Chapter 18 - How Could That Be? (1/2)

Krune was looking at the spirit stones beside the spiritual vein lake, he had almost two thousand of them now and among them almost 300 were Rank Two ones.

'This should be more than enough to breakthrough, according to Ruik, usually, the part that spends the most spiritual energy is the breaking of the core interior, the more thoroughly the core is broken, the easier it is to model it after, but after pondering about it with him for a while, we got to the conclusion that other than the braking part, the final part which is to fulfill the 'universe' with spiritual energy will spend as much as the breaking.'

Krune first calmed down and made sure he was at his peak, when he starts breaking down the interior of his core, he, as a wisp, doesn't know what he will feel, since his own soul is one with the core after all, but it's certain to be really painful.

Krune started the process, the spiritual energy of the surroundings started to gather around him, there is plenty of spiritual energy in the air because of the spiritual vein beside him, it will help save quite a lot of spirit stones, once enough spiritual energy was gathered at the center of his core, Krune forced it into rampage, barely keeping the control.

”Crack”

As soon as Krune heard the first sound of the core cracking, he almost fainted.

Painful!

Extremely painful!

Wisps really have it hard, it felt as if what was breaking wasn't his core but his soul instead, fortunately, he was prepared for it and managed to keep control over the spiritual energy in his core. But Krune noticed one thing.

'Ruik was right, you can only feel it after you start the process, I can tell that my core is barely holding up from splinting apart, you must have a peak 9th stage Qi Condensation to be able to go through it, otherwise the core or dantian simply won't be resilient enough to resist.'

Turns out that if someone tried to start the breaking down process before reaching the peak of the Qi Condensation stage, the core would immediately break completely, if not, there would be some who would try to enter the Foundation Establishment much earlier, of course, if such thing was possible, this cultivator would have a very unstable foundation, so very few would try it anyway.

Crack by crack, Krune kept breaking the core's interior, every time he used spiritual energy to further smash it, he would feel like he wanted to die, a normal cultivator would be much faster in this process since even though it would hurt, it was just the core or datian pain, but Krune is hurting his own soul in the process, he must wait some time to stabilize his state of mind before continue the process.

'Ruik said that his breaking down process only took him three days, but the way things are going I definitely will take much longer than that.'

There is no helping in it, not only he needs to stop every time he breaks it, Krune's plan was to keep smashing it's interior until he felt that it couldn't be broken any further, his universe foundation is bound to be very difficult to model, so he can't take any chances even if it kills him.

---

Slowly, an entire month went by.

Inside the spiritual vein lake room, one could hear a grunt coming from a wisp every now and then, Krune had kept at it until now and he got great harvests.

First, his core interior was truly smashed to powder now, even though he hasn't finished, the process is going much more smoothly now.

Second, all the pain had tempered his soul to an unbelievable degree, if he tried to use his Divine Sense now, it definitely would be further than a kilometer radius, and that is considering that he is still in the Qi Condensation stage! He couldn't help but think of the old saying.

'With great risks, come great rewards, I already don't need to stop anymore between every break, it still hurts but it's not unbearable anymore. Also, I feel like I understand now.'

What Krune found out is that he can measure how well broken his core interior is according to the pain that his soul feels.

'If my conjecture isn't wrong, my core's interior will only be perfectly broken when I feel no pain in my soul anymore, that is when I will know that I achieved perfection in the first part of my breakthrough.'

Krune was right, that was an unexpected gain for him, this use of the soul pain to measure the breaking down process is something that only wisps would ever be able to achieve, but how many wisps out there have tried to enter the Foundation Establishment before? It's bound to be very few and far between. This fact would help Krune achieve something that only great clans and sects are able to do, which is a perfect foundation.

Those great clans and sects would never divulge their secrets of how to do that, each one of them had their own ways to ascertain if the core's or datian's interior was perfectly broken, but for someone to use the pain of their souls to find out about that? Only wisps are able to! The impressive thing is that wisps don't know about the perfect breaking down process, so the very few wisps who had tried to breakthrough into the Foundation Establishment would not go as far as keep breaking their cores until there is no more pain, they just wanted to get over with this painful process as fast as possible, because of this, Krune could be said to be one of the firsts, if not the first himself, to ever achieve a perfect breaking down process among the wisps!

And just like that, Krune kept at it, smashing until he couldn't feel even an itchy, after 45 days, Krune suddenly stopped.

'Hum? I felt nothing? Other than the rumble of spiritual energy I couldn't feel anything else after this last smashing with spiritual energy, lets try it a few more times.'

Krune gathered spiritual energy and tried to use it to break the interiors, but he couldn't feel anything at all, it was as if the spiritual energy flowed around his core without any obstacle, his core interior couldn't even be said to be powder anymore, it looked like clay instead.

'Seems like this is it, I can't wait longer anyway, according to Ruik, once you have decided that the core's interior can't be broken any further, you must start the modeling straight away, otherwise it will lose it's balance and the process will fail.'

Krune started the modeling process, he had thought about it hundreds of times, he would first open the space that was supposed to be his small universe, by removing the clay like interior out of they way, it didn't take long for him to create a void in between his core shell and what will come to be his planet foundation later on, one must understand that once the breaking down process is concluded, the core or dantian shell will increase in size, this is a matter of course, otherwise, the cultivators would not be able to model anything since there would be no space to do so.

To form the void was the easy part, there was nothing to be modeled there after all, after that came the hard one, to use his spiritual energy to model a world, a complete world with everything it had, of course, at a much smaller scale and with less things on it, but even so, it's bound to take a lot of time anyway.

krune wasn't sad though, after all the pain of the breaking down and the tempering of his soul as reward, Krune was very ecstatic, he could feel that he was a step closer to the Foundation Establishment, Krune started the modeling process, first the planet itself, leaving just an area big enough to store his soul and nurture his future core for the Core Formation realm in the interior.