Chương 34: Volume 2 Chapter 7

Though the tempering process triggered by the Golden Marrow Tempering Jade Dew elixir he'd consumed was still ongoing—a persistent gnawing ache in his bones that waxed and waned but never truly subsided and reminded him unpleasantly of cold, hungry nights—he had already begun to feel the initial benefits of the transformation. He estimated that some fifty percent of his bone marrow had already been converted into Golden Jade Marrow, and the miraculous tissue was certainly living up to his expectations.

It had never been easier to infuse qi into his body and, though he hadn't had the occasion to truly test things in depth, many of the internal techniques of the Eight Peaks Martial Arts felt like they'd nearly doubled in efficacy. More importantly, the marrow's other functionality was even more impressive than he'd initially imagined. The rate at which it absorbed and refined qi was staggering, especially while he was meditating in concert.

It hadn't seemed so impressive when they'd been out in the world, but here in the sect with its greatly elevated qi density, the marrow could suck qi out of the air around him at least as quickly as he could himself, and it seemed to have no problem filtering even the sort of chaotic, emotionally tainted qi that Calvin refused to touch otherwise.

It also simply did so passively (though he'd found that he could with some effort prevent it from doing so), meaning he was constantly regenerating qi even while wholly focused on other tasks. Despite his extensive training over the past few days, his reserves were looking as though he'd done little else than meditate. It had taken some effort to determine how to draw qi from his marrow into his spirit, but now he could do so with little more than a thought, rapidly refilling his nodes and channels.

By doing so repeatedly, he'd been able to avoid wasting more than a few drops of the qi he'd painstakingly attuned to the phoenix figure's fire over the past weeks, making it possible to reintegrate the attunement into his Foundation today despite all his other preparations for the upcoming duel.

Sitting cross-legged in his small meditation cellar, Calvin focused on his spirit, allowing his awareness of it to overwhelm his physical senses until the world felt distant and his Foundation shone like a bright constellation painted onto his eyelids. When he looked closely, he could just barely make out the outline of a golden skeleton, bones outlined by faint ripples in his spirit like stones barely hidden beneath the waters of a shallow stream.

He briefly traced them in his mind's eye, noting the added definition around his ribs and legs and pelvis. Those had been itching terribly all day, like a rash deep within the muscle where no amount of scratching could reach combined with occasional spikes of pain like something with far too many teeth was chewing on his bones. The Scroll had called it 'modest discomfort', and he'd agreed with it at first, but sometimes the Scroll had a truly frustrating way of understating things.

He moved on, his gaze passing over the motionless form of the Figure of the Seventh Imperial Phoenix. Ever since his nearly disastrous fight against the hound of conquest, he'd been keeping a close eye on the statuette perched on the central node of his Foundation. He kept expecting it to do or say something, but other than a few tiny shifts it had remained as still as a regular metal statue.

Still, he couldn't help but shake the feeling that it was watching him, its gemstone eyes perpetually open and far too aware. He would try his best to pay attention to it today. If there was anything liable to make it react, it was reintegrating a fraction of its qi attunement into his Foundation. Then his focus shifted fully to his Foundation. Nine qi nodes glowed like stars, linked by channels flowing with currents of the palest lavender that glinted metallically in their own light.

It was a far cry from the vibrant, violet-gold blaze of the phoenix, but it was a step in that direction. Someday his qi would blaze just as brightly. It might take years, decades, even centuries, but he only had to think of how the hound had practically melted just from exposure to the Figure's aura to know it would be more than worth it in the end. For a time he simply watched, feeling the telltale warmth of qi flowing through his body.

Whereas before it has seemed to pulse like a second heartbeat, now the flow was a constant, unending stream. The rotating gate in his central qi node turned with tireless efficiency, circulating qi through his channels night and day. It had been nearly three days since he'd rebuilt this gate last, and it was still holding strong with nary a crack or fault in its structure.

The innate stability of his Foundation made it nearly trivial to maintain, and the insights he'd gained into the Nine Rotating Gates method in the past few weeks had greatly improved the baseline quality of the gate itself. Soon he hoped to be able to maintain three gates at all times, not just one. Then once he was comfortable with that, he'd move on to five, then ideally take the leap directly to all nine in the days leading up to his breakthrough.

Though harder at first, he was pretty sure that would be more efficient than trying to add one gate at a time. Symmetry was balance, and balance was stability. He couldn't be certain, but he suspected that had been one of the things he'd struggled with in the past. Gates beyond the first could not be formed in isolation, or else they would be innately unbalanced and fragile. It didn't take long for his trained senses to find a minor flaw in one of his channels.

He'd strained it earlier while practicing his new techniques, and now a hairline crack was beginning to form where it did not belong. The crack was already partially filled in by tiny specks of qi courtesy of the rotating gate, but it would be faster to repair it manually. It would only— He was stalling. Without opening his eyes, Calvin sighed heavily before resuming his meditation, the cool air of the cellar feeling heavy on his tongue.

He was nervous and he was stalling and he was wasting valuable time that could be spent on training his skills, advancing his cultivation, or any number of other things. It was understandable in a way, if less than ideal. Nerves could be a helpful warning, but they were also a weakness. They made it harder to focus, harder to act, harder to gather the decisive will and focus that cultivation demanded. This was a very big step.

A cultivator's attunement could define their future to nearly the same extent as their Foundation, perhaps even more so in some cases. While it was technically possible to change an attunement in the future, each breakthrough and each reintegration would make that harder and harder. Small changes were possible, beneficial even if you were integrating a more powerful variant of your existing attunement, but anything beyond that? Crippling at worst, and nigh impossible at best without the right pills and elixirs.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Did he really want to be a fire cultivator? He didn't mind the yang sub-aspect he'd noticed, but before rolling the figure, it had never even crossed his mind to pursue a path in that direction. His meditation room was quite literally a cool, slightly damn hole in the ground—the precise antithesis of a hot, fiery… fire cultivator. For him, fire and heat did not exactly come with pleasant memories attached.

And committing himself to this attunement would limit him in many ways. Sure it would make fire and yang techniques stronger and easier to use, but it would do the opposite for technique aligned with other elements. The other six techniques of the Eight Peaks Martial Arts would become significantly more difficult to use, including the only healing technique he knew and others he had spent years training. But then again, fire was not just destruction. It was a cleansing force, an aspect of rebirth and renewal.

Heat was not just exhaustion and fever, it was comfort in winter and the warmth of living flesh. And he had just spent more than a thousand points on fire techniques. And it wasn't like he would be fully unable to use other techniques, it would just be a little bit more difficult. Plus, when and where exactly would he find a better opportunity than the Phoenix Figure? Of course there was also the other minor source of nerves to consider.

He'd never actually done this before, reintegrating an attunement into his Foundation. He knew the steps in theory, but not in the knowledge-seared-into-his-brain way of the Scroll's knowledge tokens, but simply from books and a few free lessons provided by the sect. He was pretty sure that doing things a little wrong wouldn't be crippling, but it would probably be extremely unpleasant and spiritually damaging. Maybe he should spend a few more days preparing.

Double check the books, discuss the topic with Wallis, perhaps even hire a tutor from the sect to explain things a few more times— Calvin mentally slapped himself. He was being stupid again. He knew how this worked. Just because an artifact of ancient power and unknowable origin hadn't carved the information directly into his thoughts didn't mean he needed to hem and haw for the next three months and get nowhere. That sort of doubt would do more to cripple his advancement than a few spiritual burns.

The process of reintegrating an attunement into one's foundation was, at its core, extremely simple. So simple in fact that you could actually do it accidentally, especially if you were not cultivating frequently or let your qi sit in your channels for too long. It was one of the many reasons that it was so important to filter and purify ambient qi before absorbing it.

If you weren't careful, it was entirely possible to strongly attune yourself to an extremely weak attunement present in the environment where you most frequently meditated, which would make it significantly more difficult to attune your qi properly in the future. The most difficult part was said to be the tedium. Well, really it was maintaining a uniform level of precision over a long period of time, but that boiled down to the same thing.

It wasn't so bad if you were working with a single node, or just a few nodes and channels, but Calvin's Foundation included nine qi nodes and twenty-four channels, and multiple sources had stressed that it was important to complete the process in a single sitting or as close to that as possible. Having an irregularly attuned Foundation could cause all sorts of problems, ones that were easy enough to mitigate while meditating but much more difficult if you were interrupted during the process.

In essence, all you had to do was surround a portion of your Foundation, both from within and without, and then gently massage your attuned qi into the Foundation from both sides until it had fully permeated the permanent structure of the boundary qi. That was it. The only things approaching a challenge was maintaining your qi's stability outside your channels, something anyone who'd broken through to the Foundation realm should be capable of.

Other than that it was just a matter of patience and how much of your Foundation you could attune at a time. If you had enough control, you could potentially attune a whole node or channel at once, whereas others might need to go segment by segment. Before he could get around to psyching himself out any further, Calvin decided to just dive right in. Following the common wisdom he'd heard, he began with his first and most developed qi node—the one in his head. His first attempt was less than perfect.

Gathering his qi was no issue, nor was wrapping it around the boundary qi that made up the outside of the node. He'd decided to begin with just a quarter of the node at a time and that seemed like a reasonable place to start. It took some finesse to move large quantities of qi through his spirit without causing any damage, and he wasn't fully confident in his ability to control enough qi to encapsulate the node in its entirety. Better to start small with more control than accidentally injure himself.

The issue came with the next step after that, the one where you did the actual, well, integration. It didn't really… work at first? It took several attempts, starting and stopping to analyze his progress with the Scroll's help and his own senses before he figured out the trick to it. You really did have to massage the qi, kneed it like bread across both the inner and outer surface of the node. He quickly realized another reason that he'd always heard that it was better to attune your Foundation sooner than later.

His nodes and channels were dense and well formed, their walls smooth and layered. Not only did he have more Foundation to work with than most, he also probably required more effort to attune each part of his Foundation. But even if it was slow going, eventually he made it work and the results were everything he'd been told to expect. The formerly translucent, crystalline node slowly but surely gained a lavender tint, color sinking through the wall from inside and outside until they met in the center.

Simultaneously, crystalline dust seemed to precipitate out from the node, tiny sparks of qi that dissolved into his spirit or were carried away by the flow of qi within his node. By the time he finished working on the first node, he was already starting to feel the strain. It took focus to control his qi in such a new, precise manner. He'd get used to it, but it was like learning to use a new technique.

The first few times were always the hardest, requiring fully manual control before your qi and spirit learned the new patterns and motions. It was hard to say exactly how much time had passed, but Calvin got the sense that it was going to be a very long night. And probably a long morning and afternoon after. It was a good thing he'd intentionally not made any plans for the following day.

Taking only a moment to admire his first qi node, sparkling within his spirit like a pale lavender jewel, he moved on to the channel connecting that node to his heart. The first time would be the hardest, so it should all be downhill from here. He'd best get on with it. And for all his apprehension, he couldn't wait to see just how much more powerful his qi would become once he was finished. He was already quite impressed with his new techniques.

How much more potent would they become when fueled by much more compatible qi than would he could produce with a few minutes of cycling before a spar? Yunfei wouldn't know what hit him.