Middle Stage!
That night, under a moon like a silver plate, Gu Yue Mo Bei stands in the courtyard when his sister Gu Yue Mo Yan comes to check on him after hearing he was injured. He deflects her worry with a joke, then tells her that although Fang Yuan beat him in two or three strikes, he heard Fang Yuan panting during the match, proof that Fang Yuan is not as strong as everyone believes, and vows to defeat him fair and square one day. Mo Yan tells him not to practice for the next few days, and Mo Bei answers that he means to nurture his aperture walls instead, aiming to break through to rank one middle stage and win the class chairman position to check Fang Yuan’s dominance, since Mo Yan herself only reached vice chairman before him. ch. 50
In the Chi family’s secret room, the elder Gu Yue Chi Lian transfers his own primeval essence into his grandson’s aperture, a transfusion he gives every three days, since Chi Cheng’s talent is only C grade and would otherwise take twice as long as a B grade cultivator and four times as long as an A grade cultivator to reach middle stage. Chi Lian warns that the borrowed essence leaves the aperture walls impure and will stifle his grandson’s future talent, though a Cleansing Water Gu could one day flush it out, and he has already arranged to search for a Liquor worm instead, a rare Gu able to raise a rank one Gu Master’s own primeval essence a small realm without that same cost. He adds that the Liquor worm, along with the boar Gu and Bookworm, is snapped up the moment it appears on the market, and that he has otherwise only heard rumors of Gu said to change a Gu Master’s talent. ch. 50
Elsewhere that night, Gu Yue Fang Zheng cultivates with a primeval stone until his primeval essence fills 80% of his aperture, a natural recovery rate twice Fang Yuan’s own given his A grade talent. Counting his money afterward, he finds three primeval stones left: the academy grants him three every seven days but Fang Yuan takes one, leaving him two, and his aunt and uncle give him a further three every seven days in living expenses, though he has stopped asking them for more since learning how strained the family’s finances are. Rationing one stone a day, he expects the three he has left to last three days, and reckons he will reach middle stage in three or four days, determined to prove an A grade talent beats his brother’s C grade. ch. 50
In the academy dormitory, Fang Yuan sits awake, sensing he is one step from his own breakthrough to middle stage, and decides to push through the night rather than sleep. His primeval sea, already refined by the Liquor worm to 44% pale green middle stage essence, surges in rising waves against the aperture’s white light wall until it turns to flowing white light and reforms as a water wall, leaving 20% of his primeval essence in the sea once the change completes. Morning finds him laughing, having advanced to middle stage. ch. 50
