This day... was weird.
When Claire woke up next to Tim, she nearly jumped out of bed in panic. In the end, however, rather than escaping to get herself dressed up...
She ended up just... lying there and watching his sleeping face for so long, that she completely lost track of ti.
Then, Tim woke up, they got dressed, and moved on with their day... Only to end up when she beca his teacher and taught Tim the basics of cultivation that pretty much every cultivator knew before they advanced beyond the first cultivation stage of Qi gathering.
But with all of that said...
'What?'
"Would you be willing to trust for just a mont?"
Claire looked up and into Tim's determined eyes.
There was sothing in his face... No, it was sothing in those deep eyes of his that prevented the girl from looking away or, for that matter, taking her hand out of his hold.
"O-okay..." Claire muttered in a trembling voice, strangely agitated by this new face of the man she ca to live with.
'But just what does he need my hand for? It's not like he can connect to my spirituality without the direct contact between our blo... WOAH!'
Claire nearly jumped when a presence suddenly intruded upon her soul... but did so in such a gentle and matter-of-fact manner, she simply couldn't raise her defenses against it.
It was an invasion so deprived of hostility or the intent to break through her defenses... that her ntal defenses simply didn't consider it to be an invasion of her privacy, to begin with!
But that... That was rely the first and the mildest out of the surprises that Tim prepared for her at this mont.
At first, he simply grasped a silver of her own spiritual power... before focusing on it with all of his attention. And bit by bit, by rooting this whisker of power in its place, he continued to reinforce it, as if to make it a new elent of her cultivation of the sa kind as her core.
An elent that she didn't even need to consciously control. An elent that... just was there, roughly at the tip of the pinky of her left hand.
Then, he moved on, repeating the whole, lengthy process of slowly rooting such a point in her other finger. This ti, however, while it still took a while, the length of the process decreased as if to reflect Tim ironing out the kinks and simply getting better at the job.
Bit by bit, he continued to litter her body with those uniform points, tendrils of sorts.
And sowhere along the line, Claire simply relaxed and allowed him to do as he wished... even though his current actions were a much greater invasion of her privacy than when she offered him her purity!
'He's so gentle...' Claire thought as she fell deeper and deeper into the state of near-perfect relaxation, soon starting to long to just get closer, crawl into his arms, and just... rest down against his chest while allowing him to keep doing whatever the heck he wanted to do to her.
Sowhere along the line, Claire lowered her guard so far down, she actually started to doze off!
She dozed off, only to wake up when Tim gave her a slight shake.
"Are you awake?" he asked, only to reveal a look of concern on his face when Claire opened up her eyes and looked up.
"I..." the girl hesitated for a little, her mind too mushy, too comfy to properly process his question.
Thankfully, it wasn't a hard one, allowing Claire to reply even without her mind at its peak.
"Mhmm..." she ended up muttering while bringing her other hand up to her mouth and covering it with her fingers now coiling down to turn into a fist.
'I wonder if he thinks I'm cute right now,' Claire thought, only sowhat vaguely of just how much her thoughts have strayed from the topic of cultivation that she was supposed to be lecturing Tim about.
'Wait...'
It was this realization that forced the girl back awake.
This notice of how things... were a lot comfier than they should be!
There was absolutely no strain on her spirituality, even after she allowed Tim a free rein over it enough ti to fall into a shallow sleep. She didn't feel the weight of her core either, proving he wasn't probing into it at all.
'What's going on? Did he...'
Claire's face froze.
It took her over a year to figure out that she needed to destabilize the core she worked so hard to create if she wanted to advance beyond her current limits. Then, it took pretty much as long for her to learn how to properly control this risky process and slowly, slowly spread its influence over pretty much the whole of her body.
But now?
The familiar sense of the power bursting through her flesh was fully gone as if Tim took all that she worked so hard to develop and... made it vanish?!
'What the hell?! What did he actually do?!'
Freaking out, Claire shook her head and looked up to Tim's face again...
Only to realize he was still waiting for a proper answer!
Which only served to terrify her even further.
'If he didn't even start whatever he wanted to test, then what is he planning to...'
Claire didn't get to finish her sentence when the very sa presence that she quickly accepted the ddling off... suddenly turned extrely hostile as it pierced right into the core of her cultivation, disturbing its flow with enough strength and intensity to send her cultivation straight to a berserk state!
"STOP!" Claire cried out... but it was too late.
Her core reached the point where just a single flare of its energy would tear it apart from the inside...
Tim's influence stopped.
Her core reached the state of imminent collapse.
Her thoughts nearly ceased as the reality dawned upon her head.
And then, the wave of the energy ca...
But instead of shattering her core into pieces and turning her into a mindless monster that would rampage until her scattered spiritual energy was fully exhausted...
Instead, her body suddenly filled with as much energy as it had back when she was still at the fourth stage of QI-flesh balance.
But things didn't end there. No, this return to the lower rank... was sothing that happened only for a single instant.
It was rely the first thing she felt when the energy rushed into every single muscle, bone, and fiber of her physical being, growing stronger and stronger with every iteration of the process that was supposed to tear her core apart!
Her power, sothing she diligently worked for years to gather, continued to grow stronger and... stronger?
'No, that's not it...' Claire realized when she grew a bit more used to the feeling. 'It's not like this power is stronger, but more like...'
Claire blinked her eyes as she slowly slid her hand out of Tim's grasp only to raise it up to her eyes and stare at its palm with disbelief.
Whatever Tim did, didn't affect the sum-total of spiritual energy she harnessed in her core. Instead, all it did was give Claire a much better handle, much better control of it.
For her, using the energy of her core up until this point felt like trying to punch sothing while falling down into an infinite hole.
But now, Tim offered her a foothold from which she could properly draw and express the power of her punch!
'That's...'
Claire's eyes widened even further, a feat she never believed to be within the limits of her physique.,
'I've reached the sixth rank, didn't I?'
The idea of the sixth rank was sothing she kept thinking about ever since she reached the fifth stage. It was her goal for years, making it into sothing she was intimately familiar with, even though it remained nothing but an unattainable goal all this ti.
But now...
She simply found herself achieving that stage, even though she never sensed the mont of her breakthrough!
'Did it happen when I was asleep?' Claire's first thought was to deny this lacking elent, this missing piece of the puzzle as sothing she simply slept through while it took place.
Then again, Tim properly made sure she was awake before disturbing her core...
'Again, wait!'
With her mind in turmoil, Claire focused on her core again... Only to realize that rather than stabilizing, it reached even closer and closer to its absolute limit, way beyond what she ever expected it to be able to withstand.
It was only by so miracle that the internal forces within it didn't tear the thing from the inside out, just like it was a miracle the spiritual energy it radiated didn't accumulate to do the sa from the outside.
Instead...
Instead, each outburst of her now chaotic core would instantly vanish, its fierceness drawn away to one of the thousands of points of contact now littered all over her body, all of its minuscule energy drained by the points Tim made and serving to reinforce that specific part of her flesh.
'Oh, I see...' Claire thought as she solved the first part of the puzzle. 'So that's how this arrangent keeps my core from collapsing...'
She then bit her lips.
Because between the obvious fact that she sohow reached the sixth stage and how she never went through any process of enlightent nor did she experience any sense of breakthrough, there was only one and only possible explanation that took all those points and made them make so sense.
"Don't tell ..." a whisper escaped from the girl's lips as her eyes turned teary from just how intently she stared into the palm of her own hand.
"A perfect breakthrough?!"
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