Gu Ningyun's sword qi was formidable, but she lacked combat experience. From the start, she found herself constantly suppressed and pushed back.
Determined to use the opportunity to hone her swordsmanship, she refrained from using movement techniques or other tricks, facing her opponents with nothing but her peach wood sword.
After six months of sparring with the veteran outer sect disciples, Gu Ningyun's cultivation broke through to the late stage of Qi Refining level five.
As her combat awareness and experience grew, she went from having no power to strike back to being able to trade blows evenly with veteran outer sect disciples at Qi Refining level eleven.
The veteran inner sect disciples at the Qi Refining stage did not come down to fight her. As for those at Qi Refining level twelve in the outer sect, they were busy with sect missions and trials, focused on breaking through to the Foundation Establishment stage to enter the inner sect, so they rarely visited Fighting Peak.
The cultivation models for the inner and outer sects of Xiaoyao were different. The outer sect focused on building a solid foundation; once that was established, those who wished for deeper study and cultivation had to join the inner peaks, like Floating Peak, or even seek out a master.
According to the Xiaoyao sect rules, there were only two ways for official outer sect disciples to enter the inner sect.
The first was the inner sect promotion competition during the new disciple period. Those who passed could enter the inner sect.
The second was for those who failed the competition; they would automatically be promoted to the inner sect once they reached the Foundation Establishment stage.
Gu Ningyun pondered the records of the sect rules, unsure of what the promotion competition actually involved or when it would begin.
These veteran disciples, along with Martial Aunt Yang and the others, seemed to have made a pact. No matter how she asked, they wouldn't say a word.
Oh well. It was likely a sect regulation that prohibited disclosure. She just needed to focus on increasing her strength.
...
Time flies like a fleeting shadow. In the blink of an eye, another three months passed. Gu Ningyun's cultivation had reached the peak of Qi Refining level five, just a hair's breadth away from level six.
She sat cross-legged in her study, taking stock of her current strength.
She was set to leave the sect for a mission tomorrow, so she had to review her abilities and supplies. If anything was missing, she still had time to prepare.
It had been a year since the New Disciple Competition. As of now, Gu Ningyun had finished soaking in all the stages of body-refining spirit herbs required by her cultivation technique, completely finishing her body refining.
By now, her skin, flesh, meridians, bones, and organs had all been tempered. Her defense, toughness, and recovery speed after injury had reached the maximum possible level for her current cultivation.
From this point on, she no longer needed to soak in spirit herbs. Whenever her body absorbed spirit energy, its attraction to and absorption of the world's spirit energy would be twice as strong as it was before body refining.
A portion of this doubled spirit energy would enter her meridians and dantian through her acupoints to increase her cultivation.
The other portion would follow the paths left by the spirit herbs during tempering, flowing through her body to be absorbed and reinforced by her skin, flesh, meridians, bones, and organs, achieving a self-refining effect.
Gu Ningyun clenched her fist, feeling the strength in her body.
If she wanted to engage in physical combat with a body cultivator, relying on physical toughness alone wasn't enough.
She took out a jade slip she used as a checklist and made a note. After returning from her travels, she would find time to go to the library and look for a close-quarters combat technique.
In case she ever lost her weapon and ran out of spirit energy, she could rely on her body cultivation to defeat enemies.
Over the past year, besides sparring with her fellow disciples on Fighting Peak, she had also ground the Trial Tower. She had now cleared every level on the first floor.
During the final level, she had faced a hundred rank one peak demon beasts at once.
But with her experience from the team competition secret realm and over six months of being beaten down by veteran disciples, her combat experience had improved by leaps and bounds. She passed the level with only minor injuries.
The first level of the second floor featured a rank two early stage demon beast. The moment Gu Ningyun stepped up, she was brutally beaten, not even getting a chance to consume a pill.
With her wind spirit root and her Entry-rank movement technique, Wind Walk, her speed was exactly on par with the beast.
Her sword cultivation and spells couldn't kill it, so she even tried using 《Lingtai》.
However, she didn't know what method the Trial Tower used to manifest these beasts. They looked lifelike and possessed great power, but they lacked true consciousness. The sleep-inducing ability of 《Lingtai》 had no effect on them at all.
In other words, despite exhausting all her means and fighting for her life on the first level of the second floor, she had gained nothing but a face full of bruises and a limp, all while wasting fifty sect points just to get beaten up.
After being kicked out of the Trial Tower once she lost the ability to move, Gu Ningyun swallowed a Return-to-Spring Pill and decisively gave up on the idea of grinding the tower again for the time being.
The gap in cultivation was too large. Her win rate in a solo fight was zero; there was no need to bash her head against the Trial Tower.
Besides fighting, she had also practiced her earth wall talismans, her newly learned earth-tunneling talismans, Gold Blade Talismans, and Stealth Talismans until they reached yellow-rank top-grade, achieving a one-hundred-percent success rate.
A yellow-rank top-grade Stealth Talisman could hide a cultivator's form and breath for half an hour.
As long as the searcher's divine sense was not stronger than the middle Foundation Establishment stage, the cultivator hidden by the talisman would not be detected, regardless of how they moved or attacked.
It was the perfect partner for sneaking around, committing arson, or saving one's life in a crisis.
To match its powerful abilities, it was six times more expensive than a Fireball Talisman and significantly harder to draw.
The more types of spirit energy a talisman required, the harder it was to draw. Drawing a Stealth Talisman required drawing upon all five elements of spirit energy from the world simultaneously.
During the drawing process, one had to maintain the unique vibrational frequency of each type of spirit energy while keeping all five in balance, all while following the lines of the ancient script for "Stealth."
Each type of spirit energy had a vastly different frequency. Controlling five different frequencies at once already required a split mind, and keeping them in balance was incredibly difficult.
When she first started learning the Stealth Talisman, Gu Ningyun's hand shook so much she looked like she was having a seizure, unable to meet the frequency requirements.
In frustration, she had made a trip to the library's talisman section on the second floor. Combining the experiences of her predecessors with her own efforts, it took her a month just to master the drawing method.
It took another three months to practice the Stealth Talisman to yellow-rank top-grade with a one-hundred-percent success rate. When she moved on to the earth-tunneling talisman, she suddenly realized that with the foundation from the Stealth Talisman, no yellow-rank five-element talisman could stump her.
Unlike before, when it took her over a month to master the earth wall talisman to top-grade with a perfect success rate.
When learning the earth-tunneling and Gold Blade Talismans, she mastered them in just a few days, reaching the point where she could produce yellow-rank top-grade versions with total success.
When she realized this, Gu Ningyun rubbed her wrist, which was still a bit sore from all the shaking, feeling a surge of pleasant surprise.
Learning the Stealth Talisman had been more than worth it.
While researching in the library, she had also come across the personal journal of a senior talisman cultivator.
Calling it a journal was a bit of a stretch; it was more like a lifelong retrospective and a final testament.
According to this senior, he was an official disciple from the 3,235th generation of Xiaoyao.
Because he possessed a top-grade water spirit root, he had never encountered a bottleneck during his early stages of cultivation.
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