Daily life of a cultivation judge

With a direction and a goal in mind, the founder poured himself wholly into refining his body. He used every available resource he had in that venture. Yang Qing never thought of it at the time when he was a baby listening to the stories of their founder from his parents, but later when he was recalling the stories of the person he blamed for his misery, he couldn't help but suspect their founder may have been part of a family or organization with significant wealth.

While the body refining stage could be considered the lowest realm of cultivation, it was by no means a cheap endeavor, especially if you wanted to break through different stages. You needed enormous volumes of herbs and special natural treasures working in tandem to refine the body, which also meant you needed to either be good in alchemy and herbology or have the services of a good alchemist. In addition, you also needed a good diet as fuel for the body to support its growth. If one were to do the numbers, you'd find you would spend more improving in the body refining stage than you did in the foundation establishment realm despite both realms being two major levels apart.

Yang Qing had no idea how someone with no backing and no cultivation base was able to experiment with the body refining stage as their founder did.

Years went by as he poured resources and time into improving his body. He may have not had talent in sensing qi but when it came to being determined and ruthless to himself, he had it in spades. He had passable skills in alchemy and the willingness to experiment on anything of which Yang Qing never knew why he was so insistent, especially considering what happened next.

The founder damaged and healed his body over the years and did make some progress in the early phases of body refining stages. He had evolved from someone who didn't know much, to someone who had created countless methods to achieve an iron body, bronze body, and silver body. However, despite the progress he made, time run out for him since the body refining stages never added any life expectancy of a person except for the diamond body or the peerless jade body. With time running out he started a family and poured his obsession into his children. To his dying breath, he made them share the same fanaticism he had with the body refining stage and slowly it became a thing.

Every generation of the Yang family would pour all they had into discovering the mysteries of the body refining stage. It was to the point that some had even foregone cultivating to the qi refinement realm despite having a talent for cultivation. They instead poured all their resources and time into the body refining realm and then they would spread that same idealogy to the next generation even embellishing some details.

It spiraled to the point that the Yang family created their own ethos. They believed that body refining held countless mysteries which if continuously discovered could help a cultivator directly jump levels and there was no limit to how many levels one could skip. The only limit was the person's understanding of their own body. They even said that the current cultivation trend was living proof that the body was the door and qi was just one of the world's many keys to unlocking it.

Where is the dantian produced? the body

What senses and absorbs qi? The body

Where do pillars and cores come from? The body.

Could a cultivator form these things if they didn't have a body?

To them, if they explored the body enough, they surmised one could even jump to the palace realm in a single leap with the firmest of foundations and they could even have a higher lifespan than what a normal palace realm cultivator would have.

With such thoughts in mind, the Yang family members would rarely actively move past the body-refining stage. The only times they did breakthrough to higher cultivation realms was to further their research into the body refining stage to see if improvements could be made if one was in the qi refinement or foundation establishment realm. They made a few hypotheses that there could be certain conditions that were required to unlock even more levels of the body refining stage.

Their dedication wasn't without its fruits. Their skills in alchemy in relation to the human body were exhaustive, which was why when they decided to join Yang Qing after he passed his examinations at the Order, the Medical Valley recruited them, along with other divisions like the alchemy division and also the Institute.

In the 1,000 years since the family was started, while they have never had anyone with the peerless jade physique except Yang Qing, they have had two or three members with the Diamond body physique and over a dozen gold body physique and countless silver body physique.

Their insights, especially in the first three stages i.e. iron body, bronze body, and silver body could be considered to be the most extensive that even the Order incorporated their insights as part of the curriculum at the institute. The Yang family was all too glad to share its findings with the Order at almost zero cost in exchange for having a slew of students which Yang Qing called unwitting subjects in their body refinement endeavors.

The Order was the perfect haven for them, endless supply of resources and countless people with enormous talent to test their findings on. Yang Qing could remember how his grandfather and his cohorts had eyes reddened with excitement at how much their research would grow at the Order. In all his life, he has never seen his grandfather and the other elders cry, but on that day a bunch of old men with sturdy odd looking bodies wept as they hugged each other outside the gates of the Order after which they proceeded to enthusiastically greet the young kids with no cultivation who passed them by.

...

"Judge Yang Qing? Judge Yang Qing? We are already at the Star blooming mist valley."

Yang Qing who had been in a daze all this while was pulled back to his senses by Song Guozhi's call.

They had arrived at the venue for his ceremony tomorrow, the Star blooming mist valley, a place that exhibited the true grandeur of the Order. It was nothing short of a dreamscape.