Chapter 683: A Mixed Bag

The amount of improvement varied greatly amongst individuals, with Sasha actually seeing the biggest jump of about 1% in her cultivation efficiency, but everyone below the Spirit Realm had gained an average of about 0.6% in terms of ’aptitude’.

Now, 0.6%, or even 1% really wasn’t much of an improvement, equating to something like gaining an extra 3 to 5 hours worth of cultivation per year for an ordinary Mortal Realm Practitioner, but it was still an exciting development which once again increased the value of the Unarmed Foundations Art cultivation method. It also raised a lot of questions, chief among them being why this was happening?

Improving one’s Innate Talent wasn’t actually impossible, or even that uncommon; there were many examples of this happening even inside the Rockwell Kingdom. That said, all known cases of such improvement could be linked to the use of extremely rare resources, consumption of extraordinary Spirit Medicines refined by high-Grade Alchemists, or freak accidents.

Lucas himself had experienced such an accident, allowing his Innate Talent to improve, but that same accident, the ’lightning strike’ which had hit him on his 9th birthday, had also almost killed him and obviously wasn’t something that could be replicated.

As far as anyone around Lucas knew, there had never been a training method which could improve one’s Innate Talent, until now.

If they could figure out exactly how this happened, they might be able to improve upon it further and literally create genius cultivators.

What the upper limit of this improvement in Innate Talent was, or if this improvement would continue after reaching the Spirit Realms was totally unclear, but that didn’t dampen Project Ascension’s research team’s enthusiasm in the slightest.

Even if 1% turned out to be the absolute upper limit of improvement, it was still a 1% gain in efficiency. The gains might not be significant over the course of a year, or a decade, but for a Cultivator who lived hundreds of years, the savings in time would eventually add up.

To take advantage of this latest discovery, Lucas proposed expanding Project Ascension even further, especially among young children who were just starting to cultivate. His idea was to have them use the Unarmed Foundations Art right from the start of their cultivation journey, thinking that would give them the biggest opportunity to benefit from it.

This idea was naturally met with much reluctance and skepticism by almost everyone involved, mainly over security concerns as it was difficult to imagine such young children being able to keep such an important secret, but Lucas lobbied hard and eventually convinced them it was a risk work taking.

Of course, a lot more planning and preparations would first be needed, including what kind of safety measures they would need to implement, but that was a concern for the future.

If all of that wasn’t enough of a reason for the members of Project Ascension to celebrate, a couple of days ago, they had received one more.

Using the same method as Elizabeth Carlson, Allina Crest had also achieved a breakthrough to the Low-Rank Martial Adept Realm.

This not only confirmed the validity of this breakthrough method, at least for Martial Cultivation, it also increased the strength of the Raging River Legion, Balfour Family, and Rockwell Kingdom as a whole.

Allina actually could have attempted a breakthrough many months ago, but having learned their lesson from Supreme Elder Carlson’s experience, Celestina had first prepared a Mirage Pendant, similar to the one Christina was using, in order to mask Allina’s advancement.

Elizabeth suddenly breaking through to the Martial Adept Realm after a century of stagnation had already caused a huge shock in Rockwell Kingdom and even had ripple effects in the neighbouring nations, but it also wasn’t an unprecedented event or beyond most people’s ability to fathom.

If, however, it became known that Allina had also broken through so soon afterwards, it would definitely raise suspicions.

With the international conference coming up in a few months, while it was tempting to show off the Rockwell Kingdom’s growing strength, avoiding prying eyes was currently a higher priority.

All that said, it wasn’t like there was only good news when it came to Project Ascension.

Despite re-doubling their efforts to alter, improve, and integrate traditional Cultivation Techniques with the Unarmed Foundation Art, the research team had so far had very little success.

It turned out that trying to modify these techniques was much harder than any of them had anticipated, especially when it came to Spirit Grade Cultivation Arts.

It wasn’t like Elizabeth had no success in this regard, but most of the progress she made had been confined to much simpler Mortal Grade Techniques.

Lucas suspected this had something to do with them still not fully understanding how the Unarmed Foundations Art interacted with cultivation in the Grand Spirit Realm, but honestly, he was mostly just guessing.

Unless and until they figured out what they were missing, they would likely remain stuck, which was a real pity for both Celestina and Christina.

Celestina had been loitering at the absolute peak of the Complete High-Rank Adept Realm for decades and was eager to break through again while Christina was rapidly approaching the point where she would need to undergo Awakening so she could break through to the Grand Spirit Realm.

Given Christina’s shocking Innate Talent, it was basically guaranteed that she could use the original Focused Breathing Art to achieve a Natural Awakening, but without a proper Cultivation Technique, her progress would undoubtedly slow to a crawl after that.

The princess had repeatedly told everyone not to worry about her and that she wasn’t in a rush, but given the fact that she had recently broken through to the Seventh Step Sea Establishment Realm, it was difficult for the others to not feel a bit pressured.

Louise, her elder sister, was particularly troubled and had been spending an increasing amount of her time pouring over the Rockwell Family’s Grand Mountain Record together with the other lead researchers, trying to find a way to properly modify it to fit with the Unarmed Foundation Art.

The First Princess had even suffered a bit of backlash when she recklessly tried to test out a new circulation pattern, resulting in her having to stop her own cultivation for nearly a month to allow her meridians to heal.

All-in-all, it was a mixed bag of success and failure when it came to Project Ascension. Progress was definitely being made on all fronts, but clearly, some areas of research were fairing far better than others.