Chương 49: Mortar and Stone

As Paike expected, a couple of people followed him as he left the compound and made his way into the more wild areas of the mountain. He had not intended to look for a fight, but he was aware that it wasn't in his control. It came with being part of the Kong family. They always had a target on his back, and he couldn't forget it. Unless he reached levels of power that would render him quietly unassailable, it would not change. As the weakest member of the family, it only made things worse.

Of course, the two people following him bore no obvious signs of affiliation, so it was less likely they were part of a family or clan trying to gain reputation using a defeat of his name. That meant it was much more likely something to do with the outer sect. They were both ruby cultivators, though he didn't get a good enough look to determine what kind. At least they weren't more advanced cultivators from previous years; that might have been trouble. An ambush like the Fang clan probably wasn't a good idea.

Fights for ranking and resources were supposed to be fought by duels, especially earlier in the year. He wasn't sure if word had spread about what had happened to them, but it hadn't deterred these people, at least. Instead of stopping to fight, Paike broke into a steady run, wondering if they could match his endurance and staying power. After running laps around the mountain for a couple of hours, they fell behind. Apparently, their physical cultivation couldn't keep up with him.

And Paike felt that this had been an excellent experiment for his new physical capabilities. His run had felt like he didn't even have a physical body. The pumping of his legs and arms had felt effortless, and no fatigue or burning sensation had even started to build up. He didn't even need to use his own qi channels to flush away his exhaustion. It was as if he were an automaton with an endless battery of qi. Paike had lost his pursuers in the woods.

He had hoped they would stop before they completely ran out of qi and ran into something that they couldn't run away from. He made his way in the direction that he had remembered going with Liming. He kept his eye out but didn't notice anything too strange. There were a few odd fluctuations in the qi that he would have stopped to investigate if he hadn't had a purpose. But the most important thing he needed to do was figure out how to control his combat trance.

And before he paid for instruction, he wanted to at least try something for himself. And that trance came from the aspect of his qi, he was relatively certain. The best place to learn about that was at its source. The last time he had been there, he and Liming had run from the cave. He didn't think he would fare any better in a fight against the ancient spirit in there, so he didn't plan on interacting with it, though he was curious what had happened to it. It had seemed in pain. Had it been able to recover?

Was it weakened? Well, it would be difficult to find out without putting himself in danger. But when he made it to the cave mouth, he had noticed no significant change. Paike slid off to the side on a rock and closed his eyes, seeking out with his spiritual senses. He found that this place was rich in earth and metal qi. Both seemed to emanate from further in the cave. He let the qi wash over him, not trying to take it into his dantian, but just feeling it, letting it flow through his fingers.

There was something there, definitely something besides just earth and metal, that reminded him of what his own qi was flavored as. It wasn't exactly the same, but it was close. It was dark and damp. Sharp. Yet ancient. There was a set of contradictions in here that didn't immediately make themselves obvious with explanation. Paike opened his eyes and watched as the sun disappeared behind a cloud. It reminded him of the night a week or so ago, when he'd watched the stars fall behind the clouds.

He'd sensed something there but hadn't quite been able to grasp it. There was an insight or a breakthrough there, but he struggled to see how it connected with this earthy feeling. The stars were celestial, up in the heavens, not down here on the earth. He was well aware of the difference between heaven and earth. Paike couldn't stop the slightly bitter smile that formed on his face.

Paike began to gather the qi around him in a ball, compressing it and pulling it closer and closer to himself, attempting to feel what happened when this aspect interacted with his own. There was something. It wasn't a violent reaction, but rather a hardening, as if his slow qi froze the aspected foreign qi, as if it were wet cement that dried. However, only when he touched them directly together and let them sit for a while. This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He hesitated to reopen his spiritual wound, especially as it was partially healed. But he really wanted to bring this qi inside and see how it would interact, because this was a new property that he didn't yet understand. Instead, though, he took the ball of foreign qi and plastered it on the side of his dantian, over where the spiritual tear was reforming. As he watched, the qi hardened, turning to stone. And he smiled. That might just work.

If he could patch his dantian this way, or even leave an opening that he could cover with some sort of spiritual bandage or lid. Paike considered for a few moments before he acted. To be a cultivator was to be decisive. There was no path of advancement without it. Taking risks at every step. Every minor or major threshold came with the possibility of failure. It was almost always safer, and the smarter choice, to wait—to continue to improve your foundations or to just not risk the breakthrough.

You might die or lose your cultivation. People who thought like that, though, were called one thing: mortals. They would never be able to take the first step onto the road of cultivation. It was what everyone had thought he was until it wasn't. To become a cultivator was to embrace this risk.

Sure, there were different levels of stupidity when it came to risks, but ultimately, seizing one's fate into their own hands and defying the will of the heavens to ascend beyond what is natural—to use qi—was the essence of cultivation. Paike wasn't sure how much he believed in any of that. He just knew that he was not content being left behind by everyone around him. That if he did not take insane risks, he would never progress.

Not only would he never progress, but because of his situation, he would never even fill up his dantian again. What he was doing was probably insane. But on the other side of his spiritual organ, Paike cut a new opening. Taking the qi, he filtered out much of the tainted aspect, but not all of it. And then he began to feed it inside, as he had done previously. Sweat beaded on his brow and began to soak through his robes as he worked for what must have been hours to pack his dantian.

His qi channels, his meridians—everything was full to the brim. And then he kept pushing. He felt the membrane of his dantian stretch and then stop stretching as it reached its limit. There was no more room to give, and yet he forced more in. He could feel the weave of sinews of spiritual flesh begin to create tiny tears everywhere. And he took that tainted qi, the aspect that was like his, but not the same, and plastered it all over his dantian, except for in that one small opening.

It was as if he were a mason, pouring mortar for bricks or plastering a wall. The plaster hardened around his dantian, compressing it and keeping the fibers from tearing apart. And he shoved more qi in. The qi started to compact. It had no more room to go, but it could not overlap. It was reaching a critical mass, forcing it in and further in. Cracks started to form on the plaster of his cement qi coating his dantian. Paike attempted to both patch these with more and shove more qi in.

There was a war going on inside his dantian as it wanted to rip apart and stretch at the same time. Paike started to taste copper in his mouth, and the sweat beading off of his skin changed. It was more viscous now, and it didn't just sting. As it rolled past his eyes, it burned. Still, Paike did not give up. He reinforced the dantian more and added extra bracing around his still recovering wound. He patched it again, and there reached a tipping point. What would break? The reinforcement? His dantian?

But it was neither. It was the qi that broke first. Something happened in the center of his dantian, in the massive pool of qi, as a single fragment of it underwent a qualitative change. This change cascaded through his reserves, all the qi flashing and condensing like a collapsing star. It condensed into a near-singular point and then bounced back.

The slam released a shockwave as the qi collapsed and then exploded outward, smashing into the membrane of his dantian, sending ripples of pain coursing through his spirit. This cement-like qi cracked and fractured, and eventually slowly shattered, each piece flying away from him. Paike could only grit his teeth and will his dantian to hold. The first thing to give was the patched area from his old wound.

It ripped—not because the reinforcement broke, but because it wasn't able to stretch like the rest of his dantian. The stitching started to rip through the membrane as it started to expand. Paike hurriedly went into damage control, ripping out entire sections of his dantian membrane and weaving them fresh from qi. When he finally had it patched, there were two other places that would start to need his attention.

He went on, and on, and on again, until he felt as if he had reconstructed his entire dantian rather than simply patching it and letting it heal. When he finally felt stable, he opened his eyes and—he had to close them again because the blinding light was so intense. It took several minutes of opening and blinking his eyes for him to adapt. But when he looked around him, he didn't just sense the qi. He could see its flows. That wasn't possible.

And that shouldn't be something that a Ruby cultivator should be able to do. Qi sight. True qi sight wasn't gained until Topaz.