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Chapter 4 - Consequences
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He’s practically floating as he makes his way back home, having banked the fire. It wasn’t even that his senses were improved that much, more that he could… pay more attention to them? None of what he could hear and see and smell was new so much as he just hadn’t noticed it before, but now he could effortlessly pick out each aspect all at once.
It’s like he’s been wearing sunglasses his whole life and only just taken them off. It’s only as he’s walking up to the small wooden gate leading to the front door of his house that he notices the soft, dim glow of lamplight under the door.
He looks up at the moon and winces at its position. Apparently the breakthrough took longer than he though – he’s never been the best at estimating the time, but even he can tell it’s the wrong side of midnight.
His mother is… not going to be pleased.
Sure enough, she’s waiting for him by the table, and the look on her face is not amused. He tries for a smile, aiming for casual and falling well short. She’s admittedly handled his general strangeness better than he could have hoped for, but now he’s starting to think she was just giving him enough rope to hang himself with.
***
He’s no longer allowed out of the house alone, not even to go to the archives. He would be annoyed, but in fairness he’s being treated how any other six-year-old should be treated, and considering it was only after he showed he couldn’t be trusted that the rules started stacking up he can’t complain too much.
Doesn’t make it any easier to put up with, but at least he’s made some progress. He hadn’t quite realised how much the lack of agency had been wearing on him until he’s managed to do something tangible to prove he wasn’t helpless.
Honestly, he’s surprised he doesn’t have more issues – he feels that he’s been handling the whole ‘reborn into a new world’ situation well enough to cut himself some slack.
So he tries his best to be a model child again and doesn’t complain about being shuttled between his mother and Auntie Hua like he’ll disappear the second they take their eyes off him.
He even manages to endure Meilan’s… energetic personality with a minimum of fuss, which he feels he should get a medal for. He also learns about the downsides of improved senses – she had always been painfully exuberant, but now interacting with Meilan makes him feel vaguely like he has a hangover.
***
Auntie Hua falls sick. It’s nothing terrible, just a persistent cold, but it’s enough that she can’t look after him and Meilan. He’s briefly hopeful that he’ll be allowed back into the archives – the sorting system is incomplete, and there’s nothing he hates more than leaving a job half-finished – but unfortunately for him, he’s underestimated his mother’s level of concern.
So instead, he’s dropped off at a largish building with Meilan in tow, given a quick peck on the cheek by his harried mother, and introduced to all the other children who have busy parents.
Day care.
He’s a grown goddamn man, and he’s in daycare.
Putting up with Meilan was bad enough, but if he was being totally honest with himself, he didn’t really mind her exuberant nature. He would be the first to admit that he was on the extreme end of the Introvert-Extrovert scale, but that didn’t mean he hated all interaction.
She may occasionally get on his nerves, but to her credit, she didn’t get offended when he inevitably got a little snappy.
He didn’t realise how good he had it until he met the rest of the town brats. They just will not leave him alone, constantly poking and prodding and shoving and talking and crying and ohgodjustshutupforasecond.
What he wouldn’t give for some peace and quiet.
The caretakers are almost worse somehow, and he is forced to admit that he’s gotten used to being treated like he’s more mature than his actual age.
Sure, he’s only, like, six years old, but that doesn’t make him a moron. They act like he doesn’t know how to spell his own name, like he’s never seen a book before. He tries to stay polite and answer their endless questions without getting frustrated, but it’s hard. So hard. By the end of the first day, he’s ready to pull his hair out.
The next day isn’t much better. He finds a corner to hide in, trying to escape the constant noise and chaos, but it doesn’t take long for the other children to find him. They swarm around him, chattering and laughing, pulling at his clothes and asking a million questions. He feels like a bug under a microscope, being studied and poked at from all angles.
It’s exhausting.
When Meilan finally shows up to drag him into some game or another, he almost feels relieved. At least she’s a known quantity. He knows how to deal with her. But even her relentless energy is wearing on him more than usual. By the time his mother comes to pick him up, he’s about ready to collapse.
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As the days go by, he finds himself dreading the mornings, knowing they’ll bring another day of noise and chaos. He starts counting down the minutes until he can go home and retreat to the relative peace and quiet of his room. But even there, he finds it hard to relax. The constant sensory overload of the day leaves him feeling jittery and on edge, unable to settle down.
Finally, he gives up and sits down in the middle of the room, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. He reaches for the Qi within him, letting it flow through his body, calming and centring him. The familiar warmth of the energy soothes his frayed nerves, easing the tension in his muscles. He sinks into the meditation, letting the world fade away until there’s nothing but the gentle pulse of Qi and the steady rhythm of his breathing.
Cultivation becomes his refuge. Whenever the noise and chaos of the day become too much, he retreats to his room and sinks into meditation, letting the Qi wash over him and carry away his stress.
***
Even with their attention being pulled in a dozen different directions by all the other children, it doesn’t take long for the caretakers to notice him – if only because he’s not creating more work for them.
It lets him get away with a few things, like ducking out of some of the less tolerable games he’s dragged into. A couple of times, the caretakers even seem willing to cover for him a little, distracting the children with a well-timed question or comment.
He’s not sure why they’re doing it, but he doesn’t much care either. It helps make the days a little more tolerable, and he stops spending quite as much time planning escape routes.
A few weeks in, one of them approaches him one afternoon as he’s sitting quietly in a corner, trying to drown out the noise with meditation. It’s not going well.
“You don’t seem to enjoy the games as much as the others,” she says gently, sitting down beside him.
If he had any more social energy left he might have dignified that with a response, but as it is he just gives her a dry look.
Fortunately, she seems more amused than anything else. “How about we find something more suited to you? We have some books, puzzles, things that might be more to your liking.”
He considers it for a moment. It’s hardly going to be the peak of mental stimulation, but it’s hardly going to be any worse than what he’s putting up with right now. He shrugs and accepts.
She smiles and leads him to a quieter room at the back of the building, filled with shelves of books and a few tables scattered with puzzles and toys. It’s not exactly the archives, but it’s close enough. He immediately feels more at ease, the noise of the other children muffled by the walls.
Maybe he can finally start getting something productive done.
***
Something has changed with his cultivation. It takes him longer than he’s entirely comfortable with to notice, but it’s like… like there’s a shape in his dantian that’s slowly being revealed.
Before he managed to break through to the Qi Formation realm, it felt like his dantian held a formless mass of energy. He could reach in with mental hands and shift things around, spread it through his body, compress it, disperse it, whatever he wanted.
Now, though, it feels like there’s a wrong way to do things, and when he tries shifting it around like he did before sometimes he can feel a burning sensation deep in his gut.
It’s incredibly concerning.
The last thing he wants to do is give himself a new and exotic illness because he messed around with power beyond his mortal ken. He’s always believed in the power of attacking a problem from another angle, so he starts going over the scrolls he’d found on the nature of Qi.
There’s one scroll in particular that catches his attention, though he can’t fully explain why. He’d initially dismissed it as being overly poetic and flowery, but he’s starting to realise that if he had to describe the feeling of moving his Qi around, explain how it felt to have the energy rush through him, he’d probably have to resort to metaphors as well.
The particular passage he finds himself mulling over sounds too similar to the new-age wellness influencers he occasionally saw on Instagram for him to be comfortable with, but it’s hardly as if he has other sources of information to pull from.
“In the dance of the heavens and earth, all things move in cycles. The sun rises, falls, and rises again, painting the sky in hues of dawn and dusk, forever tracing the celestial circle. The moon waxes and wanes, a silver wheel in the night, casting its gentle light through the veil of darkness. The seasons turn, from the blush of spring to the chill of winter, each phase a part of the endless loop of time.
So, too, does the Qi of the world flow in circles. It is the breath of life, inhaled and exhaled by the great spirit of the earth, a rhythmic pulse that sustains all living things. To master Qi is to understand this cycle, to join in the dance rather than fight against it. Gather Qi with gentle hands, let it flow through your meridians like a river winding through the valleys. Embrace the circular path, for only then can you truly harmonise with the essence of the world.”
Trying to understand a vague flowery scroll on the nature of Qi while surrounded by a horde of screaming children is not his idea of a fun time.
If nothing else though, at least his new habit of frequent meditation is starting to pay off a little – his Qi senses have grown sharper and more detailed while his manipulation has improved noticeably.
On the one hand it’s an excellent sign – he’s clearly making strides along his path of cultivation. On the other hand, it’s more things for him to work on when he already feels like his plate is overflowing.
He’s starting to see why the cultivators in the stories are all centuries old – it would take nearly that long just to learn everything.
For all that, he can’t say he minds the challenge.
***
Fortunately for his sanity, it’s only a few weeks before Auntie Hua is well enough to look after them again. He swears never to take it for granted again, though he admittedly feels a little bad at seeing his mother’s dashed hopes for him to make some friends.
It’s not that he’s completely against the idea – he might be used to solitude, but that doesn’t mean he loves it – but unfortunately he just has absolutely nothing in common with any of the other children. Not only is he mentally an adult, but his experiences are totally different, the way he looks at the world thanks to his knowledge.
He slips back into reshuffling the archives like he never left, and as time-consuming as the process has been, he has to admit to some satisfaction as the chaos gradually begins shifting to order.
His efforts have started to garner some attention – while the archives are not heavily used by the average citizen of the town, enough come by to notice his burgeoning system take shape. At first, they think he’s just like any other child, messing things up and shuffling them around for no real reason, but once he explains, they look at him differently.
His mother looks on, proud and a little resigned to have such an unusual child.
It’s only as he sits down to fully explain to the curious townspeople the system he’s trying to create that he realises he’s an idiot.
This whole time, he’s been working on building up a structured system to find scrolls on Qi, and he’s been completely ignoring the same thing when it comes to actually cultivating.
The scientific method may not be terribly flashy or exciting, but it works. When it comes to trying to figure out the actual process of cultivating, he’s been doing the equivalent of throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, when he should have been methodically working through it, forming hypotheses and disproving them.
He’s somehow managed to forget the one real advantage he has over everyone here – he has a twenty-first century education and way of thinking.
The flowery scrolls talking about ‘harmonising with the essence of the world’ might be all well and good for these people, but why is he accepting that it’s the only way to do things?
He’s about to science the hell out of this cultivation thing.