Immortal Ice Empress: Path to Vengeance

Mira walked towards a small cave in the mountain that currently housed Maria and Celaine. She found that both of them were currently healing from their injuries so she just disregarded them and walked towards a small corner of the cave to begin consolidating her foundation, fully integrating the blood-infused Qi she gathered after killing the tiger, seeing if she can find a way to control Yin Fire separately, and finally testing how useful absorbing Qi from a beast core will be.

The first thing she went into was integrating the Qi she absorbed from the tiger's blood. She first took a small drop of Qi and began just trying to forcefully shove it into the Qi she's already absorbed and integrated into her body.

As she assumed, the two were like water and oil; they just don't mix, at least not easily. She essentially has to try and convert oil into water which already sounds annoyingly tedious.

Of course, she could just not mess with this and it'd probably convert and integrate on its own, but Mira wanted to fully understand the limitations of her ability. By doing so, she'll find out whether or not it's even worth absorbing blood from others to boost her cultivation. And if it isn't, then maybe she can find or come up with a technique that can make up for this fault.

Seeing how just forcefully shoving this blood-infused Qi into her own didn't work, she began trying out other ideas. Doing the same thing, but with even smaller clumps of Qi, running it through her meridians in hopes of refining it, absorbing atmospheric Qi and using that to help refine it, and even doing full rotations of her cultivation technique.

She wanted to test out every way that is currently available to her, in order to gauge just how efficient each method would be.

After a while, Mira found that all of these methods worked, but the efficiency in which they worked differed greatly.

The least efficient by far is forcefully trying to integrate it no matter how big or small, not surprisingly. The next least efficient method she found was actually running it through her meridians in hopes of refining it. If Mira were to guess, she'd say that it's probably twice as effective as using force, but that's not really saying much.

Next up would be absorbing atmospheric Qi and using that to refine it. This one was actually very close to the most effective method, using her cultivation technique and using this Qi along with the ambient mana around her. This is similar to the previous method, but it just cuts out a step, making the process a bit faster.

Mira wasn't quite satisfied with the results because if she were to cultivate normally, she'd actually have progressed more than if she were to do this. Not to mention, she has to focus a lot more when doing this than she does when cultivating like normal.

Another downside is that the amount of Qi she actually received from the tiger's blood most likely wasn't even worth the effort. She might've been able to make more Spirit Stones from selling the blood of the beast than actually using it for cultivation.

Final conclusion, her Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence is quite good in terms of combat effectiveness, but its uses are limited in terms of cultivation.

She went ahead finished refining and integrating the rest of the blood-infused Qi then decided to move on to the next thing on her list.

Next up on the agenda was absorbing Qi from the beast core. She pulled out the thumb-sized golden core of the tiger beast.

She felt the chaotic Qi in the core and hoped that this wouldn't be another annoying process like her previous testings.

Without thinking any further, Mira started to draw the chaotic Qi out of the beast core and into her body. This chaotic Qi entered her body and started going crazy. It was thrashing around violently like a caged beast, but almost immediately after Mira's Physique lit up and seemed to be pressuring this unruly Qi for causing such a ruckus.

The chaotic Qi soon went from a violently raging beast to a domestic little puppy as soon as it felt Mira's physique pressuring it.

Mira was shocked at this outcome but soon came to a realization. This White-Ice Tiger naturally had an ice affinity which most likely affected its Qi to some degree as well. If this overpowered physique, which can seemingly absorb and fuse with anything, can't even subdue its own element, how sad would that be?

Mira felt bittersweet with this outcome as it's nice that she can easily absorb the Qi from this beast, but she isn't able to gauge just how difficult it would be to absorb Qi from a beast core of a different elemental affinity.

'Whatever. From what I felt before my Physique kicked in, absorbing Qi from a beast core would be a huge pain in the ass. I'll just use the Qi contained within this beast core to consolidate my foundation.' Mira thought to herself and was quite happy about killing two birds with one stone.

***

While Mira was consolidating her foundation, she felt the energy within the surrounding area being sucked away from her and towards something else.

She stopped cultivating and looked over to see who is causing all of this only to find a large vortex above Maria's head.

This didn't surprise Mira as the Qi here is incredibly dense. The density of Qi within this entire Secret Realm is already several times that of Western Continent she lived, but its density at the top of this mountain along with all of the herbs and treasures in the area made this something of a cultivation heaven.

Maria's foundation and body are already incredibly strong, much stronger than what is needed to break through so there is no need to worry about a shabby foundation.

Around a day later, this phenomenon finally calmed down.

"Success! Mid-Xiantian Stage! Look out Mira, I'm coming for you! We'll see who's beating who up when I make it to the Late-Xiantian Stage! Hehe." Maria opened her eyes and shouted.

"It seems someone is excited. Seeing how confident you are, why don't we have a little spar? You just made a breakthrough and should be much stronger than your last lesson, what do you say?" Mira said with predatory eyes.

"Hehe, you're on! Just be sure to go easy on me so as to not break any bones, doing that will only slow down my progress in catching up to you. Something I know that you don't want!" Maria exclaimed with a giggle and marched out of the cave, knowing full well she was going to lose.

Mira wryly shook her head and walked out of the cave to do something she's done with Maria thousands of times. It's almost something of a ritual or hobby at this point and Mira did somewhat enjoy these spars with Maria.

Celaine just watched Maria challenge Mira and could only think of one word to describe Maria's behavior:

Masochist.