“Push and pull Chin, remember that. Push and pull.”

The cross-legged old man nodded.

I watched as the qi struggled through his meridians, floating to the first qi point, then fizzling out and dying before it could go any further.

“Chin, you’re doing it wrong,” I said.

Chin’s eyes snapped open in frustration.

“How? I’m pushing and pulling just like you said.”

“You’re trying to breathe in qi. What you should be doing is letting the qi fall into your meridians, not trying to drag it in.”

“That is what I’m doing-” Chin muttered.

“No, you’re trying to-” I sighed and rubbed my head for the fifth time this hour. The man just didn’t get it.

I was trying to avoid the farm analogies, but that seemed to be the easiest way to get through to him.

“Alright, get up real quick,” I grumbled.

Chin obliged and stood next to me, frowning.

“Imagine you have a farm-” the frustrated man cut in.

“I do have a farm,” he interrupted.

“Imagine you had a fictional farm in a fictional place, Chin.”

The still frowning man gave me the slightest of nods.

“Alright, now imagine that farm needs water.”

“All farms need water,” Chin grumbled.

“Well for this farm, the water is about a thousand feet away, on a river flowing down a hill.”

Chin nodded, his frown lessening a little bit.

“Now, how do you get that water to the farm.”

“If it’s up on a hill and the farm is lower than the water source, we could always dig out a small trench to get the water toward where it needs to go.”

“Right. Now think of the water as qi, and think of the farm as your dantians. The distance between the farm and the river is your body and the trenches you want to dig to divert the water to your farm are the meridians.”

Chin gave me a slightly confused nod this time.

“Good, now imagine those trenches are filled with another liquid, one that’s not water. It’s not harmful to your farm, but your plants can’t feed on it either. So what do you do?”

Chin thought for a moment and then he bent down, grabbed a stick, and started drawing in the dirt.

The man was drawing a diagram as if this was a real problem on a real farm. But I knew better than to interrupt the process. The better Chin understood this, the sooner we could move on.

The old farmer grabbed his bamboo hat and rubbed its brim for a minute.

“The best option would be to move the useless water out of the waterways and funnel it off to somewhere else where it wouldn’t be a problem.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know what the rest of the land looks like, the water would need to be moved downhill, but maybe the farm is located at the deepest area in the valley, not to mention-”

“Imagine you could control the water in the trenches as if it was your own qi.”

Chin looked at me for a moment and his eyes lit up as the analogies started to click together in his mind.

“The useless water in the waterways is my qi and I can control my qi.”

“Correct,” I replied.

“And I can move my qi, but I can’t move the qi external to me?”

“Yes,” I replied. “You can’t control the qi of the world, only your own qi. And the qi outside of your body is a thousand times more dense than the qi inside of you. Trying to manually move that qi is equivalent to taking buckets of water from the river to the farm. It works, but is ultimately tiresome and draining-”

“But by opening up my meridians and moving my own qi out of the way, I can just let the qi from the world flow into me and guide it to where it needs to go,” Chin finished.

I nodded with a light smile, keeping my senses on Chin’s meridians. This was a common technique, but an almost impossible one to master without guidance. The problem was that most people underestimated the flow of the river. Qi from the outside could rush and break your dantians like a flash flood, so most people required weeks, if not months of guided practice to master it.

But to my surprise, Chin held on and limited his initial intake of qi, quickly blocking off the entrance to his meridians before he could be overwhelmed.

“Don’t wanna flood the crops,” he mumbled.

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I watched the man navigate his meridians, stumbling through his internal pathways like a kid who had just learned to walk. This part was also dangerous, misplaced clumps of foreign qi could end lives if it was mismanaged.

But again, it wasn’t much of a problem for Chin. He managed to push most of the qi directly to his lower dantian, feeding the small spiral of qi in his lower abdomen.

Chin frowned.

“What about the rest of ‘em?” He grumbled.

“The rest of what?”

“The dantians. There were two more of them but the first one ate it all up like a greedy pig.”

I chuckled.

“Yeah well you have to strengthen all three of them before you can officially step into the first rank,” I replied.

“That’ll take ages,” the old farmer mumbled.

“Yeah, that’s why you gotta start young Chin.”

Chin’s frown deepened.

“Oh relax, I messed around with the qi density at this spot so you’ll break through into the first realm in about a week, as long as you cultivate here for about an hour a day, every day. Speaking of which, you need to learn a basic cultivation method.”

“I thought I was cultivating,” Chin said with a very noticeable frown.

“In a way,” I answered. “But that’s like calling a squirrel who forgot where he buried his acorns a farmer.”

Chin’s frown lessened just a bit at the joke. I’d love to think my comedy was getting to the man but I doubted that. Maybe the idea of a farming squirrel had lightened the mood.

“Okay, we’re going to go over the basics of cultivation, and as boring as this will be for me, you’ll need to pay attention like it’s your first day of farming school.”

Chin was unhumored by the joke. Oh well, I tried.

“Alright, first thing first. Meridians. You have twelve main meridian pathways throughout your body, and regardless of what some healers will tell you, their shape and layout does vary from person to person. But generally, the meridian pathways reflect vertically over the body. That means if you have three meridian pathways crossing over your left shoulder, you’ll have three meridian pathways crossing over your right one.”

I pulled a large scroll out of a bag. It was big. Laid out, it was just a bit taller than Chin and about twice as wide. I opened the thing and spread it out on the ground in front of Chin. On the scroll were two different figures.

One was pristine and well-muscled and while its face was blank, the physiology was clearly male. The other one was just a bit shorter and while it too was a male, it was different from the pristine generic image. It was shorter, and skinnier, with a smaller torso yet longer legs. Both images were riddled with different colored dots, each dot having a small inscription with a number and a description by their side.

“This is a generic diagram of the male body’s meridians on the right,” I said pointing to the pristine image.

“And this is a diagram of your body’s meridians and pathways.”

“I thought meridians were pathways of qi?” Chin asked.

“They are,” I replied. “But it's more complicated than that. Meridians are everywhere throughout the body, but the body is three-dimensional, meaning they can stack onto one another. It’s more like an ant hill than a maze, with tunnels going up, down, left, and right. Trying to draw a map of that system would overcomplicate things for now.”

“Then what are they?” Chin asked pointing to the dots on the paper.

“Intersection points of qi, specifically the ones that are closest to your dantians and are important to the overall functioning of your body,” I answered. “There are hundreds of thousands of these meridian points as meridian pathways intersect with each other all the time, but the ones on this graph are the closest ones to your dantians.”

Chin bent over and took a better look at both diagrams.

“They aren’t the same?” He noted.

“No, they aren’t. Most of the differences are tiny, almost unnoticeable, but numerous. That generic diagram is what most cultivators start out with, and while it helps them learn and navigate their meridians, those thousands of small differences add up and make a difference in the long run. In cultivation terms that could mean decades, or even centuries for some.”

“There are so many,” Chin grumbled. “Do I have to learn them all?”

I nodded.

“It’s a prerequisite to being able to cultivate. If you had known them then it wouldn’t have taken you that long to bring your qi to your dantians. It would have taken about a second to cycle through that small amount of qi. Also, different cultivation methods cycle the qi through different meridian points.”

Chin was still frowning, but he nodded.

“Why are they different colors?” Chin asked. “And why are they numbered?”

“The colors tell you how deep the qi points are in your body, and the numbers tell you the number of meridian pathways intersecting at any given qi point,” I answered.

Chin kept studying the large piece of paper for a moment.

“Why is there a twelve on the dantians?”

“The dantians are the spots where all the meridian pathways intersect. They’re the most qi-dense part of the body, and each meridian is also responsible for fueling a certain part of your existence.”

“Fuel my existences?”

“Yup,” I said with a nod. “Remember all that stuff with innate qi? That all comes from your lower dantian. Innate qi fuels your physical form and eventually, when a mortal’s consumption of innate qi overwhelms the rate at which their dantian produces that qi, they die.”

“What about the other two dantians?”

“Well, the upper dantian fuels your soul, and the middle dantian fuels your will,” I answered.

Chin frowned and gave me one of those dead-panned stares that yelled for clarification.

“Think of living as a three-part experience. You have the soul, will, and body. Without all three you’re not really what we call a living being,” I answered.

“And what is a living being?” Chin asked.

“I really don’t want to get metaphysical Chin,” I answered.

The farmer replied with the same dead-panned look.

I sighed.

“A living being, at least within the metaphysical sense, has a soul. A central store of experiences and sentience. A soul is basically who you are in its totality. Your mind, your thoughts, your past and present. But your soul by itself isn’t capable of change. It needs your will and body to do that.”

“Isn’t my will a part of my soul?” Chin asked.

“Nope. Your soul is who you are, and your will, while still informed by your soul, is not a part of it. If your soul was a story, then the will would be the pen and the body would be the book. Without a pen, the story can’t continue, and without the book, the story can’t be recorded.”

Chin rubbed the brim of his hat again, a bit of nervousness present in his eyes. I knew the man had been like steel this whole time, taking this world-changing information without blinking, but that was bound to stop at some point.

As a mortal, these questions were always there, but you never expected an answer for them, at least not a solid one. People had theories and ideas and religions but never definitive answers about the nature of life and humanity as a whole. When you break the essence of humanity down to its functional turning gears, it becomes harder to see that beautiful respectable thing that was life. Purpose could turn to ash and existential dread could take root in an instant.

But fortunately, Chin wasn’t just any old mortal.

A moment later, his mind calmed down and his frown returned.

“I think I might have left my lunch at home,” the man muttered. “Medin doesn’t like it when I don’t eat lunch.”