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The place where I sat down was merely a few meters away from where I had just sat with Claire and drank their insanely tasty herbal tea… And yet, with about ten meters of space between me and that very chair, it was still the closest piece of furniture to me in the entirety of the room.

In essence, this whole place looked like a big but relatively ordinary mansion that was transformed into a cultivator\'s abode only after its construction was finished.

With the eye of my imagination, I could easily picture a dividing wall going across the massive room to separate the living area with the sofa, chairs, table, cabinets, and all the other pieces of furniture one could expect from the day room from the perfectly clean, open side of it with nothing but thick padding laid across the floor.

"Okay, let\'s start with the basics," Claire announced right as I was not only done with learning everything there was to learn about the room and readily approaching the point where, even while keeping my back straight, I was starting to succumb to my desire to take a nap.

She walked back into the room… in an outfit looking like something in between a proper nightgown and a sexy lingerie aimed to tease all that was underneath.

\'Is it her way of preparing for the reward I mentioned hoping for?\' I thought, sparing her but a single glance before closing my eyes shut and regulating my breathing to calm down the small spark of excitement invoked by her looks in the single instant before I shut my vision off.

"Mortal cultivation can be divided, in rough terms, into three stages," Claire started with the very basics… that already went beyond what I knew beforehand.

"The first phase of cultivation is all about manipulation of the spiritual force. During the first step, you learn how to properly gather it. Or, in more pragmatic terms, you learn how to absorb it from whatever medium you are using, be it the air around you, a medicinal bath, or even holy flames.

This step can be further divided into the ability to sense your inner Qi, the ability to sense the free Qi, the ability to infuse your body with the free Qi, and so on."

Judging by the direction of the sound of her steps, Claire walked all the way up to my side, only to stop right in front of me, close enough for the slight scent of her fresh skin to reach my nostrils.

"The second step is all about condensing the Qi you\'ve already absorbed. You can imagine it like collapsing the fumes from the air into a proper liquid… Just don\'t get too stuck on this picture, because spiritual energy has nothing to do with the states of matter you learned back in physics class. It merely copies them in certain ways, but…"

Claire sighed.

"But that\'s a whole other can of worms that we don\'t really have the time to unpack now. So, if the first step is all about gathering the spiritual energy, then the second one is all about condensing it into a practically-viable form."

With that said, Claire picked up her pace as she first distanced herself for at least a few meters before starting to circle all around me at a steady, controlled pace.

"The third and practically last step of the first phase is all about refining your condensed spiritual power, or as some say, enriching it."

Claire stopped her walk once again, this time positioning herself behind my back.

"Now then, care to guess what\'s the difference between the two?" she asked, making sure this wasn\'t just a monotone lecture but a more interactive, engaging lesson than just her speaking.

"The first one\'s like turning sparse vapor into much thicker liquid while the other is like… distilling strong alcohol out of a weak moonshine?" I attempted to answer while using the first set of comparisons that came to my mind.

The second part in particular was rooted pretty deep in my mind, forced into my psyche by the slipper of my mother. It was merely an unpredictable end result of my attempt at following the ancient one-four-ten brewing technique as a merely fourteen-year-old kid.

Back then, however, I didn\'t have a banking account or enough drive to get myself a fermenting valve, which I tried to replace with a simple, plastic straw.

The whole event came to its climax when I accidentally ended up pushing the five-litter water bottle filled with the mash over, causing all the gases settled within to release, turning my would-be moonshine into a fountain of sticky, stinky paint that I ended up covering half of my basement walls with.

It was but a single episode of my childhood… yet one that, through the slipper of my mother, ended up deeply ingrained into my mentality, now appearing as an indeliberate choice of words and comparisons during a cultivation lesson.

\'In a sense, one could turn it into a joke. What does a moonshine have to do with cultivation?\' I thought, trying not to smirk at the silliness of this thought.

"That\'s… pretty interesting way to put it," Claire\'s voice grew slightly warmer for reasons I could likely guess… if I had the balls to open my eyes and take a look at her face.

Yet, given her choice of clothing for the lesson, by opening my eyes, I risked putting my concentration on an axe!

After all, how could I focus on the details of Claire\'s lesson when all I could think about were her curves joyfully bouncing up and down with every step she took?

"You can remember the second step as turning the spiritual energy denser while the third step as making it more… pure? Or just remember it as the step of cleaning your own Qi. While the theory behind those two steps can seem hard to distinguish, it\'s really easier to feel the difference on a practical level," Claire explained before clearing her thoughts.

"Now then, moving on to the fourth stage…" she hesitated for a second, "there are two schools of thought. Some believe it to be the last step of the spiritual cultivation of the mortal phase, while others argue it\'s a transitional stage with all the rights for a separate categorization."

"And that fourth stage is…?" I asked as soon as I sensed Claire close her sentence.

"Flesh-Qi balance, otherwise called bodily purification," Claire answered as swiftly as I did ask the question, hinting if not outright proving that she somewhat expected me to ask about it.

"Even though it\'s the fourth stage already, you should know it from all the media renditions of it, especially popular in cultivation dramas," Claire explained only to then stop her pace, once again standing still right in front of me.

"This is the stage where cultivators use their condensed and purified Qi to cleanse their flesh from all the physical imperfections, turning their bodies into vessels capable of the second phase of cultivation, the four core-based stages."