Cultivating With the Body Tempering Formation

Fu Bian was only watching Hui work casually without much expectation at first. It would usually take someone with talent in formations around four hours to finish this formation after failing 2-3 times. A normal person might fail as many as ten times. Fu Bian only stayed because she expected Hui to screw up early on, at which point she could taunt Khan.

However, half an hour passed by and her eyes widened in shock. After one hour, Fu Rian also looked stunned.

"Hey, I'm no expert in formations, but…isn't she nearly done?" Fu Rian asked her sister. She got no reply and saw that her sister was just staring blankly.

Fifteen minutes later, a white light suddenly shot up from the ground. Hui hurried across the circular formation, picked up ten equally proportioned spherical stones the size of marbles, then placed them into a smaller circle that was connected to the main large circle via a thick line. The moment the stones fell into position, the white light glowed brilliantly for a moment, then declined until it could no longer be seen.

"Yes!" Hui muttered to herself. She didn't want to come off as a brag, but she was really happy that she had succeeded and didn't waste Khan's resources!

"Haha, good job Hui, well done."

It was hard work focussing for all that time on the formation, but Hui felt that it was well worth it after being praised by her master and getting her head patted.

Fu Bian didn't know what to say, so she didn't say anything. She was wrong this time, but she wasn't about to bring that up. Anyway, Khan was too distracted to care.

"Time to try it out!" He laughed, then stepped into the circle.

"Wait, right now?" Fu Rian was startled. Wasn't he going to mentally prepare himself first? It was said that not many people could withstand more than 5-10 seconds the first time they used the 2nd stage formation, and those were mostly old, hardened cultivators at the Qi River or Spirit Tree Realms. Honestly, nobody else was even willing to try…this was literally a form of self-torture!

A person's pain tolerance would be higher if they had experienced more pain in their life, so naturally, someone who'd lived through hundreds of years of cultivation would have experienced more hardship than Khan, a 15 year old kid.

That said, those cultivators in the Samsara Sect were all reincarnators, so their life experience was usually greater than it appeared on the surface.

Khan ignored everyone and walked into the main circle. He then proceeded inwards walking over the hundreds of intricately drawn runes and sat down within the inner circle.

Unlike the 1st stage Body Tempering Formation, the 2nd stage formation was activated by one's own Blood Energy, rather than relying on Profound Qi to start it up. In his early days of training with the 1st stage formation, Khan was forced to constantly beat people up until they agreed to help him activate the formation. It was better after he bought Hui and she reached the Qi Absorption realm of course.

Khan placed both of his palms down into the oval runes by his side, then began to inject his Blood Energy through each of his hands and into the formation without hesitating for a moment.

"What the hell is he doing?!" Fu Bian cried out in shock.

"What's wrong, is he doing something dangerous again?" Fu Rian frowned, she wasn't well acquainted with the theory behind this formation.

"Ah…I thought he would at least work his way up to this point…" Hui smiled bitterly.

After taking a deep breath, Fu Bian explained to her sister the intricacies behind this 2nd stage formation.

"People often state that the 2nd stage Body Tempering Formation results in twice the rate of improvement compared to the 1st stage at the cost of enduring five times the pain. However, that's not the full extent of the formation's abilities…it's possible to increase the improvement rate up to three times, only, the level of pain will be another five times greater than using the formation at its normal low level…what he's doing right now is 25 times more painful than the 1st stage formation!"

"What?" Fu Rian's dark eyes widened in shock. "But even the 1st stage formation is renowned for being so painful that most people can only endure sessions lasting a few minutes at a time, at most putting themselves through 4-5 sessions each day!"

Hearing her younger sister point this out, Fu Bian suddenly felt curious.

"Slave- No, Hui. How did your master achieve a Vital Life Realm body by the age of 15 exactly? As far as I'm aware, this sort of speed is simply absurd."

"Well, I only met master three years ago, at which point he had a late stage Body Transformation Realm body." Hui smiled as she reminisced.

"He used to go find other outer sect disciples and drag them back to the house to force them to activate the formation for him, until I reached the Qi Absorption realm. After that, I would activate it every day as he did his usual 4-5 hours of training. Other than that, he practised some martial arts from his home world now and then, and he got in lots of trouble by robbing disciples and…umm…playing with women…and if he had any other free time, he spent the rest of the day either eating, drinking or sleeping."

Fu Bian actually ignored all of those last things about Khan, which she no longer found particularly surprising. Instead, she felt like she had misheard Hui somehow.

"Did you say 4-5 hours? What do you mean, 4-5 hours?"

"Hmm? I mean 4-5 hours a day training with the Body Tempering Formation. I think master has been doing that ever since he reached Body Transformation Realm when he was eight. Ah, he probably struggled to train peacefully when he had to rely on kidnapping people to activate the formation, though…" Hui sighed and looked at Khan sorrowfully.

"4-5 hours every day? Just how many sessions was that?"

Hui blinked. Why was Miss Fu so fixated on this?

"Just one session."

Fu Bian's jaw dropped. When her sister grabbed her shoulder and pointed towards Khan, her jaw dropped even further.

"H-h-he's actually activating the formation at full power! How, how long has he lasted by now?" She asked in shock.

"He started as soon as he sat down and put his palms on the injection runes…" Fu Rian said as she continued to watch Khan in interest.

She had seen people training with the 1st stage formation before. Those who were inexperienced would start screaming immediately and jump out. Those who were considered to have firm wills would start sweating after ten seconds, sweating heavily after a minute, gnashing their teeth ferociously after 2-3 minutes, then they might last another minute if they were resilient.

Sometimes, the 1st stage Body Tempering Formation was actually used by the outer sect disciples to host a competition, a competition to see who possessed the firmest will. Fu Rian had personally attended the largest of these competitions held last year, where the winner endured for almost nine minutes. Everyone was in awe of that guy at the time, despite the fact that he possessed a Body Transformation Realm body and regularly trained with this formation regularly.

"You said it's 25 times more painful than the usual 1st stage formation when operating at full power, right sister?" Fu Rian asked, feeling a bit dazed now.

"Mm…"

"Wow, master's really impressive, it's been three minutes now but he looks like he's not even bothered by it!" Hui exclaimed excitedly.

Within the formation, Khan stayed still with his eyes loosely shut and his palms pressed to the floor. Activating the formation was simple, he only needed to maintain a strand of his Blood Energy between each of his palms and the oval runes. Activating the lower intensity stage was accomplished using a similar method, but with the fingertips rather than the palms. Each additional finger tip increased the intensity, with two palms being the highest intensity.

This would also burn through the spirit stones more rapidly. Spirit stones were the fuel for this formation, and many other formations. They were also a key ingredient to many alchemical pills, and were often used as currency by cultivators.

Hui had placed ten spirit stones into the fuel insertion rune on the formation, but she realised that if Khan intended to use this level of intensity for 4-5 hours like he usually did, then this might not be enough.

She quickly skipped around the formation and removed another ten spirit stones from Yusef's spatial ring, then placed them into that same circle which was connected to the main formation circle via a thick glowing line.

The circle originally had the number '103' faintly visible in grey light within the centre. The moment the spirit stones entered the circle, they were surrounded by a white light with a flash, then disappeared afterwards, along with the light. The number in the circle now read '201'.

This number referred to a 'spirit unit', a term coined by human cultivators to describe the amount of spiritual energy contained within one average spirit stone. All cultivators would become familiar with this quantity of energy. Although it seemed like they used pebbles as a primitive currency, the true currency was the easily extractable and gentle energy which was stably contained within the stone.

The stones used in this formation were higher than average quality spirit stones. All spirit stones would appear to be a bland black colour at a glance, but on looking closely, you could see a faint glint of multi-coloured light. To a person who was ignorant regarding spirit stones, they would think that they all looked identical, but all cultivators learned to identify the differences, since this was often used as a currency amongst them.

Most Qi Refiners could roughly estimate the energy contained within a spirit stone by holding it and injecting a strand of their Profound Qi. More powerful cultivators naturally possessed more accurate and reliable methods.

The stones were absorbed into the formation and it would remain fuelled even after being deactivated and reactivated again.

Khan didn't pay any attention to anything happening outside of the formation. Silently, he continued training.