Back with Jason, he is preparing to breakthrough. It’s only been a short time since he started cultivating in the real world, but then again, the first step isn’t the hard part. That would be knowing which road to take and working up the nerve to do so. As Jason had already gone through this twice before, the start was more like walking home at this point instead of an overgrown path leading into the darkness.

Jason had set up the whirlpool of energies in his dantian, and with the corruptive energies held at bay was able to let it passively absorb the various types of energy he desired. Now, at the center of the swirl of energy, an eye in the storm has formed. A calm pool of many different energies resting in harmony.

He doesn’t trust this though and watches closely. Like when he cleaned up the whirlpool of unwanted energies, Jason dives into this pool of energy to observe it. Since it was still various types of energy, he knew the corrupting powers hadn’t infiltrated, but that didn’t mean everything was fine.

As if with a fine-toothed comb, Jason searches through his dantian. On the surface, the various powers are mixed perfectly. Just under the surface, though? All illusions of homogeneity fall away as small pockets of odd energies can be seen, like a drop of oil in water. Not many, but all of different types.

This is not what Jason wants, so with great care he forms his mental strength around one of the smaller blobs. Not perfectly, some of the energy he wants to keep is trapped in with it. However, he would rather lose some of what he wants if it means removing all of what he doesn’t.

Uncooperative energy now caught, Jason lifts it with a gentle touch. Out of his dantian and out of his body entirely. Though once it leaves his body, Jason can no longer keep his mental strength solid and the energy puffs out on its own. At first this stray energy seems to want to re-enter his body. This notion is soon rebuffed, though with no similar energies inside of him anymore, all that is left is the ones that reject it.

Jason sits back and observes these reactions, giving his body a moment to adjust. Though in the end mostly nothing happens. Some of the other blobs of energy shift, some as they realign, but otherwise things stay the same. Not quite what Jason had hoped would happen, but that was only the smallest bit of unwanted energy, so he hadn’t particularly expected much.

Now though that he knows it works, Jason sets himself down to remove all the remaining strange bits of energy. Not the easiest thing to do, as while most of the energy blobs are just that, blobs. Some of them however aren’t so simple. One particularly tough bit of energy is shaped like a complex root system, spreading through a quarter of the pool. To remove it, Jason had to section off each branch of the root, one by one.

Eventually, though, every bit of incompatible energy has been removed. Sure, his pool shrunk by a good ten percent, but he didn’t want that excess energy, anyway. Maybe if he had mixed it all together, it would have been suspended with the rest, but he didn’t want salad dressing in his dantian.

Tired, Jason moves over to the couch and sprawls out for the last ten or so minutes before he has to get back into the game. The time passes quickly and before he is ready, the alarm he set goes off. With a groan, he rolls off the couch and heads back into his room.

After going through the rigamarole of entering the pod, Jason appears inside his personal room. ‘Nothing has changed in here since I started playing NeoRealm, not that much changed in it before that either. Still, this place is my personal domain, the only place on the entire net completely under my control.’

Jason frowns and shakes his head, ‘Feels weird in here not having any cultivation. I’ve got more money so I could afford to pay a little to use my NeoRealm avatar while here. Then again, I’m already spending my gold, so my pod keeps my body condition in top shape. Hell, once I get a bit more I should look into upping that.’

A look of realization washes over his face, ‘wait a second. Once my real cultivation advances enough, my body will be able to maintain itself to a much better degree. After all, how else are you supposed to close up for years at a time to meditate if it couldn’t. Maybe I won’t have to up the service after all. Though that is a while off, especially since unlike in NeoRealm, the first steps aren’t so easy.’

‘Doesn’t help that I don’t know what the next step will be out there. Not that I know too much about where to go next in NeoRealm. I just expect more guidance to be available there even with how rare Energy use is. Though back to using my avatar in here. I wonder how much it costs, anyway?’

“System, how much does it cost if I wanted to use my avatar in my personal space?”

{The cost to use NeoRealm avatar in Personal space per a real world month in gold coins is as follows:

Zero Breaks: 1, One Break: 2, Two Breaks: 4, Three Breaks: 8, Four Breaks: 16, Five Breaks: 32, Six Breaks: 64, Seven Breaks: 128, Eight Breaks: 256}

Jason looks over the prices and laughs, “I’m both happy and disappointed that they didn’t go with it being based on how long you are in the room. Then again, they probably wanted to, but the people that spend the most time in their room would be the ones with the least amount of money. After all, kind of hard to keep cash on hand when you keep dying.”

“Anyway, it only costs me four gold at the moment. That isn’t too bad, so why not. System, I would like to use my avatar here for a month.”