Alex walked away with the blood that was stored in some sort of limitless gourd that Bai Jingshen gave him. He was taken to a separate room that was apparently meant for cultivation.
As soon as he walked into the room, some sort of formation activated, and an aura that he barely could feel started appearing around him.
"Time manipulation?" he couldn't help but ask when he walked in.
"Huh? How do you know that?" the leopard who brought him there was surprised that he knew that at all.
"I can feel it," Alex said. "I can tell whenever there is time manipulation happening in the surrounding."
"Wow," the female beast couldn't help but say. "I guess that makes sense since your aunt can do the same."
It wasn't why he could do what he could do, but Alex didn't bother to make her understand. "You can take your time cultivating in this room. Time moves faster here than it does outside, so you can cultivate for a long time here while only a few days will have passed outside," the leopard explained.
"I see, thank you senior," Alex said and sat inside.
The room locked up and the time aura thickened. Alex tried to see if he could do something with the aura but quickly realized he was way too oblivious about time to make any sort of progress in learning about it.
So, he ignored the aura and focused on the task before him.
He pulled out Memory and increased its size by a large amount. There was a lot of blood in the gourd, so he needed a place to pool it all up before he began.
He started filling the cauldron with all the blood inside and stopped around halfway through when he realized there was just too much to absorb at once. He needed to do it little by little.
He put the gourd aside and pulled out the Blood God's manual from his soul space. After it appeared, he flipped the book to the 1st page. This was the first time he was going to absorb blood not just to improve his own blood aura, but also his cultivation base.
The book had clear instructions on how to do so, so he needed to reread it once to make sure he understood what he was doing.
Once he read through it all, he placed the book back into his soul space and started using the absorption technique.
Slowly, the blood aura that was within the blood and in the air by this point was slowly pulled into Alex's body. At the same time, Alex used the aura to improve his own blood and cultivation base.
He focused on the absorption technique to the best of his ability to improve both at the same time, but to his surprise, the blood aura that was going into him started disappearing.
He worried at first that he was doing something wrong. Since this was the first time he tried to purposefully improve his cultivation base with such a strong pool of blood while obviously having a much weaker blood aura and cultivation base, he thought something had gone wrong.
However, a moment later, he started feeling better than ever before. It felt as if he had been sick his whole life without realizing and just today the sickness had been healed and he was healthy again.
The feeling confused Alex for a bit until he realized what was happening.
"Oh, my blood essences are reforming," he thought. The blood aura from the blood in front of him was first directly fixing the main issue of his body.
Without a vigorous blood essence, neither his blood nor his cultivation base could ever go through much improvement. As such, his body started using this instance of him cultivating to improve upon that first.
Second after second, minute after minute, Alex continued absorbing the blood aura without stopping while letting his body use it all up.
Hours passed in the blink of an eye but he was nowhere done with absorbing even just the blood in the cauldron in front of him. He took a small break from the constant absorption and used the time to prepare himself for what was going to happen soon enough.
After he was done resting for a few hours, he started once again.
Alex couldn't tell how long it had been before he was unable to draw out any more of the blood aura from the pool of blood in front of him. Without any use for it anymore, he got rid of the blood and filled up the cauldron halfway through once more.
Then he started once again.
It was only after this session of absorption that Alex felt that something other than his Blood Essence was getting improved. It seemed he had finally fully fixed the problem of his absent Blood Essence and now he can focus on the rest of it.
Alex put half of what he absorbed into his cultivation and the other half into improving his blood aura.
While his blood aura had no problem improving, his cultivation base wasn't so easy to improve quickly.
The blood aura he took in was being converted back into his most basic form, Qi. As the Qi started accumulating in his dantian, it crystallized more and more.
When he had reached Saint Foundation 9th realm, 90% of his dantian had already crystallized, with crystal pillars covering the entirety of it. The yin and yang sources inside his dantian had also been encased inside these pillars by now, although that didn't seem to affect it at all.
Now that he was cultivating to improve his cultivation base, more crystalline structures formed in his dantian, threatening to fill it up completely.
Alex focused as much as he could on completely crystallizing the Qi at that moment. Using the fresh third batch of blood, he was able to do so without any worry of running out of the blood aura.
As he absorbed more and more, and the dantian was now completely crystallized into a single ball rather than many different pillars crisscrossing inside, Alex had finally touched onto the step in his cultivation journey where his spirit that was currently tied to his body slowly separated itself from it.
The separated spirit moved into the dantian's crystal ball while still leaving a small connection with the body so that it could move back if it needed to.
Once the spirit landed inside the crystal ball, the next phase of his cultivation realm began.
The white crystal started shrinking all of a sudden, separating itself from the walls of his dantian. It was a slow and tedious process, but as Alex continued cultivating, the crystal continued shrinking.
As it shrank, the white crystal gained some slight yellow color to it. The more it shrank, the more yellow it became.
By the time the crystal was but a tenth of its original size, it had turned completely golden.
A Golden Core had formed inside of his dantian.
Alex was now but a step away from entering the Saint Core realm, and that was when the final step in the journey began.
Without any warning, the Inner Demon started its assault on Alex's mind.
