Along the trail I rest in my tent, a few rice cakes for calories and some beans for protein. A tea brewed from river water to eliminate contaminants so I remain hydrated and to still my mind before I begin cultivating. I am beginning to enjoy the sensation, at first it felt like a cold void, but now it feels like the blackness from my dantian IS something. Thick and powerful, whatever this power is it brings warmth or cold if used correctly. It is heavy or weightless. I am approaching marrow cleansing completion, in fact based on the sensations roughly 75% of my marrow has been replace by my primal chaos core. The reason I can tell is because of how enormously painful it is. I can’t wear shoes and my feet are bleeding constantly, the growing immense weight of my bones is far beyond what my flesh body can bear. My bones have long since become visible through the soles of my feet. I earlier intended to test the body with qi powered punch. It was in error on my part to say the least. I never even got a chance to try it with qi power.

I struck a tree unaided by my distorting qi, the tree burst into pieces smaller than toothpicks and blood sprayed everywhere. My bones chipped and all of my flesh tore off my near indestructible marrow. My bones themselves are now filled with this indestructible marrow and it is causing me immense anguish. After cleaning my wound I noticed that the areas where the bones had chipped on my now skeletal hand had healed to be dark, so dark that not even pitch black could describe it. No light even escaped their surface. After cleaning and pulling out the pieces of wood I stretched the flesh back over my pink bones, which hid a dark material under them that was just barely becoming visible. 

I was relieved that my flesh seemed to almost immediately adhere to my bones and that soon after being bandaged mobility seemed to return to my hand. Still the problem of what to do with my mangled feet remained. I arrived on simple tree bark sandal that I stuffed with leaves and had to replace every few kilometers as my weight wore through them. I had to clean a lot of debris out of my wounds constantly, but I was happy to see my wounds were not becoming infected and closing. I had to assume I was at least immune to mortal infections now. Thank god or I’d have died in the first few days.

During my cultivation I had an epiphany. I could use the distortions on my feet. After a few steps, cores of earth had formed a type of floating rock shoe under my foot made of small rock spheres, it was very draining, but struck me as a good way to train and reduce my need to waste time crafting my primitive bark sandals. After a night of walking I discovered that when I released the cores they had formed gems of mixed color and type based on when materials I had stepped on. I had known I could produce pressure using these distortions, but I never suspected how much until now. It must be because of my progress in cultivation that the strength of them was increasing.

I was crafting an idea of a technique I could use to hide my true power when I noticed an imminent disaster, the sap and blood mixture I’d used to form a seal to create my dantian was rapidly dissolving. I began a mad, desperate dash for some kind of soil, plant or pigment I could use to strengthen the seals. leaves, trees, anything. Nothing worked, they all just slightly preserved the seal for a few minutes longer. Then I saw a light green glow in the distant night I mistook for foxglove. It was in fact a light glowing stone, the dirt of the area radiated the same glow so I scooped it all into a single distortion and mixed it with sap to make it sticky enough to adhere and used some hair for a brush again, it worked spectacularly, too well even. My dantian rapidly expanded becoming near watermelon sized as I desperately plied more and more seals to it. I was going to explode.