53: Glory

Just as dawn broke, Ning opened his eyes. It felt like the first time in a long while that he had woken up on his own. Hearing no system sounds, he was momentarily puzzled, but then realized he had actually been asleep, not unconscious.

"Wow. Did I fall asleep? That's great," he thought. Only then did he bother to look around and saw a sliver of light peeking through the door crack. He was afraid.

"Am I late?" he wondered. He immediately ran out, only to find that the sun hadn't risen yet; he was just looking at the bright sky. "Oh, thank goodness," he thought.

He checked the sky; the sun was about to rise. There was no time to train in the village center, so he decided to train right there.

"Damn it. I haven't even figured out if I'm Yin or Yang, or neither. I hope it's the latter," he thought. He had woken up in the mornings and waited for the sun to rise enough times now that he knew when was the best time to start his routine.

Following the Sun God's Morning Cleansing routine, he began to move his limbs, twist his torso and neck, forming shapes he imagined in his mind. Slowly, specks of light appeared around him, gradually gathering towards him, as if...

"Am I cultivating?" he was somewhat surprised. But that wasn't the case. The Sun God's Morning Cleansing technique was a body technique, not a Qi technique, so there shouldn't be any Qi involved.

"But why is Qi gathering towards me?" he was puzzled.

After a few more seconds, the Qi that appeared around him attached itself to his body, emitting a glow from within that could only be seen in the dark.

"Oh, so that's why they glow in the morning. They have Qi attached to them," Ning thought. He fully expected that as time passed, more Qi would attach to him, and his body would glow brighter. However, none of that happened.

Instead of becoming brighter, his body began to stop glowing even before the sun fully rose.

"What's happening?" he wondered. Just then, he felt it. Like drinking a cold glass of water on a hot summer day, he felt the disappearing Qi begin to flush through his body's interior, slowly clearing something out of him.

After the Qi finished flushing through his body, he felt a little colder. "Was that... Yang?" he thought. If what he thought was true, then the Sun God's Morning Cleansing technique that the Krave people were currently learning was indeed just a mediocre version of the original.

After his body was flushed with Qi, the sun rose above the horizon. Intense Yang immediately entered his body, starting to burn everything. However, for Ning, this was at most only slightly uncomfortable. He didn't stop performing different movements until the sun had fully risen.

When it was time to stop, he completed his movements, touched his body, looked around for trees, and finding a palm tree nearby, he didn't hesitate for a moment and suddenly punched it.

BAM

His strike echoed across the entire island. "Ow," he winced, shaking his hands in pain after the loud sound. "Idiot. You've only been cultivating for a day; why would you suddenly hit a tree for no reason?" he scolded himself.

He did notice a small dent on the surface of the tree he had just hit, but he didn't know if this was due to Qi cultivation or what had just happened, so he ignored it and walked directly back to the village.

"Ah, I forgot to accumulate energy today," he thought. "Never mind, I'll do it later."

He arrived in the village and saw the Villagers back to doing nothing.

Hyesi saw him coming and immediately ran up to ask him, "Where were you, Inikaka?"

"Oh, I was cultivating this human body to temporarily grow stronger," Ning said truthfully, looking around the entire village, wondering if his imagination about the original technique was true.

"System, please grant me the knowledge of the Sun God's Morning Cleansing technique," he asked.

The system displayed knowledge levels divided into five tiers, ranging from 50,000 energy to 500 million energy. He spent 5 million energy to buy the intermediate version.

Suddenly, information flooded into his mind. He scanned the new knowledge in his head, thinking, "So I was right, but also wrong." If he were to impart this new, or rather, old, Sun God's Morning Cleansing technique to the Villagers, their cultivation would immediately triple.

That was good, but it couldn't compare to what he did earlier for Hyesi, whose body cultivation he had increased by over fifty times, and that was because he successfully expelled the Yin from his body.

"However, if he had the original cultivation method, he shouldn't have asked me to do this," he thought. The original cultivation method could gather surrounding Qi to the cultivator's body and enter it, temporarily removing both Yang and Yin, after which the pure Yang from the sun would enter the cultivator's body.

But the true Qi on the Villagers' bodies never entered them; instead, it attached to the outside, making their bodies glow. The only reason they couldn't let the true Qi enter their bodies was... "They haven't cultivated Qi yet," Ning thought. "I see. Now it's time for the Villagers to start cultivating Qi."