271 Sky Knight Pill (1/2)
Time went by like water flows down a river. While Xue Wei was busy cultivating within the Soul Tower, the Gu and Yuan families were strengthening their Qi. None of them were making a fuss about it and made sure to keep everything about their deal under wraps, so that news never spread.
Many still tried to socialize with Lin Xiao and Hei Gou for the sake of getting information or maybe some pills or formations—they would do everything within their power to start a relationship with them.
Gu Bing'er and Yuan Bailong often came to visit them, bringing with them news about their families' strength and the differences they had experienced since they began their Qi cultivation.
Both Gu Bing'er and Yuan Bailong were filled with excitement as they saw the family elders grow in strength, their fathers and mothers as well.
It has to be said that, although they were advancing in strength, the majority of them were only first or second layer of the Ordinary Knight rank—a rank similar to the people from the academy who had gotten a pill from Lin Xiao and Hei Gou earlier. But if one were to look at their combat strength, the academy students would be completely eclipsed by the ones from the Gu and Yuan families because of their purified Q.
There was a major difference between Qi that one had purified and refined attentively and Qi that had been purified naturally while one was busy doing other things.
Although the people of Yan Dalu looked down upon Qi cultivation, they were now starting to find it interesting and novel. They had long since known about the strength of the Primordial Beasts who cultivated Qi seriously, and that they were not in any way inferior to those that cultivated spiritual energy.
And therefore they also understood that if they could wield both this overwhelmingly strong Qi and at the same time the spiritual energy of the mind, then they would be able to increase their strength tremendously.
And even better was that if this advancement was reserved solely for a few families, then although the Gu and Yuan families would not be able to shake the other royal families, they would be second only to the Royals themselves.
Currently, they were ranked the second and third strongest of the three major families within the capital and the continent—not counting the royal family— but it was impossible for them to defeat the Baili family without more strength.
The Baili family has been the strongest family within the capital for thousands of years; no one has had the chance to challenge them. It was not that the Gu and the Yuan families had not wanted to do so, they simply did not have the power, even if they ganged up together.
Now things were changing. The Baili family were still as proud and arrogant as before, but there was now a light at the end of the tunnel for the Gu and the Yuan families. They saw a way to reverse their situation.
Xue Wei knew nothing about this power struggle, neither did he care about the fact that the two figures he had picked out of all the people present might cause a storm to appear within the capital. All that mattered to him was that he was getting everything he requested and that the people he worked with were smart.
This time, Xue Wei stayed within the Soul Tower for a full month and a half, during which he had managed to reach the stairs leading to the eighth floor.
Unfortunately, he had never been alone on the seventh floor, so he had been incapable of summoning out the golden dragon spirit to advance under its protection.
In the time Xue Wei had spent cultivating his spiritual energy on the seventh floor, he had successfully broken through to the third layer of the Earth Knight rank, maintaining his rather rapid rate of advancement.
Xue Wei was feeling quite satisfied with his performance when he saw Bai Tianyi come down from the eighth floor staircase and revealed a wry smile on his face as he shook his head. Bai Tianyi had already advanced to the seventh layer of the Earth Knight rank, a speed so rapid that no one could compare.
It was not only Xue Wei who was reacting upon seeing Bai Tianyi; the other two experts within the seventh floor looked at him too, unable to withdraw the astonishment in their faces.
The experts had started to pay quite a bit of attention towards Bai Tianyi ever since they witnessed his feat of entering the ninth floor, and they had also started taking notice of his cultivation base too.
Seeing the lights that showed Bai Tianyi had mainly spent his time on the eighth floor, everyone had expected that it was because the pressure on the ninth floor was simply too dreadful for him to manage consistently, but his speed of advancing in rank was just as horrifying as the fact that he had entered the ninth floor.
They had already been stunned silly by Xue Wei's speed of advance, yet comparing the two of them was like comparing the heavens to the earth.
The experts within the seventh floor felt floored, in fact, they even felt incredibly embarrassed. They were seen as the peerless geniuses of the Garden of Shadows, but the truth was that they could not even compare to a ten-year-old child who had joined the academy for less than half a year.
Even Xue Wei was considered a genius amongst geniuses with his advancement speed, but compared to Bai Tianyi, he was still barely worth mentioning.
Xue Wei did not mind though. He understood that Bai Tianyi was using a shortcut. His entire body was made from soul power and spiritual energy. He had no such thing as 'bottlenecks' in his cultivation, nor did he have any problems storing energy within his body.
Bai Tianyi was also quite eager to absorb as much energy as possible. He wanted to age, he was simply tired of being a ten-year-old child, no one would take him seriously with this body—or they just thought he was some kind of freaky ancient expert.