Chương 26: Chapter 25

The second line nearly tore the paper. Ling Tian reduced pressure. Lesson learned. The next section recorded his own condition before cultivation. This required more estimation, but the broad facts were reliable enough. Approximately ten years old. Chronically underfed. Low muscle mass. Poor endurance. Significant cold sensitivity. Severe fatigue after ordinary mountain travel. No meaningful cultivation base. He also noted that he lacked numerical measurements for weight, resting pulse, or caloric intake.

That mattered. If something had not been measured, the ledger would say so. A blank number was better than fictional precision. Ling Tian had worked in environments where that principle was occasionally regarded as radical. He liked it much more when the consequences involved his organs. The first controlled Earth Qi deposit filled the next several sections. Ling Tian reconstructed the procedure step by step.

He recorded how he isolated the smallest reliably perceptible quantity of Earth Qi beneath his right palm, opened one meridian gate only wide enough to admit that sample, and closed it immediately afterward. Then came the route. Palm. Wrist. Forearm. Elbow. Upper arm. Shoulder. Torso. Dantian. Rather than writing each location as a separate note, Ling Tian sketched a crude human figure beside the text and marked the approximate pathway through it. The drawing looked terrible. He stared at it.

The torso resembled a potato. The limbs resembled lines added to the potato by someone under administrative pressure. Ling Tian added labels. It became an annotated potato. Acceptable. The more important information involved the bottlenecks. The wrist had created resistance. So had the elbow. The shoulder-to-torso transition remained the most uncomfortable section, largely because mistakes there felt considerably more consequential than mistakes in the forearm.

During the second deposit, changing joint angle before forcing the sample through those narrow points had reduced resistance. That deserved emphasis. Better routing did not justify larger dosage. Ling Tian wrote the warning carefully. Procedure becoming easier does not mean quantity should increase. He underlined it once. Twice had already proven unnecessarily hostile toward the paper. The effects following the first deposit came next.

Ling Tian recorded reduced cold sensitivity, faster muscular recovery, dramatically improved endurance, stronger structural support during impact, and expansion of spiritual perception. None of the effects received invented percentages. Where he lacked timing equipment or measurable baselines, he described the direction and scale of change honestly. Then he reached the first plateau incident. Ling Tian slowed. That section mattered too much to summarize casually.

He reconstructed the progression from memory: extended climbing, repeated sprint testing, impact training with the bronze weapon, growing hunger, and Earth Qi repeatedly reducing the muscular fatigue that should have forced him to stop. Then came the collapse. Hand tremor. Cold sweat. Narrowing vision. Nausea. Sudden weakness. Earth Qi unable to correct the symptoms. Gradual recovery only after food and rest. Ling Tian labeled the event Probable acute energy depletion / low blood sugar analogue.

The word probable remained. He was not a doctor. He had no glucose meter. The symptom pattern fit well enough to guide survival decisions, but the ledger would not promote a working explanation into biological fact merely because it sounded reasonable. Beneath the entry, he added the more useful conclusion: Earth Qi could apparently mask or rapidly correct some forms of muscular fatigue without necessarily replacing the deeper energy reserves being consumed. That explained why the plateau test had become dangerous.

The body could keep operating after one of its ordinary warning systems had been partially suppressed. Ling Tian leaned back from the table. His fingers cramped. He stared at them in mild betrayal. Breaking granite had apparently become easier than writing several pages by hand. Cultivation was an unusual technological direction for civilization. He stood, reheated some of the morning meal, and ate another bowl before continuing.

The break allowed the first pages to dry and gave his hand enough time to stop protesting the unfamiliar workload. When he returned to the stool, the shack had warmed slightly from the hearth. Ling Tian moved on to the financial and nutritional correction. He recorded the rare-herb harvest, sale through Auntie Mei, increased access to food, and the deliberate recovery period before the second cultivation attempt.

The exact herb prices mattered less to the biological record than the resulting change in diet, but Ling Tian still noted enough to explain the new conditions. The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Two silver remained hidden as emergency reserve. Big copper and small copper covered routine purchases. More importantly, his diet had changed from starvation-level millet and dried meat to rice, pork, fat, vegetables, and regular meals. That was a major experimental variable.

The second Earth Qi deposit followed after seventy-two hours. Same element. Same approximate quantity. Same entry point. Same route. Lower procedural uncertainty. Successful integration. No immediate adverse reaction. Ling Tian wrote the sequence as a proper paragraph rather than treating the similarities as evidence that the process was safe forever. Two successful attempts established repeatability only within a very narrow range of conditions. That distinction stayed visible in the notes.

Then he reached the current morning's test. Ling Tian documented the sixty-meter shuttle course and the lack of precise timing equipment. He recorded that sprint speed was visibly higher but unmeasured, while forty repeated crossings produced far less muscular fatigue than the earlier test. Breathing and heart rate still rose normally, which suggested cardiovascular demand remained intact even while local muscular recovery improved. The passive behavior of the Earth Qi appeared different too.

After one deposit, severe fatigue had accumulated before a stronger pulse reduced it. After two, the background reinforcement seemed sufficient to prevent that same fatigue from building as quickly. Ling Tian stopped there. He did not write that the Qi was "flushing lactic acid." He had no evidence for that. He did not write that it was repairing muscle fibers in real time. He had no evidence for that either. The ledger recorded the observable behavior and left the mechanism open. That was the point.

The granite test followed. The sealed bronze weapon could now fracture stone repeatedly without producing obvious injury to his wrists, elbows, shoulders, or spine. Recoil still traveled through the body, but Earth Qi appeared to distribute the stress across the full skeletal structure rather than allowing it to remain concentrated in smaller joints. Again, no invented measurements. The result itself was enough. The final observation from the morning required more care. Ling Tian wrote slowly.

No repeat metabolic collapse despite greater workload. Hunger present but moderate. Below that, he added: Possible improvement in energy efficiency after second E1 deposit. Confidence: low. Then came the most important line. Major confounding variable: substantially improved nutrition and recovery before test. Ling Tian stared at the sentence for several seconds. Good. That might be the most valuable entry on the page. Not because the theory was correct.

Because the ledger contained the reason it might be wrong. He added instructions for future comparisons. Maintain a stable diet for several days before testing. Track meal quantity as consistently as it was practical. Compare hunger onset after similar workloads. Do not deliberately starve himself merely to improve the quality of the data. That final rule felt worth writing in full. A better experiment is not worth becoming unconscious alone on a mountain. Ling Tian considered the sentence.

Slightly less clinical than the rest. He left it. Experimental ethics became much easier when the test subject and research director shared a body. The next section covered spiritual perception. Ling Tian recorded the change from his initial short-range awareness to the much broader radius he could now maintain, along with the difference between raw perception and filtered perception. Crimson Peak's overwhelming Earth Qi could be muted. Verdant signatures could be isolated.

Large diffuse organisms such as trees felt different from compact, unusually dense botanical concentrations. That distinction had led directly to the discovery of the Crimson Starpetals. He also noted that improvement in perception could not automatically be attributed to additional Earth Qi. Practice mattered. Familiarity mattered. Learning how to filter unwanted information mattered. Another confounding variable.

The more he wrote, the more Ling Tian realized how many of his previous conclusions had quietly combined cultivation progress with simple skill acquisition. The distinction pleased him. It meant not every improvement required increasing the dangerous substance inside his body. By late afternoon, several dense sections covered the treated paper. Ling Tian's handwriting had improved with repetition.

It remained unattractive, but the spacing became more consistent, his lines stayed straighter, and the rigid nib allowed him to write compactly enough that the expensive paper lasted longer than expected. He paused often to let fresh ink dry before rolling the completed portion aside. The shack darkened gradually around him. Wind strengthened outside. Eventually, Ling Tian lit the cheap oil lamp and continued beneath its yellow glow. The next section concerned the bronze sword.

He deliberately omitted the exact location of the hidden cavern. There was no reason to record every secret simply because paper existed. The weapon itself received a concise description: ancient bronze construction, exceptional preservation, unusually good balance, blade initially drawable, then completely sealed by the following morning. No visible locking mechanism. No active Qi signature that Ling Tian could detect. Current function: blunt weapon. Current exterior: covered in pitch and dirt for concealment.

Ling Tian nearly moved on. Then he remembered the pulse. During the initial extraction, when the weapon first left the stone pedestal, something had traveled through the hilt into his palm. One brief sensation. Heartbeat-like. So faint that he had dismissed it almost immediately. Ling Tian stared at the page. That was exactly the kind of detail memory would discard if it remained inconveniently unexplained. He added the observation. * During initial extraction, one faint pulse felt through hilt. Heartbeat-like.

Extremely brief. Cause unknown. Possibly mechanical vibration. No repeat observation. * He reread the line. Better. Not mystical. Not ignored. Recorded. The storm event received another section. Ling Tian possessed very little hard information there, so the entry remained appropriately limited. An exceptionally large storm had formed over the upper region of Crimson Peak. Spiritual pressure had increased dramatically.

His perception suggested the presence of an enormous living entity somewhere within or above the cloud system. He did not speculate about species. He did not estimate cultivation realm. He recorded the useful conclusion. Avoid upper region until significantly stronger or better informed. Confidence in that recommendation: extremely high. Ling Tian continued writing as night settled fully over the mountain. The oil lamp trembled whenever wind slipped through the walls.

His hand began aching again, forcing him to change his grip several times, while the level inside the first ink jar dropped far faster than expected. Apparently administration also possessed operating costs. Of course it did. Still, the expense felt worthwhile. Page after page accumulated. Scattered memories became chronology. Impressions became observations. Near-death experiences became warnings instead of anecdotes. Unknowns became clearly labeled gaps instead of quietly hardening into assumptions.

Ling Tian found the process unexpectedly calming. The cultivation system remained dangerous. Crimson Peak remained dangerous. The wider world remained full of people and creatures capable of killing him without particularly noticing the effort. None of that changed. But ignorance felt different once it had borders. A question written on paper remained a question. It could not quietly disguise itself as knowledge. Near midnight, Ling Tian finally stopped.

His shoulders ached from leaning over the table, his fingers were stained black, and the lamp had burned low enough that conserving oil became more valuable than another page of notes. He set the pen down and looked across the work. Dense lines of Bahasa Indonesia covered the paper, broken by crude diagrams, abbreviated elemental labels, warning boxes, and sections separated by dates relative to the first controlled deposit. To anyone from this world, the ledger should look incomprehensible.

To Ling Tian, it was the first cultivation manual he had encountered that he actually trusted. No cranes. No moonlight entering lakes. No rivers becoming oceans. No demands that the reader understand the temperament of heaven before being told where to put the Qi. Just observations, procedures, warnings, uncertainties, and the occasional annotated potato. Much better. Then another practical problem arrived. Storage. Leaving the ledger on the table would make the entire encryption exercise feel slightly theatrical.

The shack had no meaningful lock. Anyone determined enough to enter could probably defeat the door by leaning against it with conviction. Ling Tian surveyed the room. Under the sleeping mat was obvious. The roof leaked. The walls barely possessed enough material to conceal themselves. The floor offered better possibilities. One corner of the shack stayed relatively dry because the roof overhang protected it from most rainfall. A wooden plank along that edge had already separated slightly from the others.

Ling Tian crossed the room and tested it. Loose. He wedged his fingers beneath the edge and lifted until the board came free with a protesting creak. Packed soil lay underneath. Good. Ling Tian began digging a shallow cavity. Then stopped. Paper buried directly in dirt. Excellent way to create an encrypted compost pile. He looked around. One of the smaller clay storage jars near the food supplies would work better.

Ling Tian emptied it, cleaned the interior carefully, and held it near the hearth until he was satisfied the clay had dried completely. The ledger received another layer of cloth before going inside, and the lid was tied tightly enough to discourage insects and casual moisture. Only then did Ling Tian place the jar beneath the floor. He packed soil around it, replaced the plank, and scattered old dust across the seam until nothing looked recently disturbed. The remaining supplies were separated.

Ink jars went into a different corner. The pen and spare nibs stayed beneath the old wooden box containing his parents' brushes. If someone discovered one item, there was no reason to make the rest conveniently available beside it. Ling Tian returned to the stool. The day had contained no near-death experience. That felt pleasantly unusual. He had purchased stationery, organized data, built a basic encryption system, and buried a ledger beneath the floor. For Aditya, the entire exercise was almost nostalgic.

For Ling Tian, it might eventually determine whether he repeated the death that brought him here. He looked toward the section of floor concealing the jar. Every future cultivation attempt now had somewhere to go. Every new symptom could be compared against the previous one. Every theory could remain labeled as theory until enough evidence justified promoting it. Most importantly, his memory no longer had to function as the sole database for an increasingly complicated magical experiment.

For the first time, Ling Tian's cultivation possessed something resembling institutional memory. He leaned back against the wall and let out a slow breath. That might actually be more valuable than another drop of Qi. Almost. Tomorrow, he could begin using it properly.