Chapter 72: Cultivating through Seven Cycles

Chapter 72: Chapter 72: Cultivating through Seven Cycles

Sliding into Room 401, Eric deadbolted the heavy oak door and engaged the room’s brass privacy array with a twist of the rune dial.

He moved directly to the woven rug beside the window, kicking off his boots and dropping into a grounded lotus posture. With a soft pulse across his spiritual sea, he summoned Coal from the beast space.

*FLASH.*

*Caw?* Coal tilted his sleek head, shaking out his obsidian flight feathers with a crisp rustle.

Eric retrieved a dense cluster of Soldier-rank mana stones from his spatial inventory, setting them onto the low wooden stool beside the coat rack.

"Here, buddy. Feast on these while I tackle this monster of a text. Keep watch and don’t let any external noise break my focus."

Coal offered a low, resonant rumble of understanding, hopped onto the stool, and began quietly siphoning the elemental energy into his dark marrow through his talons.

Eric turned his undivided attention to the heavy, leather-bound tome resting across his knees: the *Seven Star Mana Circulation Manual*.

He cracked the glowing silver ward seal and turned the thick vellum pages. Instantly, an intricate web of luminous celestial diagrams and archaic meridian routes flared across his field of view, mapping out the seven astral nodes required to filter and compress raw environmental mana into stellar-grade liquid reserves. The sheer mathematical complexity made his temples throb with an intense, burning ache.

*Talent: Skill Comprehension, engage!*

A cool, lucid spark ignited in the center of his mind. The Rank-C talent immediately broke down the convoluted spatial diagrams into logical, bite-sized geometric conduits.

Yet even with this cognitive acceleration, the depth of a Low-Heaven Grade art was staggering. It wasn’t something a frontier commoner could master in a casual read; every rhythmic breath, every meridian gate, and every circulation loop had to be perfectly synchronized with the natural ebb and flow of the ambient elements.

Hour after hour slipped away in total, breathless silence.

It took ten unbroken hours of grueling cognitive mapping before Eric finally absorbed the final passage. He closed the heavy tome with a soft, decisive thud, every verse, meridian channel, and nodal transition burned indelibly into his memory.

Glancing at his silver smartband, he verified his schedule: no mandatory lectures were slated for the following day. His calendar was completely clear.

"Ten hours down, fourteen left on the rental clock," Eric murmured, his dark eyes blazing with anticipation. "Let’s put it to work."

Eric closed his eyes, emptied his consciousness of distractions, and initiated the *Seven Star Mana Circulation*.

*WHOOSH.*

The ambient energy trapped within Room 401 surged violently.

Assisted by the soothing, crystalline resonance radiating passively from the *Ring of Tranquility*, the thick, mana-saturated capital air was drawn through Eric’s pores like iron shavings to a lodestone.

Rather than funneling the incoming current straight into his Mana Heart as his crude mortal breathing technique had done, the Heaven-grade manual forced the raw flow through seven distinct starry nodes anchored along his spine, shoulders, and sternum.

First cycle... Second cycle... Third...

The mana was systematically scrubbed of atmospheric dross, compressed under internal pressure, and stripped of turbulent friction.

By the time the flow crossed the Seventh Cycle, the misty vapor had condensed into drops of incandescent, shimmering starlight-blue liquid. The refined nectar trickled down into his Mana Heart with devastating, heavyweight density.

Next arrived the most critical and painful phase: baseline conversion.

Eric systematically withdrew his previously accumulated Soldier Level 2 liquid mana and drove it backward through the seven-star purification matrix.

The qualitative contrast between his old frontier reserves and this sovereign technique was like comparing murky river water to liquid diamond. As the residual impurities were purged and expelled through his pores in faint wisps of gray vapor, his total mana volume visibly receded.

What had previously occupied a brimming one hundred percent capacity in his Mana Heart was condensed, compressed, and refined until it filled a mere twenty percent of his core reservoir.

Yet Eric did not feel weakened in the slightest, he felt terrifyingly stronger.

That twenty percent of starlight liquid humming within his core packed three times the explosive volatility of his old pool. Better still, his passive absorption speed had permanently doubled. What once demanded an entire exhausting afternoon of meditation to recover could now be gathered, refined, and stored in half the time.

For the next thirteen hours, Eric cultivated without pausing for breath, steadily replenishing his purified core until the starlight-blue nectar swelled to fifty percent capacity.

*DING.*

A twenty-three-hour warning chime from his smartband broke his trance.

Eric’s eyes snapped open. A faint, electric-blue luminescence flickered briefly in his dark pupils before dissolving back into deep obsidian.

"Incredible..." Eric breathed, holding up his hands as tiny arcs of condensed mana danced across his fingertips like blue static.

He wanted nothing more than to dive right back into the celestial circulation, but the old clerk’s warning echoed sharply in his memory: a single minute past the twenty-four-hour mark meant a fifty-merit penalty. And Eric currently possesses an account balance of absolute zero.

Scooping up the heavy tome, Eric donned his dark scholar coat and bolted down the stairwell.

Unlocking a scooter, he rode through the evening calm, reaching the Academy Treasure Pavilion with precisely twenty minutes to spare. The silver-haired elder was still sitting behind the counter, steadily whittling away at the same block of fragrant cedarwood.

"Returning the Seven Star Manual, Elder. Right on schedule." Eric placed the heavy codex squarely onto the counter.

The old man inspected the pristine silver wards, grunted with faint satisfaction, and dropped the manual into the subterranean vault hatch. "Right on time, kid. No penalties on file."

"Thank you, Elder."

Stepping out of the pavilion into the courtyard, Eric’s stomach let out a violent, echoing growl that caused an incoming first-year girl to stumble over her skirts.

"Ugh, I’m completely starving..." Eric groaned, pressing a hand against his concave abdomen.

Between ten hours of intense cognitive breakdown and thirteen hours of continuous internal conversion, he hadn’t touched a single morsel of food or a drop of water since the previous evening.

He rode straight to the central dining pavilion, marched up to the complimentary commons counter, and loaded a wide wooden tray with four heaping bowls of spiced grain porridge, a massive platter of smoked horned-ox ribs, and two carafes of chilled herbal brew.

Finding an empty booth beneath the stained-glass lancet windows, he dug in like a starving beast.

*Man, this feedback is unreal,* Eric thought between massive mouthfuls of tender ribs, flexing his fingers beneath the table.

*My foundation is completely renewed. With this refined seven-star liquid mana, my physical strikes and sword arts will hit with twice the explosive kinetic force. If Edward and I had another spar right now, I could dismantle his dagger guard in two exchanges flat. That thousand-merit investment was worth every single point.*

He washed down the meat with a long, satisfying draught of herbal tea, his dark eyes turning contemplative.

"The cultivation bottleneck is solved," Eric muttered under his breath, ticking off his mental checklist. "That leaves two massive hurdles: acquiring Coal’s primary evolution catalysts, and finding a second contracted beast to fill my empty soul slot."

He pulled up his student profile on his wristband, staring down at his balance:

[INSTITUTIONAL MERIT WALLET]

Current Balance: 0 Points

"Sigh... flat broke again," Eric rubbed his temples with a dry, self-deprecating smirk.

"Freshmen aren’t permitted to exit the campus perimeter without a certified permission from principal or an official field excursion pass, which means hunting in outside wilderness rifts for beast cores is completely off the table for now."

He tapped his chin, watching senior research fellows outside the lancet windows hauling wheeled carts loaded with sealed alchemical glass and pressurized specimen canisters.

"Which means my only path to resources is right here inside these walls. Research."

A bright, predatory grin spread across Eric’s face as he pushed his empty wooden tray aside.

"Right. Research was the primary reason I chose Central Research in the first place. With the Myriad Beast Encyclopedia in my head, it’s time to turn theoretical cheat codes into cold, hard merit points."