130 Battle of the minds

A red spot of light started floating from the brightly lit red flower in Alex's hands. They slowly entered his body, mixing into his bloodstream through his lungs, and went up to his brain. There, the little spots of lights started merging with the already available spiritual sea.

Little by little, the spiritual sea started to expand. By the end, the flower was completely gone, and the spiritual sea had nearly doubled in size.

Near 7 am in the morning, Alex opened his eyes. He looked down at his hands and realized that the flower was no longer there. "Did I use it?" he wondered. He sent out his spiritual sense to see how far he could reach with it. To his disappointment, it was still at 20 meters.

"But the spiritual sea has clearly gotten bigger. Why can't I expand my spiritual sense then?" he wondered. He tried different things like concentrating on multiple objects, sending out the spiritual sense as far as he could, and trying to deplete it to see how fast the sea would reduce.

'Hmm…' he hummed as he realized something. While his ability to concentrate on multiple things was still the same and the maximum distance he could stretch was still 30 meters, he could now keep the spiritual sense going on for double the previous time. Basically, his amount of spiritual sense had doubled.

'Oh wow, that means I don't really have to worry about it ending, huh,' he thought. Suddenly, he also realized, "Does that mean I can use Heaven's Impact 8 different times instead of just four times now?" he wondered. Unfortunately, he didn't have anyone he could try it on.

After checking his spiritual sense and spiritual sea for a little more, he decided to leave for breakfast. After half an hour or so, he finally returned back to the game.

As soon as he returned, he shouted "status". His status window appeared in front of him allowing him to view his current amounts of Qi.

"Enough to breakthrough once more, huh. I should be good enough to break through now." As he said that, he hit [Breakthrough].

<Congratulations. You have broken through to 'Bone Tempering: 9th Realm'>

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[Player Name: Yu Ming

Cultivation: Bone Tempering 9th Realm (1,000,000 Qi : 100%) [Breakthrough]

Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body

Talent: God

Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots

Cultivation Method: Starry Sky Qi Absorption Method

Qi: 219,588

]

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"Urghh… it's going to take forever to break through if I just use the cultivation method. I will have to resort to eating pills and cores now." Alex said as he shook his head. The upcoming breakthroughs were going to take forever, but with the right pills and cores, that shouldn't be a problem.

He reached into his bag and took out a monster's core. It was from a monster with the cultivation of Bone Tempering 9th realm, the same as his. He looked at it and ate it.

"Sigh. That's barely any. I will have to eat 2 more of these just to have enough to level up. Thankfully, my senior sister gave me a lot so I can just use them." He thought himself lucky when he realized he wouldn't have to waste days on end, just sitting in one place, cultivating.

He reached back into his storage bag and took out another core. This time, it was the core of a monster in the 1st realm of Organ tempering. Just like the last time, he put the core into his mouth and swallowed it.

Rawr!!

A beastly scream rang inside of him. He saw the silhouette of a monster with 8 legs and 2 horns that liked to crawl around like an alligator. The beast's roar started creating turbulences in his head as the spiritual sea started splashing around.

Alex suddenly found himself in another place. He tried to look around with his spiritual sense and realized he couldn't use it. So, he simply just looked around. It didn't take him long to realize he was inside his mind floating on top of the dark and cold-looking spiritual sea.

The only thing he could see around was himself with no clothes on, the sea itself, and a weird-looking figure up ahead. It was the figure of the same alligator. It was somehow in his head as well.

The alligator came lunging towards him with all of its 8 legs and tried to impale him with its 2 horns. Alex instinctively reached to his side to take out his sword and remembered that he didn't have his storage bags with him.

"Sh*t," he shouted. The alligator was still quite far away as it seemed to be very slow for some reason.

'Is it slow, or am I just fast?' Alex wondered. Since he had no weapons, he could only hit it with his arms and legs. And he had just learned the perfect technique for that.

The technique was called the Iron Fist Punch and allowed one to send out a punch with massive energy behind it. Being a heaven-grade technique, it was not something the opponents could easily ignore.

Alex brought his arms to a fist and out of nowhere, his fist started glowing yellow. He simply punched and a massive yellow fist-shaped energy flew out from his arms. It flew directly towards the alligator and hit it squarely in the head.

"Take that," Alex said as his first proper usage of the fist technique had landed. However, when he saw the Alligator moving again, he was surprised.

The alligator seemed to be a little hurt, but it still had a lot of fight in it. "Goddammit," Alex said as he went forward to accept the fight. Surprisingly, he realized that he could use all the techniques without care for Qi as they seemed to not use any.

He sent out punches after punches with the Iron Fist Punch and used the Elusive Heaven Technique to dodge the alligator's attack. The only thing he couldn't do in his mind was conceal himself and use his spiritual sense.

After a while of tumultuous fighting, he finally managed to beat the alligator and with a final Iron Fist Punch, killed it.