A two year old with hair longer than a two year old should have was sitting in a little ramshackle hut in the middle of a forest that probably housed multiple demonic spiritual bears. He sat in a lotus position with his eyes closed. Suddenly, the boy opened his eyes.

“Gah ow owie ow owiwee ow ow!”

After saying this, the boy fell over.

This boy was Will, and he was currently trying to cultivate. Sadly, he didn't know how to cultivate, and he was currently in, quite possibly, one of the worst places for someone who doesn't know how to cultivate to try to cultivate. This was because the surroundings were suffused with demonic lightning spiritual energy. Not even just regular demonic lightning spiritual energy either, it was especially aggressive too. Even though Will was completely immune to Qi deviation, this demonic lightning spiritual energy was trying to not only electrocute him when he inhaled it, but also demonically corrupt him and beat him up, too.

He had succeeded in feeling the spiritual energy around him, and he had succeeded in bringing it in. But every time he brought it in he'd get zapped, eviled, and beat up and lose focus. This last time, he had tried to just keep inhaling throughout this process, and the results were not shocking. It hurt more. That was about it. But he was getting used to it! It hurt like hell, but it didn't seem to do much damage, and the pure spiritual energy brought in with it healed the damage from the previous attempt, thus leaving him with only the new injuries that occured after he lost control of it.

He decided to do another big inhale.

“Owie ow ow owie, that hurts, ow ow!”

It hurt still, but it seemed like it actually hurt less than last time. Taking this as progress he repeated this process eight more times. By the eighth time, he was only going “ow” and grimacing a bit. He decided to take a break from evil electrocuting himself and try something else.

Will suddenly remembered meridians. He remembered something about having to open them or something. He decided to find them first. He closed his eyes and looked inward, trying to find any weird things. It took a few minutes, but after that, he finally found something. After he found the first, he was able to follow along its length to find the others. He quickly sent a part of his consciousness into the mind space, opened the Document Manipulation section, and used the copy function to copy what he had observed. It seemed to work perfectly. He now had a three dimensional map of all of his meridians. Maybe. He didn't know how many there should be. He decided to keep looking for a bit.

After a minute he found three big balls in his head, torso, and stomach. He assumed these were his dantians. He put them on the map and went back to looking.

After looking some more, he found some weird stick looking thing just overlayed over everything in a really trippy way. It looked grey and was pretty small. He didn't know what it was but it seemed useful so he decided to try giving it stuff later and seeing if it does anything.

After looking for a few more minutes he was almost certain he had found everything. He decided to look at his meridians a bit closer now. Looking at them closely, they seemed to be full of some weird gross crap. Seeing this, Will had an idea. Since the demonic lightning spiritual energy wants to go wild and destroy things, all he needed to do to get rid of all the gunk was to shove it in there.

With a plan in mind, he closed his eyes and inhaled the spiritual energy. Then he lost focus from the pain.

After a few seconds of recovery, he inhaled again. This time he was ready for it, and quickly shoved all of it into a random meridian. The spiritual energy phased through the wall, and as soon as it did so, all the pain was gone immediately. The demonic lightning spiritual energy starting attacking the gunk violently, completely destroying a portion of it before dying out.

Will didn't know this, but what he did would've caused a normal person to go into qi deviation as the malicious spiritual energy blew up their meridians one by one.

After the resounding success, he decided to repeat the process. After a few minutes he got bored and played some music with his phone in the mind space. With the music to go with it, the task went by like a breeze. It was really quite satisfying to watch it clear away the gunk. He only stopped two hours later because the Inter-Universal Connection Dimensional Energy Bar was empty and his music turned off.

He suddenly remembered the weird stick thing from earlier. He hesitated to mess with it, in case it was something important, but remembering how the tutorial had emphasized how absolute things like his Qi Deviation Immunity were, he decided to go for it. He inhaled again and quickly sent it all to the stick thing. Both the pure spiritual energy and the demonic lightning spiritual energy latched onto it. When he did it again, he realized that the amount he brought in was a bit bigger.

What Will didn't know is that the “weird stick thing” was his spiritual roots, and what he just did would have caused a normal person to go into qi deviation from their spiritual roots exploding. Even if they didn't, the misshapen roots would cause all the qi in their body to go wild, giving them qi deviation anyway.

Seeing the increasing amount, Will was excited. Since the amount increased when more was added, and more was added when the amount was increased, this was basically exponential growth. This was much more satisfying than simple gunk cleaning. As such, Will decided to repeat the process.

He only stopped when he realized that the amount of spiritual energy per inhale stopped increasing. He opened his eyes and looked around him. Looking around, he first realized that the sun had set. But the second thing he noticed was that the room he was in was almost devoid of spiritual energy. He was incredibly disappointed at this. He decided he should just go to bed.

Will walked up to the bed his parents used to sleep in. It was small, clearly intended for one person. His parents in this life had brought him to this forest somewhat recently. They seemed to be on the run for some reason, but he'd never managed to overhear why. Once the food they had ran out, they left the hut in search of more. They never came back. Will didn't know whether they died or not, but frankly he didn't care too much.

He began the laborious work of getting onto the bed. It was a good bit taller than him, so he would have to climb it.

As he grabbed the ledge of the bed and tried to pull himself up, he discovered that it wasn't actually hard at all. It was like he was lifting his current self with the arms from when he was twelve. It was easy. Thinking about it, it was probably because of how he kept getting his muscles damaged by the demonic lightning spiritual energy and repaired by pure spiritual energy.

The bed was surprisingly comfy, especially considering how much his parents complained about how hard it was all the time. He guessed it was because he was too light to sink into the mattress enough that his back hit the wood. Pulling up the thin sheet and resting his head on the pillow, he soon fell asleep.

—

The night passed and Will woke up feeling rested as can be. He hopped out of bed and danced his way to the kitchen. Then he remembered there was no food there. His spirits were dampened a bit, but they remained high. As he was strutting around trying to find a place with any spiritual energy, he heard a weird noise. It sounded like a buzzy squeak.

Turning to the noise, Will was greeted with a mouse. A yellow mouse. A shiny yellow mouse with red eyes.

The mouse wasn't paying any attention currently. It was currently in the safe spot it found where no predators came. The only other thing here was this bipedal thing, and when it looked at it with its spiritual senses, it had barely as much spiritual energy as the surroundings. Though it felt like it remembered it being dead a bit ago. Either way it wasn't a threat, so it just ignored it. Then it got picked up.

Will held the mouse in his hand. He could feel sparks coming off of it. It reminded him of that one electric mouse that was popular in the other universe, but they didn't really look very similar. The mouse was incredibly docile. It didn't even seem upset about being picked up. In fact, it looked at him as if it was just wondering what this idiot was doing. It didn't even register Will as a threat when he held it in his hand.

Though Will had been enthusiastic earlier, now that he held it in his hand he realized that he really didn't feel like eating a mouse. Yet he could feel that the mouse was full of spiritual energy. To give up and just let it go because he was grossed out would be foolish. He really wished he could just take it all for himself without eating it. He sent his gaze inward and went up his arm to his hand holding the mouse, then tried to peer into the mouse itself. He managed to see a bit into the mouse, though he couldn't send his gaze into the mouse itself. He saw a few of its meridians. They seemed to be empty. On the other hand, the part of a dantian he could see was full of pure spiritual energy. In a fit of greed, Will tried to inhale spiritual energy from the mouse.

The mouse wasn't too peeved about being picked up. It was kind of fun being up here, and it's not as if it could be hurt by the creature. Until it felt its spiritual energy leaving its body. This startled the mouse a bit. It hadn't expected it to be able to do that. Even so, it wasn't scared by it. It just had to kill the thing, something that it could do with a simple…

BZZZT

The mouse watched as the foul beast got hit by the lighting. It saw and could tell and knew that it turned the damn thing into a pile of buzzing charcoal.

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But it was still in its hand. And the thing, that by all means should be a light tap away from a pile of ashes, stood there completely unharmed. It was bewildering.

But not bewildering enough to matter. If the thing could survive that attack, it would just have to use a bigger, stronger one.

BOOM KRAKOOM

The walls shook, the floorboards splintered, charred lines spreading out from the point of impact like cracks in a window. And the point of impact was standing there like nothing happened.

At this time, Will was just confused why the mouse wasn't attacking him. He knew it had the power to, he could feel it. But instead of attacking him, it just attacked around him.

The stupidity of his own question knocked Will out of his half-asleep state. This was obviously his Instant Death Immunity. Which was shocking in its own right, this little mouse being able to instantly kill him.

But a thing this dangerous was sure to have a lot of spiritual energy in it. As the mouse sat dejectedly, now feeling hopeless, Will continued inhaling its spiritual energy. He decided to put it in his middle dantian this time.

Though he'd probably be able to guess as much, Will was yet unaware that what he was doing now would send any normal person into qi deviation and kill them. Though there are many techniques to turn another's power into one's own, those are techniques. To just pull it out like this was to put one's own spirit roots and qi manipulation ability against another's spirit roots, qi manipulation ability, willpower, and body to grab hold of a power that will refuse to listen to you and fight you the whole time. Just initiating this battle of wills would cause one's own spiritual energy to go wild as well, likely also giving them qi deviation.

Yet as Will pulled all the spiritual energy out of the dantian of the mouse, he put it in his middle dantian and it immediately stopped resisting at all. But even after emptying its dantian, the mouse was still alive. Will also noticed that it didn't seem to be empty. There was still something there.

As Will inhaled the new thing he found, he saw that it was a green energy full of life. In fact, it seemed as if it was a half of life itself. Like it was the force between all the physical parts of life. As he saw the mouse shrivel up and turn decrepit, he came to the conclusion that it was lifeforce.

This brought up a small conundrum, as he didn't want to mix in mouse lifeforce with his own lifeforce. He didn't much like the idea of mixing half of his life itself with the half of life itself of some mouse in a hut in the woods. This brought up the question of what to actually do with it. It seemed like a very different brand of energy from the pure spiritual energy and demonic lightning spiritual energy he'd been interacting with so far. He decided to slap it onto the stick thing.

Then he stopped. This “stick thing” was probably his spiritual roots. He hadn't made the connection since he wasn't thinking about spiritual roots and the time. And the way he spiritual roots could hardly be called a root if one were just describing its shape. Now he was second guessing whether he wanted to put lifeforce onto it. Putting just spiritual energy on there was already something that seemed iffy in hindsight. The spiritual roots should be made out of… well, he didn't quite know. He went with the idea that they should be made out of spiritual root, whatever that means. Though spiritual energy worked out, spiritual energy and spiritual root were both spiritual? Maybe? This was the issue with having no actual knowledge of any of this, he didn't know if he was super intelligently deducing the way this world worked step by step, or if he was just making shit up so far from reality that any actual cultivator he told this all to would beat him to death for making a mockery of cultivation as a practice.

When he thought about how little he knew, he came to the conclusion that it was best to just try it. The most likely outcome of failure would just be qi deviation, and if he had fucked up really really bad then it would instantly kill him. And he had an Immunity for both of those. And if he were to give up on an opportunity to gain strength over some bogus he made up, he'd be crazy pissed about it when he found out.

Making up his mind, he slapped the lifeforce onto his spiritual roots. What he'd done would've killed a normal person. Adding your own lifeforce to your spiritual roots is something a few archaic techniques describe, sure. Adding something else's lifeforce, furthermore, not even something of the same species's lifeforce, is just insane. Putting any lifeforce on your spiritual roots would already cause you to likely blow up. It's only through exploiting how both one’s own lifeforce and one’s own spiritual roots are so deeply connected with the self that it can even be feasibly possible. Yet, Will hadn't even done that, he tried to jam together two completely different things from two completely different places and ask it to just work somehow.

The outcome was obvious, he blew up and disintegrated at the same time, dying instantly. And as such he was completely unharmed.

Once the initial rejection of the two was denied, they were stuck. The explosion between the two would be the time when they separate from each other, and with that negated they were left with no momentum to explode over. They were just there now.

Immediately afterwards, Will felt a huge change. Before, he could only perceive the lifeforce in the mouse because he had known it was there and consciously observed it.

Once he put that bit of life force onto his spiritual roots, though, everything changed. He could now perceive minuscule bits of lifeforce all over the place! And he could control it all a bit too!

But, if he could control a bit with a bit of lifeforce, then why not get more and control a lot? Will inhaled the lifeforce in his surroundings. It wasn't a lot, and it barely made a change in the amount of lifeforce on his spiritual roots.

After a few minutes, he gave up. This seemed like the kind of thing that would only be useful when he had something to use it on. With just the lifeforce in the surroundings, he was unlikely to have any real difference to show for it.

But when he decided to go back to dealing with spiritual energy, he noticed that the problem of the day before persisted to today. Though it was slightly less barren than he had left it, considering how it was before he started, the change might as well not exist. It seemed like he would have to go outside.

Directly outside, right outside the front entrance, was the same as inside. This made sense since the hut had no door. It didn't even have a door frame. In fact, it barely even succeeded in having the wall that goes around the door frame, considering how misshapen it was. So his plan was to go around to the side of the hut.

Though he was a bit worried about being out here like this, he was assured in the fact that this hut had a formation hiding it from view from the dangerous beasts of the forest. Though, considering the “harmless critters” that the formation didn't stop could kill him in one hit, he was still a bit worried. But trying to cultivate inside would be like trying to fill one’s stomach by smelling food. And the longer he spent doing it, the more likely something came through that would manage to kill him, anyway.

He sat against the wall of the house, leaning his back against it, and focused. The spiritual energy here was much better. It was only a sliver less than the spiritual energy inside was before he started. He decided it was time he actually started cultivating, instead of cultivating his speed of cultivating.

He inhaled the spiritual energy, sending it into his meridians immediately. But this time, with his enhanced spiritual roots, he saw more clearly what happened. The demonic lightning spiritual energy didn't fizzle and fade out as he thought before. No, it was assimilated by the sludge. The demonic lightning spiritual energy was destroying the sludge, but for every 2 parts beaten 1 part of the demonic lightning spiritual energy turned into sludge. It was incredible. And also disappointing that he destroyed so much of it. Luckily, he was still cultivating slowly at the time and had only gotten a tenth removed, though if he had said that one tenth of the impurities in his meridians gone in less than a day was slow, a cultivator in Rising Dragon Village would probably cough up blood on the spot without even hearing the words themselves.

The only issue was that he didn't have control over it. But the solution was obvious to Will. Another repeat of the classic, put it on your spiritual roots method. And so he went about doing just that.

He first had to get it there, and since he couldn't control it directly, he would have to move it with something else. He decided to use the spiritual energy he took from the mouse.

Will sent a strand of spiritual energy to a spot in his meridian near the sludge, then shaped it into a big thick bowl shape. He then scooped up a bit of impurities with it, pulled out through the wall of the channel, and quickly brought it to his spiritual roots before all the pure spiritual energy got subsumed into the sludge. Once he threw it onto his spiritual roots, he found that there was more to it than he thought.

The sludge itself didn't seem to be causing the spiritual energy to turn into sludge. What seemed to be causing it was, well, he didn't know quite what it was. It looked like a black gas, but it stayed pretty dense and didn't spread out. It looked almost like a flame, but at some points it also seemed more like water. It gave off a very strange feeling as well. It felt like it had a bunch of negative emotions about pure spiritual energy. It seemed to hold a grudge against, but also seemed to look down on it, scoffing at it. It seemed like it both thought it was unnatural and wrong, but also belittled it for being something so intertwined with everything in nature. It almost felt completely contradictory. Surely any cultivator would consider it a useless thing, reasonless and worthless, hating the very pure spiritual energy that exists throughout everything and allowed them to achieve immortality.

But Will understood it. Though the part of him that always lived in this world didn't give any insight into it, the part from another world allowed him to understand it exactly. In fact, what it was trying to tell was exactly the thoughts that had been in the back of his mind. pure spiritual energy was weird. How something so integral to this world, tied into everything, could just not exist in the other one. How it seemed to deny physics sometimes, and follow them at others. How the idea that not having it and being able to use it would make one be considered worthless, but in this world where it existed, they didn't even have so much as trains when it came to technology. They'd consider a place with low pure spiritual energy backwater here, but when it comes to backwater, even the big cities he had been taken through would have been considered an almost third world country level of backwater back in the other world.

And this strange black substance felt his thoughts, and where it had been trying to resist before, it stopped. It seemed like it felt like it had been finally understood for the first time. More than that, it seemed as if all of its seemingly contradictory beliefs became possible for it to understand. Like all those feelings were finally explained. Like it had been told for the first time that it wasn't crazy. It felt… oddly coherent for a weird black gas, almost like it was a living thing.

And then it seemed as if the black gas reached out to him. It gave him an offer: abandon this stupid pure spiritual energy nonsense and make use of it instead. Will refused.

The black gas seemed about to riot at this. It seemed as if it felt betrayed.

Then Will, deciding to treat the black gas as something that he could talk to for the time being, attempted to explain his reason to it. He chided the black gas for being wasteful. This was a world running on pure spiritual energy, whether he liked it or not. To simply give up on it would be foolish. It was clear that no matter how nonsensical it was, it had power. And Will needed all the power he could get. Even once he got out of the forest, there was still whatever his parents had ran into a dangerous forest like this one to escape, and there was no telling whether they'd chase him down when he got out. He didn't even know who they were. He needed pure spiritual energy, plain and simple.

The black gas seemed to understand a bit, but it still looked as if it felt it had been abandoned. Like it had found the one person who understood its point against pure spiritual energy, and they still would use said pure spiritual energy instead of it.

And Will tried to explain again. How his point about not abandoning paths extended to it as well, how he had even incorporated lifeforce when he got the chance. And so he offered the black gas his own offer: to join him. To try to understand pure spiritual energy, not as the true and only way to gain strength, not as a thing to be deified, but as just another thing that exists and does things.

And the black gas agreed. As soon as it did, he felt all the sludge disappear, as if the black gas was just leaving it there to make cultivation harder. As it did so, the black gas even seemed to get stronger. After that, the bit of black gas he had put on his spiritual roots finally fully melded in. This left Will with only the question of what to do with it all.

Oh, and if it was ever a question, yes, putting the impurities in one's body into their spiritual roots will give them qi deviation. So will putting in the thing making those impurities. That should be pretty obvious

He couldn't put it in his middle dantian, since that had the pure spiritual energy from the mouse in it. He didn't want to put in his upper dantian, in case it prevented some mental ability upgrades spiritual energy might give him, and he already planned to try putting demonic lightning spiritual energy in his lower dantian, since he was scared it might cause issues in his upper dantian. He wouldn't have been so worried to put it in his upper dantian if it was just lightning spiritual energy, since death by brain frying sounded like a level of instant he'd be immune to, but with the demonic part of it, he was a bit worried he'd become an evil demon or something. He could already imagine himself standing over some farm girl face down on the ground with a bloody stab wound on her back, doing that weird slight squat that lunatics do and licking the knife. The worst part is that he'd probably just stand there reveling in the kill like an idiot until someone comes and finds him, and since he'll be too far gone he'll keep killing people while on the run and lead everyone straight to him. He was honestly more upset about the being stupid part than the being evil part. He didn't like the idea of turning evil, he actually disliked it a fair bit, but he hated the idea of becoming the kind of person he'd make fun of for dying over stupid crap more.

Either way, he was left with a conundrum. That was, until the black gas seemed to notice. All the black gas in his meridians flew out to a seemingly random spot. Then he found where it was going. It was another meridian! A big one! Like almost dantian sized big!

He hadn't seen it before, but now that he had seen it, he remembered something about there being some other special meridians or something. He didn't really remember much else, but he felt like getting them was special or something? Well, special or not, it was the perfect place to put the black gas. The meridian the black gas had found was running around his waist like a belt. As soon as it settled in, Will started looking again to find the rest.

After twenty minutes of looking, he managed to find seven more, which seemed to fit with the eight extraordinary meridians he assumed these were. They would do nicely as bonus dantians for all the weird crap he may stumble across.

With his meridians cleared out in what Will assumed was likely record time, or close to it, he now had to do something else. Which was going to be hard, since he really did not know how to cultivate.