Fang Qiu

Heavy breathing could be heard coming from a small open space in the myriad mountain range. Beasts roamed this place all year round and they would surely be attracted to the smell of blood from the battle that just took place. The corpses of several youths could be seen laying in this open space, one was even missing both arms yet an additional third arm could be seen scattered around this corpse.

The heavy breathing came from a young boy looking to be around sixteen years old. He had jet black hair like the deep abyss of space and could be considered handsome according to the standards of this world. The first thing people would notice is probably the bloody scar going horizontally through the bridge of his nose and the shoulder currently being bandaged up using some strips of cloth, or at the very least what's left of it.

The boy only had his right arm currently with the left one laying around the corpses in the mud, the arm was cut off right below the shoulder by a sword but his face didn't show any pain aside from clenched teeth and some heavy breathing.

"First I need to get out of this place the moment I get my shoulder bandaged up" Fang Qiu spoke to no one in particular. The beasts would surely be attracted to the sounds of battle combined with the smell of blood and in his current state Fang Qiu had a low chance of surviving if he ended up surrounded by a bunch of beasts. "Luckily those three were inexperienced fighters, probably newly awakened that wanted to try out their new powers."

People in this world awaken at sixteen because that is the age when their bodies should be sturdy enough to hold spirit qi. Awakening requires no special rituals or items, one merely has to try sensing the spirit qi in the air and guide it into their bodies where their dantian is. The moment their body absorbs spirit qi it will awaken its hidden potential by condensing the qi in their dantian into a core.

The dantian is where a cultivator's qi resides and the core in the middle of the dantian holds the elemental comprehension.

These three corpses next to Fang Qiu were newly awakened youths with no special background to speak of. Fang Qiu knew this because they were talking non stop whilst entering this forest.

Luckily for Fang Qiu they could not fully control their powers yet, and had no experience fighting serious battles at all, there is a big difference after all between real life and death battles and a basic spar where the opponent basically lets you hit them.

Sadly though, one of them was a metal awakened who was a bit stronger than expected which cost Fang Qiu an arm.

Every newly "awakened" gains a core spirit together with a spirit ability upon first forming their core within the dantian, this power manifests in the form of an item or beast that can be used in battles alongside the cultivator, of course there are cultivators whose spirit or spirit ability is not combat related and cannot fight. This core spirit is related to one of the elements: water, fire, earth, wind, lightning, metal, space, dark, light.

thus allowing the cultivator to gain comprehension over said element, but this also means they cannot gain comprehension of other elements in this life.

There are some rare and unique elements besides the main eight which are mainly combinations of two elements like the wood element which is a combination of earth and light element, but only one percent of youths awaken a rare element when they turn sixteen.

Realising he was zoning out, probably due to blood loss, Fang Qiu quickly returned his focus to the matter at hand.

The three bodies lying in the mud were a newly awakened fire, metal and earth cultivator. The fire cultivator had a core spirit called flaming sparrow which gave the cultivator the spirit ability to share vision with the spirit, which was also how Fang Qiu was unexpectedly discovered and chased.

The sparrow was a combat spirit which caused several burns on Fang Qiu's arms whilst the fire cultivator himself left a big charred palm imprint on Fang Qiu's chest. The charring came from his innate flame conjuring which every flame cultivator has.

"Luckily I was wearing the leather armor grandfather left me or that palm would've fried my organs" Fang Qiu thought to himself whilst he finished bandaging up his shoulder, or at least what's left of it.

The second awakened was a girl who awakened metal element powers and her core spirit was a dagger which cost Fang Qiu his left arm, yet he did not have any regrets. Fighting against three cultivators solo it's already a miracle that he won, let alone only losing an arm in the process. In the years Fang Qiu grew up in the forest he got plenty of fighting experience and learned to be ruthless when it comes down to a life or death fight. His body was riddled with scars from old fights against beasts and he even lost 3 fingers on his left hand whilst fighting a wild wolf a few years back.

It was his first time hunting on his own after his grandfather passed away, and he made many mistakes that day costing him three fingers whilst it should've been an easy fight without any substantial injuries if he wasn't so careless.

Fang Qiu finally got up and left after making sure he stopped the bleeding on his shoulder and nose as well as he could in a short period of time.

"Void storage" Fang Qiu called out in his mind, after which the belongings of the three corpses on the ground disappeared with a single touch as if they were never there.

Fang Qiu was an awakened of the space and light element which was considered very rare. Every element has an innate ability and all space element users have a "void storage" allowing them to store items in an independent space without having to carry them.

Currently Fang Qiu could store up to one cubic meter of stuff, and besides his loot from this battle the void storage was packed to the brim with beast materials and daily necessities.

The bandages also came out of said storage, otherwise wouldn't people think he was retarded if he went into a fight holding a roll of bandages?

As for the corpses themselves, they were already gone by the time Fang Qiu finished bandaging his shoulder. All that was left in this place now was the smell of blood and a cute little panda. The panda is Fang Qiu's space and light element core spirit called "star swallowing panda". A well deserved name seeing how it "ate" all the corpses in a matter of seconds.

Seeing this ability again made Fang Qiu think back to what his grandfather told him back then.

"Every core spirit is formed inside the core and had a certain ability, some are stronger than others and it allows cultivators to be unique from one another.

Finding someone that owns the same core spirit is not too uncommon but the same abilities could differ in strength which was the dividing line between a normal person and a genius. The most famous abilities throughout history even allowed the owner to kill anyone he looked at or allowed someone to be near unkillable even in the lowest cultivation stages. of course these abilities are exceptions and are rare even if looking at millions of years of history."

Core beasts can use the same innate element ability as the cultivator which is why the knee high panda could absorb three full corpses. It had its own void storage where the corpses were currently being stored and slowly turned into cultivation progress for Fang Qiu, just like how both the flame cultivator and his fire sparrow could use flame conjuring which is the innate ability of all fire element cultivators.

"Thankfully Little Black can eat the corpses to increase my cultivation or I would have lost a lot of potential cultivation progress." The star swallowing panda's spirit ability allowed Fang Qiu to eat creatures he killed to gain parts of their cultivation progress without side effects. This also worked on humans but Fang Qiu was pretty disgusted by the idea of cannibalism even if it increased his cultivation. This was why he had the panda conveniently named "little Black" absorb those corpses instead of eating them himself. Another bonus is that the panda can directly absorb and convert corpses from its own storage without the need to actually eat them unlike Fang Qiu. The cultivation progress would be added regardless of whether he ate the corpses or the panda did it since the core spirit is created by the person's core and thus part of the cultivator.

This spirit ability could be considered extremely overpowered since every other cultivator has to absorb qi day after day to advance the ranks whilst Fang Qiu could just absorb a few corpses and save himself months if not years of work. In theory, for as far as Fang Qui knew, he could eat his way up to the peak of cultivation without actually cultivating for a single day as long as he had enemies throwing themselves at his feet.

But on the other hand he was weaker in battle than most awakened since most cultivators have a spirit ability that can be used to attack, like the third attacker being an earth element cultivator.

she had awakened a shield shaped core spirit which caused small scale earthquakes at the place she slammed her core shield in the ground. It doesn't seem that useful at first but catching him unexpected with a well timed earthquake caused Fang Qiu to lose his balance therefor having to sacrifice an arm.

Most abilities can be very lethal trump cards if used at the right moment in a fight, Star swallowing was an incredibly strong ability but had almost zero use in a fight, and the panda itself cannot help in a fight either since it is a non-combat core beast, which was miles off compared to the sparrow of the flame cultivator that could attack Fang Qiu and severely burn his arms. the panda was more like a mobile gluttonous backpack at this point until Fang Qiu could find new ways to use the panda to his advantage since awakening a different or second core spirit is not possible.

Every cultivator can only awaken a single core spirit since they only have one core. dual awakened are rare but not impossible to find, just like Fang Qiu being a dual space/light cultivator. Dual awakened do not own two cores but instead have a dual element core and their core spirit controls two elements. The star swallowing ability made use of a combination of light energy to absorb the power and space energy to transfer it to Fang Qiu.

the only thing that allowed him to win against these three people was the huge gap in fighting experience from surviving most of his life in this forest. Otherwise a team of a long range fire cultivator, a hard to kill earth cultivator and an aggressive close range metal cultivator would have been near impossible to win against in Fang Qiu's situation.

"Let's go Little black"

______

A couple hours later at the edge of the forest….

A youth missing an arm slowly emerged together with a knee high panda hanging clumsily on the boy's back like a backpack. The panda had black spots like a regular panda but when looking into them people would get the feeling they were looking at a vast galaxy containing millions of stars.

Qi refinement was the first major realm in cultivation divided into nine sub tiers. Cultivators first had to absorb spirit qi into their dantian, condensing it nine times to break through to the foundation realm. Fang Qiu had absorbed the cultivation from those three corpses on the way out of the forest through Little Black, also healing in the process which was due to his light element.

Light element users could heal themselves and others but it required massive amounts of spirit qi to do so. But since Fang Qiu could absorb others' cultivation to add it to his own he can easily make use of the corpses to heal himself. All other healers could only use their own qi to heal people which made Fang Qiu unique in this aspect since healing is the innate ability of all light element cultivators.

he was also still in the first tier of Qi refinement even after gradually absorbing the cultivation from three cultivators that little black ate. It seems they really had awakened recently otherwise he would not have stayed at simply tier one if all three of them had cultivated a little more. Thankfully though, he had managed to close his wounds by healing whilst increasing his cultivation or he might have bled to death from losing an arm.

Not that all of this was on Fang Qiu's mind right now, he had plenty of time on the way leaving the forest to inspect his healing progress and growing cultivation.

"Time to enter the city for the first time in ten years, I wonder... would the food really be as good as the old man always described?" Wiping the drool off his mouth he quickly made his way to the city with an equally drooling knee high backpack...

"They better serve meat or I'm having panda for dinner!"