Chapter 515: Training Toward Darkmist Island

As he blinked awake, Kai realized first that he was in the main cabin of the Clanless, then that they were still passing over the ocean. He'd taken multiple trips over the ocean at this point, from the relaxed journey after their honeymoon to the mad rush through the Blood Current. Most recently, he'd desperately flown the Clanless back to Cloudspire, hoping his wives were still alive.

Now, going in the opposite direction, he maintained an unusual sort of relaxed tension. Everything was fine, yet the incursion still loomed in the future, four months away. It felt wrong to slip into a routine, but acting more aggressively wouldn't get them there any faster.

The first step in his routine was getting out of bed, which was trickier than it seemed. Zae Zin Nim was asleep against his chest, an arm and leg wrapped around him, and he didn't want to wake her. While he carefully extracted himself, he noticed that Omilaena was awake, and she took the opportunity to extend a foot out to his thigh to tease. He smiled back, but shook his head, so she rolled her eyes and flopped back under the covers.

Once he slipped free of Zae Zin Nim she shifted restlessly, stretching until she brushed up against Omilaena and promptly latched onto her instead. Kai smiled at his wives cuddling together as he let the Beggar King's Rags wrap around him, then headed out onto the deck.

There he discovered Cragrila on watch duty, going through a training exercise with her new spear. It seemed that she had dismantled two legendary weapons and fused them into a single spear of wood, jade, and crystal. "Another day," she said conversationally.

"Another day," Kai agreed.

They began to spar, a final challenge for her and a warm-up for him. She was a real threat to cultivators, in general and especially with her new spear, but the gap in power made it easy for him to keep control of the fight. It was rare for them to say much of anything during their sparring matches, yet he looked forward to them.

After the match, she returned to meditate until her watch was over, so Kai shifted to his own training regimen. He focused on his familiar Physique routine, even though those exercises wouldn't get him from C-8 to C-9 no matter how many times he repeated them.

The reason he trained was because of the new item burning in his spatial ring, the Twisted Immortal Carnal Seed. He had experimented with it a little and was fairly confident he knew what it would do: if he swallowed the twisted pill, it would extend roots of power throughout his body, which could easily be lethal if he couldn't endure the pain and absorb the power. He thought he had a clear grasp of the ordeal and could definitely survive it, so the only question was if the "Immortal" aspect of the name was meaningful. That was a task to discuss with Omilaena when she could be distracted from her current pill obsession.

Even though he was in new territory, he was fairly sure that the normal rules of Physique would apply, which was why he was waiting to consume the Twisted Immortal Carnal Seed. It would likely help him break through a level, so he wanted to use it to reach B-1 instead of wasting it on C-9. To do that, he'd have to train his body and find the absolute limits of C rank.

That much was obvious... whether or not it was the right strategy from a broader perspective was less clear. Zae Zin Nim had managed to unlock an entirely different type of Physique and Omilaena was convinced that there was something else that most didn't understand, so she would use her own methods.

For whatever reason, that didn't seem to be his path. Kai wasn't sure if he even could follow a normal path, given the unique nature of his monstrous body. What he did know was that the boost of reaching B rank Physique was the power most available to him, the jump he was most capable of making before the incursion.

As for whether the fundamental limits of his soul would be a problem... that was something else that worried him, but there was nothing they could do while traveling. It seemed certain that when his human soul neared 999 Power he would begin to reach limits, and both Omilaena and Zae Zin Nim had required very specific help to expand their souls. What kinds of things would apply to him, he had no idea.

If he did, though... having greater than 2000 effective Power would put him in the top ranks of the world. That goal kept him pushing himself to the limit throughout his exercises.

Once he finished, he went to check in on the others, which had become another step in his routine. Inafay and Orotaisin had locked their door, so he gave them their privacy and moved on. Omilaena was in their bedroom, still wearing just her nightgown, but bent over her new pill furnace experimenting.

"Do you even see yourself?" Kai asked as he moved up behind her and put his hands on her hips.

"If I'm not teasing you two, what's the point?" Omilaena shot a smirk over her shoulder, but she was clearly much too focused to play around. "I actually think it might be possible to use the pill furnace to refine energy from dual cultivation, but I haven't figured out the mechanics. Definitely too busy for playtime."

"You didn't seem to agree a few hours ago."

"Definitely too busy."

After playfully bumping up against her one more time, Kai left her to her work. He was curious if Omilaena would unlock any more secrets with her study of alchemy, and how much that overlapped with the other arts he knew. From their past conversations he knew that she was only somewhat familiar with Goralian potion brewing - she hadn't ever met Juray, as odd as that seemed to him.

Since she was busy, Kai sought out Zae Zin Nim instead in the engine room. She had a routine as well, because she basically spent all her time cultivating. When he arrived she was in the middle of a cycle, so Kai sat down and began his own cultivation - he'd planned to swallow one of the qi pills from the vault, but there was so much power overflowing in the engine room that it wasn't necessary.

Zae Zin Nim's cultivation was growing by leaps and bounds, but she needed lots of jumps like that to reach her next goal. They hadn't explicitly said that she could make herself an unparalleled cultivator if she reached Sky Soul, but it was obvious and she seemed pleased.

"I am finished," his wife said abruptly, though she was still soaking in qi after her cycle. "Did you have anything you wanted to talk about?"

"Not in particular," Kai said.

"Your own cultivation is proceeding well?"

"Still slow, because my soul is consuming a lot of the qi, but nothing unusual. You?"

"That is somewhat more complicated." Zae Zin Nim slipped a blue coil from out of her sleeve and examined it. "It was said that an Earth Soul couldn't survive the perfection of their meridians, but I have tested, and I definitely can... but I don't want to waste the power, and using it now might."

"You mean you might absorb it for your advancement, instead of developing a secondary capacity?"

"Yes, it is meant to be a great technique that differentiates Sky Souls." His wife frowned and shifted. "However... Omilaena says that this may not be necessary or ideal. She thinks it's a way to get around the 1000 Power barrier."

Kai was familiar with the 999 barrier, but that was new, so he cracked an eye. "Is that a cultivation thing that I somehow still haven't heard about?"

"Oh... no, it is not, apologies. Omi and I have been discussing the strongest fighters we have seen, and we observed that many individual abilities seem to reach their limit at 1000 Power, same as that of a perfect Sky Soul. This seems unlikely to be a coincidence."

"Yeah, it was the same with the great powers of Rosemount, and they used a wide variety of different systems. I don't think it can be like the overall limit to the soul, can it? I know each capacity of the soul is limited, but surely people would notice if they had a maximum size."

"That is not clear. There are not so many who have reached those heights of power, so there may be much we do not understand. I am cultivating as much as possible while we explore other possibilities."

They discussed those as they continued cultivating: apparently there was some chance that it might be possible to obtain Brightwind Meridian Perfection as a core part of one's cultivation, yet there were enough details uncertain that they didn't want to attempt it. Another problem they would hopefully solve before they reached Deadwaste.

Busy with cultivation, Kai almost forgot lunch, but the sounds of the others drew his attention. Everyone on the Clanless ate together at lunch - even Nirka, who otherwise stayed out of the way - and it was generally a good time, a moment to relax from all the other training.

In the afternoon it was back to work, trying to push his Physique in new ways. That day it was testing training methods from the Elemental Nations, but it could just as easily have been pills with Omilaena or his personal explorations with his monstrous abilities.

The evening meal was usually taken separately because everyone operated on such different schedules. Kai and Zae Zin Nim managed to pry Omilaena away from her experiments, and once they did she ended up pulling them all into bed. Yet as soon as they were done, she leapt up restlessly, fiddling with her pill experiments even before getting dressed again.

Intimacy was itself a method of training the Savage Heart, as Kai still hadn't gained all the benefits of dual cultivation from his wives' recent advancements. After that, however, he was on his own trying to experiment with new chakra arts. Without direct sources, it was difficult to advance, but he couldn't afford to ignore the Savage Heart.

He managed to eke out minor advancements and gained further control of transforming his body, yet always ran into the same barriers. There was no way to gain a direct Power boost without giving up control, which was a risk he only took while flying away from the Clanless. As for the larger transformation he'd experienced in Floodisle City, that seemed impossible unless he had large amounts of energy in the region to drain.

Some days he went to sleep much later, but that day he ended up returning first. Zae Zin Nim finished her cultivation like clockwork, returning and sitting next to him comfortably to meditate. Sometimes they all got together in the evenings, but Omilaena was working feverishly - he had no idea when she went to sleep, he just always woke up with her in bed with them.

And so he drifted to sleep, having extracted everything he could from another day. One day closer, both to Darkmist Island and to the incursion.