The moment Lin Mu touched the surface of the Liquid Gold, he felt the difference.
It was dense enough that his body was repulsed by it a bit. If it were not for the fact that he had already absorbed a relatively high amount of gold in his body, he might not have even been able to sink into the liquid gold.
After all, the density of gold was way higher than that of the human body, making it close to impossible to sink into it.
Even then, the density of the liquid gold in the cauldron was way higher than the gold Lin Mu had refined before this. Thus he had to force his way into it. If he didn't put a constant pressure, he would be pushed out of the gold.
Thankfully, his body was no longer affected by the heat of the gold and could withstand it with ease. The previous two steps had increased his defense to handle that much with ease.
'Now to wait till it solidifies, so I don't need to constantly keep on pushing myself down.' Lin Mu thought to himself.
The volume of gold in the cauldron was more than double Lin Mu's original volume, which meant that he was fully immersed in it and could sit cross legged inside it. This was also how it was described in the True Gold Body Forging Arts.
He was supposed to be fully 'encased' in the gold once it cools and solidifies. Only after that happened was he supposed to start cultivate with the mnemonic of the technique. It took about three hours before the gold was fully solidified.
Lin Mu was sure that there were some qualitative changes that had happened to the gold as normal gold should solidify way faster than this. Though once it did, Lin Mu started cultivating almost immediately.
In this step of the True Gold Body Forging Arts, the practitioner needed to cultivate within the solid gold until they could 'breathe' in it. Once they managed to reach that point, the gold would slowly started to shrink and assimilate into their bodies.
There was no time estimate to how long this would take as more than 99% of those that practiced this technique had failed, not to mention the ones that reached this step were but just a fraction of that.
Lin Mu and Xukong were discussing about it a while back and they had come to an estimation about the number of people that managed to cultivate the True Gold Body Forging Arts. They came to the assumption that there was a chance Lin Mu might have been one of the five or so people that reached this point.
This figure was due to just how high the requirements and difficulty of this technique were. For Lin Mu, the requirements were greatly lowered, but for a normal cultivator they would need a lot more resources and additional pills like the Bone Enameling pill.
The progress that had taken Lin Mu two months to reach would take others at least a year or more. Though there was still the third stage that had no time estimate as it would greatly vary depend on the individual talent and skills.
Many would simply die because they would end up suffocating inside the gold and would be far too weak to breakout themselves. Lin Mu didn't have that issue since if he wanted to he could break out of it forcefully with his power and could hold his breath for a very long time.
Time started to slowly pass as Lin Mu continued to cultivate. During this time, he discovered more things just by the things that he was experiencing.
One of the main things being, why it was mentioned in the True Gold Body Forging Arts that one had to 'breathe' though the gold.
'Gold is of the metal element which conforms to the Lungs… thus if one is able to 'breathe' in the gold, doesn't that mean their affinity to the metal element has increased?' Lin Mu thought to himself.
While this was just a theory for now, Lin Mu was sure that as long as he kept on going, he will reach the truth.
And just like that, hours turned into days, which then turned into weeks. By now, Lin Mu had entered a state of trance. In a way, he wasn't even conscious and his body had fully adapted to cultivating without any manual control.
Lin Mu could feel himself in his mind and he could feel his surrounding but he didn't have the need to control anything. To him, everything was in harmony and him controlling things would only mess it up.
Thus he let things progress as it is, and he simply stayed as he was. More time passed like this, and Lin Mu felt a bit different.
Simply staying there in his mind felt a little boring to him now, and he wondered if he could do something else at this time. And thus he decided on something that could be done with just his mind.
He would be training his spirit sense and refining it further!
Lin Mu had not done this for a long while now… at least not intentionally. His spirit sense would improve on its own slowly as his cultivation base improved and he had not needed to manually improve it before this.
But now this was the only thing he could do at this time and he decided to do it. Within his mind, his spirit sense started to reveal itself. It was as if there was infinite space within his mind and no matter how much his spirit sense expanded within it, there would always be more area to expand into.
Once the entirety of the spirit sense had appeared, Lin Mu started training it using the many methods he had now.
More time passed as Lin Mu kept both the tasks, practicing the True Gold Body Forging Arts and refining his spirit sense.
Weeks had turned into months now and Lin Mu completely lost the track of time.
