Chương 98: Chapter 96

I'm reclining on my bed as I watch out of the corner of my eye how Lianhua closes the door of my room, something she does with that characteristic softness of hers that makes the wood barely emit a whisper as it fits into the frame. After closing the door, Lianhua doesn't waste time, and I see how her hand disappears inside her sleeve in a gesture that resembles too closely the one Master Mu uses, and when her hand comes back out it does so holding a talisman that I instantly recognize as a privacy one.

Lianhua activates it with a small gesture of her fingers and, an instant later, that subtle sensation I've already learned to identify spreads across the room like an invisible blanket, wrapping everything within these four walls in a bubble of discretion that's proof against indiscreet ears.

Once the talisman is activated, Lianhua turns toward me with that expression of hers that combines professional calm with an almost imperceptible note of doubt, and from the way her lips part slightly I know she's about to ask me a question that she has clearly been thinking of asking me for some time.

"Are you sure you wish to begin cultivating the Gate Opening in your bedroom, Zhāohuán Wen?" she finally asks me, and I notice that her tone isn't that of someone trying to dissuade me, but rather that of someone wanting to make sure I've thought through all the options before making a decision I won't be able to easily change later. I sigh upon hearing the question and lift myself slightly against the cushions to better support myself as I reply.

"It's the best place considering that I have to be as discreet as I can", I tell her with a frankness I don't bother to soften.

"And since I'm no longer going to release the disgusting impurities to stain everything, which was the main reason I cultivated in the bath, I see no reason not to do it here." I make a pause before continuing, and as I do, I can't help but make a grimace at the thought of what I'm about to say next.

"Besides, it's not as if we still have a Qi-gathering formation we could use if we wanted to opt for a better location", I add, and the words come out in a tone that mixes resignation with self-recrimination, because however much I try to disguise it, the reality is that the formation was ruined because of me, and I know it perfectly well.

And the memory assails me without warning, with the image of the runes covered by that viscous layer of impurities that spread from the center of the formation until they covered the runes with a revolting patina. A formation that cost me an indecent amount of money and that, in my infinite recklessness, I decided to render useless in a single night for the simple reason of not knowing when to stop.

I push the memory to the same corner of my mind where I store all the other regrets I'd rather not recall and turn my focus back to Lianhua. Lianhua nods after listening to my explanation, and from her expression I know my reasons seem fairly sensible to her, which is saying a lot coming from her and, above all, considering my recent track record of decisions.

"Do you want any further advice on how to do it, Zhāohuán Wen?" she asks me after a moment of silence.

"Before you begin, I mean." I think about it for a moment, but the truth is that the information I have on how to open the Gates I've gathered and reviewed so many times over the past few days that I could recite it in my sleep if necessary. Between the papers from the Celestial Fragment, Lianhua's explanations, and the clarifications my mother has given me discreetly this very morning during breakfast, I think I have an image clear enough to begin.

"There's no need", I reply.

"I think I've understood it well enough, and besides, since you're going to be here, if I have any doubt during the process, I can always ask you." Lianhua nods upon hearing me, but from her expression, that small signal I've already learned to interpret as an indication that she's going to add something more, I sense that the conversation isn't going to end yet.

"Even so", she tells me after an instant.

"I have a couple of last-minute pieces of advice I'd like to give you." I make a small gesture with my hand to invite her to continue.

"All right, give them to me", I tell her. After hearing my confirmation, Lianhua approaches the bed a little more and clasps her hands in front of her body in that posture she adopts when she's preparing to say something she considers important.

"The first piece of advice I have to give you is not to rush", she tells me with that calm cadence she uses when she's explaining something to me.

"The Gate Opening phase is much longer than that of Body Tempering. If the latter weren't limited to one stage per year, it could even be completed in a couple of years without problems." I nod as I listen, because I had already suspected that, although direct confirmation always helps to calibrate expectations, and the fact that Lianhua tells me so without adding any qualifications indicates that she's speaking completely seriously.

"I'm going to use myself as an example of what one might more or less take", Lianhua continues, and from the way her voice drops a tone, I realize she's about to tell me something she rarely allows herself to share, which immediately makes me give her my full attention.

"When I was assigned as your RuNu, I had just opened the Yang Gate." Although over time I had come to imagine that she was already in the Gate Opening when she was assigned to look after me, I had never had confirmation of it until now. But I set aside those thoughts and turn my attention back to Lianhua.

"Over the years and up to your seventh birthday, I managed to open another Gate and was close to opening the third", she tells me.

"And it was only when on your seventh birthday when I obtained the reward of being able to access a Qi-gathering formation that I increased the pace of my cultivation, and with it I managed to open the third Gate and to be more than halfway to opening the fourth." She makes a small pause and, when she speaks again, there is a note in her voice that indicates she's entering a terrain she knows well.

"And I managed to open the fourth a while after arriving in the city of Xi'An, since upon leaving the Capital I lost access to the Qi-gathering formation", she continues, and the comment lands in my chest like a small but heavy stone. Because, however much Lianhua says it without a single note in her voice suggesting she's throwing it in my face, the reality is that I was the one who caused our exile to Xi'An, even if it was by accident.

And the simple fact that there isn't any kind of reproach or anger in her voice when mentioning it makes the guilt feel a little stronger. But I say nothing, because it's not the moment to divert the conversation toward my own remorse, and I simply keep listening.

"As I told you back then, I managed to open the fifth Gate in the Celestial Fragment of the Sands", Lianhua continues without noticing my small inner conflict, or more likely noticing it perfectly and choosing not to comment on it.

"In that place my cultivation was enormously boosted by the great concentration of Qi that was there, to which I could add the small amount of spirit beast meat I could eat without having the Earth Gate open." Here curiosity gets the better of me, since I had never heard that the Qi was denser inside the Celestial Fragment.

"Lianhua, a question", I interrupt her.

"How dense was the Qi in the Celestial Fragment?" Lianhua allows herself a small smile upon hearing my question, that smile that appears when I ask her one of my questions she considers curious but pertinent.

"It varied depending on the area", she replies after a moment of reflection.

"But in general it was between ten and twenty times denser than outside, so it was practically like being continuously inside a Qi-gathering formation." The figure surprises me more than I expected, because that quantity of Qi is something that completely reconfigures the mental image I had of the Celestial Fragment and the reasons people had for entering it, which up to this moment I really thought were only economic.

"Well, that really is a difference", I comment without hiding my surprise.

"Please continue." Lianhua nods after my interruption and picks up the thread where she had left off. This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

"The rest you already know", she tells me.

"Upon returning to the Imperial Capital you granted me access to the Qi-gathering formation you commissioned, so I was able to finish opening the sixth Gate quickly and, finally, open the seventh." She makes a brief pause before speaking again, and from the way her eyes settle on me with a new intentionality, I know she has reached the point she wanted to reach from the beginning.

"What I want to tell you by recounting all this", she continues with her voice a bit calmer.

"Is to make you understand that, even with the sporadic help of Qi-gathering formations, if you include the time it took me to open my first Gate, completing the Gate Opening has taken me more than ten years." I take in the figure as Lianhua continues.

"And although I don't consider myself a genius, my talent is supposed to be above average", she adds with that modesty so characteristic of her.

"So don't become impatient if you think you're going too slowly. It's normal to take several decades in this stage, and there are even people who never finish it in their lifetime because they cannot afford access to a formation that would accelerate their cultivation." And here Lianhua makes a pause that gives me time to think about the story she has just told me. I think about it carefully and suddenly I realize something that probably should have been obvious from the beginning.

Lianhua isn't telling me this just for the sake of telling it; she's almost certainly telling me this because she's still frightened by what I did the other day when I completed Body Tempering. I imagine her reliving, over and over again, that moment when she saw how I rushed and ended up covered in impurities in the middle of the night, and all of it for having completed two stages of cultivation in a single session when I could have perfectly done it over two.

And now, faced with the prospect that I'm about to begin another phase of cultivation, it's clear she's giving me an extremely long piece of advice not because she doubts my ability, but because she's afraid I'm going to do some similar piece of madness again. And that thought makes a small pang of guilt add to the one I already had over the matter of the exile after her story, since it's clear that for Lianhua what I did the other day is going to be a worry for a long time.

"Don't worry, Lianhua", I tell her, trying to make my voice convey all the sincerity I have.

"I don't intend to do again what I did the other day. I've learned the lesson." Lianhua looks at me with an expression that mixes something resembling relief with a skepticism that can only have grown after years of dealing with me, and I see how she opens her mouth to say something, but I don't give her the opportunity, because I add my own qualification with a tone between ironic and amused that I don't bother to disguise.

"Besides, even if I wanted to, I couldn't", I tell her, and I can't help a crooked smile escaping me.

"I no longer have the Qi-gathering formation, and I don't have the funds to acquire a new one either." Lianhua slightly arches an eyebrow upon hearing the mention of money, which encourages me to continue as I enumerate my financial problems with the feigned solemnity of someone making fun of their own situation.

"I still have to finish paying off the loan I asked my mother for to fund my tenth birthday party", I remind her.

"And on top of that I have to think about where I'm going to get the money for my eleventh birthday party, which is in a few months. So even if I felt like buying a new formation in order to repeat that piece of madness, I wouldn't have the means to pay for it in any justifiable way, since supposedly I have almost no spirit stones left."

That seems to relax Lianhua a bit more, because the logic of financial reality is something even my most reckless impulses can't skip over, and I return the tone of my voice to a more normal one before continuing.

"Well, leaving that aside", I tell her.

"What's the second piece of advice?" Lianhua slightly readjusts her posture before answering, and from the way she does it, I sense that the second piece of advice is going to be just as important as the first.

"What I want to advise you is, once again, that you have patience", she tells me with that seriousness she reserves for when she's talking about practical matters of cultivation.

"The problem of Qi depletion is even greater during the Gate Opening than during Body Tempering." And upon hearing those words, I really do find myself surprised, because my mind immediately starts doing the math of what that implies. If the Qi in the surroundings where I could harvest it lasted me approximately half an hour before having to start waiting for more to arrive, at what speed am I going to run out of it now?

Because from the look on Lianhua's face as she's telling me, I don't think it's a small increase, but rather a substantial change. But I push that thought out of my head since it won't be long before I confirm it for myself, and sighing now over something I'm going to confirm later anyway is not going to bring me anything at all.

"I'll keep it in mind", I tell Lianhua.

"But now I'm going to begin." Lianhua nods upon hearing my declaration without making any other comment and withdraws to her usual spot in the room, where I see her position herself at that point from which she can keep watch on both the door and me without having to turn her head. Once I see that Lianhua is ready, I adjust my posture to be as comfortable as possible and, finally, I close my eyes to focus on seeing the Qi particles around me.

Soon, my perception is flooded by the image of the Qi particles I can see within my sphere of influence, that vision I'm already so accustomed to that it almost seems as natural to me as sight with my eyes open. But before beginning with the Gate Opening cultivation proper, there's something I want to do.

I focus my attention and begin grasping Qi particles one by one with the ease of someone who has done this exercise hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, until I have the ten that I can grasp firmly held in my mental hands. As I do so, I tell myself that, since later I'm going to have to practice in order to be able to use the Myriad of Hands technique, it's better to start now with this simple exercise that's already part of my routine and which, at this point, requires almost no conscious effort to maintain.

Once I have the ten particles firmly held, for a moment I hesitate, because the possibility of activating the neutral Qi resonance before beginning comes to mind. The idea is tempting, because after discovering what the resonance can do, I find it difficult to consider cultivating without using it.

But I quickly dismiss the idea and tell myself that, for my first Gate Opening session, it's better to do it the normal way, without adding variables I don't fully control, and at most, activate it another day and compare the difference between one session and the other. Besides, things have to be done in order, and the scientific method I was taught in my previous life always said that you don't change two variables at a time, since afterward you can't know which of them produced each effect.

Once that decision has been made, I bring to my memory everything I'm supposed to do in order to begin the Gate Opening. The information is there, ordered and clear like any other memory thanks to my Blessing, and I review it mentally like someone reviewing a manual before using a new tool. One has to direct the Qi to the Gate one wishes to open, maintain the constant flow so it can be absorbed by it until it yields and stops absorbing more Qi, at which moment one understands that the Gate has been opened.

Simple in theory, although, as usually happens with things related to cultivation, I sense that the practice is going to have more nuances than meets the eye. But I set those concerns aside and, following those instructions, my concentration centers on the Gate I want to open first, the Yang. And as I focus on it, I notice something curious.

The way the whole thing functions is as if it were a kind of mechanism that only worked while you held it pressed down, or rather in this case, while you maintain your concentration on it. It's like a machine that deactivates the moment you stop pressing the switch, a metaphor I wasn't expecting but that fits so well that it almost makes me smile.

I focus my concentration on the Yang Gate more strongly and begin to notice that there's a kind of latent receptivity, as though the Gate were waiting for me to activate it. But upon doing so, something happens that I wasn't expecting, or rather, something I probably should have expected but didn't anticipate. The concentration of the part of my mind that holds the ten Qi particles in place breaks.

It's not a serious failure, nor a painful one, I simply notice how the mental hands dissolve from my inability to maintain my concentration on them and the ten particles return to the natural flow of the Qi around me. I let out a sigh as I stop concentrating on the Yang Gate.

My mind, which I thought was already accustomed to maintaining the ten particles without effort, has turned out not to be as well-trained as I believed, and the moment I had to devote attention to something else that required conscious concentration, it crumbled like a house of cards. But, instead of getting frustrated, what I notice is something more like interest, because I've just discovered a limit I wasn't aware of, and discovering that limit is the first step to surpassing it.

And if I want to truly practice for the Myriad of Hands technique, which is what I was aiming for, it does me no good to grasp ten particles in a controlled situation without distractions. What I have to achieve is to be able to maintain them while I do something else, because when the moment comes to use the actual technique, it's going to be while I'm doing other tasks, since otherwise it does me no good.

And if I can't hold the Qi particles in place while I focus on cultivating, an activity I've been doing for years and that should already be almost automatic, then I still have a long way to go. So, with renewed determination, I focus again on the particles floating around me, grasping them once more with patience until I have the ten of them held again.

But while I have the Qi particles held, I decide that I'm not going to begin with the Gate Opening until I'm capable of maintaining the particles firmly grasped while at the same time I cultivate the Yang Gate.

If I'm going to do things, I'm going to do them well from the start, because I've already seen where rushing leads me and probably all the time I would save now by not doing so I would lose later in one way or another, so I keep the ten particles in place with one part of my attention, making sure the hold is firm, and then, with much more care than the first time, I once again direct another part of my attention toward the Yang Gate.

This time I don't focus it all at once, but rather I concentrate little by little, with the caution of someone who knows that an abrupt movement will make them lose their balance, and I notice how the particles tremble slightly under my hold as they sense how I'm directing part of my mind to another place. But this time I hold on without the mental hands dissipating on me. Just barely, that's for sure, because I can notice how two or three of them are on the verge of crumbling, but I keep them.

And I tell myself that this, this is the true exercise I need to master before fully throwing myself into the Gate Opening. It's going to be a long session, I know that already, and almost certainly I'm going to be able to cultivate hardly anything, but that doesn't bother me. As Lianhua has just reminded me, this is a long-distance race and not a sprint, so since I've decided to do it this way, I'm going to make sure to do it well. Or at least, I'm going to try.