Yuki saw her wounds healing and decided to look over her body. She really had no idea how long she was in the cave for or what was done to her, but she wanted to check one thing to make sure it was still intact. Once she was done and knew she was perfectly fine, she put her mind at ease on that issue and began thinking about her meridian cleansing phase. The problem with this was that she wanted to cleanse her meridians a few times. Once with spiritual qi and then again with demonic qi. She took a moment to clear her mind and decided to first try one of each to see if it would do anything bad to her meridians. This way, she can stop before too much damage was done.

Right now, her meridians were still weak. She would need to thoroughly cleanse each one and strengthen them before she could do the meridian widening phase. The meridian widening phase was one of the most important steps besides the meridian opening phase. Widening the meridians would allow for more demonic qi and spiritual qi to flow into her body, making her cultivation even faster.

She took a deep breath and let part of her consciousness listen for any trouble before focusing the other part on detecting spiritual qi. She had not done this in a while, so she was hoping things would go smoothly.

She did not take long to detect spiritual qi or demonic qi. She first focused on the fate meridian and decided to take in a strand of demonic qi first to test it out. After a few breaths, she beckoned one to enter through her fate meridian. It slipped in, and surprisingly Yuki did not feel anything different about it. Tilting her head to the side, she flipped through her clan's cultivation method and began using the demonic qi to cleanse her fate meridian according to what was said within. After an hour, the first strand was used up, and her fate meridian had strengthened by a lot.

Now was the test to see if this would be overridden or not. She sucked in a strand of spiritual qi and did the same thing as before. She did not know if it was going to fail or not, but luckily she saw her meridian strengthening even more. But what she found strange was that her meridian had one black side now and one white side. She did not know how meridians were supposed to be, so she could only continue with her current method. Her cultivation manual said each meridian needed to be cleansed one hundred times. The time and length of each cleansing could take quite a few hours to do.

This meant for Yuki, who was planning on cleansing her meridians not just once but four times since she wanted to double cleanse them for the maximum effect. She would be here for a long time since she has one hundred and eight of them.

Yuki worked day and night, only stopping to eat. If she had to use the bathroom, she would dig a hole in the corner of the trunk she was in and go. At this point and time, she was not too worried about hygiene as she only cared about cultivating and breaking through to the first fate star as soon as possible.

Days passed, and so did weeks. It was on one cool, damp morning as the rain fell from the sky that Yuki, who was getting dripped on, opened her eyes. She had finished quadruple cleansing her meridians making them extra powerful. Each one had one black side and one white side. The demonic qi and spiritual qi entered through them each without issue. Making her very happy. Whether this would have a strange effect on her later, she did not know, but right now, she was quite happy with her results.

Yuki stood up and stretched, and only then did she realize her little hideout was starting to flood. With a small frown, she got her sword ready and jumped out of the tree trunk. She had to find a new place. The current one was not livable anymore. She looked around to see a few demonic beasts roaming around. She decided not to fight them for the time being. She jumped from tree to tree until she found a small crevice in a cliff wall.

Curious as to see if it would bring her anywhere, she slipped through it sideways. The skinny path twisted and turned a few times until it came to a small enclosed area covered by tall cliffs and tree canopies. In the middle was a small pound that was crystal clear. Yuki could see all the way to the bottom without issue. It was not very deep, maybe up to her chest, but it made for a good place to hide out to finish her body fortification cultivation. She walked around the place first to check for anything living down her. When she saw no signs of anything, she stripped her clothes off and jumped into the water to clean off a little. While she was at it, she even gulped up a few mouthfuls of water as she swam to the bottom of the pond to check for anything interesting. But sadly, there were no fortuitous encounters this time around.

Yuki rose to the water's surface and swam back to shore. She grabbed her clothes and dunked them into the water, dirtying it with blood and dirt from her travels. She then wrung them out and hung them from one of the low lying vines. Only then did she find a dry spot and lay down. She had not slept for a few days and wanted to close her eyes for a while, but as she did, she kept picturing the scenes of everything that had happened in the past, causing her to wake up almost instantly.

She decided to just go back to cultivating. Since she can’t sleep, she might as well use her time productively. It was time to begin the third to last phase of body fortification. The meridian widening phase.