Chương 9: Chapter 8

Cause of death: uncontrolled intake of multiple incompatible or poorly interacting energy types into an unconditioned meridian network, followed by panic-induced escalation. Contributing factor: severe desperation. Additional contributing factor: cultivation instruction written by a poet. Ling Tian stared at the manual. The anger he had felt toward the original boy earlier was gone. Calling it simple stupidity would have been unfair.

The child had done exactly what desperate children did when the only escape from misery seemed to be sitting in front of them. He had gambled because doing nothing also looked like death. Ling Tian understood that better than he wanted to. The difference was that he now possessed information purchased with that boy's life. Wasting it would be unforgivable. He leaned forward and studied the notes scratched into the wood. The problem was no longer whether cultivation worked. It did. The problem was exposure.

The body could apparently accept Qi. The original Ling Tian had successfully brought it across the boundary of his skin. The failure occurred because the volume was too high, the meridians were unconditioned, several energy types were introduced at once, and the boy had no mechanism for controlling the flow once it began. So Ling Tian would remove those variables. One at a time. He would not "embrace the ten thousand breaths."

The ten thousand breaths could remain outside until they completed the appropriate paperwork. First, he needed one element. Only one. Ling Tian placed both palms against the dirt floor and cautiously loosened the smallest possible fraction of his spiritual perception. The shack changed. Not visually. His eyes remained open, watching the lamp and the dirt beneath his hands, but beneath ordinary sensation another layer surfaced. Wind Qi slipped through the cracks in the walls, restless and irregular.

Residual warmth from the lamp radiated faint Fire Qi. Moisture trapped deeper in the mountain soil carried traces of Water. And beneath his palms sat Earth. Ling Tian focused on it. Compared to the waterfall, the Earth Qi beneath the shack was not especially dense. There were no exposed cliffs or enormous stone formations directly beneath him. Yet the signal was consistent. Slow. Heavy. It seemed to exist with complete indifference toward everything happening above it. He considered the available options.

Fire was eliminated immediately. Its behavior was aggressive, and his predecessor's death had given him enough memories involving internal burning to satisfy his curiosity for the foreseeable future. Wind was also rejected. Too fast. Too mobile. He could barely track its movement outside his body. Allowing it inside seemed like opening a door for a guest who had already demonstrated an enthusiasm for sprinting through hallways with knives. Water was more tempting.

It seemed smoother than Earth and easier to find in large quantities. Unfortunately, the memory of crushing internal pressure remained vivid enough that his abdomen tightened simply thinking about it. That left Earth. Slow. Dense. Stable. Boring. Ling Tian approved immediately. Earth Qi was the cultivation equivalent of placing money in a savings account with terrible interest and excellent government insurance. Exactly his preferred risk profile. The question became quantity.

The manual repeatedly encouraged beginners to draw in "a stream." Ling Tian considered the author's previous recommendations. Then he mentally reduced the suggested amount by several orders of magnitude. No stream. Not even a trickle. A drop. Less than a drop, if possible. The smallest unit he could successfully isolate and still perceive. He would introduce that amount through one access point. He would move it through one predetermined meridian path. He would monitor the reaction continuously.

Any sharp pain, rapid increase in temperature, uncontrolled acceleration, swelling sensation, pressure spike, numbness, or other suspicious biological feedback would terminate the test immediately. No heroism. No enduring agony because pain supposedly strengthened resolve. Pain was an alarm system. Ignoring alarms was how factories exploded. Ling Tian opened his eyes fully and looked around the shack. There was one more problem. If something went wrong, he had no doctor. No healer. No cultivation elder. No pills.

No emergency room. No one even knew he was conducting an experiment. He imagined dying here during the night and Auntie Mei eventually climbing the mountain because he had failed to appear for several days, only to discover his corpse sitting cross-legged beside a bloodstained book. That would be embarrassing. It also strengthened his commitment to caution. He adjusted his position until his legs were comfortably crossed rather than forced into the exaggerated meditation posture illustrated in the manual.

His spine straightened naturally. He rolled his shoulders once and rested his hands on his knees, then reconsidered and placed his right palm against the dirt. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. One entry point. One route. One element. One sample. He began breathing. Not because he believed counting seconds possessed mystical significance.

The manual emphasized stable breathing repeatedly, and he had noticed earlier that spiritual perception became easier when his heartbeat and attention settled. That was enough evidence to retain the practice. Inhale. Slowly. Hold. Exhale. Again. The shack gradually faded from his attention. The lamp still burned. The wind still moved through the walls. The roof still threatened long-term structural collapse. But those facts became distant.

Ling Tian narrowed his awareness until his right hand, the dirt beneath it, and the faint weight of Earth Qi were the only variables that mattered. His heartbeat slowed. The spiritual layer sharpened. He could feel the Earth Qi resting beneath his palm now—not as one continuous mass, but as countless faint concentrations embedded through soil, dust, tiny stones, and the mountain beneath them. Too much. He reduced his focus. Smaller. Again. Smaller.

He searched until one tiny concentration stood apart from everything around it. There. Ling Tian held his attention on it. The amount was pathetic. If cultivators measured Qi in oceans, rivers, streams, or even cups, this would not qualify as moisture left on the rim. Perfect. His mouth twitched. The raw manual wanted him to swallow heaven and earth. Ling Tian intended to begin with a micro-transaction. He mentally reviewed the procedure one final time. Isolate the Earth Qi.

Open the smallest possible entry point in the right palm. Allow only the selected sample inside. Close the entry immediately. Observe. If stable, begin controlled transport. If unstable, abort. No improvisation. No bravery. No greed. His predecessor had already performed the uncontrolled version of the experiment. The result had been conclusive. Ling Tian drew in one last slow breath. The cold air filled his lungs.

For the first time since awakening in this world, he was about to deliberately allow foreign Qi into his body. Not sense it. Not observe it. Absorb it. The distinction made every primitive survival instinct he possessed begin screaming at once. Ling Tian ignored them. Not recklessly. Methodically. The test parameters were established. The variables were isolated. The emergency procedure was as good as he could make it. There was nothing left to audit. He closed his eyes. Phase two was officially over.

The first transaction was ready to begin.

Ling Tian did not move. For several minutes after settling onto the packed dirt floor, he remained perfectly still, his right palm resting flat against the cold ground while his left hand lay loosely over his knee. The weak oil lamp continued burning beside him, occasionally bending whenever the mountain wind found another crack between the rotten wooden planks. Shadows stretched and contracted across the cramped shack.

Somewhere above the sagging roof, pine branches scraped against one another with long, wooden groans. None of it mattered. His attention had narrowed to a patch of soil smaller than his palm, and beneath that soil rested the first deposit. The tiny concentration of Earth Qi remained exactly where he had isolated it, heavy and almost offensively inactive. Wind Qi constantly moved. Fire radiated. Water flowed and accumulated. Earth simply existed.

If he stopped concentrating for a moment, it did not dart away or disperse into the surrounding environment. It waited with the profound patience of something that had spent several million years being part of a mountain and saw no particular reason to change careers tonight. Ling Tian appreciated that quality immensely. He slowly reduced the range of his spiritual perception.

Earlier on the mountain path, opening his senses without restraint had nearly incapacitated him, and that mistake had taught him something useful. Spiritual perception did not have to function as an indiscriminate radar sweeping every available frequency at once. It could be narrowed, filtered, and directed. He pulled his awareness inward until the rest of the shack disappeared from his spiritual map. The Wind Qi slipping through the walls vanished first. The faint Fire Qi radiating from the oil lamp followed.

Even the deeper, heavier presence of the mountain beneath him became irrelevant background noise. Three feet became one foot, then several inches, until the only signal he allowed himself to acknowledge came from directly beneath the center of his right palm. There, the isolated fragment of Earth Qi sat within his awareness, a microscopic concentration embedded among countless others. He studied it carefully. Large ambitions were expensive. Small experiments were survivable.

Tonight, he had no interest in becoming impressive. He inhaled slowly. Four seconds. Held the breath for two. Exhaled over four. Then he repeated the cycle, forcing his heartbeat into something approaching a controlled rhythm. It remained elevated despite the deliberate breathing. He could hear it pounding faintly in his ears, and the reason required no complicated diagnosis. The body remembered.

The original owner of this flesh had sat in a similar posture, opened himself to the energies of the world, and died in agony. Ling Tian could still access the memory if he searched for it: the expanding pressure, the violent heat, the tearing meridians. He refused. The lesson had already been extracted. Reopening the trauma for motivational purposes would only waste concentration. Instead, he focused on the center of his right palm and the meridian point hidden there.

According to The Way of Natural Harmony, the human body possessed numerous locations through which environmental Qi could cross its boundaries. The manual called them lotus gates, breathing apertures, heavenly doors, mortal bridges, and half a dozen other names apparently invented because using one standardized term would have offended the author's artistic sensibilities. Ling Tian had classified all of them under a simpler heading: ports. The point in the center of his right palm was one of them.

There was nothing physically visible in the skin, yet once he knew what to search for, he could sense a faint difference in the way his internal pathways approached the surface there. The manual instructed practitioners to relax these points and "welcome nature without resistance." Ling Tian considered that sentence for several seconds and decided to ignore most of it. No welcoming. No unrestricted access. No natural energy wandering through his biological infrastructure without authorization.

He required one port opened only far enough and long enough for one approved sample to enter. Nothing else. When he attempted to command the meridian point to open, nothing happened. He tried again, more forcefully, and received exactly the same result. Ling Tian frowned. The manual had made this stage sound instinctive, but "open the lotus of flesh" remained completely useless if the flesh had no idea what the word open was supposed to mean.

He stopped trying to force it and instead searched the predecessor's memories for the moments immediately before the fatal absorption. Not the pain itself, but the physical mechanism that had preceded it. A vague somatic impression surfaced: a sensation of releasing tension around something he had never previously known could tighten. Ling Tian followed that memory cautiously. The point in his palm loosened. His breath stopped. Spiritually, the change was immediate.

For the first time, the barrier separating his internal meridian network from the surrounding environmental Qi became permeable. It did not fully open, but it was enough. The Earth Qi beneath his palm reacted. So did everything else. A faint thread of Wind Qi pressed toward the newly responsive opening. Residual Fire Qi from the lamp tugged from the side. The deeper Earth Qi within the dirt shifted in his direction. Ling Tian's pulse jumped, and he immediately slammed the point shut. The attraction vanished.

Nothing had crossed the boundary. He opened his eyes and stared down at his right hand. The failed attempt had lasted less than a second, but it had produced useful information. Opening a meridian point did not merely allow Qi to enter; it seemed to create a form of attraction. Ambient energy did not necessarily wait politely for the practitioner to select it. That made the procedure significantly more dangerous than the manual suggested, which at this point no longer surprised him.

Ling Tian rubbed his thumb across the center of his palm despite the absence of any physical mark. The order of operations needed revision. He would isolate the sample first, bring it directly against the boundary of the selected port, then open the passage for the minimum possible period of time. Anything resembling leisurely spiritual communion with nature was officially prohibited. He closed his eyes again and reconstructed the narrow sensory filter. Earth Qi returned to his awareness.

This time, Ling Tian attempted to separate the chosen fragment before opening his body. The task proved far more difficult than expected. Qi did not exist as convenient droplets waiting to be individually collected. The tiny concentration he had selected blended naturally into the larger mass beneath it, and whenever he mentally pulled at one portion, the surrounding Earth Qi shifted as well, much like damp soil clinging together when pinched. Ling Tian immediately released the pressure. Too much.

He tried again, this time tracing the conceptual edge of the fragment rather than dragging it outright. The process reminded him absurdly of trying to separate one useful entry from a corrupted dataset after several thousand rows had somehow merged into the same cell. You could not simply grab what you wanted. First, you needed to establish where it ended and the surrounding garbage began. He reduced his focus until the selected fragment became almost too faint to perceive. Then he made it smaller. Smaller again.

At the absolute edge of what his senses could reliably distinguish, he finally isolated something that felt less like a drop of energy and more like the suggestion of one. Ling Tian held it carefully in place and began drawing it upward through the soil. The response was sluggish to the point of comedy. Earth Qi resisted his influence not by fighting him, but by displaying a profound disinterest in movement. He applied slightly more pressure. The fragment shifted perhaps a few millimeters, then stopped.

He pushed again. It moved. There was no elegant stream flowing obediently toward him, no mystical river answering his call. It felt like dragging an iron filing across a table with a magnet barely strong enough to overcome friction. Ling Tian's mouth twitched. Excellent. Slow was good. Slow meant he had time to panic professionally. Eventually, the fragment reached the surface directly beneath his palm. Ling Tian held it there. His heartbeat accelerated again.

Until this moment, every step had still been observation or manipulation of something outside his body. Once that tiny amount crossed the skin, the experiment became materially different. He would have intentionally introduced an unknown supernatural substance into a biological system he barely understood, armed with a cultivation manual written by a poet and the medical resources of a medieval orphan. The rational response would have been to stop. The practical response was less comforting.

Remaining mortal in this world carried its own extremely visible mortality rate. Ling Tian breathed. Four seconds in. Two seconds held. Four seconds out. He loosened the meridian point in his palm by the smallest amount he could manage. The isolated Earth Qi touched the boundary. For a fraction of a second, nothing happened. Then it crossed.