Chương 10: Chapter 9

The sensation shocked him so badly that his first instinct was to rip his hand away from the dirt. It felt nothing like the manual's description of the mountain's breath gently entering the body. There was no refreshing coolness, no spiritual warmth, no sudden feeling of becoming one with creation. The microscopic fragment of Earth Qi passed beneath the skin and registered as a bead of impossibly dense metal being injected directly into his palm. It was not hot. The terrifying part was the weight.

Intellectually, Ling Tian knew he had absorbed an amount so small that an experienced cultivator would probably fail to notice it. His nervous system disagreed. The sample carried a density wildly disproportionate to its size, as though a piece of the mountain's conceptual mass had been compressed into something smaller than a grain of sand and lodged beneath his skin. Panic surged for one brief moment.

The predecessor's death flashed at the edge of his memory; heat, pressure, tearing, and Ling Tian reacted instantly. The palm port slammed shut behind the sample. Every trace of attraction toward the surrounding environment disappeared. No second fragment entered. No Wind Qi slipped through behind it. No Fire followed. The tiny Earth Qi deposit remained completely isolated inside his palm. He held his breath for several seconds before forcing himself back into the established breathing cadence.

"Containment successful," he whispered, more for his own benefit than anything else. Saying the words aloud gave the event a procedural quality and helped prevent his imagination from converting one uncomfortable sensation into twelve fictional medical emergencies. The dangerous phase had not ended, however. The foreign energy was now trapped inside his hand, and the Dantian was still a considerable distance away. Ling Tian directed his awareness inward.

He could not see the meridian as a glowing tube or neat anatomical diagram, which irritated him greatly. Instead, he perceived direction, resistance, and a vague internal pathway through which Qi seemed naturally intended to travel. The route extending from the palm toward the wrist felt narrow and completely unused. The original Ling Tian had forced multiple torrents of elemental energy through pathways like this.

Experiencing the physical limitation firsthand gave Ling Tian a renewed appreciation for just how catastrophically optimistic that decision had been. He considered expelling the sample. The experiment had already provided useful data, and ending it now would not constitute failure. The Earth Qi had crossed the boundary successfully. He knew how the port behaved. He knew the sensation produced by a minimal intake.

Yet when Ling Tian studied the fragment and the tissue around it, he found no heat, swelling, tearing, numbness, or uncontrolled movement. The discomfort was substantial but stable. He decided to proceed exactly one centimeter. No farther without another evaluation. Ling Tian applied pressure with his will. The Earth Qi moved. Pain bloomed immediately through his palm. His teeth clenched. The fragment dragged against the meridian with a dull, scraping resistance, refusing to glide smoothly through the pathway.

It felt less like blood moving through a vessel and more like forcing thick electrical cable through a conduit manufactured several sizes too small, except the conduit was packed with nerves and belonged to him. Ling Tian stopped after the fragment moved approximately a finger's width. He waited. Five seconds. Ten. The pain did not worsen. His skin remained normal. He moved each finger experimentally. No numbness. No loss of control. No rising temperature.

No sensation resembling the violent expansion that had killed the predecessor. The pathway was stressed, but it appeared intact. He pushed again. The Earth Qi crawled toward his wrist with all the enthusiasm of an employee assigned unpaid overtime. The resistance was immense, but its consistency reassured him. Wind Qi might have flowed more easily, but Wind Qi also possessed a demonstrated willingness to move independently and unpredictably. Earth remained where he placed it.

Ling Tian preferred stubborn obedience over enthusiastic chaos. The tiny deposit eventually reached the wrist, where the internal route changed direction sharply. He stopped again and tested the joint physically, rotating his hand while monitoring the sample. The Qi remained stationary. When he bent the wrist slightly, the pathway seemed to align more naturally. He guided the fragment forward. It passed through with considerably less resistance. The upper forearm proved unpleasant but manageable.

A slow ache tracked the Earth Qi's exact location beneath his skin as it progressed. Ling Tian monitored that detail carefully. Whenever the fragment moved, the pain moved with it. Whenever he stopped, the discomfort settled rather than spreading outward. That suggested friction or pressure rather than active damage. His forehead became damp with sweat despite the freezing temperature of the shack. He continued in tiny increments, stopping every few centimeters to verify that his fingers remained responsive.

Halfway to the elbow, his hand twitched unexpectedly. Ling Tian froze. He moved each finger one at a time, tested his grip, and waited through a full minute before the twitching stopped. Only then did he resume. Cowardice was free. Healer consultations were not. The inside of the elbow presented the first serious warning. The fragment reached the joint and refused to pass. Ling Tian increased the pressure slightly. The dull ache sharpened immediately into something narrow and dangerous.

He stopped so quickly that his entire body tensed. There was the distinction he had been searching for. Normal transit resistance produced heaviness and friction. This felt different, sharp, concentrated, closer to tearing. He withdrew the pressure and waited for the pain to fade. Then he rotated his forearm outward, adjusted the physical angle of the elbow, and examined the meridian again. The pathway straightened slightly. With far less force, the Earth Qi slid through the junction. Ling Tian exhaled slowly.

Forcing harder was not always the answer. Sometimes the infrastructure needed proper alignment. Somewhere inside The Way of Natural Harmony, the author had probably hidden this extremely useful fact beneath a sentence about rivers respecting the shape of mountains.

Ling Tian made a private promise that if he survived long enough to acquire paper in bulk, he would produce an annotated version of the manual with numbered instructions, diagrams, safety margins, and a dedicated section titled STOP IF IT FEELS LIKE YOUR ORGANS ARE TEARING. He would distribute it purely out of spite. Once beyond the elbow, the upper arm was easier.

The meridian felt marginally broader, though Ling Tian could not determine whether this represented genuine anatomical difference or simply improving perception. Time became difficult to measure. The movement of the sample consumed his entire attention, reducing the night to a sequence of checkpoints: palm, wrist, forearm, elbow, upper arm. Each stage followed the same rigid pattern. Move. Stop. Assess. Compare against the predecessor's fatal symptoms. Continue only if stable.

The procedure was slow, uncomfortable, tedious, and remarkably undramatic. Ling Tian considered all four qualities encouraging. Fatal experiments tended to become exciting very quickly. Eventually, the Earth Qi reached his right shoulder. Ling Tian stopped immediately. Until now, the deposit had remained inside a limb. Damage there could ruin his hand or arm, which would be catastrophic for a child who survived through manual labor, but it did not guarantee death. Beyond the shoulder waited the torso.

The pathway would run near the lungs, heart, and whatever other spiritual structures occupied the central body before reaching the Dantian below the navel. A serious failure there would make his carefully prepared emergency procedures somewhat academic. He opened his eyes. The oil lamp had burned noticeably lower, its weak flame occasionally shrinking until Ling Tian expected it to die completely. His right arm throbbed with a deep, bruised fatigue. He flexed the fingers again. Still functional.

He briefly considered stopping the experiment and leaving the Earth Qi at the shoulder, but the manual explicitly warned against allowing unrefined environmental energy to stagnate within the meridians. Unfortunately, as usual, it offered very little explanation of what would happen afterward beyond something about a "blocked river breeding poison." Attempting to reverse the route would require dragging the sample through every stressed section again and reopening the palm.

Continuing toward the Dantian remained the cleanest available route. Ling Tian closed his eyes and studied the shoulder junction for several minutes. Multiple possible pathways seemed to branch through the torso, some rising toward the neck and head, others moving inward or downward. He rejected everything leading toward the skull without further consideration. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

His experimental courage had limits, and introducing unknown magical energy anywhere near the brain comfortably exceeded them. Eventually he located the route most closely matching the crude sketches in the manual: a primary channel moving inward before descending along the center of the body toward the lower abdomen. He moved the Earth Qi across the junction. The sensation entering his chest was immediately horrifying. Ling Tian's entire body stiffened.

Although spiritual meridians did not appear to correspond perfectly with physical anatomy, having the dense fragment anywhere near his lungs produced an instinctive terror completely out of proportion to the sample's size. With each breath, he imagined the Earth Qi pressing against delicate tissue behind the ribs. His first instinct demanded immediate evacuation. He forced himself to examine the actual evidence instead. No sharp pain. No heat. No increasing pressure. No spreading numbness.

The fragment remained stable. He continued downward. The next stretch was agonizingly slow. Ling Tian moved the Earth Qi one centimeter at a time, sometimes less, pausing after every adjustment. His heartbeat sounded deafening in the silence of the shack, each heavy thud reminding him that an irreplaceable organ sat somewhere alarmingly close to his experiment.

He found himself developing considerably more sympathy for all the fictional cultivators he had mocked in his previous life for sweating during breakthroughs. Criticism had been much easier from an air-conditioned apartment while eating instant noodles. The fragment passed near the sternum. A strange pressure touched his breathing. Ling Tian stopped. His heart rate climbed. He waited, inhaled deeply, then exhaled. No pain followed the movement of the lungs. The sensation remained localized to the meridian itself.

Mechanical pressure, then, not respiratory failure. He continued. The dull friction trailed downward through his chest, but none of the predecessor's fatal warning signs appeared. That death had involved escalation—rapidly increasing heat, conflicting currents, uncontrolled acceleration, spreading pressure, and finally tearing. His current sample displayed none of them. Earth Qi remained exactly what he had selected it to be: heavy, slow, stubborn, profoundly boring. Beautifully boring.

The fragment finally passed beneath the lower ribs and approached the diaphragm. Ling Tian's breathing loosened as it moved farther from the heart and lungs. Sweat had soaked the back of his tunic, and both his shoulders ached from remaining motionless for so long, but he refused to rush the final stage. The closer the sample came to the lower abdomen, the more clearly he could sense the empty spiritual structure waiting there. Then the Dantian reacted. Ling Tian immediately halted the transit.

Until now, the space beneath his navel had felt spiritually empty. Not physically hollow, obviously; his intestines would strongly object to that diagnosis. But the Dantian itself carried the impression of an unused reservoir: present, structured, capable of containing something, yet currently holding nothing. As the Earth Qi approached, a faint pull emerged from that empty space. Ling Tian frowned. He allowed the fragment to drift forward without pushing. It moved. Slowly, but unmistakably.

The Dantian appeared to attract Qi naturally.

"Well," he murmured quietly.

"At least one part of this anatomy comes with automation." He did not surrender control completely. Ling Tian maintained a slight resistance, preventing the sample from accelerating, while allowing the natural attraction to assist the final stage. The meridian widened noticeably near the core, and the grinding discomfort began to ease. The tiny deposit moved downward until it hovered directly before the threshold of the Dantian. Ling Tian stopped one final time. He was exhausted.

His head throbbed faintly from sustained concentration. His entire right arm felt bruised from the inside, and his back had become stiff despite the reasonably comfortable posture. Yet every relevant signal remained within acceptable parameters. No tearing. No uncontrolled heat. No contamination from other elements. No loss of sensation. The Earth Qi remained stable. The Dantian waited. He opened the threshold. The fragment dropped inside. The effect was immediate.

The grinding ache vanished so suddenly that Ling Tian's eyes opened in surprise. One moment, the dense Earth Qi pressed heavily against the final section of meridian; the next, it was gone from the pathway entirely. A low sensation pulsed from beneath his navel. It was not quite sound and not exactly vibration, but something between the two; deep, steady, and unexpectedly cool. Ling Tian stared down at his abdomen before closing his eyes again and directing his perception toward the Dantian. The Earth Qi was there.

It had changed. The elemental character remained unmistakably Earth, dense and stable, but the roughness that had defined its journey through the meridians was gone. Inside the Dantian, the fragment seemed to settle naturally, rounding within his perception until it resembled a microscopic drop of heavy liquid. Then it began to move. Ling Tian immediately tensed. The drop rotated. Once. Then again. Each slow revolution released a faint pulse into the surrounding body. Ling Tian watched with intense suspicion.

The manual claimed that after natural Qi entered the "silent ocean," the practitioner's internal nature would wash away the wildness of heaven and make the energy their own. For once, the poetry appeared to describe an observable process with surprising accuracy. Outside the Dantian, the Earth Qi had felt distinctly foreign. Now, after only a few rotations within the core, that alien quality faded. The energy remained Earth Qi, but his body no longer reacted to it as an intrusion.

A second cooling pulse spread outward from beneath his navel. The muscles around his abdomen relaxed. A faint warmth traveled toward his limbs. Even the lingering ache in his right arm softened slightly. Ling Tian remained absolutely motionless. Success was not a reason to abandon caution. Delayed failures existed. He had audited several companies whose entire business models depended on that fact. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Nothing exploded. The drop continued rotating. His breathing remained normal.

His meridians remained intact. Ling Tian slowly opened his eyes. The shack looked exactly the same. For some reason, he found that slightly insulting. The oil lamp still burned rancid animal fat. The wall beside the door still leaned inward. Wind continued flowing through cracks large enough to make the concept of "indoors" debatable. There was no golden light erupting from his body, no celestial phenomenon above Crimson Peak, no disembodied voice announcing that an unparalleled genius had begun his rise. Good.

He preferred it that way. Ling Tian looked down at his right hand. It was trembling slightly now that he was no longer forcing every muscle into disciplined stillness. He slowly curled the fingers into a fist. His arm hurt, but it was ordinary pain: dull, exhausted, bruised. Alive pain. A laugh escaped him. Quiet and short. He leaned backward until his shoulders touched the rough wooden wall and allowed his head to rest against the planks.

For the first time since beginning the procedure, he drew in a completely unregulated breath. Then another. He had done it. The amount of Qi inside his Dantian was laughable. Compared to the colossal storm-wrapped creature that had passed over Crimson Peak, the scaled beast pulling the Yan Clan carriage, or even the cultivators whose presence had silenced Hua City, his current reserve probably did not qualify as a rounding error.

If experienced cultivators possessed rivers or oceans of refined energy, Ling Tian had acquired atmospheric moisture. He smiled anyway. The amount did not matter. The method did.

He had isolated a single element, reduced the intake to the smallest controllable quantity, closed the entry point immediately, moved the sample through the meridian network in measured stages, stopped whenever the biological feedback changed, adjusted his route when resistance became dangerous, and successfully stored the Qi within the Dantian without rupturing anything important. It was repeatable. At least theoretically. Repeatable processes produced data. Data improved procedures.

Improved procedures could eventually scale. The grin on Ling Tian's face widened before he caught himself. That line of thinking was dangerous. This was exactly how idiots died. They succeeded once, became excited, and immediately multiplied the experiment. One drop worked, so they tried ten. Ten worked, so they attempted a hundred. Then a senior cultivator discovered fragments of them decorating the ceiling and solemnly declared that the Dao was merciless. No. Tonight was finished.

Ling Tian would not absorb another sample. He would not test Water Qi. He would not become curious about Fire. He would absolutely not investigate whether Wind moved faster through the meridians. He would sit here, observe the deposit, sleep if possible, and inspect his physical condition in the morning. The correct response to a successful high-risk test was to stop touching the equipment. He pulled his spiritual awareness inward until the surrounding environmental Qi disappeared completely.

Only the tiny deposit within his Dantian remained, rotating with its slow, steady rhythm. Pulse. Pause. Pulse. Something faint spread outward with each revolution. Ling Tian studied the sensation. It was too subtle to classify properly, but his right hand already felt slightly less exhausted than it should have. The pain from the transit remained, yet beneath it ran a strange steadiness, as if his body had acquired an extremely small secondary source of support. Interesting. Tomorrow's problem.

Tonight, he allowed himself one moment of satisfaction. He had gathered herbs before. He had inherited the shack, the manual, the body, and whatever miserable possessions the original Ling Tian had left behind. He had purchased food using copper earned through labor. Yet none of those things felt quite like this. This was his. One microscopic drop of refined Earth Qi. Possibly the smallest cultivation reserve possessed by any active cultivator on Crimson Peak. Ling Tian valued it immensely.

The world remained dangerous. He remained poor. He remained physically ten years old. He was still one careless encounter with a high-level cultivator away from becoming an unidentified stain on the landscape. But one variable had changed. Yesterday, he had been a mortal capable of sensing Qi. Tonight, he possessed Qi of his own. The difference was microscopic. So had been the transaction. Ling Tian closed his eyes, feeling the small pulse turning steadily beneath his navel. The first deposit had cleared.

And, most importantly, he was still alive.