After a long and mentally exhausting climb, I was resting in an eagle-shaped position on top of the mountain. I decided that I needed a much-welcomed rest before I attempted to break through to the foundation establishment realm.

  ‘Now that I think about it, I haven't rested since the opening of the secret realm two days ago.’

  A few hours later I felt ready: I picked out the yin tulips and the body of the monkey boss and adjusted my state of mind to one of pure focus.

  I ate the monkey boss first and used my qi to quickly digest it. Immediately a surge of yang qi started traveling along my body, and I directed it through my meridians. The qi I had was enough for my breakthrough but I felt that for the formation of the foundation I wanted, I needed more.

  So I ate the yin tulips and immediately had to use my entire concentration to avoid the collision of the two opposing energies obliterating me. I had to balance them but not merge them, as I already knew how dangerous that would have been.

  After a while traveling my meridians the two qis had become more tame and resembled two snakes intertwining each other. At this point, I directed the flow to my dantian where they joined my existing qi creating a maelstrom.

  Despite my preparations, I coughed some blood at this point. Nonetheless, I continued as this was the critical juncture.

  After the maelstrom in my dantian subsided I finally had a view of the situation.

  My dantian had been separated into two parts. The lower part took three-quarters of my dantian and was filled with dense gaslike neutral qi. On top of that slowly rotated the tai chi’s symbol of yin and yang, but without the dots.

  Matching the rhythm of the symbol rotated two balls of qi, one of yin and one of yang.

  It meant that now I didn’t need to convert the qi into yin or yang qi because they were already directly stored in my dantian.

  As I was going to look at the tai chi symbol a surge of mental energy was suddenly liberated inside my mind. Realizing promptly what it was I started using it to condense a pillar inside my crystal mind lake.

  It was like molding clay with your hands trying to create a tower no matter how you try it always seems uneven or tilted on one side.

  ‘Yes, clay!’

  Following the comparison I started rotating the base of the tower at high speed and the molding became much more simple. I finished just as the surge of mental energy started to wane and used the leftovers to solidify the foundation of the tower. When it was finished the lake started glowing softly and a myriad of little sparks started appearing inside the lake.

  I had broken through.

  At this point, two pieces of information were unlocked in my mind.

  Each came from respectively the qi and mental cultivation manuals that started showing the path to take to achieve the next realm.

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  In the Bear Sutra manual, I have to create nine pillars below the tai chi symbol to form the foundation of my future cultivation.

  In the Crystal Mind Palace manual, I can choose and build a foundation on which I will construct my palace.

  Before doing that I decided to check my status.

  ‘Hmm, let's see this YinYang tai chi symbol.’

  As I concentrated on it, it disappeared from the screen and a stream of information entered my head. This symbol has three functions. The first is to convert my neutral qi into yin and yang qi, constantly replenishing the two qi balls. The second is to maintain the balance of the two elements at least internally. So I don’t need to manually keep the balance between the two qis, because the symbol will do it. Lastly, the symbol will be a fundamental piece in the creation of my golden core.

  Now let’s look at foundation options:

  I considered my options: the first two were out since their benefits were subpar compared to the latter two.

  ‘So the decision is between more facilities and better defense. Hmm, a good-defended mind sounds useful..’

  I picked the Cloud Foundation.

  From the progress between the first and the third option, the defense started decreasing in favor of more facilities. From that, I can deduce that the facilities are more important than defense.

  “I hope I am not making a mistake.”