Murim's Weakest Princess-Chapter 78: Initial Core Cultivator

Anji felt feverish. One moment, she felt hot. The next, she was shivering. It was only late summer with the early signs of autumn. She did not understand why she had suddenly fallen sick. However, staying indoors did not help. Her shifu had taken her outside and started a cold bath for her while tossing sticks into a campfire nearby. Anji was sitting in the wooden tub with her clothes on and told to meditate while her teacher occasionally tossed in the sticks to keep the fire going.

"Don’t stop," Yan Ping warned, tossing another stick into the fire and adding more ice to the tub. "Keep circulating your energy through all your meridians and open that last seal to your cultivation core. I sent your bodyguard to inform your father. He should be here soon."

As soon as she said that, Zhao Mingfeng materialised at the main gate using a teleportation scroll. One scroll was easily worth a large gold ingot. However, the man ripped it without hesitation to save time.

"You’re here," Yan Ping acknowledged as he entered her barrier, not moving from her spot. "Help me out."

Without hesitation, Mingfeng sat down behind his shivering daughter, who had flushed cheeks. The situation was worse than Gu Ying described. Although she unlocked all her meridians, the foundation stage was still highly unstable, causing her energy to run rampant. Yan Ping’s vital energy signals were also severely weakened. No wonder she sent Gu Ying over as fast as possible.

"What should I do?" he asked, preparing to channel his qi into his daughter.

Under Yan Ping’s guidance to navigate past her modified seal, Mingfeng coordinated carefully and allowed Anji to draw on his strength to open the last few valves connecting all twenty meridian channels to her golden core.

Watching his daughter weave her own meridians together using the seven-star formation first-hand, Mingfeng had to admit that his daughter was a true prodigy. He never knew there was such an effective method to tie different paths together. It was a complicated balance that took immense concentration, unbefitting of a four-year-old child. Yan Ping continued to monitor the father and daughter even as the sun had set.

At some point, Lizi snuck in to deliver food and extra clothing when she learned that the sect master had left to assist Anji with her training. However, nobody seemed to realise her presence when she arrived. The maid did the chores she needed to and left, praying for the success of her young mistress’ cultivation establishment.

Anji had no idea how to describe what she felt. Instead of alternating between heating up and shivering, her body had now adapted fully to accepting both sides of the energy, standing on the border of freezing and boiling. She was starting to get accustomed to the strange feeling with the help of her father, who stabilised her energy flow. However, the biggest challenge remained unfazed.

"Don’t rush," her teacher’s voice rang out clearly. "Carefully analyse the parts that are still weak and bring them into your formation carefully. Unlike other people, you must find a way to balance all twenty meridian channels simultaneously. It’s the same method you found before displacing part of your energy and consciousness when establishing your Governor Vessel."

Returning to the path she was about to deviate from, Anji trusted her teacher’s guidance and forged on the never-ending journey. She had already assimilated the main meridians with the two most important extraordinary meridians. Everything should be merged with the Governor and Conception Vessels because they represented the core yin and yang energies in her body that were directly connected to her core. Even the miscellaneous smaller branches of energy routes were woven to go straight to them. What else did she overlook?

It was close to midnight now. Yan Ping was exhausted but continued observing her student like a hawk even as she ate. Anji was getting closer to opening the gates she placed in the modified seal. However, something was preventing the gates from opening on the other side. It was strange.

At this point, even Mingfeng noticed something unusual in his daughter. The twenty meridians were already working together seamlessly in harmony. He had circulated pure energy in Anji’s body over twenty times. It usually only took a regular person to circulate one breath of pure qi in the meridian path once to stabilise the Initial Core. What were they missing?

The heat and cold had melted together in one pot as Anji regulated them. The two clashing energies were finally becoming one, but something else made her uncomfortable. She knew her father’s and teacher’s energy that was mixed in her body. They did not obstruct her cultivation practice. However, another strange energy trace prevented Anji from getting close to her sealed golden core, no matter how hard she tried. Each time she tried to push at the gate, she would be rejected and re-routed to go in a different direction.

Twenty times she knocked at those doors, twenty times she was rejected. It was as if a magnet was repelling her visit to her own golden core. What was happening?

Unwilling to give up now that she had come so far, Anji tried it again, circulating it for the twenty-first time. However, the same thing happened at the most critical part. She was rejected once more.

Frustrated, Anji inhaled deeply and increased her output. The meridian pathways in her body were more robust now than when they were first established. Anji did not believe she could not open these last gates. If only she had a little more power...

Mingfeng’s eyes shot open when Anji steadily accumulated qi inside her body in various acupoints. He quickly glanced at Yan Ping and reported the situation using his inner voice.

Smiling, Yan Ping shook her head and replied to him using her inner voice so she would not break Anji’s focus. There were over three hundred acupoints in the human body, and Anji knew the names of every spot. The cores were constantly circulating smoothly after Anji had established her pathways. Apart from the first few lessons, Anji had never used them to store energy in place of her golden core. It was also Mingfeng’s first time seeing how this worked. However, it was safe. Anji is an expert in multitasking now. Her ability to compartmentalise different tasks was incredible. In fact, this skill was something only Anji could do, even if Yan Ping were the creator.

In two hours, Anji created a large reservoir of energy in her body as she filled every pathway with energy while circulating it constantly with her father’s help. She noticed the resistance becoming stronger each time she pushed at the gates. However, she found the distance between her energy circulation and the gate seal becoming shorter. It was working. She needed a little more force.

Eventually, Mingfeng found himself turning into an energy storage bank as Anji started subconsciously extending her circulation into his body, the same way her teacher would do it with her. He did not resist the foreign energy and allowed Anji to do as she pleased, taking and replenishing the energy she needed for the fortieth circulation. His daughter was skilful in energy control, which must have resulted from Yan Ping’s guidance.

Visible steam was appearing from Anji’s body as she increased the amount of energy required to blast open those damned gates. Her father was a strong cultivator, so she placed her faith in him, believing he could help her hold onto the excess energy her body could not handle.

At the forty-ninth circulation, Anji finally felt it.

Creak!

The seal of the first gate to her golden core budged a little as she brushed past it. From that little gap, a little energy from her golden core escaped and mixed into her circulation path, mingling with the other energy forms.

Yan Ping was instantly on high alert when she sensed a different energy being emitted by her student. Mingfeng was sweating profusely while trying to contain the overflowing demand for intense, constant circulation.

Jumping into the fray, Yan Ping held Anji’s palms from the front of the dry washtub. The campfire had died out a few hours ago, and all the water had evaporated from the intensity of Anji’s energy.

With an additional person to help anchor Anji’s demanding celestial root cultivation method, the girl visibly relaxed a little when her teacher came to assist her with guiding the energy circulation. With one less thing to concentrate on, Anji cranked up her energy accumulation and extended the circulation flow from her father to her teacher. As energy filled the three of them, Anji finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

After circulating the energy for the hundredth time, Anji found that she could now touch the gate seal briefly. There were three seals over her core, but the most difficult seal to get to was the containment seal that her father created when she was a baby. Yan Ping could not rewrite that but added two additional gates to contain the damage that would come after the containment seal was broken.

By now, even Yan Ping was trembling. However, nobody intended to give up, even as the heat within the isolated barrier was enough to fry an egg. She could sense that strange foreign energy was coming from within Anji. Although she could not be sure of the source, Yan Ping could guess what that was. However, she refrained from commenting on it. It was better to focus on the crisis first and avert it.

One hundred and seven circulations later, Anji felt part of her gate seal loosen permanently. She clung onto the gap desperately as more internal qi from her original golden core leaked out, drastically increasing the danger.

Mingfeng reacted quickly and lured the foreign energy into his body to circulate internally while Anji tried to pry her seals open. Unable to win the overwhelming repulsion force of the seal, Anji had to let go and try again, this time with the new reinforcements from the foreign energy.

The seal that Mingfeng used all his might to create broke on the hundred-and-eighth attempt.

Ka-chang!

A surge of golden qi ran rampant in Anji’s body after the gate was broken. Thankfully, Yan Ping’s two other adjustment seals were activated to block off certain Merdian pathways. The valves and cores in Anji’s meridian went into a total shutout formation, squeezing out every last bit of energy to fuel the imprisonment spell, sparing Anji from a path of qi deviation and pathway destruction.

"Disperse all the energy now!" Yan Ping shouted when the spells trembled.

Without hesitation, Mingfeng, who stored the bulk of Anji’s needed energy, cast it out into the environment, blowing the hut away with an absurd gust of wind and destroying everything within the isolation barrier. Yan Ping did the same and extracted the excess energy from within Anji to assist her clueless student.

Just in time, the golden qi broke free from the spells and ran rampant in Anji’s body, charging through all her meridian pathways, igniting every single core and valve available. With the hollowed shell of a circuit, the thirsty cores and valves slowly siphoned away at the excess foreign energy, taming and turning it into Anji’s energy source.

After a few more hours of meditation, Yan Ping finally excused herself and left the rest of the stabilisation to Mingfeng while Anji became acquainted with her golden core for the first time.

The sun started rising again by the time they were done, and Yan Ping quickly realised that she would have to sleep in the open air. The hut that used to be there was now reduced to rubble, along with all the learning charts and books she made for Anji. On the bright side, her disciple was finally an Initial Core cultivator. It took a while and a lot of gamble, but it was worth it.