Cultivating is gross.

Stepping into the cultivation room Collin sat down on the towel and shut the door. Sitting in the small room with its bright white walls, the only noises he could hear came from himself. To start cultivating Collin needed to quite his mind and be calm to get the best results but thought of this room made it difficult.

In the future when he tried to breakthrough to Foundation Establishment, he would most likely be inside this cultivation room or one at his other villa, and if he failed to increase the rank of Alchemic Pill Dantian he would die. His body would remain in this room for fifty years before the city management reclaimed the villa, and his body would be found by the cleaning crews. In fifty years, who would remember that he even existed?

Cultivation rooms had arrays that cut off everything outside, that every so often gave a suffocating isolating feeling that sometimes took Collin some time to get over. He didn't like these thoughts, but all he could do was try to push them out of his mind and start cultivating. After wondering what would happen to the food that was delivered to his villa twice a day, would it be thrown away or would the delivery person eat it, Collin was able to calm his mind and begin cultivating.

After swallowing the three pills, the medicinal properties began to seep out and were wrapped in Collins internal energy and slowly moved to his heart. Every beat of his heart would expose more of his blood to the medicinal properties of the pills. After half an hour, the pills had given all they could and a few minutes later all the medicinal properties had been absorbed by his blood.

Moving a more powerful stream of Qi from his dantian to his heart, his blood began to absorb this Qi as it moved through his heart and spread through his body's circulatory system. Now that he knew the path his blood took through his body, he began to send the Qi from his dantian along the same path. It took a while to get a steady stream of Qi to continuously flow through his veins without being completely absorbed by his blood.

The first complete cycle around his body was slow and clumsy, but with each successful cycle it would become faster and smoother. After two dozen cycles his blood had hit the tipping point, he would succeed or fail in the next several cycles. After two cycles Collin felt a familiar hollow feeling indicating that he had succeeded in mutating his blood.

It went as he expected, since this method was designed to allow those without Qi to transform their blood into a dantian, those who are already cultivators who use this method have far greater chance of being successful on the first attempt. Now he would have to cultivate to fill his blood with Qi, tomorrow he would start using the beginning stages of the new body art.

Cultivating his blood felt odd to Collin, instead of the hollow feeling coming from a centralized location like his dantian, it came from all over his body, but some parts felt hollower. As Collins Qi flowed along with his blood throughout his body the hollow feeling slowly dissipated before changing into a full sensation. After a few cycles of not having to add to the Qi flowing along with his blood he knew that it was time to stop cultivating. It would take about a month for his newly mutated blood to mutate the rest of his blood and alter his blood marrow so it would create new mutated blood instead of regular blood.

Till that process was complete he would have to slowly nurture his newly mutated blood before he could seriously cultivate with the intention of increasing his bloods strength. If he were to try to truly cultivate his blood now it would greatly slow down the conversion process and severely limit his bloods cultivation speed, and if he tried to overuse the Qi in his blood, he would risk damaging or destroying his newly mutated blood. Since he was an Alchemic Cultivator, his first priority was to strengthening his Alchemic Pill Dantian, everything else would be secondary, so he was fine with taking it slowly.

With this round of cultivation done, Collin stopped focusing on what was happening inside his body and started focusing on what was happening outside his body. The first thing he noticed was a putrid smell filling the air, after opening his eyes the second thing he noticed was that he was covered in a film of a light grayish slime.

Lifting arm to get a better look at the slime on his arm came with some resistance as strings of slime stretched from his arm to his leg. Pressing his thumb to his index finger felt squishy and pulling finger apart produced the same slimy strings. Gross was the only thing he could think of to describe this feeling. He didn't understand where this slime came from, the book did mention a slight oily secretion from the medicinal residue but not slime. The only thing he could think of was that as an Alchemic Cultivator he had far more medicinal residue in his body than a normal cultivator let alone a body cultivator.

He needed to see if he could wipe this off onto the towel with the hope that he wouldn't coat everything he touched and stepped on with this slime. The moment his hand touched the far more porous towel the slime stuck to it, with a tug the slime peeled off from the palm of his hand. After doing the same to the other hand Collin opened the door to let in some fresh air. Next was standing up, he was worried that the slime may have acted as glue and would make it impossible to stand up, but he was worried for nothing. Only some weird noises were made when he stood up, after scraping the bottoms of his feet on some clean sections of the towel he stepped out of the cultivation room.

After collecting the towel Collin not only left the basement, but he also left the main house. He didn't want to use the shower in the main house and cause a mess. Of the three choices of where to clean himself, the guardhouse was out because it still had a large pot with filth in it. This only left the two servant quarters; he used the male servants' quarters when he broke through to the 3rd layer, so he decided to use the female servants' quarters, even if it did have all those arrays for spying.

The slime started melting in the warm water of the shower and began sluffing off on to the tile floor. By the time he was done showering the slime coating looked a giant snake had shed it skin. Soaking in the tub small pieces of slime that didn't come off in the shower were floating in the water dissolving.

After getting every piece of slime on his body off, or so he hoped, he used his Qi to get mostly dry. Walking towards the main house he could smell the flower-scented perfume from the bath water on him, even if he wasn't the type of person to bathe again if there was no soap, he would just to get rid of this smell off him. After bathing, he would read till half an hour before his normal bedtime then he would begin practicing the soul art he chose.

Soul arts are normally practiced before sleep, due to extreme tiredness one would feel after the practice. He started to wonder if he would have a relaxing sleep or a draining one, but those questions were soon replaced with another question, would anything gross happen during his soul cultivation? He was also wondering if cultivating is gross and no one bothered to tell him or if it was just him.