As Huang Long Dan entered his belly one by one, Luo Hong's cultivation improved at a steady speed, and the silver runes in the basic skills and meridians were also steadily comprehended.
But the good times did not last long. Less than a month had passed when Luo Hong had an accident while refining the power of the Huanglong Pill. The new mana that was supposed to enter the Dantian was squeezed out and then overflowed.
Luo Hong looked at his current mana limit, which was 500. His cultivation level was only 11 mana limits away from the peak of the eighth level of Qi Refining.
“It turns out we have encountered a bottleneck, great!”
During the Qi refining period, immortal cultivators generally advance from the fourth level to the fifth level, from the eighth level to the ninth level, and from the twelfth level to the thirteenth level. They encounter bottlenecks at these three levels.
If you can't break through, you can't go any further. Throughout the ages, there are countless cultivators whose path to foundation building has been cut off before these three levels. Although it's not a bottleneck yet, you will definitely not be happy if you encounter it.
However, Luo Hong regarded the bottleneck as a rare research opportunity. He did not feel any hindrance when he upgraded from the fourth floor to the fifth floor. He felt quite disappointed at the time, but now he was finally caught.
"Let me tell you, with my fourth-grade spiritual root qualifications, how could I not encounter bottlenecks? I was just worrying blindly before."
In fact, just by looking at the data, we can know that the so-called bottleneck is the phenomenon where immortal cultivators cannot reach the upper limit of mana required to break through to the next level by practicing in a normal way.
When Luo Hong happened to attend a lecture at Chuan Gong Hall before, he heard some commonly used methods to break through bottlenecks. These previous experiences all verified his conclusion.
First of all, the best way is to take drugs, take a powerful elixir, and use the increased mana limit in a short period of time to forcefully break through the bottleneck.
The second step is to refine your own mana and spend a lot of time polishing and refining it over and over again. Then you will be able to break through the bottleneck naturally.
All cultivators in the Qi refining period who encounter bottlenecks will choose to take drugs, but reality will force most of them to embark on the path of pure mana. This is why there are so many refiners with pure mana in Yellow Maple Valley.
Old man in Qi period
After figuring out what the bottleneck is, the next question is:
Why is the upper limit of mana for cultivators restricted?
Why do immortal cultivators with good spiritual roots and qualifications not encounter bottlenecks?
These two questions are not difficult to answer. As we all know, the Qi refining period is actually the period when cultivators polish and strengthen their Dantian.
Then the upper limit of mana cannot be increased, naturally because the cultivator's Dantian can no longer hold more mana.
The spiritual root qualification determines the purity of the cultivator's initial mana. Taking Luo Hong's fourth-grade spiritual root as an example, he will absorb four of the five elements of spiritual energy during cultivation. Compared with a second-grade spiritual root that only absorbs two kinds of spiritual energy,
Root, if you also run a skill, the magic power produced by Luo Hong will have more impurities.
In other words, the higher the spiritual root qualification, the higher the purity of the mana essence cultivated by the immortal cultivator.
The higher the purity of mana essence, the greater the actual amount of mana in a Dantian of the same size. In this way, highly qualified immortal cultivators will naturally not encounter bottlenecks.
So should I start to consciously refine pure mana for future cultivation?
Luo Hong couldn't help but fall into such thinking.
This is something that other cultivators do not need to consider at all. There are too few elixirs that can help break through the bottleneck. Failure to refine mana is equivalent to giving up on the path to cultivating immortals.
The reason why Luo Hong hesitated was because he thought of those seniors in Yellow Maple Valley who had reached the foundation building stage but were trapped by the bottleneck of foundation building.
They are basically second-grade spiritual cultivators. With their qualifications and long-term polishing of their magic power, their magic power should be quite pure, but they still cannot be broken through. Why?
Obviously, in addition to the purity of mana essence, there must be other restrictions!
If you think about it carefully, the problem most likely lies in the size of your pubic area.
Because when the purity of mana essence is difficult to change, the only thing that can significantly increase the upper limit of mana power is the size of the Dantian.
The size of the Dantian is only related to a person's physique. Except for the few types of Dharma bodies, there should be only slight differences between each immortal cultivator.
Immortal cultivators with second-level spiritual roots have encountered very few bottlenecks throughout their cultivation, but they may have expanded their Dantian when building the foundation, because it is not necessary at other times, which ultimately makes it difficult for their upper limit of mana to reach the needs of the next realm. .
Of course, at this stage, there will always be immortal cultivators who are aware of this problem, and they will also try to expand their Dantian, but why are so few successful?
Could it be said that the expansion of Dantian is not that easy?
Luo Hong felt that it was necessary to conduct an experiment, so he took another Huanglong Pill.
This time, he no longer stored every bit of mana he refined into his dantian, but let them continue to circulate with the spiritual energy in his meridians, and finally stuffed the 6 extracted mana into his dantian.
Luo Hong was 11 mana short of breaking through. Although these 6 mana could not allow him to break through, it also caused his Dantian to exceed the current load-bearing limit, so the Dantian was slightly stretched.
However, the next moment, the Dantian began to shrink, and the 6 mana that Luo Hong had forced in was quickly forced out.
"It turns out that there will be this reaction. In this case, if you want to expand the Dantian, you must continue to input mana into the Dantian, so that the Dantian can remain in an expanded state for a long time and eventually enter a stable state.
The amount of mana input cannot be less than what is expelled from the Dantian, otherwise it will be useless. How to do this?"
Luo Hong quickly thought of the simplest way, taking a very powerful elixir, refining part of the medicine and inserting it into the Dantian, and the remaining medicine was continuously refined into mana to replenish it like normal practice.
"If I want to maintain a balance and gain maximum benefits, I need to collect more data."
After that, Luo Hong took another Huanglong Pill. This time he forced 2 mana into it first, and after all was squeezed out, he forced 4 mana into it.
The result is obvious, the more mana is forced in, the faster the mana is squeezed out of the Dantian.
"Fortunately, I practice the spiritual pressure method. The spiritual pressure in the meridians is stable, and the mana produced per unit time is fixed. Otherwise, it would be really difficult to control."
After some calculations, the results are shocking.
Luo Hong accelerated his cultivation speed by more than 20 times under the spiritual pressure method, but he could only barely maintain 10 mana in his Dantian!
This does not mean that you can break through twice in a row. The first time you can exceed the limit of 10 mana, but after the Dantian expands, the next time you may not be able to maintain even 1 mana over the limit.
According to this calculation, it is impossible for a cultivator to break through the bottleneck by swallowing pills, but facts tell Luo Hong that taking drugs is the easiest way to break through the bottleneck.
Practice is the only criterion for testing truth, and data cannot lie. It is only possible that Luo Hong has missed a crucial factor!
This unknown factor can provide the missing part of the cultivation speed when the cultivator breaks through the bottleneck.