[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0! ]

[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0! ]

[ Your Dual-ele... ]

As soon as I picked the fifth crystal, I got several notifs about absorbing nothing in for a whole minute, while my Dual-Element stat stayed at 11 points.

This obviously meant one thing…. I have finally reached the limit of the initial layer!

The next step was to breakthrough the bottleneck between the initial layer and the intermediate layer, only then would I finally start to gain the true benefits of elemental practice.

I used my mental energy to look into my cells as I could feel the saturation degree of elements in them, it seemed as if my cells were half filled with elements but for some reason, it felt like there was some sort of a barrier containing the elements from increasing any further….

This was precisely the bottleneck that I needed to breakthrough!

As for the methods for breaking the bottleneck, there were several ways of achieving the same target.

The first method was to enter secluded mediation to absorb enough elements to slowly eat away at that barrier, this was considered as the most common method as it was possible for almost anybody.

As for the second method, one would simply have to use higher amount and quality of elements to simply overwhelm the barrier, it could be done either through the help of another elemental expert of the same element who is on a higher stage of by the use of elemental resources such as elemental crystals, of course, this was only a method that wealthy families or recognized prodigies could use.

There were still several other methods but they were mostly exceptional methods used by certain people only.

As for me, I certainly went for the second method as it was the fastest and the most efficient method, not to forget that I had enough surplus of grade-2 crystals to use for my breakthrough.

As such I picked another crystal and put it on my other hand and started its absorption as well, this was the dual absorption ability that I unexpectedly found out while testing some stuff during my rests in-between raid clearing.

It turned out I could absorb as much as two crystals of any grade ( not sure as I didn't have higher grade crystals than 0 & 1 before ) the time of absorption would then increase slightly and the part of the absorbed elements would usually disperse causing me a small loss to achieve more efficiency.

The reason that I still didn't use dual-absorption till this point was obviously for that loss as I needed to at least keep my resources enough for my personal use as I never knew when would I reach the peak of the 2ns stage.

But at the moment, I needed to get as much elements as I could harvest within a certain time frame to attack the barrier more powerfully, so as to say I getting 0.4 points of elements at the same moment would do better at breaking the bottleneck than 0.5 points harvested with a time difference of 30 minutes.

So, all I could do at the moment was to wait patiently for the absorption to be completed, hoping that the first shot would normally break the bottleneck while anticipating the powers granted by advancing to the next layer….

[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0! ]

[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0! ]

[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0! ]

[ Your Du…... ]

`~~`~~`~~`

40 minutes later

[ Your Dual-element has increased by 0.01! ]

[ 'Lightning cell' has advanced to the '2nd Stage, Intermedial Layer'! ]

[ 'Thunder cell' has advanced to the '2nd Stage, Intermedial Layer'! ]