Chương 6: First Circulation

Morning came in shades of grey. Zero had been watching the sky for two hours when the sect's first bell rang. The sound came from somewhere on the inner mountain, deep and unhurried, bringing the loud chime to Team Zero's living space through the morning air. Within seconds, lanterns in the outer grounds began to dim, and disciples emerged from the bunkhouses in twos and threes, moving toward the training yard without speaking. Miho was awake well before that point.

She had not, as far as Zero could tell, ever fully been asleep. As her hand had been on her sword every time Zero had checked. She stood without sound and looked at the others. Viria was face-down on her mat, one arm flung over her head to block out light. Yukito was sitting upright in his corner, eyes open, having apparently never moved from the position he had taken the night before.

"Up," Miho said. Viria made a sound that was not language.

"Now."

"Two minutes…" Viria mumbled, eyes still closed." Now." Viria sat up with an aggrieved groan. Her hair was on the wrong side of her head. She looked at the window and at the grey light coming through it.

"It is not even morning yet. The sun hasn't fully risen."

"It has."

"It has not. It's pre-morning right now."

"I don't care." Zero observed the exchange and made a note: Miho's commands escalated in shortness, not in volume. Viria's resistance was performance, but the performance was the protest. Underneath, she was already standing.

"Where do we train?" Yukito asked. Miho glanced toward the door.

"Not the main yard. The disciples are there. We were told not to interrupt them."

"There was a smaller yard behind the bunkhouse," Zero said. Miho looked at him.

"I saw it during the night." A pause, just long enough for Zero to recognize that Miho was deciding whether to ask about that.

"Then we use that one."

The smaller yard was packed earth, roughly twenty paces across, bordered on three sides by low walls and on the fourth by a steep drop into a pine slope. There was a single stone bench, weathered, and a wooden post worn smooth in patches at shoulder height. It was a 'striking post', according to Miho, though they would not be using it yet. Today was for something else. She had them sit cross-legged on the cold earth, facing her.

"First," she said, "the rules." Viria rubbed her eyes.

"There are rules to sitting?"

"There are rules to everything. Listen." Viria listened.

"Qi exists everywhere," Miho said.

"In the air, the ground, the body, the things you eat, and everywhere in between. Most worlds have it in some form. Yours may have called it something else. It is important to note that qi is not the same as the energy you already use. Viria, your Nature Energy is something specific to elves; Yukito, your Shadow Energy is something specific to you. Qi is what those energies refine.

Some practitioners use only qi, some use qi alongside a different refined energy, others use a refined energy that has forgotten its qi origin entirely." Zero asked, "Which am I?"

"I don't know yet. We will find out."

"My energy is called Anima."

"I know. I am not familiar with it though. We will treat Anima the same way we would treat any energy refined from qi, and see what happens." She paused again. Zero had begun to notice that Miho's pauses were almost always teaching.

"Cultivation," she said, "is the deliberate practice of drawing in qi, refining it, and using it. The basic process has three stages: first, you make your body a vessel that can hold qi without being damaged by it, which is called body cleansing; second, you learn to draw qi in and circulate it through specific paths in the body, called meridians; third, you learn to do something with the qi once it is in you."

"How long does each stage take?" Yukito asked.

"For most cultivators in this world? A child begins body cleansing at seven or eight, and they complete it by ten or eleven. The first circulation takes another year. The first useful technique takes another two or three. That is for a child raised in a clan with proper instruction, ample resources, and good fortune."

"We have like, seven days," Viria said.

"We are doing the bare minimum. The Cloud Sea does not require that you be a cultivator. It requires that your body be able to not die in saturated qi. That is the first stage only. Body cleansing, then a partial first circulation. Enough to keep the qi from killing you while you cross. Nothing more."

"And that's possible in seven days?"

"For a child? No. For four contestants chosen by something that called itself a god? I hope the answer is yes." Zero filed the phrasing ' I hope' away. Miho was reasoning under the assumption that they had been selected for capability they did not yet know they had. He had not previously considered that.

"Body cleansing," he said.

"Can you explain it?" Miho looked at him.

"Please?" he added, which felt strange in his mouth. She did not react to the addition.

"Every body carries impurities. Toxins from food and air, residues of injury, dead matter that the body did not fully clear. In an uncleansed body, qi cannot move freely, as the impurities clog the channels it would use. Worse, qi reacts to impurities. In a body unprepared for that reaction, it would be fatal. Body cleansing is simply the controlled use of one's own internal heat to burn out impurities before qi is introduced. It is uncomfortable."

"How uncomfortable?" Viria asked.

"It depends on the body. Some people sweat. Some vomit. Some experience fever. The body purges in whatever way it can. The first cleansing is the worst. It is rarely fatal, but it is unforgettable." A pause.

"Wonderful," Viria said.

"I love that for me." Miho ignored her.

"I will guide you through the process. You will follow my instructions exactly. If something feels seriously wrong, you will stop and tell me. Do you understand?" The three of them nodded. Miho exhaled.

"Then sit straight. Put your hands on your knees, palms up. Close your eyes. Breathe in slowly through your nose, hold it for a count of four, then exhale through your mouth for a count of six. Do that until I tell you to stop."

For a long time, Zero counted breaths and watched the others through the gaps between counts. Viria's breathing was uneven as she kept losing the count and starting again, frustrated each time. Yukito's was steady almost immediately; he had clearly done some form of breath control before, though Zero could not tell what or why. Miho watched them all with the half-lidded attention of a teacher who had done this a hundred times before, and Zero wondered, briefly, who she had taught it to.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. His own breathing was easy. He could regulate his lungs the way another person might regulate their fingers. He held the four-count. He held the six-count. He waited.

"Now," Miho said quietly, after some unmeasured time.

"Turn your attention inward. Do not look for anything specific. Pay attention to your body, your weight on the ground, the air in your lungs, and the places where your skin is cold or warm. After you do that, you will be looking for warmth that does not come from outside. That is the first hint of your internal energy." Zero searched. He found warmth, but the warmth was wrong. It was Anima, the silver heat he had been carrying his whole life that the lab had measured, but never explained.

It moved through him along channels that did not match anything Miho had described. There were no 'meridians' in the sense he was beginning to understand. But there was something else. It resembled meridians, but distributed differently. It was layered into his musculature and his transformation systems rather than running along fixed lines. He sat with this for a while, and then opened his eyes. Miho was already looking at him.

"You felt something," she said. Not a question.

"Yes. But not what you described." Miho waited for him to continue.

"I have no meridians, but I have something. It's not like the lines you described, mine is woven into my transformation systems instead. It moves with my body, not through it." Miho was silent for a long moment before speaking again.

"How sure are you?"

"I have been monitoring my body's internal state since I was old enough to understand what monitoring meant. If there were channels in the standard configuration, I would have noticed them."

"You are sure, then."

"Yes." She exhaled slowly.

"That is a problem."

"How much of one?"

"I don't know yet. The first circulation will not work for you the way it works for them. Cleansing might still work, since impurities should burn the same regardless of channel structure. But circulation requires channels. If yours are non-standard, we will need to find them and follow them, rather than imposing the standard pattern on you. That is a much harder kind of teaching. I am not confident that I can do it safely."

"You can teach the others?" She nodded.

"Then focus on them. I will work on my own." Miho's eyes narrowed.

"You are not even a beginner cultivator. You cannot work on this on your own."

"I have spent my life observing my body. If anyone could, I could." A pause. Miho closed her eyes.

"We will see," she said after opening them.

"For now, just sit and continue breathing. I will work with them. When I have time, I will return to you and we will look at your channels together. Do not attempt anything advanced without me. Do you understand?"

"Yes." She turned to Viria and Yukito.

"You two. Continue. Find your warmth."

Body cleansing began before noon. For Viria, it began as a wave of nausea that arrived without warning and did not leave for the better part of three hours. She vomited twice into the corner Miho had indicated as appropriate, complained without rest in the gaps between, and at one point asked Zero with apparently genuine curiosity whether he thought she was going to die.

"No," Zero said.

"Are you sure?"

"Reasonably." Viria laughed, which immediately made her vomit again. Zero watched it happen and made a mental note of that. Though his brain knew observation was useless, since he would not need it later. But he noted it anyway. Zero was beginning to suspect that he catalogued things for the same reason that Viria made jokes: because it was a way to respond to unknown or uncomfortable situations that could ease his mind. For Yukito, body cleansing began as fever.

His skin went pale, then flushed; his shadow, which had been pooled neatly under him, began to drift at the edges. He did not vomit or complain. He simply sat through it, sweat running down his temples, his breathing deliberate and controlled, his hands open and resting on his knees. Miho watched with something like approval.

After the third hour, when his fever began to recede and the impurities had visibly purged through his skin in a faint dark film he then wiped away with a cloth, she said, very quietly, "You have done something like this before."

"Not exactly," Yukito said. His voice was hoarse.

"Meditation. For control. The first time the shadows came out — there were no instructions. I taught myself to sit and breathe until the shadows would stop responding to my fear. It is not the same as what you taught. But the muscle is similar."

"It is similar enough. You may progress faster than I expected." He did not smile, but his shoulders relaxed. Zero noted that, too: it was the third instance of validation from Miho that produced visible physical change in Yukito. He sat with his inner feelings for a while. This time, they did not go away.

Zero's own cleansing took longer. Miho had told him to expect that. Without standard channels, the impurities had nowhere obvious to go; they had to be coaxed out along the non-standard pathways Zero was still mapping. He sat for hours, breathing, searching, finding faint resistances in his Anima flow that he had never registered before; small congestions in the energy-paths woven through his musculature, places where the flow stuttered.

He had lived with these stutters his entire life, not even knowing they were present. That realization, when it came, was uncomfortable. He had spent nearly twenty years monitoring his body and identifying every measurable variable he could think of, and yet, there had been an entire layer of his internal state that he had simply not had the ability to perceive. The lab had not taught him to look for it, so he had not looked. And what he had not looked for, he had not seen.

He found the blockages one by one and held his attention there. Each one was a 'small warmth', as Miho had said. He directed the warmth slowly and patiently, resembling the way he had once directed bone growth under researcher instruction. It was a similar discipline, but applied to a layer of himself he had not known he had. The first blockage took him an hour to clear, the second took him half that time. By the fourth one, Zero could work without Miho's direct instructions.

By the eighth, he was working in a rhythm: locate, warm, burn, repeat. Each impurity left a small dark residue that surfaced as a smudge of grey along his arms or legs or chest after it was expelled. He wiped them away as they appeared. By late afternoon, his entire body was streaked with the marks, which was a sign that the cleansing was working much faster than expected, according to Miho.

"Did you find your channels?" she asked.

"I am beginning to."

"Show me." He held one hand out. Across the back of it, traced under the skin in a pattern Miho could see if she looked carefully. A faint network of Anima flow, lit from within, not following any meridian map she would have recognized. She looked for a long time.

"Zero," she said.

"You have channels."

"Yes."

"But they are not human channels, nor the channels of any cultivator I have ever heard of. They are yours, and yours alone."

"Is that good?"

"It means I cannot teach you a system. But it also means you may be able to develop a system no one else has. Depending on what you do, you could end up with a crippled body, or a perfect constitution." She paused.

"I am surprised at how quickly you found them."

"I have been looking for things in my body my entire life. Once I knew to look, they were easy to find." Miho briefly made an expression that Zero had not seen on her before, but she quickly regained her composure.

"Continue cleansing," she said.

"I will check on the others." She turned away. Then, halfway across the yard, she stopped, looked back, and said, "You are doing well." Zero sat with that too. He did not know what it meant, but the warmth he was supposed to be cultivating to burn out his impurities suddenly felt like it had a partner somewhere in his chest, distinct and unexpected. It felt like the reward stimulation he received in the lab, but he also felt a second, unfamiliar sensation that brought out a completely new facet of the first one.

He savored the emotions for a while, then filed them away before they faded away. Eventually, Zero would come to know those sensations as 'pride' and 'praise'.

That evening, everyone felt drained. Viria collapsed onto her sleeping mat the moment they returned to the room and announced, with great solemnity, that she had achieved enlightenment. When Yukito asked what enlightenment revealed to her, she had said, "That cultivators are insane, whoever invented this process was a monster, and if anyone tries to make me do this again tomorrow I will probably die."

"You will do this again tomorrow," Miho said. Yukito had not collapsed, but he was moving slowly, in the way a one trudged along after running a great distance. He sat down against the wall, closed his eyes, and breathed evenly for a long time. The shadow under him was darker than Zero had ever seen it. It was at rest, in a way it had not been since they'd met. Miho watched him for a moment, then turned to Zero.

"You did well today," she said again. Zero said nothing. He still had not fully processed the emotions he had felt from the first time she said those words.

"I mean it." Zero asked the only question he could think of, "Will I be able to cross the Cloud Sea?"

"I don't know yet. In one day, you did what would normally take years. You found channels I did not know existed, and burned impurities I did not know your body had. By any reasonable measure, you have already exceeded expectations." Zero felt the sensations from earlier blooming again, but he suppressed his expression and responded.

"And by unreasonable measure?" A small twitch at the corner of her mouth, not quite a smile yet.

"By unreasonable measure," she said, "you have six days left, and I do not yet know what you will be by the end of them. I am not in the habit of guessing what someone like you will become. I am, however, in the habit of being curious." She did not say more. Zero sat down on his sleeping mat with his back to the wall and watched the others settle. Viria muttering complaints into her pillow. Yukito breathing in the corner.

Miho cleaning her sword in slow, deliberate strokes, the way she did when she was thinking about something she did not want to say out loud yet. Outside, the first bell of evening rang on the inner mountain. Though Zero had been told to sleep. He would not. There was important work he wanted to do tonight in his own head: mapping the channels he had begun to find.

He suspected that he could find more if he kept looking, and that he could understand more about himself in one week of this than he had in the nearly twenty years spent in the lab. He suspected he had been looking at the wrong things for his whole life. It was the first 'regret' he had ever experienced, though he did not know that word yet.

But, sitting in the small grey room with the bell echoing across the mountains and the three strangers who had become, in the space of a day, the only people who had ever looked at him without measuring him, he was beginning to understand that he was going to spend the rest of his life finding words for new things. And that too, was something he wanted.