Thoustei Shi Kenryu

Stolen Cultivation is the rock’s defining alternative to ordinary progression. Rather than relying only on conventional experience and level increases, the technique allows it to absorb the energy of magical treasures and convert that material wealth into cultivation power. Its importance lies in the contradiction it creates: the rock can become stronger through what it consumes even when the system does not register a corresponding level increase, making treasure both resource and loophole.

Discovery Through the Gold Hoard

The technique first becomes visible when the rock is placed atop the dragon’s treasure. The dragon opens its Astral Pocket and releases an avalanche of gold coins stamped by a hundred kingdoms, spreading them across the cavern floor before setting the rock at the summit of the pile. Coins lodge themselves in the rock’s exterior, and the rock extends its newly developed Qi vessels toward them. Its stone flesh parts as the gold is drawn inward, slowly absorbing the coins into the growing core.

The process produces an immediate numerical result: the rock’s gold content reaches 1 percent, and then, after it optimizes the arrangement of the coin pile and repeatedly gathers the lodged gold toward its center, reaches 100 percent. Yet the absorption is not a simple transfer of visible matter. Three complete coins enter the rock, while only a small portion remains in its body at the center; the rest disappears somewhere within the process. This unexplained loss establishes that the technique is transforming the treasure rather than merely storing it.

A Demonic Alternative to Leveling

Once the gold reaches 100 percent, a roiling core of golden energy forms at the rock’s center. The system identifies the result as a Golden Core, with core heat reaching 400 K and progress toward the next realm beginning at zero out of 100. The achievement is explicitly connected to the rock’s ceaseless patience and to its use of a nonstandard technique described as demonic.

The system then grants a new ability named Stolen Cultivation. Its stated function is to cultivate further by absorbing the energies of magical treasures. The wording frames the method as both advancement and appropriation: power is not earned solely through ordinary combat or sanctioned growth, but taken from valuable objects and redirected into the rock’s own cultivation base. The technique therefore gives material possession a second life as internal energy.

Its use also exposes a structural fault in the system. The rock grows in mass even though it has not leveled, despite the system’s formula tying mass intrinsically to level. The rock’s physical development has escaped the expected numerical pathway. Stolen Cultivation consequently does more than provide an ability; it produces an unauthorized relation between treasure, bodily growth, and progression, forcing the system to confront a result its own rules were not designed to accommodate.

Conversion of Magical Equipment

The technique later becomes a repeatable engine of advancement rather than a one-time consequence of the gold hoard. After the rock encounters a party consisting of a Knight, a Cleric, a Mage, and a Thief, the dragon throws it at the adventurers. The attack crushes the four members, but the magical tools on their bodies are no longer present when the dragon examines the remains. The rock has taken the equipment, turning the adventurers’ heavily enchanted gear into another supply of cultivational material.

The rock treats the find as exceptionally fortunate because the equipment is rare and abundant. Stolen Cultivation activates, displays a conversion process for the artifacts, and reports completion. The sequence makes the technique’s operating principle concrete: the rock absorbs magical treasures, converts their stored power, and receives cultivation energy rather than simply accumulating a conventional inventory. The adventurers’ equipment thus becomes an invisible continuation of the rock’s body and growth.

Gemstones and Continued Development

The technique remains active even after the initial golden breakthrough. The rock notices a gemstone rich in mana lodged within it and deliberately turns to that unabsorbed resource. It extends tendrils of mana toward the crystal, probes it, and gradually draws it inside, drinking in its magic while enlarging its cultivation base.

Stolen Cultivation activates again, converts the artifact’s energy, and completes the process. This recurrence shows that the method is not restricted to coins or to treasure obtained from a particular enemy. Gold, enchanted equipment, and mana-rich gemstones all belong to the same usable category: valuable magical matter whose energy can be stripped from its original form and assimilated into the rock’s internal advancement.

Narrative and Thematic Function

Stolen Cultivation reorganizes the story’s power network around the rock. Goblins notice the pebble because enchanted tools are beyond their usual means; the Bone Core panics as the intruder refuses to stop; the dragon values its hoard and reacts furiously when its treasures vanish; adventurers carry equipment as signs of preparedness and status. The technique links all these otherwise separate actors through the movement of material power into the rock. What others collect, guard, wield, or seek becomes the rock’s means of transformation.

The ability also supports the story’s widening ontology. The rock eventually recognizes that planets, sand, and itself are fundamentally rocks differentiated by scale and power. Against that background, Stolen Cultivation is not merely a magical skill but a material philosophy: things that appear to be external wealth can become internal capacity, and the boundary between object, body, and resource is unstable. Its apparent violation of level-based growth reinforces the larger tension between the system’s categories and a protagonist whose stone nature keeps producing results those categories cannot fully contain.