Nyx’Sol’s entire body prickled with a new sensation as the ice-cold feeling of the pill slowly spread down his throat and stomach, up his nose, and radiated into his eyes. The cold feeling mellowed out the more it spread, and soon the sensation of touching ice faded into the feeling of a cool breeze.

  Sol adjusted the position he was sitting in, his aching body protesting his straightened posture. Every breath he took sent a comfortable chill through his body, renewing the cool feeling the shapeshifting pill had awoken in him. The pill radiated its energy throughout his body in what Sol assumed to be his Qi channels, interconnected networks that spiritually ran through his organs, bones, and tendons.

  In his mind, he could envision a rough map, like a painting of lines that had been smudged and was barely visible. He could will this newfound energy to move. It took effort and was tedious since the channels seemed to resist this effort, and bottlenecks in certain places only allowed a small amount to pass. Were these bottlenecks meridians? Were they just minor impurities blocking his channels?

  He moved his Qi forward into his hands, returned it back to his body, and then did the same with his feet. It was a slow process, but his feeling of handling a broomstick like a drunk toddler was slowly fading.

  His Qi started to obey more smoothly, and moving a large quantity also began to tire Sol out physically. He did not dare break his concentration to open his eyes to check how much time had passed, so he decided to just sit and observe for a while.

  The demon girl with the white mask had told him that after awakening to cultivation, there would be cracks that let in natural Qi from the outside. Now that Sol could feel the Qi inside his body, he would heavily disagree. They were like needle-sized holes all over his body, constantly letting in energy from the outside. A prickling feeling that almost bordered on itching accompanied the process.

  Sol observed how tiny motes of Qi were pressing through the holes eagerly, wedging themselves into his larger pool, greedily adding to it. They immediately adjusted from their natural state to the state of his Qi, assimilated and added to his own. While the stream of energy was constant all over his body, the amount was minor. Compared to the seemingly bottomless abyss that the pill had provided him, they seemed like dewdrops on a sunflower in the morning.

  He would have to spend all of this energy. Otherwise, he would not be able to turn off his focus skill by running out of Qi. And that was the first step to understanding how it worked.

  Sol retracted and protracted his claws with his shapeshifting ability. It did not require any Qi to do so, but the process felt tiresome and slow. When he tried to add Qi to his claws, it was even harder to move them, his application making them stick to the surrounding skin more than usual. He frowned. This was not as simple as he had thought.

  Instead of focusing on his claws, he decided to try and make his skin more durable. Harder skin would be better, right? He slowly moved his energy to the outer side of his forearm. Then he carefully tried to spread it along a line upwards.

  He was greeted with a sharp sting of pain and felt a few prickling holes disappear. Touching his forearm confirmed that he had cut himself from the inside. Not a deep cut—he did not bleed—but his skin had been cut.

  It took him what felt like hours and several more minor cuts to figure out what he had done wrong. Instead of violently shoving out his energy through his skin, he slowly brought it up toward it and let the skin soak in it. He felt the local Qi absorption points expand slightly, and his skin was slightly more rough and hard to the touch.

  Sol let his internal energy spin in excitement. It was a thrilling feeling to discover new concepts such as these. If only he had paid more attention when reading theory books. They had always bored him to death.

  This must be the key to achieving Skin Tempering. Being able to take in more energy and apply it to strengthen yourself against external force. Immediately, Sol went to apply this newfound concept to his entire body. Every skin cell he could find he slowly fed more of his energy, making the uncomfortable prickling sensation disappear entirely.

  He fed his energy into this process continuously, first supplying only his fingers and arms, then moving on to his back, head, face, and finally his legs. It was a difficult process of keeping up his concentration while his mind was constantly occupied with managing the greater collective force moving in his body.

  When he was done, his entire body had a smooth sensation, without the annoying prickling feeling he had initially experienced. He opened his eyes slowly, but the expected daylight was nowhere to be found. How long had he been in meditation? Sol caught the presence of a little bird on his shoulder. It had taken him as a resting spot underneath the cover of the dirt hole hideout. Outside, light raindrops periodically dropped into the grass.

  Nyx noticed that his robes were slightly wet, but with a mental shrug, he closed his eyes and dove back into meditation. He happily took the little bird as a good sign to continue his exploration. There was still quite some energy left for him to use.

  The facilities of the Skin Tempering Garden of the Verdant Reflection Sect were all temperature-themed—snow, ice, pools of water, and likely also some heat-based training spots. In order to ascend through the Skin Tempering step of his body cultivation, he would have to master how his body processed basic protections against temperature as well as blunt blows.

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  The patriarch of the Eternal Blossom Clan had once read him a book when he had been younger. It told a love story about two demons. One was fierce as fire, and the other was cold as ice. They roamed their world and destroyed whatever they encountered, the fury of fire devouring cities and a wave of ice and snow burying towns and settlements.

  Whenever they would meet, they would fiercely clash, before finding calm in each other's presence. They danced, their forces equal in nature, and they quickly found understanding for each other through this. But their newfound love would have destroyed their very nature, and so the Demonic Ancestor intervened. He threw them to the horizon, leaving them to chase after one another ever since. Sometimes, they meet and cast our world in darkness.

  Sol had to smile when he thought about the silly story. His father likely saw himself and his mother in the two. Maybe he had made the story up himself. But it was a cute way of teaching about Yin and Yang, and it had stuck with Sol.

  He tried to analyze the Qi streaming into his body in trickles. He had expected the process to be very hard, but after just a little while, he realized that each trickle of energy was equal parts composed of positive and negative forces. He tore apart some skin cells after he had tried to apply either force in full. Yin Qi let his cell crumble and break under a freezing force, and Yang Qi burnt the cell outright, leaving charred remains.

  Balance in all things. Yin and Yang both had part of each other, Sol reminded himself. That application went a lot smoother, and after a while, he was able to apply his energy fully across his hand. Touching it made it feel either cold as steel or warm like heated bread. It took a lot of focus to just apply the effect on his arm after separating the Qi accordingly.

  Soon, he noticed that if he used too much of the Yang Qi that entered his body to apply heat to his arm, the Yin energy assimilated into his Qi reserves and slowly made his internal body colder. His heartbeat increased. Suddenly, it felt dangerous, like he had stepped outside into the freezing cold in the middle of winter. Nature would not discriminate.

  It was not so easy after all. Sol hastily tried to balance the forces out once more. He did not want to waste all of the remaining pill energy by just applying either Yin or Yang Qi and expelling the other from his body. Even if he knew how to go about doing so, he did not want to. There was still more he wanted to try.

  He now knew how to apply Yin and Yang energy to his skin as well as harden his skin by soaking it in Qi. He was unsure how well this would work in combat, but the concept was there. It also seemed to alleviate his struggling Qi intake. Maybe he could use his Qi to heal wounds as well? At least in his skin?

  Sol moved a large portion of energy to a bruised area on his forearm. He had strengthened the wounded skin cells there by soaking them before, and they had hardened and felt soothed just as any other spot. But what would happen if he tried to nudge the cell to—do something?

  Maybe it was greedy to think that way, since there likely were a lot of teachers in the sect who could instill a sense of the theoretical concept of healing in him. Sol comprised a small amount of Qi of equal parts Yin and Yang energy, each containing the other, and made them spin around each other slowly. Then he applied that force to one of his cells. The skin cell pulsated. Then vibrated and exploded violently.

  On a very small scale. Sol had opened his eyes only to be unable to even spot the tiny cell he had just annihilated by accident. The bruise had spread a bit and radiated more pain into his arm when he touched it. Maybe it was not such a good idea to do this. But the violent explosion gave him an idea for future offensive techniques. Why not apply this energy at the end of a punch?

  Sol bit his lower lip in excitement. Maybe he could even fight against Rax’Rathos’s defenses like this. But offensive techniques like this would take a higher cultivation to execute. It was nothing that he would be able to conjure in the Skin Tempering step.

  Lastly, he wanted to focus more on his shapeshifting. The pills were made with that goal in mind after all, were they not? Sol focused on his fingers and the back of his hands. Picking individual skin cells, he focused on shapeshifting them, just as he did with his claws. Unlike that natural instinct that functioned seemingly without energy, this skin cell began greedily devouring his Qi reserves.

  It changed shape into a smooth metallic substance that mirrored the look of his own skin. Its durability was comparable to his claws. Cell after cell, he changed the composition of the back of his right hand until roughly a fingerprint-sized field had been created. It was a tedious process, since his Qi still moved rather tediously through the nearby bottleneck of the channels.

  Sol also discovered that applying force—his own claw in this case—easily broke the cohesion and pushed some skin cells deep, ripping their connections. He had used half of his remaining energy just for these few cells, and now he would have to spend the rest fixing them into a shape that mirrored the cohesive structure of his natural cells. Otherwise, they would not bend and absorb, but rather break like loose bricks stacked on top of one another.

  He needed mortar to fill the gaps, so he went about changing the cells again. This time, he stacked his ‘metal plating’ on top of his normal cells and tried to shapeshift them into a harder, yet malleable, organic substance. His first few attempts failed, creating weird-looking cells or material that he had not wanted to change into before finally getting the process right. He fixed the previous fingerprint-sized area and then went to add a few more cells before running out of energy fully.

  Immediately, physical exhaustion hit Sol like a horse. Slumping against the tree, he opened his eyes again, eyeing the night sky. He had no idea how long he had spent cultivating, but he was satisfied with his progress.

  Nyx had started the day without knowledge or understanding. Now, he was aware of his focus technique, could detect his own body's generation of Qi, could apply it in different ways, and he had made a friend who had helped him gain perspective and understanding.

  Glancing to his left, Nyx’Sol’s satisfied smile vanished, replaced by a frown accompanied by an annoyed twitch underneath his eye.

  The bird had left him a gift.

  Great.