Chương 14: Raw Channels

The pair of siblings made it back to the sect's training ground just in time for the physical cultivation class to begin. As they walked, Paike acutely felt each one of his injuries. Every time he let his guard down and stepped wrong on his bad leg, he let out a tiny hiss of breath between his clenched teeth. It was a soft sound, but not soft enough. His sister heard it every time and shot him an increasingly worried look. Briefly, she had tried to argue that he should skip the physical cultivation classes.

He had vehemently disagreed. If he was late or didn't show up for even one class, he wouldn't receive further instruction. A little bit of pain wasn't enough to make him give that up. Liming offered to spend as much time as necessary coaching him through the cultivation as she learned it in class. It was a generous offer, and he would definitely take it if, for some reason, he literally couldn't be there. But he was confident they could make it in time.

Besides, if by some miracle he managed to awaken physically, he didn't want Elder Ji's opinion of him soured by disrespecting him and not showing up for a lesson when he could have. It was because of this pure focus on just getting there that, when the lesson began, Paike hadn't noticed the continual changes to his cultivation. Elder Ji started the lesson off in a slightly different way than he had last time. Instead of beginning with physical exercises, he had them sit in rows.

"Physical cultivation isn't simply letting qi reinforce your body," he began with no preamble.

"It's about constructing your perfect form, layering qi down like coats of paint as if you were lacquering the most beautiful furniture, and doing this repeatedly until there's nothing left but the ossified qi left behind from so many centuries before. This is the final stage of physical cultivation that almost none of you will ever achieve. It is important to understand this before you start on the demanding journey of physical cultivation. Even if the beginning is simple, do not expect it to stay that way."

He went on to explain the method for spinning qi out of one's dantian and layering it into the body, one tiny strand at a time, reinforcing bones and sinew, enhancing organs, and improving the flow of blood. The class of new cultivators sat and listened, entranced. Paike was both relieved and frustrated at the same time. The exercises they had done last time were something he could do. He was good at that. It was one thing in his life that he had actually been talented in.

He had always been physically fit and willing to push his body beyond what almost anyone else could. Now, it appeared that physical cultivation would be just as hard for him as regular cultivation. If it involved moving qi around and layering it delicately like this, it wasn't something he thought he could do well. Not compared to how he was at the exercises. Still, once the Elder had finished explaining and answered a few questions, he began to take them through an exercise.

With his first try, he didn't move delicately enough. His qi refused to separate into anything fine. It clumped together, spread unevenly, and moved like molasses. Starting over, Paike attempted to spin out a strand of his qi even slower. It took him a while, but he eventually managed something passible, more like a strand of rough wool yarn rather than a fine silk thread. It wasn't nearly as refined as his instructor had described, nor was it as consistent as he would have liked.

But when he went to lay it into his bones, it melded after some effort of aligning it properly. The qi dissipated slowly into his little finger along the bone as if it had always belonged. Even as he layered the first strand in, though, he started to sense that something was wrong. Not that his qi was moving unexpectedly, but there was a different quality to it now. Upon closer inspection, it felt like a certain lingering taint from the ancient spirit.

He had figured that when he assimilated it and brought it into his dantian, it would passively purify. After all, he'd never had a problem with this when he brought in environmental qi in his quick and dirty way. Perhaps the standard cultivation techniques were there for a reason. There was always a heavy emphasis on purification and integration in all the techniques he had heard of. Something that he didn't, couldn't, do. Still, he didn't stop. This was simply something he would have to just push through.

As he laboriously started pulling the second goopy string of qi from his core, Elder Ji stopped his pacing in front of him. Paike looked up from where he sat cross-legged and studied the Elder's face. In it, he found genuine confusion.

"How are you alive?" The Elder asked.

"Excuse me, Elder?" Paike responded.

"You have higher-order qi in you by at least three realms. The toxicity should be killing you."

"Um..." Paike answered eloquently.

"Cycle your qi for me," the Elder instructed. Paike grimaced inwardly and slowly began a basic cycle. He had never actually completed one, in truth. Once, he had spent four hours trying; his sister could do it in under a minute. But the Elder sat there watching for several minutes before he huffed. This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Whether it was some sort of toxicity in his qi or simply an aspect of the spirit he was adopting, like how many cultivators added a flame aspect to their qi, he wasn't sure. He would have liked to have chosen his first aspect, but it was very possible this new feature of his qi was utterly benign. Besides, if it were genuinely toxic, he would probably be dead already. The Elder seemed to think differently, though.

It was already in his dantian, and that was usually the end of every great story he'd ever read that involved a hero getting poisoned with qi. There was always a frantic race to destroy the invasive qi technique or poison before it reached one's core. Paike could sense that his entire cultivation already had this shadowy essence meddled into its foundations. He started to focus on it more, as it wasn't what he would have expected from the spirit in the cave.

He thought it was earth or stone if it was some sort of aberrant variation. But it was more. There was darkness and shadow mixed in with the earth.

"You are a lucky boy. You might not feel it yet, but... well, hopefully, you can get it under control before the toxicity finally kills you." Paike wasn't sure how to react to that.

"I need to...?" He started with a question but trailed off as the Elder simply lifted a shoulder in a shrug. He wasn't even sure how to ask what he needed to do. Likely, the answer was to purify the qi, but he couldn't really do that.

"Just keep progressing." The answer came as a surprise. But that didn't make it any easier to actually accomplish. Paike felt a knot of worry form in the pit of his stomach as the Elder walked away. What was he supposed to do with that? Maybe the issue came from the difference in realms between him and the qi he had recovered from the ancient spirit rather than the aspect tainting the qi? That would explain why progressing would help.

So maybe if he just worked on assimilating the power better, then he could reduce the toxicity coming from the differences in realms. But there was an insurmountable climb between them. A shout coming from somewhere to his left drew Paike's attention, causing him to fumble the strand of qi he was attempting to lay into his humerus. He turned his head, along with every other student.

Elder Ji vanished from the other side of the field and reappeared in front of a student who was violently retching on the floor, black ooze streaming out of his eyes and nose. The Elder was careful not to touch or get too close.

"Congratulations, Li Feng," Elder Ji said.

"You are excused for the day. Go clean up. Awakenings are always rough." A chorus of hushed whispers echoed through the crowd, and Paike could feel the energy change as everyone's focus sharpened. They had their first physical cultivator awakened, and now all of them were falling behind. Li Feng and the Elder exchanged a few more words, but Paike wasn't listening anymore. He gathered up the remnants of his last strand of qi and began to rebuild it carefully but with focused vigor.

He was so focused that the subtle changes in his qi almost went unnoticed again. But this time, he realized what was happening. Little bubbles of something formed in his qi as bits of the foreign cultivation and his mixed. The bubbles then slowly rose to the surface. It had been subtle at first, like a pot of water with tiny bubbles that only seemed like cloudiness. But as the heat grew, the size and speed increased until it was at a roiling boil.

The burning in his dantian and qi channels made more and more sense as the qi in his dantian threatened to boil over. He clenched his teeth to keep from gasping in pain but continued his work. If anything, the bubbling of his qi made moving it ever so slightly easier. Now, all he had to do was direct the motion. As he spun out strand after strand, they began to look better and better. Even as it burned, he kept layering. Another layer, another strand into another unreinforced muscle, into another unreinforced bone.

He just kept working, his eyes closed, feeling only the pain of being boiled from the inside and the satisfaction as his flesh became more and more buttressed with qi, more robust and better able to handle the pain. He didn't notice the class had ended until Guan Li nudged his side.

"Hey. You okay there?" Paike opened his eyes, his vision blurry and swimming. He wavered as he stood, and Guan Li had to put his hand on Paike's shoulder to steady him. Paike looked around and found his sister, worried, standing off to the side. With a blank and uncomprehending look, Paike gazed back into her eyes. Paike felt inside himself. His qi hadn't changed at all. It was still turbulent, even if he could withstand the burning better. This was not a sustainable situation.

"Elder!" Guan Li called, but the Elder had already gone. The class was over. At the shout, Paike pulled his thoughts together through sheer force of will. What had the Elder told him to do? Progress. He needed to progress.

"I just need to cultivate," Paike said.

"I think I'm close?" It was more of a question than a statement.

"Let's get you back to our cultivation chamber, and we can crush some cultivation stones to increase the qi density and get you a better spot," Guan Li insisted. Liming immediately handed him several Ruby stones. Paike focused on putting one foot in front of the other, barely registering the world around him until he was back home, sitting cross-legged in the cultivation chamber. He didn't continue his physical cultivation right away.

Still, he simply worked on stirring his qi, slowly mixing all the pieces together. He needed to get a better grasp of what was happening. As he moved it around, he found many different pockets of the odd new aspect to his qi that weren't evenly mixed with everything else. It was from those gradient differences in qi type and quality that the roiling bubbles emerged. It was like a thunderstorm where hot air currents mixed with cold, producing lightning—except it was inside him and made of qi.

Slowly, he picked apart these pieces and stirred them together with as much care as he could muster. Focused and diligent, he slowly calmed the qi, its motion eventually settling. Once it did, he began to notice the impurities he had brought in. It wasn't just a strange aspect—there was that too—but there were also other things. One by one, he picked out tiny black specks and expelled them, pushing them out through his fingers to be washed away by the drains in the cultivation room.

It was a long process, but by dawn, he felt a little more stable. Not back to normal by any means, but closer. His qi was no longer boiling, and his channels were no longer burning. Instead, they just felt raw. In his Dantain, all of his qi was at the same stable cultivation level. His qi still had a certain aspect to it, though—something he could neither categorize nor define. Only once he had reached an equilibrium did he resume the physical cultivation.

The qi was harder to form into strands, but it melted into his body just as easily.