With the fruits collected I headed back into the white room and sat down admiring them, they looked like overgrown peaches, with very beautiful and vivid color to them, a bright mix of orange and some red spots.
The fruit itself had a very appealing smell and would definitely make anyone salivate for a bite.
I began looking through the Poison God's recopies for the Nascent Soul Fruit usages in alchemy, and if I could get more benefits from it by transforming it into a pill.
But I found nothing but the direct usage of the actual fruit is the best use of its properties and gives the most benefit. No attempt at creating an alchemy recipe had managed to fully preserve or increase the potency of the fruit itself.
Since the fruit had a heavenly law within it, it would only be wasted if diluted or modified by human means and tools.
So I bit the bullet, or in this situation, the fruit.
Heavenly juice seeped from it as I bet, which made me feel like I have bitten through something from another world. It was tasty, sweet and immediately, made my mind feel like it had gone through a blast that cleared every fog that ever tempered with it.
That hidden wrath and rage I've been trying to suppress was almost immediately snuffed out. And my whole body began vibrating with undulated energy that I never thought I had before.
Qi, this is Qi, something I never ever had the ability to sense, feel or use, and now it was coursing through my meridians, as if it was the purest of water springs, cleansing and cleaning all the muck and wrongness that the Bone and Body Grinding Poison had caused me.
However, I knew well that this Qi, was not mine and will never be mine, it was only here as an additional effect of the fruit.
But at the same time, since this Qi was made by heavenly order, it was still able to impact and affect my own poison Qi.
My meridians soaked up in this naturally pure QI and fused it into them, then slowly began rotating it between them, spreading the natural Qi evenly all over my spiritual system. Then it came the turn for the Dantian, as the moment all the meridians were full they sent the rest of the Qi to the Dantian for storage.
But I didn't need to store this, because it wouldn't have been helpful to me anyway, so I began using this Qi to rotate my core, slowly but surely, the golden core in the middle of my Dantian began moving and rotating around itself like a small planet.
And the more Qi from the fruit was sent in the faster it rotated, and the faster it moved the more power the Core began generating.
Then, came the first breakthrough, my core's energy reached its maximum limit, and then, since it couldn't sustain the Qi, it began growing, inflating to a bigger size to host the Qi.
"Fifth Core stage! Done!"
The Core however didn't stop rotating, as this whole thing was nothing but a single bite from the whole fruit, and this was already enough to push me to the next Core Stage.
I took another bite, and then the same thing happened again, with the Qi revolting and raging within me, unharming yet overbearing, powerful yet gentle, not aiming to harm and only aiming to create.
Qi gathered, raged, roared, and blasted outwards of my body, as I made a second breakthrough.
"More!" I said as I finished off the rest of the fruit.
This gave me an even greater surge of Qi, that caused me to shake.
My meridians, since they weren't accustomed to the natural worldly Qi became confused as they weren't able to fully handle the Qi surging from within the remains of the consumed fruit.
Thus I made an active attempt to move the Qi I was getting from the fruit into the Dantian, and left the golden Core to do its job, rotating around itself like a top, gathering all the Qi around it.
The golden core broke through once again, to the seventh, then the eighth layer. But I was already running on fumes, I then took another bite from another Nascent Origin Soul Fruit and immediately noticed that the quality of the Qi I received from this fruit was far, far, far less than the first one.
Then it hit me, perhaps this fruit is only one-time use, and secondary uses won't help with breakthroughs but only supply Qi. Still, that wasn't a problem. The Qi I got was still substantial, and eating more of the same fruit will aid in the following breakthrough.
I then began eating more of the few fruits I had left and used all the Qi I generated to break through the Eight to the Ninth layer, but immediately, I felt like my whole body was husked out the moment my Golden Core inflated for the ninth time.
Because its size, compared to the massive water fortress I have inside my sea of consciousness looked like a literal sun compared to an ant.
All the Qi that was saturating my body had immediately disappeared inside the massive sun-like golden core, and looking at it right now, it seemed that it was moving at a snail's pace.
And I had no way to keep it rotating and reach the next and final stage to breakthrough. Or do I?
I pulled another item that I didn't really want to use, but a factor I noticed in the point and contribution rewards from the upcoming wars made me less skimpy on using it.
It was the Law Fruit. This thing is almost the same as a Nascent Soul Origin fruit, only this one supplies Law knowledge and understanding instead of aiding the growth of a Nascent Soul.
But if it is also filled with heavenly law and Qi, then, this is something that I didn't use before, so it won't be downgraded in Qi quality like the Origin Nascent Soul fruit.
I then pulled up the Law Fruit, hesitation was clear on my face as I didn't want to lose the Law Lines written on it.
But remembering the fact that the Lord of Lords pagoda can temporarily hide my presence from heavenly eyes, I had a pretty bold idea.
I pulled the Black Merchant's Quill and Inkpot and began writing all the law lines on the Law Fruit on a talisman. And once I was done, I waited, for the thunderbolt to come down, but nothing happened.
Grinning, I continued on writing the lines while I gave my body some time to relax and rest from the consecutive breakthroughs.
Though it would be best to do several breakthroughs in one breath and in one momentum, I'm not too crazy to attempt breaking into the Nascent Soul without fully stabilizing my current cultivation.
And thus, I gave my body time, as I wrote all the Heavenly Laws on a talisman, then began doing something that was slightly crazy. I began extracting the law liens and imprinting them on other talismans, so many other talismans that I had more than a few thousand of them once the day was done.
This was, of course, to be used later, as a very surprising, unorthodox method of guaranteeing my survival.
Once I felt I was fully rested, and completely well after eating a lot of other pills to calm my mind and restore some soul and mental energy that I lost in today's events.
I prepared to tackle the final advent.
Getting to the Nascent Soul stage isn't going to be hard. After all I saw Meng Hao doing it while he was half dead. So how hard could that be?
Then I immediately regretted my words, because Meng Hao had the Main Character Aura seeping from him, and I just raised the biggest flag of my life.
I sighed then pulled the law fruit in front of me and said, "Be good to me," then took a bite.
If the first fruit tasted like heaven, this one, tasted like utter shit, completely disgusting, unmistakably corrupted, and impossibly bad.
The taste was worse than a seven days old piece of cheese mixed with fish guts that were left inside the stomach of a dead bloated camel that spent several weeks under the desert sun.
It was so bad I almost gaged, it was so bad my eyes teared up and my whole body shook and shuddered. But the Qi it supplied me, was tens, no even hundreds of times more than even the first bite of the Nascent Origin Fruit.
But at the same time, I knew damn well, that I needed to finish up this whole thing, because it dawned on me, that if I don't fully finish eating this, what I will get will be incomplete. It was a feeling I had, and I tided through it.
With snot leaving my nose, and my stomach desperately trying to push back this atrociousness and the devilish torturous thing I was giving it, but I kept on eating, as the Qi began surging to my Dantian, and the massive core, that felt like it wouldn't move in a thousand years, budged, then slowly rotated.
The more I ate, the more I suffered the more the Golden Core spun, and at the same time, I noticed that the golden core's spiraling motions, were a reason to rejoice.
The very symbols on the law fruit I was eating, were slowly painting themselves on the outer crust of the golden core. This only made me braver into going for more of this disgusting thing. And I did, and it was awful, but the rewards, as I happened to realize by the end, were damn worth eating this putrid thing.
Even if by just a little…