At last, he decided to start cultivating his sea of consciousness before anything else. After all, having better control over energy would help him cultivate faster and learn any technique easier.

Also, no one would realize he was cultivating his mind.

If he cultivated his body, it would be evident that he had become physically stronger, and cultivating his dantian may be perceived by someone with higher senses.

But the mind was different.

He could cultivate his mind all he wanted, and nobody would realize he was advancing. That way, he could say that he was focusing on his body or dantian, creating a fake image of his strength, allowing him to remain low and have an ace up his sleeve.

In the end, the difference would not be enough to defeat someone with much higher cultivation than him, but it may save his ass at some point. Also, Rad had said that he should focus on his sea of consciousness, so he would do as he said.

With his priorities clear, Xan sat on the ground and began cultivating.

Strengthening his sea of consciousness was easy. He just needed to send energy toward his brain, which would absorb that energy to advance.

The only thing Xan had to take care of was the pace at which the energy arrived. He would feel like a sword traversing his skull if he sent too much at one.

This frustrated Xan, as he could gather more energy with his dantian than the one he was using on his mind, so he decided to use the excess to strengthen his dantian too.

To strengthen his dantian, he would make the energy directly fuse with the dantian's walls, expanding them and burning any impurity that could remain on them.

He stopped after cultivating for a few hours. He could already fill the difference compared to before starting cultivating. As he was at the first stage, advancing was extremely easy, and in those few hours, he managed to advance around a third toward the next stage on his sea of consciousness and a little more than a tenth with his dantian.

Knowing that he had yet to use any resources, he estimated that he might be able to reach the second stage with everything in a day if he optimized everything to the maximum.

But he decided to resist the temptation of secluding himself in his room. Rad had told him to start setting up the farce of him delivering mushrooms in exchange for energy coins, but the truth was that he genuinely wanted to do it.

After all, it was a way to win some extra resources and would help him to learn how to survive in the wild in relatively safe conditions. Also, he had to spend some time in that forest before no one doubted what he was doing, so he had better use that time to do something useful.

It was already mid-afternoon when he finished cultivating, so he still had time for a short trip to the forest. He took a bag and filled it with some resources that he might need if he had to stay the whole night in the woods for some reason, and after that, he left his room.