Maybe it was a lucky thing Helare had told him about the cores at everyone's being when she had. Because soul cultivation was all about improving the core. Once one was able to sense it of course.

It was more involved than that. There was an escalating difficulty that had to do with exercising the whole schema and feeding it but that was only possible when the schema became visible. Most people couldn't cultivate souls as early as Rafe because they were not able to sense their souls.

Rafe was also at a disadvantage, being from an Essence Desert. He had found a book about soul development through Hestus, and he had found that in overall growth potential, people from Essence Deserts were estimated to have a higher ceiling. But they were initially very much weaker.

The soul governed everything, for it was the core of one's being. If one's soul was weak, they had a ceiling on their stat growth at every tier. And soul cultivation was a very slow process. For example, it would take over a year of directed soul cultivation to increase one's ability to hold ten extra stat points in each stat per tier.

The system still helped people from Essence Deserts. Or at least it helped the elite of such planets by providing high quality treasures.

The only way to cultivate the soul without being able to see or sense it was to wantonly consume soul nurturing treasures. This was undirected training though, and usually took longer to see results than the directed training people were able to do once they achieved soul perception. The higher the quality of natural treasures used though, the faster the cultivation.

In terms of advantages, people from Essence Deserts might have weak souls, but said souls were neutral as well. They had a lot of potential. Having zero quality and very low strength numbers, they were unaligned.

People born in Essence rich worlds had a flavour to their souls. A trait in some, a natural affinity in others. A kind of mark. Their souls were given a direction from birth, and so they needed very specific natural treasures to grow. And it was difficult to change if one wanted a different trait, though it was possible; expensive, but not impossible. So the quality of such people's souls, linked as it was to inborn properties, was capped.

For people born in Essence Deserts though, it was theoretically possible to choose any direction you wanted your soul to take. Of course the Essence on the planet would be influenced by the strongest beings there, so future generations would depend on the strongest progenitors of the planet.

Theoretically, people from Essence Deserts could have soul cores so refined they shined more than suns. Soul cores, their numbers and colours were the one true measure for soul quality. Some techniques focused on numbers while others focused on colour. Which kind of techniques someone not from an Essence Desert used depended on the tried and tested methods of their, say sect, or family, or faction. Whatever they called it in whatever part of the multiverse one grew up.

For people in Essence Deserts however, they could take any direction really, or both. It was their choice. Most took both, thinking that an absolute level of quality would be worth it in the end, though no one had ever quite gotten there yet. Imagine having nine golden cores. And then breaking into the white core ruler realm and breaking two of those nine cores. Forming a golden pond of Essence. Growing that pond into a lake and then a sea. That would be the absolute pinnacle of soul cultivation.

Nine cores was the recorded highest level a numbers cultivator had ever reached, and his sea wasn't golden, it was jade, a lesser colour. And in terms of quality, he'd been compared to someone who'd cultivated three cores to past gold and into a sort of white core stage. They were both called grand rulers, recognized to have broken past the ruler stage. At the ruler stage, people started to use their soul created Essence to power their skills, increasing the strength their skills could exhibit, a sign of one approaching divinity.

The rest of the text Rafe read didn't make a lot of sense. It went on to explain how there were many routes to divinity, and how it was suspected that this was how the first guardian, who was a soul architect, first became a god. A god wasn't a guardian. There were levels in godhood too.

Anyway, the whole thing about multiple routes to divinity meant nothing to Rafe. He had trained with a bunch of gods, but to be honest he knew nothing about what becoming a god entailed. He thought about them differently, the gods. They had been stronger than him, more experienced. They had trained him, but had they been gods for real?

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He hadn't seen it. To him, they were just people. They were his mentors. They were his friends, his family. They were just people with messy lives. And who made mistakes. And who had found family with each other. The kind of family he wanted too.

With a shrug, Rafe let the thoughts roll away from him.

Most people from Essence Deserts who got greedy ultimately failed. Soul cultivation was an overall slow process. It didn't help that it was important in the higher ranks, as it also caused bottlenecks that were difficult to cheat. The body cultivation focused bottleneck was easier to break past. The soul cultivation bottleneck of the was, according to reports, the true test of most people's divine potential.

Of course, these kinds of future bottlenecks were often paired with truth related goals, further complicating future advancement.

Rafe did not have to worry about that now. What he did have to consider though, was the fact that most of these notes were made for people of higher grades than him.

For example the thing about needing a whole year to increase one's soul strength enough to accommodate ten extra stat points. Rafe had to wonder how his relatively low grade would factor into that. Would it make his soul strength cultivation faster, or slower? He had concluded the only advantage he had in terms of soul quality cultivation was that he'd started it relatively early, and so he could aim for maybe five cores but try to go colour instead of numbers. Five White cores seemed good enough.

He was conceptually talented, so perhaps he'd get to divinity through that method. He guessed that was what the whole essay about different ways to reach godhood was about.

With all that out of the way, Rafe absorbed the soul cultivation manual. When he first opened it, he saw a floating orb, a copper or maybe brass looking orb, a soul core. It looked to have layers of maybe rust, although he wasn't sure those particular metals could rust. It wasn't a perfect orb. And it was hollow in sections too.

And then the Essence came. Slow, deliberate, being woven and mixed with some other external energy. Rafe frowned.

The Essence being used was the one absorbed from the outside. Not the one manufactured by the core. So then what was this other external energy? He hadn't had the question for more than a few moments before he thought of a possible answer. The soul nurturing treasures.

As they mixed with it, the Essence changed into another form of energy. Rafe decided to call it soul energy. The soul energy entered the core. Some of it oddly dissipating after contacting the irregular, rust strewn parts of the core. The parts of the core they met became more regular and lost some of the excess deposit.

Some dissipated after touching the edges of the holes in the core. And the holes became smaller. But most of it entered the inside of the core and caused the core to distend slightly. Like a partially filled water balloon. It could never get full because of the holes.

Although the more soul energy poured out, the more the holes in the core shrunk and the more the irregular potions were refined.

Rafe watched the image as the core was slowly refined into a shiny bronze core without any sort of blemish. No holes and no irregular deposits of impurities. The manual's projection, of course, never provided any sort of timeline.

Still, it was obvious to Rafe that, for at least this particular manual, its only role was to get his core to a level where it wasn't leaking anymore soul energy. It was to get him ready for a more advanced manual.

He didn't know how effective the method was for collecting strength and the like, but at least for soul quality, the use of the method was obvious.

The manual's projection entered his soul, just like his technique manuals usually did. This time though, Rafe was hit with a sharp and sudden pang in the head. Things he hadn't gleaned from the projection, a whole feast of information, entered his brain.

First off, the main use of directed training was resource management. Making sure the treasures he put in were used as efficiently as possible.

Because obviously even someone doing less efficient undirected training would have a spotless core by the time they started directed cultivation sometime in the D grade or later. Which told Rafe something. Was it possible that this manual had been specifically made by the gods for him, since he got soul perception earlier than most? It wasn't a stretch really. This method was very valuable. But it was not really useful for someone past the E grade. Even someone who wasn't using treasures would reach the stage this method ended at before the D grade.

It was an impressive manual, but utterly useless for anyone who was not him. Still, it would be a good starting point. He did have a way to measure his soul quality, but not its strength. He also wasn't quite sure yet what higher soul quality meant in the grand scheme of things, and why it was so important. He was just going to think of it like his insights. So he would start from an impure copper core and refine it into a pure bronze or so core. And then he'd try to split it into multiple cores or to increase the purity of its colour.

The core of the manual centered around creating some kind of tank near the soul core. The tank's role was to store the energy from the natural treasures to make sure it was available every time one sat down for a cultivation session. If the goal was efficiency, then only the amount of energy necessary was used per directed session and the rest stored until the treasure ran out and was replaced.

Rafe thought about it, and it meant his current treasures, whose quality he wasn't a hundred percent sure of, would last him a few months using this hoarding technique. He liked that. He liked the sound of daily soul cultivation a lot.

Without further ado, he started on the process of weaving a reservoir out of Essence for the energy of his treasures

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