“One, of course, are the various flaws mentioned before. Remaining at the Qi Refining stage means you won’t possess the Divine Abilities that later realms have, nor can you refine a Life-bound Magical Treasure.”
“You’d have to rely on Divine Artifacts for flight, and the cost to extend your lifespan would be enormous,” the Terminal Ring replied.
“There’s another reason: this path is simply too difficult. The further you go in Qi Refining, the harder cultivation becomes. Once you reach the Golden Core Stage, every additional layer is as hard to achieve as breaking through a sub-realm in the Golden Core Stage itself.”
“After entering the Nascent Soul Stage, each breakthrough is equally as difficult as advancing through a sub-realm in the Nascent Soul Stage.”
“This is just too difficult!” Mu Yanxi couldn’t help but sigh. She remembered the Terminal Ring had just said that a cultivator at the fiftieth layer of Qi Refining would have strength comparable to the early Golden Core Stage, and one at the three-hundredth layer would be equal to the mid-Nascent Soul Stage.
It wasn’t hard to estimate from there—a rough calculation would be: after the thirteenth layer and up to just under fifty, the strength would be similar to the Foundation Establishment stage; below a hundred layers, equivalent to the Golden Core Stage; and above a hundred layers, equal to the Nascent Soul Stage.
That is to say, in the Golden Core Stage, every ten or so layers would be akin to a small realm breakthrough. The problem was that every single layer required the difficulty of breaking through a small realm.
Ordinary people only needed to break through three bottlenecks to go from early Golden Core to mid and then late Golden Core.
But for someone in Infinite Qi Refining, they would need at least fifty breakthroughs—and in the Nascent Soul Stage, over a hundred, all at the same level of difficulty, just to go from early to mid-stage!
Mu Yanxi herself had been a Nascent Soul Stage cultivator before. She knew full well the difficulty of every realm breakthrough in the Golden Core Stage, as well as the bottleneck for the Nascent Soul Stage.
She formed her Golden Core at the age of seven, and it took her until sixteen to reach the Nascent Soul, almost nine years in total.
That meant an average of three years per small realm, and that was only because her clan and sect had poured a huge amount of resources into her.
If the same level of difficulty required fifty breakthroughs, Mu Yanxi would have needed at least a hundred and fifty years just to reach the same level of power at the Qi Refining stage—she would have run out of lifespan and died in meditation long ago, not to mention reaching the Nascent Soul Stage, which would require a hundred times that difficulty.
No wonder that sect in her previous life believed that the Infinite Dantian was a completely flawed constitution.
No wonder the earliest record of a great Qi Refining cultivator was of the Everlasting Longevity Physique, someone with unlimited lifespan.
With such a pitiful constitution, if you didn’t have time to endure, you could never achieve anything.
The second example the Terminal Ring had mentioned earlier was a peerless genius who’d reached the fiftieth layer of Qi Refining in a hundred years.
Looking at it now, how was he just a genius? He was a true monster!
If not for being dragged down by the pitiful Infinite Dantian constitution, his talent would have surely already broken through to the Void Refining Stage. Why would he still be desperately seeking life-extending methods with only Golden Core-level strength?
“Indeed, this path is fraught with difficulty. But some sects, for their own reasons, still choose to let some disciples cultivate at the Qi Refining stage with the Infinite Dantian constitution.”
“Still, the vast majority of cultivators only use the Infinite Dantian as a phase during Qi Refining, and after a while, they break through to the Foundation Establishment stage,” the Terminal Ring answered.
Hearing that the Infinite Dantian could still advance to the Foundation Establishment stage, Mu Yanxi breathed a long sigh of relief. She’d almost thought she would be forced down a path of no return.
It made sense, after all—her parents wouldn’t intentionally ruin her. Since this world had the surgery to give someone the Infinite Dantian, there must naturally be a way to fix it as well.
But Mu Yanxi remembered that in the hospital, the Yixiu had once said that every student in a top sect had to undergo the Infinite Dantian surgery. So she couldn’t help but ask, “Why is it necessary to go through this process?”