"The star hawk is not only exceedingly rare, it is also one of the most dangerous creatures in the void. While the star hawk is a medium-sized bird. It is, however, very close to being classified as a large bird. The Star Hawk has a very uncanny ability for flight, making it the fastest bird and the most agile." she said as she started walking around the seventh floor, looking at the shelves. "By having this gene, it has placed you amongst the core disciples of our sect and allowed you to have a core elder, such as myself, as your mentor." she grinned at me for a second before going back to the shelves.

When she wasn't looking any more, I rolled my eyes, thinking she was trying really hard to make this gene sound really important just to make her role in mentoring me sound more important than it needed to be.

"So, you are going to give me this technique to cultivate and then what? Lock me away somewhere to cultivate it until I'm useful enough to fight the galactic federation for you?"

She pulled a scroll off a shelf and looked it over before putting it back on the shelf and moving on to another shelf as she muttered, "water affinity technique would not work for you at all". She pulled another scroll off the shelf but tossed it back on a second later, muttering about fire affinity's sucking before turning to answer my question.

"hmm? Oh, no, we will help you reach immortal ascension, and we won't hold you here. You can go back and get infected again any time you want. However, the captain says if you remain here until you reach immortal ascension, then the sect will have one of our ships constructed for you." She said offhandedly as she picked up a scroll that looked like it had white lines flowing around it before she tossed it back on the shelf

"air affinity would not be the right choice." She muttered as she turned to another shelf that looked like it had black scrolls on it.

After a few moments she suddenly pulled a scroll out of a pile triumphantly like she had found the holy grail or something.

"ha! This one is perfect for you. It is a time and space affinity cultivation scroll, great for void walking birds!" She exclaimed excitedly before turning to me and holding the scroll out to me.

"Cultivate this, it will get you from Mortal, into Qi gathering and see you to the peak of Foundation Establishment." She nodded her head as she waved it in front of me expectantly.

"what do I do when I reach the peak of foundation whatever?" I asked curiously.

"Foundation Establishment, and you come tell me, then I get you a better technique, the Time and Space Golden Core Technique, to be exact. It's the next scroll in this technique's series." She replied as I took the scroll.

I took the scroll and opened it slowly, seeing a language on the scroll I didn't understand at all. The next moment, Zhang Mei waved her hand pointing at the scroll then shifting her finger to tap it against my forehead. I'm not proud of it, but the second her finger touched my head I screamed, dropping the scroll. I clutched my head as what felt like a rail spike shoved its way into my skull, and then the pain got worse. I felt the information contained in the scroll flooding into my brain and forcing understanding. A moment later I was sitting on the floor, the scroll having been scooped up by my mentor, and the pain in my head was slowly starting to subside.

"Oh, that was hell, please don't ever do that again." I whined as I considered rolling over into the fetal position and taking a moment or two hundred.

"oh, don't be such a baby, it was only a light information transfer." She said nonchalantly as she placed the scroll back on the shelf and turned to face me.

"It still hurts." I grumbled as I got to my feet and glared at her a little bit.

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"Okay, well, follow me and I will show you to your cultivation chamber, you already know where your room is, the chamber is nearby that." She ignored my look and started walking over to the stairs and heading back down to the bottom floor.

After a moment of looking at all the surrounding scrolls, I hurried to follow her. Once we hit the bottom floor and breezed past the front doors and back out into the hallway, she turned and started walking back towards what she had called my room. We almost made it there before she turned suddenly and walked down a new hallway that only lasted six dozen feet and ended in a door that Zhang Mei waved her hand at.

"This is your cultivation chamber, normally you would have to sit on a hill and cultivate at night when you can see the stars but since we are in space, you get a glass room with an airlock door into the hull of the ship, space and stars all the time, lots to think about, and so on and so on. Anyway federation scum I have completed my task and will leave you to cultivate in peace, I recommend a sixteen-hour cultivation with an 8-hour sleep, feed yourself during the sixteen-hour window and never skimp on the sleep." She declared before turning and walking away, leaving me there to make my decision.

I looked at the technique that was floating in my mind and decided to give it a go. I opened the airlock door stepping through it, I found an anti chamber between the two airlock doors and in the wall was a little closet with a thin material suit and a sign saying 'please wear the cultivation suit at all times during cultivation sessions' deciding I had best adhere to these rules I quickly put it on finding it resized itself to fit me. Once I was suited up, I opened the next door and stepped out onto a glass ball with a flat floor and a single black cushion sitting on the floor in the middle.

"Damn, that's terrifying." I whispered as I slowly extended my foot out to poke the cushion.

Finding the cushion was sitting on solid, I hesitated a few more moments before weighing my options and coming to the decision that if the celestial and the galactic ranked ass hats cultivated. Then I had better start doing it too. I stepped out and slowly sat down on the cushion in a lotus pose because that's the position all the cultivation stories back home said people used when they cultivated. The technique didn't mention any position to sit in while cultivating the technique.

Once I was sitting comfortably, I turned my attention to the information I had gotten from the scroll and slowly began to follow its instructions. I looked with in my body for a dantian, then looked out at the air around me for any Qi that might be moving into my body, before looking in again for that Qi. I was struggling to notice anything and was starting to get frustrated when the air in the chamber suddenly got denser and began to prickle against my skin. I opened my eyes to see the ship had moved, placing the sun on my side. As I stared into the sun, still breathing in the way the technique had told me to, I felt something click in my mind.

The next moment I noticed something in the surrounding air, something denser than the air, and I was breathing it into my lungs, letting it circulate through my blood before being expelled back out of my lungs into the air. I let it do this a few more times before I remembered the technique told me to shunt it at a certain point from my blood into the dantian, so I began to try doing that. It was like trying to guide smoke with your bare hands, it sort of worked, but the smoke didn't really go further than an inch or two in the direction you were fanning it. It took me hours before I noticed the tiniest bit had made it to my dantian, and it was just sitting there floating.

After glancing at the technique again, it informed me to keep pushing the Qi into my dantian from my bloodstream. I should start trying to make the Qi in my dantian circle around the dantian a few times before pushing it back out to my bloodstream. I let out a groan at how dumb this was but buckled down, deciding if Zeo and the boys could do it. Then so could I. I paused as I came to the realisation that I was assuming they did it. I didn't know for sure, they never mentioned it after all, maybe they were still in the dark about it.…

I shook those thoughts off and focused back on trying to move the Qi into my dantian so I could circulate it and send it back out to follow the natural path around my body. It was then expelled out into the room. The dense air suddenly vanished, causing me to open my eyes. I saw the sun slowly moving away from my side of the ship and quickly closed my eyes, trying to keep a hold of the Qi I had found. Only for it to slip from my fingers and vanish along with the sun.

"Damn it, son of Mexican Enchiladas!" I screamed as I tried to use some insults but ended in food I could really go for as I felt my stomach grumble.

I let out a breath slowly and started from scratch, trying to feel for the Qi in the air again. It didn't come back until the sun did, and I quickly started trying to force as much of it into my dantian as I could before the sun vanished again. I noticed it was slightly easier this time to move the Qi into the dantian, but it was still refusing to circulate, it was kind of just floating around a current that it wasn't part of. I frowned as I tried to focus on getting this to work, but before I could, the sun vanished again and a chime went off in the chamber.

"Ding! You have completed 8 hours of cultivation, as someone that has not reached Qi Gathering stage 1, yet we recommend you take a break and have lunch before returning to cultivation."

I glanced around until I noticed the speaker just above the door and let out a sigh as I got to my feet and left the room, exiting through the airlock. I made sure to hang the suit up before I stepped out into the ship. I was starting to wonder where I could get food when I noticed the wall next to me suddenly changed, a section that took up the same space an 81-inch television would have. From the white paint of the wall to a detailed map of the ship with a blue line leading from where I assumed I was to the nearest cafeteria. After a moment of hesitation, I studied it and then followed it, only getting lost once before I found the cafeteria. It was completely empty of people, but that was just fine with me. I hurried in and found what looked like coffee machines around the edge of the room sitting sort of half in the walls, causing me to frown as I looked around for where I might get food. I wasn't here for coffee… a few moments of hesitation and mentally wrestling with my stomach later, I found myself at one of the coffee machine looking machines with a sudden craving for coffee.

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