The first thing I noticed after breaking through to Foundation Establishnt was just how dense my Qi had beco. Every technique I could cast now would hit with triple the effect, even with only half the mastery.
Typically, once soone reached Foundation Establishnt, they'd focus entirely on stability. Pick an elent. Refine their Qi. Avoid using elental techniques that might misalign their spiritual roots. It was a careful, calculated process.
But I didn't need to wait.
Because I'd already lived a lifeti with the elent I was going to choose. Spending an unhealthy amount of ti with it.
I doubted many cultivators had spent over twenty years using their chosen elent every single day. Not in theory. In practice.
When a cultivator mastered both an elent and an Earth Grade technique, sothing extraordinary happened. You could fuse them. Mold your Qi into sothing more than just raw power. Song Song had shown that with the Falling Moon Claw. After she imbued it with her blood-based elent, what was once a simple invisible wind slash beca sothing far more deadly. Each cut she landed bled harder, drained faster.
Subtle, but quite scary.
Now that I'd reached Foundation Establishnt, I had the bare minimum power to form my own organization. I could build sothing, gather people, get things done. Especially things that were better done in the dark. I'd keep that idea in my back pocket.
But first… the elent.
I'd thought about this for a long ti. Too long, maybe.
There were monts in the past where I'd considered going all in on sothing extre. I once thought about using the Eight Mind Phantoms Technique to turn myself into a thought ghost, puppeteering my own body through a glitch, sacrificing my sanity without touching my soul. Risking everything.
I dropped that plan fast. It was clever, sure, but clever didn't always an survivable. And you didn't get second chances at sothing like that.
So. Back to the present. My elent.
I had toyed with many ideas. Grand ones.
Knowledge. Technology. Evolution. Understanding.
But those were too abstract. Too big. Too formless to serve as a foundation. "Books" crossed my mind once, but it wasn't the books I cared about; it was the ideas inside them.
Fire? A classic pick. The Blazing Sun Sect would've welcod that choice with open arms. I even had the Hearthfire Ice-Stem Flower bolstering my affinity for it. But fire felt too linear.
Light? Intriguing, but it felt too far removed from my reality. I didn't live in light. Also, it would have taken too much energy to power sothing like that, aning it would have made it unusable.
Jade was solid. I had real, tangible experience with it. I'd built my techniques from it. But it wasn't the path I wanted to walk. Not fully.
And then it ca to ... ironically, the answer had always been with .
From my previous life. How could I approach the mind elent, without it actually being that?
Electricity.
Lightning.
Humanity's golden age began with its discovery. It powered our cities, carried our words, stored our knowledge, and drove our machines. It was everything. Phones, caras, computers, lights, cars, and everywhere, in everything, at all tis.
I had spent my entire life surrounded by it.
It wasn't just energy. It was life. Connection. Speed. Evolution.
Lightning was not just a force; it was civilization.
And now, it would be my elent… kind of. I wasn’t going to be shooting lightning bolts around anyti soon.
As for my first Foundation Establishnt technique, it had to be simple. Sothing I could build upon, but also sothing experintal. A test.
Ti De-Accel.
I began slowly engraving it into my newly ford Qi pillar, and with that, I officially beca a one-star Foundation Establishnt Cultivator.
The technique was a fusion of my past life’s knowledge of the brain and what I’d learned here. Specifically, how Qi interacted with the mind when I used my Sky Grade technique.
Ti De-Accel worked by guiding a minute amount of Electric Qi into the brain, enhancing neuron conductivity. It temporarily boosted perception, reaction speed, and decision-making. To the cultivator, ti appeared to slow down; not because ti changed, but because their brain processed more “fras per second,” so to speak.
The downside? Overheating, ntal fatigue… or even nerve damage, if overused.
My goal was to recreate that state warriors sotis achieved in the heat of battle, when everything seed to slow down and each movent beca clear. I wasn’t sure if the lightning elent could influence the mind this way, but…
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It worked.
Or… I think it did. There were no blockages, no resistance, no rejection. The technique etched itself into the pillar in glowing script that only I could read, abstract, shifting lines that existed more in concept than form.
I opened my eyes.
The first thing I noticed was how strange my vision felt. It was nightti now, but it barely registered. Darkness had shape, layers, clarity.
Snow had gathered on my shoulders and head. I brushed it off and ward my clothes with a bit of Qi, drying the moisture instantly.
It felt like putting on glasses for the first ti, like the world had always been this vivid, and I had simply been too blind to see it. The snowflakes, the way the wind curled along the rocks, the starlight refracting off the ice on distant peaks… this world was beautiful.
I spread my senses and focused.
Fu Yating. Wu Yan. Speedy.
And the egg. I couldn’t sense it directly, but I knew it was there.
Crouching down, I took a long breath. My pupils dilated so wide it felt like they might pop out of their sockets.
Galloping Horse Power.
My Earth Grade movent technique was one I hadn’t used in a while. My fighting style didn’t usually call for it, and I often traveled with people I didn’t want to leave behind.
But now?
Now I was alone. Now I was free.
I surged Qi into my legs. My thighs swelled with power, and the mont I launched off the mountaintop, the stone cracked beneath .
The air howled past my ears. I twisted back, catching a glimpse of the cratered summit I’d left behind. Wind scread around as I shot downward like a teor.
Grinning, I spread my arms wide like wings.
“Fuck yeah!” I scread, but the air swallowed the sound.
I was a blur, tearing through the sky.
Too much commotion, maybe. I sensed sothing sharp slicing through the distance toward . A flying monstrous beast. Wait, no, two. Their Qi signatures were so tightly intertwined that they almost felt like one.
I slowed my descent with a jade armor construct forming around , its weight and resistance bleeding off speed.
Then I saw them. Two seagulls. One of them radiated a one-star Foundation Establishnt presence.
Seriously. Seagulls?
I hovered midair, blinking.
“What the hell are seagulls doing out in the middle of the night?” I muttered.
I had to wait until they got closer before I could use my arrays, which was my primary combat thod now. Sure, I still had my Earth Grade techniques, but those were cards I planned to keep hidden until soone got too close.
Once the birds were in range, I ford a hand seal midair and activated Ti De-Accel. My core pulsed.
In an instant, the world lurched into a crawl.
The birds didn’t stop; they still moved, but their wings cut through the air like they were dragging reality with them. Each flap stretched out into a series of sluggish fras, rippling like syrup. Sound warped into low, droning echoes. Dust hung frozen midair. It wasn’t that ti had stopped, just that I’d pulled so far ahead of it.
Every heartbeat felt like a minute. Every blink, an eternity.
With the world moving slower than my breath, I shifted my fingers into a new seal.
The array blood to life beneath .
Lines of light spiraled out, geotric precision forming in the air around my hovering form. I layered function after function in the space of a breath, my thoughts racing faster than most cultivators could even follow while ditating. My mind was the lightning. The rest of the world was the strike zone.
By the ti the birds even finished the downward beat of their wings, the array was complete, humming with power, suspended midair.
All that remained… was the trigger.
Holy shit, this felt natural. For a second, it hadn’t even felt like casting, it felt like thinking. Like scratching an itch. Like blinking.
But then the downside reared its head: I was stuck in place.
Sure, my mind was lightning-fast. But my body? Nowhere near fast enough.
Just as the birds flapped again, the array locked into place. A blue sky-colored field shimred into view, anchored across the space like a net.
Even though I hadn’t taken the more power-centered route of the lightning elent, my Qi being perfectly in tune with it made a difference. A massive difference.
A glowing ball of lightning gathered at the top of the array, then fired two thick bolts downward.
And wow, those blasts were slow. Not in reality, but in my ti-accelerated perception, it was like watching lightning travel through molasses. Every arc, every flicker, was exaggerated. It was going to take forever to hit them.
Even moving my eyes to track it felt sluggish and delayed, like walking waist-deep in water.
Still, unlike the Sky Grade technique that pushed my brain to the brink, this had no real drawback… other than boredom. Combat had never felt this long.
When it finally happened, it was like the sky cracked. The two lightning bolts reached the birds and fried them in midair, smoke, feathers, and a burst of charred scent tearing through the frozen mont.
I ended the technique.
The world slamd back into motion. Sound, ti, and thought fell back into place like an avalanche.
My mind felt slightly sluggish now, like waking from a deep nap, but I could concentrate again.
I dismissed the lightning array, and the birds, already scorched, started to fall. Before they hit the ground, I lifted a hand and used Falling Moon Claw. A dozen invisible wind blades shredded them midair, reducing the fried birds to smoking chunks and tumbling at.
As they rained down, I couldn’t help but think about the techniques I wanted to create going forward.
Lightning. It was a basic elent. Common. Studied.
But I wasn’t aiming for thunder and power, I was chasing electricity. Signals. Neurons. The stuff that made modern life work: computers, networks, communication. The very essence of thought.
This was the closest I could get to the Mind Elent without… well, without going insane.
So far, it was working. I didn’t feel crazy. Just excited.
I exhaled, turned west, and began to glide gently toward the group.
Ti to take it slow. The Blazing Sun Sect was still ahead, and I had a plan.
Eventually, I spotted them in the distance. Fu Yating yawned and waved casually as I descended.
“Okay, I get the impression you broke through,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “But did you actually do it? I still can’t sense anything. And you move just as fast, barely visible as anything more than a flash, so it kinda seems the sa from where I’m standing.”
She stretched lazily, then added, “Anyway, congrats. Can we please get back on the road now?”
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