Chương 27: Chapter 26

The morning after Ling Tian buried his first proper cultivation ledger beneath the floorboards, he began treating his life with considerably more structure. Not because structure was exciting. That was precisely the appeal. For the past week, nearly every improvement had arrived through some combination of desperation, experimentation, accidental discovery, and events that could easily have ended with another corpse on Crimson Peak.

Ling Tian had learned enough to understand that surviving one dangerous experiment did not make improvisation a valid long-term strategy. He needed routine. Routine created comparable conditions. Comparable conditions created useful data. Useful data made dying from the same mistake twice slightly less embarrassing. So Ling Tian created a schedule. The first rule concerned food. He no longer trained on an empty stomach.

Every morning began beside the small hearth, usually before sunlight fully reached the eastern ridge. Ling Tian would revive the embers, place the clay pot above them, and cook whatever combination of rice, pork, rendered fat, root vegetables, and seasoning remained available. The meals were not elegant. They were dense. That mattered more. The plateau collapse had permanently cured Ling Tian of romantic ideas about cultivators surviving through willpower.

Whatever Earth Qi was doing inside his body, his current stage still required ordinary food in substantial quantities. Possibly more than an ordinary child. Possibly less than his physical output suggested. The exact relationship remained uncertain. That was why he wrote everything down. He began with rough portions rather than pretending he possessed a scale. One bowl of cooked rice. Half a bowl of pork and vegetables. Additional fat added during cooking. Hunger level before eating.

Hunger level one hour afterward. Crude measurements. Consistent measurements. That distinction mattered. After breakfast came physical training. Ling Tian deliberately avoided designing the sort of routine a deranged martial arts master might approve of. He had no intention of destroying his body every morning simply because Earth Qi made recovery unusually fast. The goal was adaptation. Not punishment. He began with ordinary movements. Push-ups. Squats. Sit-ups. Short holds. Basic balance work. Nothing mystical.

Nothing dramatic. The first morning, Ling Tian discovered that the numbers he remembered from his previous life had become almost useless. Twenty push-ups barely registered. Fifty created warmth. By the time his arms finally began developing meaningful fatigue, the count had already reached a number the original Ling Tian would have considered ridiculous. Ling Tian stopped there. Not at collapse. At useful fatigue. That was another rule.

The Earth Qi inside his Dantian had a tendency to reduce muscular warning signs before his deeper reserves were necessarily exhausted. If Ling Tian trained until the body physically refused to continue, he risked recreating the exact mistake that had dropped him onto the plateau. So he learned to stop earlier. Observe the first meaningful fatigue. Continue briefly. Then recover. The distinction made training slower. Ling Tian considered that an acceptable price for remaining conscious.

His squats followed the same pattern. So did the abdominal work. The two-drop Earth Qi reserve pulsed steadily throughout each session, reducing soreness and stabilizing his joints, but Ling Tian no longer treated that support as permission to ignore biological limits. Instead, he recorded how long fatigue took to appear. How quickly it faded. Whether the next morning produced stiffness. Whether hunger arrived earlier after higher-volume sessions. The ledger beneath the floor slowly accumulated answers.

It also accumulated questions much faster. By the end of the first week, Ling Tian had confirmed one uncomfortable fact. His body was improving too quickly for his old intuition to remain useful. Movements that challenged him on Monday became warm-ups several days later. The bronze weapon became easier to handle. The mountain trails became easier to climb. Even his perception changed subtly as repeated use improved his ability to separate meaningful signals from Crimson Peak's overwhelming background of Earth Qi.

Cultivation was not merely adding strength. It was changing the baseline from which he measured strength. That required constant recalibration. Every few days, Ling Tian returned to the secluded plateau. He resisted the temptation to convert every visit into another demolition project. The broken pine remained where he had left it. The damaged boulder remained partially shattered near the western edge. Both served as reminders that can break and should continue breaking were different categories.

Instead, the plateau became his controlled testing ground. He repeated the sixty-meter shuttle runs under similar conditions. Same approximate time of day. Similar meal beforehand. Same bronze weapon carried during the run. Same number of crossings whenever possible. The results became clearer once they existed on paper. His sprinting improved. Not in a sudden, impossible leap. Gradually. His turns became cleaner. His balance adjusted faster. The heavy bronze club disrupted his movement less with each session.

More interesting was the continued reduction in muscular fatigue. The stronger the Earth Qi reserve became, the less often his legs reached the severe burning stage that had characterized the first plateau test. That still did not prove why. Ling Tian maintained the same warning in the ledger. Observed effect is not confirmed mechanism. He liked that sentence enough to copy it near the beginning of every new testing section. The same principle applied to food. His appetite remained large. Very large.

But it did not scale proportionally with the ridiculous amount of work his body could now produce. That strengthened the hypothesis that Earth Qi was contributing something to his energy economy. Perhaps directly. Perhaps indirectly. Perhaps through a cultivation mechanism his modern education had no category for. Ling Tian still refused to write confirmed. One day, he might obtain better evidence. Until then, the ledger would remain irritatingly honest. His combat practice developed more cautiously.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Calling it combat practice was generous. Ling Tian possessed no formal technique. He had no teacher. No martial manual. No understanding of local weapon traditions. What he possessed was a sealed bronze sword with excellent balance and a rapidly improving grasp of basic mechanics. So he trained movement rather than pretending to invent a martial art. Foot placement. Recovery after a swing.

How quickly he could stop the weapon without overloading his wrists. How far a horizontal strike pulled his center of gravity. How to transition from an overhead motion back into a guarded stance without presenting his entire body to an imaginary opponent. The waterfall became his preferred location. Its constant roar swallowed the sound of bronze striking wood and stone, reducing the chance that anyone passing several ridges away would wonder why a child was conducting demolition work beside a hidden cave.

Ling Tian chose targets carefully. Dead wood. Loose stones. Already broken sections of rock. He avoided living trees unless necessary and refused to repeatedly strike the same boulder simply to create impressive damage. He was training himself. Not landscaping. The weapon remained sealed throughout the month. Ling Tian tested the hilt periodically. Not every day. That would have become obsessive.

Once every few sessions, he would brace the scabbard, grip the hilt, and attempt to draw the blade with controlled force. Nothing. No movement. No pulse. No voice. No response to spiritual perception. The sword continued functioning as the world's most suspiciously durable stick. Ling Tian recorded each failed attempt anyway. The faint heartbeat-like sensation during the original extraction remained the only anomalous event associated with the weapon. One observation. Never repeated. Still unexplained.

Ling Tian found that increasingly annoying. His spiritual cultivation progressed much more slowly than his physical training. That was deliberate. Three days after the second successful Earth Qi deposit, Ling Tian attempted the third. The preparation remained almost identical. Eat first. Rest. No strenuous training beforehand. Check for lingering meridian pain. Open perception narrowly. Isolate the smallest reliably controlled fragment of Earth Qi. One access point. One route. No increase in quantity.

The third deposit entered through his right palm. Travel through the meridian network felt easier than the second attempt, though not enough to justify carelessness. The wrist bottleneck remained. The elbow required alignment. The shoulder-to-torso transition still produced the most uncomfortable pressure. Ling Tian followed the established procedure. Pause. Observe. Continue. The third deposit reached the Dantian without incident. The existing Earth Qi responded almost immediately.

The new fragment settled into the same slow rotational pattern, its rough external quality smoothing as it integrated with the refined reserve already present. Ling Tian waited for an hour afterward. Nothing failed. He opened the floor. Removed the clay jar. Unrolled the ledger. Recorded everything. Three days later, he repeated the process. Then again. The interval became one of the most important rules in his routine. Ling Tian did not know whether three days was medically or spiritually optimal.

He knew it had worked. That was enough. Each session received the same checklist. No lingering meridian pain. Normal appetite. Normal sleep. No unusual temperature changes. Stable existing Qi. No new symptoms. If anything looked wrong, the next deposit would be postponed. Progress did not receive a guaranteed appointment. By the middle of the month, Ling Tian had become surprisingly efficient at the procedure. That efficiency worried him. Familiarity was dangerous.

The first deposit had been terrifying enough that every centimeter of movement received complete attention. Later deposits began feeling routine. Routine invited shortcuts. Ling Tian recognized the problem before it became serious and added another line to the ledger. Ease of procedure does not reduce the consequences of failure. He underlined it. Once. The paper remained grateful. After that, he deliberately slowed every cultivation session. Even when he knew the route. Especially when he knew the route.

The Earth Qi reserve grew incrementally. Third deposit. Fourth. Fifth. Then more. By the final week, Ling Tian had crossed into double digits when measuring the reserve in original deposit-sized units. It still looked tiny inside the vast emptiness of the Dantian. A genuine cultivator might have laughed. Ling Tian did not care. Every fragment had entered safely. Every fragment had been documented. No flood. No breakthrough. No dramatic heavenly phenomenon. Exactly as intended.

The physical consequences accumulated gradually. Cold became increasingly irrelevant. Ling Tian still perceived it. Freezing water still felt freezing. Mountain wind still registered against exposed skin. But the body no longer responded with the same desperate struggle to preserve heat. Earth Qi kept everything stable enough that bathing in the waterfall basin became unpleasant rather than punishing. His recovery improved too. Minor soreness rarely survived until the following morning.

Small cuts closed normally but seemed to stop aching sooner. Bruises faded faster than Ling Tian expected. He documented each observation cautiously. Healing was not regeneration. He had no intention of testing whether Earth Qi could repair serious wounds by creating one. Some questions deserved to remain unanswered until circumstances forced them. His perception radius continued growing. Again, Ling Tian refused to assign all credit to cultivation. Part of the improvement came from increased Qi.

Part came from simple practice. He had spent weeks learning how Crimson Peak felt. Earth was no longer an undifferentiated wall of pressure. Wind could be ignored when necessary. Verdant signatures could be sorted by density. Changes in terrain became easier to notice. Ling Tian even became better at identifying where perception became unreliable. That might have been the most valuable improvement. Knowing when a tool stopped being trustworthy mattered more than simply having the tool.

By the third week, the mountain around his shack had become deeply familiar. Ling Tian knew which trails remained stable after rain. Which slopes accumulated loose slate. Where animal tracks appeared most frequently. Which ravines carried water year-round. Where Cloudmint grew abundantly enough that an ordinary gathering trip would look believable. He also knew where the rarer Verdant signatures remained hidden. Those he mostly left alone. That decision was intentional. Auntie Mei's warning remained valid.

One unusually successful gathering trip could be luck. Repeated sacks of rare herbs from a ten-year-old orphan became a question. Ling Tian preferred not becoming a question. So he harvested common plants occasionally. Cloudmint. Bitterleaf. Other ordinary medicinal herbs the original boy recognized. Some were used. Some were sold during small visits to Hua City. The earnings were unimpressive. That was the point. A ragged gatherer selling ordinary herbs looked normal. Normal was valuable.

The rare plants remained his emergency income source. Ling Tian treated them the same way he treated the two hidden silver coins. Available. Useful. Not to be touched without reason. The month continued. His days settled into a rhythm. Eat. Train. Work. Observe. Record. Every third day, cultivation replaced the harder evening training. On those nights, Ling Tian ate more heavily, rested longer, and opened the floor only after the new deposit had remained stable for several hours. The ledger thickened.

His handwriting improved. The diagrams remained terrible. One drawing of the shoulder meridian became so confusing that Ling Tian stared at it for several minutes before adding a note beneath it. Diagram unreliable. Refer to written description. That was probably the most honest annotation in the entire document. The routine changed his body. Not overnight. Not into the exaggerated physique of an adult martial artist somehow compressed into a child. Ling Tian was still ten. Still short.

Still carrying the consequences of years of poor nutrition. But by the end of the fourth week, the starving appearance had begun to disappear. He noticed it at the waterfall. Ling Tian had stripped off his tunic after training and stepped into the shallow edge of the basin to wash away sweat and dust. The water remained painfully cold, though the discomfort no longer reached deep enough to force him out immediately. He crouched beside a calmer section. His reflection moved across the surface. Ling Tian stared.

The face remained familiar. Thin. Young. Dark hair falling messily across his forehead. But the hollows beneath his cheeks had softened. His collarbones no longer projected so sharply beneath the skin. The ribs that had once been visible with every breath were harder to count. His arms remained narrow, but there was actual muscle there now. Not much. Enough. His shoulders had gained a little definition. His legs looked stronger. Healthier. That was the more important word. Ling Tian flexed one arm.

The reflection produced a deeply unimpressive bicep. He considered it.

"Terrifying." The waterfall continued roaring. Ling Tian smiled despite himself. The visual change mattered less than the way the body moved. He no longer climbed out of the basin carefully because his joints felt fragile. He stepped onto the rock. Balanced. Reached down. Lifted the bronze weapon. A month earlier, the sword had been awkwardly large and undeniably heavy. Now the tar-covered stick settled into his hand with comfortable familiarity. Still heavy. Just no longer burdensome.

Ling Tian swung it slowly through the air. The motion stopped exactly where he intended. Better. He returned to the shack that evening in a good mood. The mood lasted approximately thirty seconds. Then he opened the pantry. The rice sack felt suspiciously light. Ling Tian frowned. He lifted it. Almost empty. That was expected eventually. Still offensive. The remaining pork supply was worse. Only a small wrapped portion remained inside the clay container.

The root vegetables had been reduced to several unimpressive pieces, while his cooking oil and seasonings had also declined through repeated use. Ling Tian stood in the corner and performed a silent inventory. Food runway: poor. He checked his visible money next. The small copper pouch contained very little. Most of the big copper had disappeared too. Not irresponsibly. That was almost more irritating. The money had gone exactly where it was supposed to go. Rice. Meat. Vegetables. Lamp fuel. Salt.

Occasional replacement supplies. A little cloth. Ink. More food. Then more food. The two silver remained hidden inside the inner layers of his clothing. Untouched. Ling Tian checked them anyway. Both present. Good. That was emergency capital. He could spend one. Technically. But using emergency reserves to cover ordinary operating expenses did not solve the underlying problem. It simply delayed recognizing it. Ling Tian sat beside the pantry and reviewed the month.

His initial Hua City purchase had provided a large amount of food, but not enough to sustain four weeks of increased activity without replenishment. Small market trips had filled the gaps, funded partly through his remaining copper and partly through ordinary herb sales. Those small sales had preserved his cover. They had not preserved his budget. Cloudmint remained Cloudmint. Improved search efficiency could make gathering common herbs easier. It could not transform them into high-margin inventory.

Ling Tian rubbed one hand over his face.

"The operating costs are becoming offensive." The comment echoed faintly around the shack. His stomach, apparently sensing discussion of future supply problems, chose that moment to growl. Ling Tian looked at it.

"You are the largest expense category." No defense was offered. He opened the ledger. The financial problem did not require complicated analysis. His body was stronger. His training volume had increased. His cultivation schedule required adequate nutritional reserves. His ordinary income could no longer support the system comfortably. The foundation itself was succeeding. The supply chain supporting it was not. That meant the month-long isolation phase had reached its natural end. Ling Tian closed the ledger.

There was no crisis yet. That distinction mattered. He still possessed two silver. Enough emergency money to buy food. He still had common herbs available nearby. Enough low-margin income to prevent immediate starvation. The situation was not dangerous. It was becoming inefficient. That was the correct time to solve it. Before inefficient became urgent. Ling Tian replaced the ledger inside its clay jar and buried it beneath the floor again. Then he retrieved his gathering sack.

The canvas had been repaired twice during the month. It still looked terrible. Good. He checked the straps. Serviceable. The bronze stick came next. Ling Tian lifted it and gave the tar coating an inspection. Several sections had worn smooth from repeated handling, though enough dirt and pitch remained to hide the metal underneath. He would need to reapply the camouflage eventually. Not today. The weapon looked worthless enough. He stepped outside. Evening had settled across Crimson Peak.

The last sunlight burned orange along the western ridges while the upper mountain disappeared into gathering shadow. The familiar trail toward Hua City descended below him. Ling Tian did not look that way. Not yet. He turned uphill. His spiritual perception opened carefully. Earth filled the mountain. Wind moved between the ridges. Verdant life spread through the forest. Ling Tian filtered. Common signatures dimmed. Cloudmint disappeared into the background. Ordinary shrubs vanished. The mountain became simpler.

Then the concentrated signals emerged. Rare plants. Hidden in cliffs. Ravines. Shaded ledges. Places ordinary gatherers avoided because reaching them required equipment, luck, or a dangerously relaxed attitude toward falling. Ling Tian had intentionally left many of those signatures untouched for weeks. Some had strengthened. Interesting. Potential maturation. Worth recording later. For now, he needed inventory. High-value inventory.

Enough to restore his food budget without returning to Auntie Mei every three days with another suspicious miracle sack. That meant a targeted harvest. Limited volume. Several different species if possible. Common herbs mixed in for camouflage. No flooding. No greed. Ling Tian adjusted the gathering sack across his shoulder. A month earlier, climbing into the upper ridges had been an experiment. Tonight, it felt like returning to work. That realization amused him more than it should have.

His cultivation was stable. His body was fed. His records were current. His emergency reserve remained intact. The only account currently underperforming was cash flow. Compared with being dead, that felt refreshingly ordinary. Ling Tian rested the ugly bronze club against one shoulder and looked toward the first concentrated Verdant signature burning faintly at the edge of his perception. Then he started uphill. Crimson Peak still contained plenty of assets. His fiscal quarter simply required another harvest.