As Alex started moving his Qi around his body, Pearl started cultivating as well.
At first, Alex felt nothing. However, slowly he started feeling the familiar feeling of skin splitting from the body cultivation that happened with Pearl.
He hadn't felt this feeling for over 2 years, so he started to forget the worry he was feeling about cultivating for a whole month in one go.
He wasn't worried so much as he was anxious, after all this was the first time he was going to cultivate for so long without any alchemy or training breaks in between.
Even that was gone now that he was starting to feel the slight, tingling pain around his skin which was starting to extend to his muscles.
As his muscles started tearing up, his bones started to show signs of fractures while the cut on his skin started to grow to be longer and wider.
Next were his organs, then his meridians, and finally mind. Alex had wished that tempering his mind made him have better spiritual sense but that was expecting too much of a technique that was shared with him.
Tempering his mind during body cultivation did just that. It made his brain physically stronger.
By the time the small cuts had reached his mind, the cuts on his skin were getting so wide that drops of blood were starting to ooze out of it.
'That has never happened before,' he thought but continued with his cultivation. Anytime now, he wanted to break through and stabilize his foundation in the True Lord 1st realm.
However, even as he thought of beginning that, the cut on his skin, and his muscles started to widen even more.
Blood poured out of him like he was sweating on a particularly hot day. They gathered upon his skin and rolled down together.
Soon, there were lines of blood all over his skin from head to toe, and they kept flowing down.
Worst of all, the wound on his kept on getting bigger and bigger. As Pearl gets more comfortable in his cultivation, the worse the wound on Alex's body got.
At one point, he started thinking that this was the most pain he had ever felt in his entire life.
This was not true at all, but at the moment, Alex had a hard time thinking of a pain that was worse than this. Even when he lost his arm, that pain felt like a light tap compared to this.
Fortunately, unlike the first few times when he cultivated with Pearl, he did not lose consciousness.
Even though the pain hurt a lot, he endured it with gritted teeth and even moved his own Qi around his body to cultivate.
As the pain stopped increasing, Alex could finally be relieved, even though he had to keep gritting his teeth with the pain.
On the inside, he was only starting to realize what his mistake was.
Never in his entire life had there been a time when Pearl's cultivation base was ahead of him. Even in the time when Pearl had a cultivation base, and he had a normal body, he still had a Qi cultivation that far surpassed him.
Now that Pearl was both ahead of him on body and Qi, the real power of his Golden Tiger's Dominating body technique was starting to show itself to Alex.
Now, his body was trying to rapidly catch up to Pearl, and in the process, it was wrecking itself.
It wasn't long before Alex understood that he couldn't cultivate for quite a while until his body cultivation had grown enough to handle the wound without bleeding out.
Alex took out a pill to restore the blood he had lost and ate it. After circulating the energy of the pill throughout his body to replenish his blood, he left his body so that he wouldn't have to worry about the pain and went into his spiritual mind.
Even in there, he could feel the pain from before, but it was more muffled and so it was slightly easier for Alex now.
Alex looked at the silver threads from the silver mountain that floated throughout his spiritual world.
He looked at the spiritual sea below him and somehow none of the silver threads fell into it.
Since he hadn't been here in almost a month, the silver strings had flown far and wide. Collecting them was going to take some time.
Fortunately, Alex had many.
He leisurely flew through the sky and grabbed the silver threads as they disappeared into him.
From time to time, he kept an eye on his body outside to see if there was something wrong that happened to it from him not being there.
However, from what he could see, he was fine. Judging from the speed of blood loss he was suffering, the blood replenishing pill he had eaten should do him good for an entire day, if not more.
With that in mind, Alex went back to gathering the silver threads.
Godslayer remained quiet as he watched Alex gather the silver thread, and Alex knew it was seeing him do so.
One of the times during his 2-year training, it had, in cryptic words, told him how fortunate someone would be if they managed to find something like this, let alone manage to get it into their spiritual sea.
It didn't say anything more than that, but that was enough for Alex to continuously absorb the thread without questioning everything.
After all, Godslayer was a spirit that dealt with the gods. If it said something was good, Alex was absolutely sure that it was good.
The black goo-covered spirit didn't even say anything as Alex destroyed the black goo around him.
Alex wasn't sure if the black goo was what brought on the power of its temptation, but he wasn't going to let it grow too much and start tempting him again.
He was sure he could defy it this time, but he wasn't confident enough to test that theory. Especially not now when he wanted so many things for himself.
Alex wasn't sure if he would be able to stop himself if the spirit was strong and it promised him to go back home.
It took him many hours to collect all of the silver thread as he went in and out of his body on multiple occasions to look at what was happening outside.
When he was finally done, he left the spiritual sea.
Alex was either getting used to the pain, or his body cultivation was increasing. He couldn't tell if he had grown or not, but just getting numb to the pain, for now, was a win in his heart.
With this, he could get ready for breaking through to the next realm.
He finally started using his cultivation technique and he got his body ready for a clean breakthrough.
After some time, he started pushing his Qi through the pain as he moved it around his tattered body.
As he was doing so, Alex heard someone speaking.
He immediately stopped. He looked around and even sent out his spiritual sense to see if someone had come inside.
However, aside from him and Pearl, there was no one in the room. 'What was that?' he thought. After noticing nothing wrong, he continued with his breakthrough.
However, once again, as he was getting close to it, he heard a voice saying something incoherent.
Alex stopped once more and even checked to see if that Godslayer was doing anything. In the end, he found nothing.
So, when he started breaking through for the third time and still heard something, he ignored it and continued with his breakthrough.
After a couple of minutes, his Qi circulation reached the peak and he broke through to True Lord 1st realm.
Now that he was slightly stronger, the pain from Pearl felt less and less. So, he continued cultivating to stabilize his foundation and at the same time, improve his body cultivation.
* * * * *
The Saint realm experts on the outside were still around, waiting for their disciples to come out.
They were in meditation as there was nothing else to do.
Shen Jing simply waited around on top of a rock. He had gone back to check on the people he had left behind and came back after making sure everything was fine.
Now, it had been half a day since he came back.
Since there were still 5 more days, he wondered if he should leave and come back sometime later. However, it was only 5 days. He didn't need to do that.
As he thought that, he sensed something and looked towards the sky as his eyes narrowed.
A few seconds later, some of the stronger Saint realm elders also noticed something.
It was a dark aura that undulated above the sky, flickering for a few seconds.
It looked as if it was hesitating whether it should descend fully or not.
Shen Jing frowned. He looked around but he couldn't see a single saint realm elder missing.
"Did a Saint enter the realm while I was away?" he asked softly, but every single person there heard him.
"No, senior," the saint elders told him.
Shen Jing didn't see any reason to doubt them since their number was the same.
'Then… could it be him?' he thought. Alex was the only non-saint realm cultivator to go inside the realm who could have learned a Dao for himself.
Since he now held authority over something fundamental in the world, the world would start to slowly give him obstacles in his cultivation journey.
Sometimes, they would be mental, sometimes physical.
From the looks of the sky, Shen Jing was sure this was a mental obstacle that never fully descended. If it fully did, it would be unnoticeable. Meaning…
"That kid nearly developed an Inner Demon, huh?"
