Meditation.

A process in which a trainee would enter a state of deep focus, a state when they would… forget themselves.

And a state in which one could harness the power of Qi.

This was the exact thing I was missing to finally pass the exam and advance to the status of a cultivator. There, I would have to face all sorts of new challenges, but…

But up until now, I was deprived of this right.

The right to learn how to feel, manipulate, and experience the Qi and the world through it.

At pretty much the same moment, I felt like rushing out.

Now that I've managed to meditate… I could actually get my qualifications, right? Maybe the training would…

My body froze.

The motivation died as soon as it appeared.

'What good would training more do?' I thought to myself, once again looking down upon my own hands. 'Why should I go back to doing more of the thing that clearly didn't work for me, if…'

My eyes turned over to the broken, incomplete gizmo.

Then, almost outside of my control, my hand reached out for my phone.

I didn't call my master to beg for him to allow my return to the institution. I didn't bother calling the work even after turning the plane mode off.

Instead, I did what I really didn't want to and dialed my father's number…

Only for my thumb to hover over the call button without actually pressing it.

I then erased the number and moved back to the main screen before opening up the banking app I was using to manage my finances.

Mere ten minutes later, I've become a proud owner of a considerable loan of five thousand Esecs, with payments of a round hundred esecs on a monthly basis.

It was a bad decision, and I took it with no hesitation whatsoever. Maybe after five years of beating my forehead against the wall of inability to meditate, now that I saw a ray of hope, I dared not to hold back in the slightest.

Still, I was more willing to take out a loan with the excuse of starting to build my credit score up than to call my parents to ask for some help.

Heavens knew they've already supported me enough and… Regardless of how bad of an idea it was to take a loan when I was already at the bottom…

I opted to loan from the bank rather than ask my parents for help simply because it put the issue of me wasting my life and the ensuing confrontation for later.

The bank only required a simple form and came with no poli-hourly lecture about how I should've long become a lawyer or a doctor rather than living in the dream of becoming a cultivator…

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

A moment later, the notification on my phone indicated the fresh funds had arrived at my account, swelling it to the levels I'd never seen before.

Still, this wasn't my spending money. It was purely an investment.

I knew I would need that money to craft more even before I bothered to look deeper into the topic. Between materials, tools, or all the stuff that I didn't even know I needed yet… All of that would cost money. And while finally learning how to gather Qi promised some prospects in every field I would try to specialize in, all the perks would only come with time!

With the issue of immediate living expenses secured, I moved to the crate before pulling out the crafting book I'd found there again.

Now that I had Qi, this manual was actually better than anything I could find online. After all, rather than teaching me a single trick, it introduced a systematic set of knowledge and basics needed when delving into the field of crafting for cultivators.

And without wasting even a moment, I threw myself onto the bed, carefully not to break it again, before immersing myself in the lecture.

Immerse me I did, weathering through the boring foreword, bloated introduction, and then ass-licking added even to the very first, proper page of the manual. After all, why learn what I wanted if I could read about how much the author loved the publisher behind the manual?

Still, I read it all through, not daring to miss even the tiniest potentially important element due to nothing more but impatience and lack of discipline.

And so, I've kept reading.

Reading about the physical qualities of Qi, what it is, how it can affect the world… And how craftsmen of all sorts could make use of it.

Roughly two hours later, I realized that the first four chapters of the manual could all be summed up with just one sentence and explained in four.

The power of Qi was pretty much the mana people knew from the fantasy novels.

To explain, mana was merely a force, potential energy leftover after the act of creation itself and now constantly brimming in every particle of air that surrounded us. It was this energy that the cultivators of the past exploited through techniques, cultivators of the spiritual renaissance era wielded through the use of spells and modern-day cultivators harnessed through meditation and procedures.

The cultivation techniques of the ancients, the spells of the restorationists, and the procedures of today were ultimately all the same… one being the upgrade and evolution of the other.

Spiritual techniques started as merely means of circulating one's Qi through their own body to form different flows that would then invoke different effects. Spells organized this process, turning the spiritual energy into mere fuel for the instructions of their spells. Modern cultivators, however, ingrained the procedures directly into the flow of the Qi itself, making the whole process several times more efficient than ever before.

But ultimately…

The spiritual energy was just… mana. A fuel for cultivators to use, be it for training their fists or for crafting their creations.

And in both cases, as I've learned, the supple access to dense, spiritual energy was the key.

If I wanted to make the most out of every meditative state I've managed to enter… Just tinkering around in my room wouldn't be anywhere nearly enough. Not because there was something wrong with my room… But because, contrary to the area occupied by the institute, the spiritual energy within my room was extremely… thin.

For others, this would be a problem, another wall to overcome.

For the me now, though?

"So I just need to make the spiritual energy in the air… richer?"

Now that I figured out some sort of a goal… I quickly found out not to be as innovative as I momentarily thought myself to be, when on the very next page, I found a recipe for a simple, Qi-Condensing array.

The painting on the pages was perfectly formulaic, making it extremely simple to replicate the entire thing, even when lacking skill as I did. All I really needed was a pen and paper to draw the few dots and dashes that made up most of the runes included within the array.

But as I looked down and, thanks to what I learned from the first four chapters of the manual, understood…

"Couldn't I make it a little… better?"

I gulped my saliva down as if to ease the arrogance behind this statement down my throat.

But still...

"Or maybe, not better but... more modern?"