Birthday and growing pains

His birthday passed with him celebrating by doing nothing but watering the garden and laying down next to his plant sending satisfaction and joyful emotions to it while it sent happy and comforting emotions back.

The day after was spent condensing his energy veins into liquid energy once more, and circulating energy while going about his tasks of watering the plants and practicing martial arts, it took a grand total of 32 days to completely fill his body with liquid energy without using a drop of it. After once more advancing his mental energy to liquid and letting it refill, he went out to hunt more slimes and deal with the backlog caused by him not doing anything for the past month. The common scouting party had gotten as large as 50 and as small as 40, with stray groups usually numbering between 15 and 20 in a group.

With 8 months of living in a cave by himself and constantly doing the same things again and again with little change besides when he cultivates, he begins to somewhat crave the advancement state as although painful the monotonous of day's on end doing the same thing was gone.

He had 15 bowls and an ever increasing ability to manipulate elements, he had started with water, then fire, and is currently practicing earth by seeing if he can't use it to carve better bowls and utensils. He had also learned how to manipulate it without touching it as was required when he began to practice with fire, he got burned enough times before learning that to have a certain disdain of that particular element. On the plus side he can now make small floating water balls the size of a golf ball, although only two at a time for now he was sure with more energy it would increase.

He was also preparing to advance once more as it would most likely take him between two and three months to finish condensing his solid energy before he can completely advance again. And another one and a half months to finish the complete body and mind expansion, the only upside is he wouldn't need to eat during the expansion period as the energy would be absorb from himself naturally and his body entered a state similar to hibernation.

He planned to deal with all scouting parties in a 20 minute radius and if possible lure a small pack to his stream and kill off most of them so as to lower the slimes in the area so as to maximize his safety in the following period. 

With his constant hunting of any scouts and stray slimes most slimes didn't come within the ten minute border he has set up anymore, only once every other week has a slime scout come through and he has always made sure to kill them when they did. Even the sixty slime large scouting parties were done in with a mix of energy and water. With an advantageous setting he can barely win against a small slime pack of a hundred.

  Over the following week he did exactly that, hunting 5 scouting parties and 2 small slime packs of 100 and 104 respectively.

With the area as clear as he can get and his energy full he once more begins the condensing process. After 4 hours he condenses his liquid energy into solidified energy, from this point he will spend all but one day a month in his cave preserving energy, cultivating, and watering crops. But will cull the slime numbers in the area once a month to prevent problems. Having to expand energy while also consolidating it will make the process take longer than it would most likely otherwise be but he had no choice but to cull them or in the time it takes to advance he would be completely over run.

Like that he spend the next three months consolidating as much energy as possible while using as little energy when hunting. With his energy full he condenses his mental energy into the solidified state for the third time.

Only three condensation cycles and yet it went from one week to 4 months to complete the step from gasses energy to solid energy.

He would once more clear out surrounding packs and then prepare for complete breakthrough, as he would be completely out of it for the next one to two months to finish this breakthrough.

Killing one small pack and 4 hunting parties in a 20 minute area the following week he knows by the time this is finished he will have spent over one year in this dungeon.

Stripping his clothes and putting them in his comm space he lay's down next to his plant and begins the advancement process, The pain rips through him but like last time he is completely focused on his mental energy and mental sphere allowing him to block some of the pain, but it is still a quadruple amount of pain to the last time, so although he can ignore it his body had to bare with it, he can fill not just his energy veins being injured but also some of his nerve endings and his muscles which are spasming so much they are ripping. Once everything is over he lets sleep come over him so as to refill his mental energy for the next part of the advancement. 

Waking to pain that fills like someone put cuts all over him he check his mental sphere to make sure it was completely filled, feeling it completely full he once more began the expansion process. He focused on his body during this process so as to see what would happen and to help ignore the pain, the corrupt energy once more left his nerves again but this time his nerves that were damaged also began to repair themselves using his mental energy. Again and again he slowly pushed out on the mental sphere until all of the energy was completely integrated.

Passing out he knew he had finally finished the arduous process once more.

Awakening to the smell of decay and death he knew the amount of corruption spat this time was more and far stickier than last time, with it being this bad in smell he immediately headed to the bath spot once more to begin scrapping off the gunk on his body using his refilled energy and water, it still took an hour to get all gunk off.

Clean and wearing the other pair of clothes that had spent months going from soaking in one water bath to the other sink his last advancement. He checked how long he had taken to finish his advancement, 2 months to complete his third energy expansion. 

He had spent over 1 year and 1 month in this dungeon.