Ascend

He picked up the other two Miasma cultivation beads and consumed it immediately.

He stayed in his cultivation stance for a long while, carefully guiding the new influx of Miasma into his cultivation core.

Most beginners would simply brute force their cultivation beads and pills directly onto the cultivation core, but experts knew that it would be a big mistake.

That would create a clash inside their cultivation core as the old energy battled with the new.

The old cultivation energy wants to assert dominance over the new recruits so as to establish order but the new energy wants to disrupt that order and create a new system that revolves around them.

For beginners, this clash was unnoticeable. Only when they reached the apex of cultivation would they realize that their cultivation cores had micro cracks all the way inside.

This would impair their Yi energy storage and prevent them from reaching their full potential. This caused some cultivators to shatter their own cores and start over even though they were near the top of cultivation.

After about a day of meditating, Zoran came out of his stance. He looked inside his cultivation core and saw that the Miasma bead barely filled his core.

It was then that he truly realized how massive a SSS-class cultivation core was.

If he had a normal A-class cultivation core, those three cultivation beads would have filled a small puddle in his dantian.

With his core, it barely filled with one droplet.

His advancement in stages would slow down to a crawl because of this. Others would reach the 5th stage before he even reached 2nd.

If amateurs learned of this, they would make fun of him. If experts knew of this…

They would be envious.

Masters knew that quality triumphs quantity, especially in the later stages. After all, they can always increase the quantity after a lot of time and cultivation pills, but they could not go back and enhance the quality of their Yi energy.

He was glad. The Miasma looked to be an endless void which he would need a lot of time to navigate and escape.

That was too much time to waste, especially in this critical state of his cultivation. There were also a lot of events that would soon happen on the overworld that he needed to be a part of.

With a lifetime of knowledge, he could search for more treasures and cultivation pills that would accelerate his progress.

He thought he would have to postpone his cultivation while he was in the Miasma, but the beads in his hands solved that problem.

He could take his time exploring the Miasma while cultivating at the same time.

In his quest for finding the exit to the overworld, Zoran would inevitably encounter more Miasma Beasts.

Those poor creatures would have to be subject in Zoran's journey of cultivation as they served as battle practice and a source of cultivation.

And so that's what Zoran did. He explored the Miasma.

The consistency of the Miasma was similar to an underwater realm, so Zoran was able to swim in 3 dimensions; left & right, front & back, up & down.

His first exploration was straight up. He assumed that if he followed from where he fell, he could find his way back to Draco's cave.

However, he underestimated the size of the Miasma. He swam up straight for one whole day, and everywhere he looked was still an endless void of unbroken darkness.

He was going at his fastest speed. He modified his body by giving himself swimming fins made out of Miasma and boosted himself by using the Law of Attraction by repelling the Miasma below him which pushed him up.

At that speed, he was already as fast as a speeding car. But it still looked like he was back to where he started.

But Zoran persevered. He kept swimming up with no break. He didn't eat or sleep as the Miasma filled him with enough nourishment to sustain this gruesome marathon.

On the fifth day, Zoran finally met some more Miasma Panthers, but there were only two of them this time.

He easily destroyed their Miasma bodies and used their beads for his cultivation. These two were a little bit stronger than the beasts he encountered on his first day, but they still succumbed to one hit of the Tyrannical Miasma Strike.

He went on and on, spending days and days swimming and occasionally battling Miasma beasts in his path.

These creatures were his only companions during this trip. They kept him from going crazy in this endless void.

As he went up, he met more and more Miasma Beasts. The frequency of his confrontations increased to daily encounters, which served as his daily hunt.

After a month of nonstop journey, he finally reached the top but he was disappointed with what he saw.

There was just a ceiling of Miasma overhead, preventing Zoran from ascending.

It was a solid form of Miasma, with its density akin to giant slabs of metal sheets. It laid flat, with no indentations of crevices.

Zoran pushed his finger towards the ceiling and immediately felt resistance. Even when using all his strength, he could not push through more than one inch into the Miasma.

And the prolonged exposure of his finger led it to being decayed from the solid Miasma.

Zoran retracted his finger, or what's left of it. His enhanced durability was no match for the solid Miasma as evidenced from his pointer finger rotting to the bone.

Within the safety of the liquid Miasma, Zoran's internal regeneration quickly recovered the missing parts of his finger.

Zoran concluded that the Miasma above was more intense than the Miasma he was currently in.

He knew that there were different parts of the world with more dangerous Miasma pits than others, but nobody ever knew why.

That was probably because nobody had ever entered the Miasma, so nobody could distinguish between them.

But now, Zoran knew. His body was not equipped to handle the intensity of the solid Miasma just yet.

An advancement to the next stage would not be enough in his estimation. He would have to advance beyond his current realm of Body Strengthening.

Zoran slowly descended back. Advancing to the next realm was simply unachievable in the void of the Miasma.

There was a sparse number of cultivation sources apart from the Miasma Beasts. And once Zoran advanced further, those cultivation beads would no longer have an effect on him.

With this dead end, Zoran reached the top with no semblance of an exit. But he didn't give up.

He descended down the Miasma once again without much speed. He tried hard to erase the pulses of reverberations from his movements to become as stealthy as possible.

A day later, he found a pack of Miasma Beasts meandering about.

He took out a few Miasma cultivation beads and threw it near them. He then quickly erased his presence with a coating of Miasma all over his body.

Immediately, the Miasma Panthers perked up their snake-like heads and sniffed the Miasma for potential food.

When they found the Miasma beads scattered about, their black bodies immediately pounced.

They took it in their mouths, but they didn't consume it. They laid it right on their tongues. Once they achieved this, they turned back as if they had done their jobs.

Zoran smiled as his prediction was proven right. When he noticed that the frequency of Miasma Beasts increased as he went up, he immediately thought of one possibility;

There was a nest nearby.