Because of the rhythm of flow around him, Ma Yuan's body was being transformed to adapt to his state while still maintaining its strength. The changes in his body were adapting to his lack of a core and dantian, while still maintaining its strength and essence as the body of a core formation expert. With the changes happening to his body, soon enough he may not need to eat food that contained dense volumes of spiritual qi and essence capable of sustaining a core formation expert. His body would be able to function normally just doing what he was doing, surrounded by life.

Yang Qing could feel his thoughts flowing into a high state. Ideas that he had thought of being aligned together to form a pathway of enlightenment.

He absentmindedly started walking forward with countless ideas being formed with the essence being extracted for the insights it contained which were then solidified into a pathway. With every step he took the wonderous his state became as he could feel the profundities of the world whisper to him, showing him a world he could not see before, holding his hand and guiding him forward, resolving the doubts he had, consolidating what he thought he knew while adding new ideas that he had not yet thought.

His body, essence, and spirit were being transformed by the step as resplendent lights that contained the charm of the natural dao surrounded him. The dao markings of the yin-yang jade bones lit up releasing an ancient almost primordial aura filled with the balance of life, complemented by radiant all-encompassing transcendent light of the universal light of the myriad worlds cultivation art.

Yang Qing at this moment looked like a banished immortal, free and unfettered, surrounded by ethereal colorful lights that carried the profundity of something that was formed at the dawn of the world, accompanied by the balance of the yin and yang that shaped the functioning of the world.

Looking at him made one feel like they were staring at a world, a world with the laws of life and accommodation. The elements around him seemed to be leaping with excitement as they surrounded him. The pupils in his eyes rotated mirroring the colors of those elements, swirling and mixing them, releasing a colorful radiant glow as they did so."What is vitality?"

Yang Qing could hardly sense what was happening around him from the state he was. Everything had blanked out, except for the path beneath his feet. Everything else had been drowned out. The state he was in, he could sense excitement and tranquility, vibrancy and stillness at the same time.

It was after he took the fourth step, that he heard a voice, a familiar voice that was gentle, ethereal, childlike but at the same time carried the weight of the boundless age within it. A voice that was simple yet complex.

Yang Qing looked up and saw a green cocoon the size of his thumb but surrounded by a profound aura of green and blue that was the size of several oceans piled together.

"What is vitality?"

He absentmindedly muttered as he gazed at the sky of green and blue above him before he lowered his gaze leveling it with what was ahead of him. His compound appeared before his eyes. The birds, the trees, the flowers, the insects, the plants, the pond, the earth, the rocks, the air around it, his courtyard, the arrays, Ma Yuan, Ma Ling, and the threads of colored aurora lights that connected them.

And when he looked down, he could see all the threads converging to him.

"The flow of life.." said Yang Qing.

His words, like a trigger, caused the light curtain waves, and the light threads around him to explode with radiant lights as they released a grand, profound, and primordial aura. The threads and curtain wave still maintained form but other lines formed within them. These lines were the sources of the profound and primordial aura. Those threads would switch colors every second and with every change, there was a switch in quality about them. More colors that were not there before seemed to have appeared.

Yang Qing tried to focus on one of the new ones. He extended his senses to one that was grey-silver, however, he quickly pulled back his senses when the harmless-looking silver thread released a terrifying destructive power the moment Yang Qing tried to make contact with it.

Adopting a cautious approach, Yang Qing decided to just soak in the changes around him and flow with it like a leaf that glides along the stream of a river, rather than force it. When he surrendered himself to the flow and freed his mind, he could hear indistinct voices coming from those threads. They seemed muffled. Yang Qing tried to focus more on the voices but nothing came of it. He still couldn't hear them, however, he could feel his body, essence, and spirit being transformed and elevated by the voices.

The state didn't seem to last long with those threads disappearing not long after with the scene back to how it was. Although his cultivation base had not improved and was still at the peak of the second stage, he could feel he had made considerable improvements in his cultivation. His understanding of the vitality dao had improved immensely along with the understanding he had with his purple grade art, the universal light of the myriad worlds.

The proof of it was the internal manifestation of his palace realm. The green flame tree now had a fruit, a crystal fruit that swirled with colorful lights. The lights were weak, but even in that frailty, they contained profound power. He could see the same curtain of light from before being produced from the fruit as it spread to the grass and shrubs below, to the ocean ahead, and to the sun and moon above it, creating a linked connection with the components of his palace realm.

From the change, he could feel his overall strength had improved by at least 5% from the strength of his body to the power of his soul, to the manipulation and execution of his cultivation arts, and even his absurdly huge qi capacity had increased. He was closely approaching the capacity of those who had reached the seventh stage of the palace realm.

That didn't mean that he could fight a seventh-stage palace realm. His qi reserves, though high, still lacked the refined quality of someone in the seventh stage which was a factor of one's understanding of their dao. The deeper their understanding, the more their qi will be filled with it, and the more powerful their abilities are.

His understanding of the dao wasn't at that level yet, thus he would lose out in a frontal confrontation, but when it came to triggering talismans and other treasures that required high reserves of qi, that he could definitely do without regard. With every improvement he made, his abilities to guarantee his life were growing with it. He may not be able to defeat his opponents in frontal confrontation, but he could outlast them in endurance and vitality and scam a victory through it. In the end, for life and death, it doesn't matter how you survive, as long as you do.

At the Institute the instructors always told them, that a shameless scam bag victory had one of the best flavors to it. Frustrating your opponent to the very end and slapping them with a loss they can't swallow. Even in death, they will be riled up and indignant. There was nothing more satisfying, and Yang Qing, being the diligent student he was, kept those words in his heart to faithfully abide by.

He had a heroic spirit in him and as such, he would love to defeat his opponents flawlessly, in one move, giving them a peaceful ending with the knowledge that they were not defeated unjustly, he was just that powerful. But the world was what it was, and sometimes, quick victories were not possible, and in those cases, as much as it pained his true heroic self, he had to don the robes of the shameless.

Victory was victory in the end, the process mattered too little as long as you acquired it.