Chương 11: Progress

The next morning, he woke up, faintly remembering a nightmare, this time without purple eyes and instead the more 'mundane' image of the back of the demonic cultivator exploding in his face. He shook himself and sat down in his cultivation chamber to squeeze in a few minutes of exercise before his training with Minghao. His continued attempts to grasp the qi were supposed to be his focus. His mind briefly wandered to the opening technique itself.

It required cycling qi through one's channels in a specific order for each gate, gaining momentum, and then crashing the accelerated qi against the impurities clogging the gate—it felt somehow dangerous to him, but he shook off the thought and returned to his practice.

"Today, we will work on Rise and Sink. Let's begin," Minghao said, waving Jianyi into the circle. The retainer assumed the same starting position as he had the previous day for Open and Close, then lifted from the ankles upward, straightening his knees as his arms rose in tandem.

"Elevate your spirit, lift your gaze to the horizon. Begin." Jianyi followed through with the exercise, despite the slight soreness he felt from the day before.

"The power is generated from below, lifting you up. Again." Again. And again. And again. Jianyi had resolved not to count the repetitions; there was no value in doing so. He would focus on the movement and nothing else. He could actually see how he had utilized the movement without knowing it in some of his spear forms, but it started to make sense to him to separate the movement from the overall form and perfect it.

"Good progress. Let us move to Sink." As previously, Minghao assumed the starting position in the center of the training circle. His back remained straight, but Jianyi could almost feel how the weight dropped through the hips as Minghao pressed down his heels and bent his knees further.

"Go." Jianyi felt pretty good with his first attempt.

"You are rooted in place; nothing can move you. Again." Despite sweating heavily, Jianyi's breath remained steady. The exercises were exhausting, but he had trained a lot over the years, he hoped that this would take him to the next level. A level that would carry him to success during the test.

"Now, we move from Rise to Sink without friction. Movement to movement. Begin." It felt satisfying to flow up and down, from lightness to stability.

"That is enough for today. A good start." Jianyi noted that a good start was very different from a good performance. But it was only the second day—he had to make each of the 88 left count to change that. After breakfast, they returned to the courtyard, not to the training triangle this time, but to the garden where herbs and vegetables were growing in abundance. Today's task was to weed the flower beds. Just like on the first day that he had stepped into the courtyard, the flowers and herbs gave off…

something—Jianyi couldn't describe it well—that went beyond a normal flower. Not that he was an expert, given that he had never left the city before coming to the sect, but the jasmine in their neighbor's garden had smelled pleasant, but not given off a feeling of intense… life? Energy? Minghao smiled as he observed Jianyi slightly hesitating to step towards the flower beds.

"What you sense is the qi that these herbs emanate. There was a time when Elder Sun had ambitions to become a proper alchemist," Minghao chuckled.

"In that phase, he went all over the Empire hunting for rare natural treasures." The retainer pointed at a simple-looking yellow flower.

"This Ancient Earthroot Dandelion he found in a forest, not too far from the capital, I believe. It is quite rare, and its leaves can be harvested every five years and are a sought-after base ingredient for Wood-affinity pills." Jianyi looked at the plant that seemed to him like any other, though now that he concentrated, he did feel that it was one of those that felt different from a regular weed.

"It is quite unusual that you can sense the qi, despite your dantians still being closed. Good for you!" Minghao showed him which weeds to remove, and that he needed to pull them out by the root instead of just removing the plant on the surface.

"You said that he wanted to be a proper alchemist… Is that something he still does?"

"Most cultivators follow one craft or another. As I said the other day, cultivation is very expensive, and a craft can help you earn the resources you need." They moved to the next flower bed before Minghao continued.

"Do you know the basics of crafting?"

"Well, my mother is a tailor, so I know a bit about that." Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. The older man nodded.

"Good, but in the cultivation world, we think about it a bit differently. We differentiate between two areas: those that retain the cards they use and those that destroy them—Formations and Alchemy.

"Alchemy is a very wide field, though, because it is often used as an umbrella for all the crafts and activities that feed it and use its outputs.

"The elder these days focuses only on the first step, generating essences from cards—that is the heart of alchemy, and incidentally also the most profitable part," Minghao said with a wink.

"When Elder Sun was in this 'phase' of his, he also dabbled in actually using these essences to create pills and potions, but he found eventually that that wasn't for him." Jianyi had heard of essences, but he hadn't known that they were made from cards. It made sense, now that he thought about it, but his heart bled thinking about all the wonderful techniques that were turned into potions instead of being used by a cultivator.

"Are there other uses for essences than just potions?" he asked.

"Yes, they are used by almost all other crafters. Blacksmiths, jewelers, armorers, and others can use essences to infuse their crafts with qi and the aspects of the cards and natural treasures that those essences were extracted from."

"Are there tailors who use essences?" Jianyi thought of his mother and her mortal craft.

"Yes, though it was more prevalent in the past. I am not even sure we have one in the sect—though I could be wrong." It was nothing he could deal with for now, but something that he found interesting and would love to explore—assuming he would pass the test and had the time to do so.

Jianyi stood in front of the administration building that he had visited with Elder Sun previously. A messenger had come with a request for him to present himself. He entered the reception hall, asked an attendant for directions to Elder Wang Xing Yu, and was directed to a room in the back. An assistant made him sit down on a chair against the wall and largely ignored him. What was this about? Jianyi's head was jumping from one possible explanation to the next, each one wilder than the one before.

Had he already been found out? If so, should he deny things? A deep breath helped him steady himself. He needed to conduct himself with dignity, either way. Almost half an hour after he arrived, the assistant opened the door to a large study with light blue walls and a pair of crossed spears on the right wall, while the left was covered with shelves full of scrolls, small trophies, and mementos. There was a faint smell of jasmine in the air that reminded him of their neighbor's garden.

Behind the simple desk at the center of the back wall sat a woman whose features were smooth and ageless. She did not have a single gray streak in her long hair, which was pulled back into a bun on the back of her head, yet he knew deep down that this woman was not young. She looked at him with unflinching, gray eyes and directed him with a gesture to the seat in front of her desk. Jianyi bowed, "Greetings, honorable elder," before sitting down.

Minghao had told him that most elders would be fine with a simple greeting, but adding 'honorable' didn't hurt.

"Your sect medallion," she held out her hand. Jianyi swallowed and pulled the smooth, circular piece of jade out of his pocket and handed it over. She put it to the side without looking at it.

"How did you meet Elder Sun?" Elder Wang's eyes had not left him for a second. Based on the few interactions he had had in the sect so far, Jianyi had not expected an interrogation, but he did remember Elder Sun's warning to keep things to himself.

"We met in the city. By chance."

"By chance?"

"Yes."

"Your affinities."

"Wood and Fire."

"Who are your parents?" Jianyi sat up straighter.

"My mother is a tailor, my father died on the frontlines."

"Why should I break protocol to allow you as a temporary outer sect member." Jianyi thought about the question for a moment. He couldn't say that he was at risk from demonic cultivators. Simply hiding behind Elder Sun also didn't sit right with him.

"I am committed to executing my duties with discipline and dignity, as my parents have taught me, and I will give everything to become strong enough to fight the demons!" his voice had slightly risen towards the end, not quite a shout, but forceful. The elder slightly raised an eyebrow.

"Elder Sun hasn't taken on a student in a very long time." Jianyi returned her stare, not knowing how else to react to the statement. Without looking, she grabbed the medallion she had placed on her desk and flipped it over to him, leaning back in her chair. Jianyi grabbed it with his right fist and felt the emblem press into his hand.

"You are dismissed." Jianyi stood, bowed, and turned to leave as the elder spoke one more time.

"Don't disappoint him. It would be bad for all of us." Jianyi bowed one more time and left the building. He wiped the sweat on his hands on his pants and took a deep breath. He wasn't sure what the meeting had been really about, but it had felt important.

That evening, after another training session, Jianyi reread the scroll, wanting to make sure that he didn't miss any nuances, and then resumed his attempts to grasp the qi in his lower dantian. After two hours, he stopped in frustration. He hadn't made any progress. He slowly breathed in and out and tried to center himself. Before resuming, he reflected on the task. What was he trying to do? He needed to grasp… He paused. Did he need to grasp the qi? He treated it like something that was foreign. Separate.

But hadn't his body and spirit already made the environmental qi part of him? Was it any less him than the blood flowing through his veins? The breath in his lungs? No, it wasn't. Maybe the air he breathed in was a good analogy. He could decide how deeply he breathed in, how long he would hold it, and whether to exhale via his mouth or the nose. It was natural. Effortless. He resumed the centered lotus position and instead of trying to grab the qi with an iron fist, he willed the little flicker, his qi, to move.

And it did. The little golden ball of energy moved—first slightly, then erratically—in his dantian. Jianyi opened his eyes and smiled broadly. He realized that it was just a tiny thing, but it was his first success as a cultivator. Hopefully, a lot more was to come. The next step was to make it move the way he wanted, meaning through his meridian channels. The first challenge with that was that he couldn't see them. If he looked inside himself, currently only the lower meridian was alight in the glow of his qi.

First, he got a sense of how to direct the qi the way he wanted. That took a bit of practice, but worked eventually. As he did that, he identified multiple entrance points into the spiritual space that was his dantian. Slowly, he moved the qi towards one of those channel openings. As it moved out of his dantian, he immediately felt deeply uncomfortable, weakness spreading through his body. He quickly guided the qi back toward his dantian, and the weakness faded. Jianyi paused to consider what the problem could be.

After some deliberation, the only explanation he found was that his body and spirit had gotten used to the qi in his dantian—he knew of the strengthening influence it had on cultivators over time. The solution he saw was not to move all of his qi, but to try to extract a fragment of it and use that to explore his meridian channels. Excited about what the day had brought and the outlook of what was to come, he decided to go to bed.