Immortal Ice Empress: Path to Vengeance

Once the Ice Elemental Essence entered Mira's body, it went straight into her heart. While normally this would cause immense pain and in some cases internal injuries, Mira's situation is a bit different.

Not only was her Dao, the Absolute Ice Dao, but her physique and bloodline are also special.

That being the case, the Ice Elemental Essence didn't even have a chance to struggle, and neither would it have dared to.

Mira also decided to completely absorb this Ice Elemental Essence as the benefits should be much more than just increasing her comprehension of her Dao and slightly changing the nature of her ice.

Soon, a blood-colored ice mist started flowing from Mira's heart into her veins, meridians, and slowly her body.

It didn't take long for the bloody-ice tendrils to reach her dantian and soon a connection was formed with her dantian and the Ice Elemental Essence.

Now the ice-vortex in her dantian had bloody-red streaks, but things weren't over yet. Due to all of the vitality and Qi that the Ice Elemental Essence had accumulated by sucking the dead beasts dry, there was an overwhelming amount of Qi held within these blood-red streaks.

This Qi was washing over Mira's body like a tidal wave as she had to put her entire mind into condensing this overwhelming Qi.

Every time Mira condensed some Qi, more would instantly take its place and it seemed like this wouldn't stop anytime soon.

From an outsider's point of view, Mira's body was constantly expanding and deflating due to her body constantly filling up with an overwhelming amount of Qi.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, Maria and Celaine were also cultivating and didn't notice what was happening to Mira. This was because Mira wasn't sucking in any of the surrounding Qi as the Ice Elemental Essence had more than enough for her.

Soon, Mira broke through to the Mid-Xiantian Stage and she was already getting exhausted due to pushing her mind and body to condense all of that Qi, but it didn't stop there as she was only able to take in about 30-40% of the Qi held within the blood-red streaks.

As soon as she broke through, her body that only held a small amount of highly condensed Qi has instantly filled up again as her body started to inflate.

Mira was once again forced to start condensing it or her body may explode. Luckily, her body was already extremely tough due to cultivating the Magma Dragon Body, or else she definitely would've died if she tried to absorb this Ice Elemental Essence without it.

After an unknown amount of time, Mira's body expanded once again before it soon deflated. The only difference this time is the overwhelming power that radiated from Mira's body compared to the other times.

She was able to break straight through into the Late-Xiantian Stage with the help of the Ice Elemental Essence, which Mira decided to name the Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence.

During this time, although she was able to break through into the Late-Xiantian Stage, not all of it was due to the Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence, she also had the help of one of her Mid-Grade Spirit Stone which helped a lot. Though she did end up using about half of it in order to break through.

Now that has finished completely absorbing and integrating the Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence into her body, she decided to do a bit of introspecting.

The first place she looked at was her heart, where she saw a small ice crystal with blood-red veins on it floating in the middle of her heart.

The next place she checked out was her dantian, which looked slightly different than before. The blizzard vortex was much denser than before and was holding strong as the soon-to-be origin point for her Qi whenever she reached the Core Formation Realm.

Mira then looked over her body to make sure everything was fine, to which she found out that everything was not only fine but much stronger than before due to her breakthroughs.

The only problem that Mira felt was that her Qi was catching up to her body's strength, but this wasn't too much of a problem as she should be able to breakthrough into the Peak-Xiantian Stage and maybe even the Core Formation Realm with her current physical strength.

Also, if she just waits for her body to adjust to its newly found strength, she'll easily be able to break through those two stages with no issues at all.

Next, Mira decided to check out her scythe which was currently sitting in her soul. She quickly noticed that its sharpness, durability, toughness, and even its affinity with ice were raised by another level. The Abyssal Sea Scythe was now a Mid-Earth Grade weapon, but Mira guessed that she wouldn't see her weapon upgrade again until she reached the Core Formation Realm, but even with that she was still extremely satisfied with the results.

A Mid-Earth Grade weapon was already a weapon that a Stage 4-6 Core Formation Realm Expert would use. Not only that, but since the Abyssal Sea Scythe is a Spiritual Weapon, it's already comparable to Late or even some Peak-Earth Grade weapons.

The last benefit that Mira felt was her increased comprehension in her Absolute Ice Dao, although not as much as she would've liked. Nonetheless, she can't be greedy and was already more than satisfied with the results.

Mira opened her eyes after feeling satisfied with the results and soon made a small ice crystal appear in front of her. This ice crystal was similar, but a bit different than before. It was sharper, tougher, denser, but the main difference is there were now small red veins in the ice crystal. This is a characteristic of the Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence, which made Mira fairly excited.

She wondered if she'd be able to increase her cultivation by killing things and sucking their blood, but Mira also figured that it probably wouldn't be so easy.

She'll have to do a bit of testing, but just she already instinctually knew some of the limitations due to fully absorbing the Vampyric Ice Elemental Essence into her body.

One, it wasn't very efficient to absorb blood and refine the Qi held within it; two, the entity that she's absorbing blood from needs a certain quality of blood and Qi in their body in order for her to refine it which only gets more limited the stronger she gets.

This rules out the idea of just going to a bunch of villages and low-level towns and massacring everyone in order to increase her cultivation as the disadvantage outweigh the advantages.

Mira also guessed that using it on low ranking beasts and Qi Condensation Realm humans is essentially useless as their blood won't hold much Qi if any and the quality of beast blood is relatively low as well.

This still needs to be experimented on though as it should work relatively well on Rank 4 beasts and higher as well as humans at the Foundation Realm and higher.

Feeling satisfied and even somewhat excited about testing out her new ability, Mira stood up and walked over to Maria and Celaine, who were quietly cultivating.

The two of them sensed someone walking over and knew that it was Mira, so they both stopped cultivating and looked over towards her.

"Are you finally done?" Maria asked while Mira nodded.

"Good! We can finally leave this place! We've had to sit here for nearly 10 days you know?! How are you going to repa-WHAT?! Late-Xiantian?! HOW?!" Maria yelled, flustered by Mira's rise in strength.

Celaine also widened her eyes but wasn't quite as shocked as Mira. Occasionally she'd pay attention to Mira during these last ten days as occasionally she'd sense a dense and oppressive Qi coming from Mira so she assumed that something good must've happened. But still, it was quite shocking to see Mira's sudden rise in strength.

"The Ice Elemental Essence helped quite a bit as it seemed to be holding a reasonable amount of Qi that was just waiting to be absorbed by me, hehe," Mira said as she gave them an evil grin.

"Let's spar. I'd like to see how much stronger I got."

"No thanks!!" They both yelled and started to run away.

Mira's evil grin got wider as she collected the Qi Gathering Array and leftover Spirit Stones before dashing after them.