Sitting by a small fire with his three fish gutted and roasting over it on sticks and a bamboo pot filled with water containing a bamboo shoot he had dug out of the ground next to them, Lan Jin stares up at the darkening sky with an unreadable look on his face. All things considered, he believes he has done well for the last two days. He thinks he messed up interacting with Moxian and Qingshui, but he was introduced to cultivation because of them. So realistically, he doesn’t regret interacting with them, but only the fact that he didn’t know enough to realize he was in danger while interacting with them.
“I wonder what Qingshui looks like under the veil.” He mutters softly before growing silent.
After a few seconds, he sighs.
“Man, why did she have to be a sociopath? She has such a beautiful voice! I could spend my entire life listening to her. And up until she snapped, I actually enjoyed talking to her.
Between her and Moxian, I wonder which one is more fucked up in the head. Moxian wanted me to be her pet, but if not for her biting herself, smearing blood on me, and clearly becoming obsessive about not wanting me to betray her after just meeting me, she was actually really nice to be around. Granted, most of that was her face value, but if she could tone her personality down a bit I wouldn’t mind spending more time with her.
As for Qingshui… Uh… I mean, Moxian has some pretty unforgivable kinks, but at least she didn’t try to murder me. Qingshui is definitely more fucked up in the head.”
With his back facing the hole he had dug out of the foothill, Lan Jin has enough room to lean his head back against the red clay wall behind him while still being able to sprawl out and let his feet toast by the fire.
Taking a quick glance at his fish and the bamboo shoot cooking by the fire, Lan Jin closes his eyes and looks into the Omega Browser’s Space. Within, he is surprised to see that the little star had seemingly regained all of its energy after he dumped so much purple mist into it. In fact, it was larger now than it had been first thing in the morning. It was also very obviously purple and he even felt a strange sense of warmth while looking at it that he hadn’t noticed earlier.
He looks over the purple star and wonders if he’s imagining the sensation, but when he glimpses at the other objects within the Space he finds that he has vague sensations while looking at them as well.
“Well, that’s weird.” He wonders what it means that he can feel something off about the items in the Space, but not having a clue what it might imply, he switches tracks. “Should I search for something?”
He thinks he has enough time before his food is finished but he doesn’t know what he wants to focus on first. In his mind, he has three options right now. He can search for Qi Sensing, the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame, or the Great Desolates Body Transformation.
However, despite having narrowed his possible choices down, it isn’t easy for him to decide. After talking with Qingshui and reading the brown scroll, he knows that he needs to sense Qi to even begin cultivating. But when compared to absorbing the purple mist, which he’s already become quite good at and is stupidly simple, he doesn’t think that sensing Qi will offer him any immediate benefits. After all, the author of the brown scroll claimed that the Qi Sensing stage offered no benefits. Compared to absorbing purple mist might make him luckier, there was a clear winner between the two.
Then there is the Great Desolates Body Transformation which could be an immense boost to his current self or it could be a major flop. He believes the Great Desolates Body Transformation is probably something amazing, and that’s because the author of the scroll made it seem formidable with how he wrote about the early humans and all of the problems they caused when they first left the Great Desolates and arrived in the Divine Realm. Unfortunately, the author clearly wrote that humans lost the ability to use the Great Desolates Body Transformation after mating with the denizens of the Divine Realm and Lan Jin didn’t know if he fell into the same category as everyone else. So he might be able to use it because he came from Earth, or it could be a waste of time.
“Do I invest in the future, try to improve what I already can do, or do I take a gamble?”
He thinks it over for a minute and decides to exclude the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame from the options.
“After I got the Auspicious Tri-Colored Flame, the contents of the jade changed. Maybe there’s more information inside the jade already and I just haven’t met the prerequisites to look at it. And if that’s the case, I’d be wasting my time looking up information that won’t benefit me until much later when I could have looked up something to benefit me sooner.
So that leaves the other two options, but which one is most likely to benefit me right now?”
Several seconds pass and Lan Jin finally makes up his mind.
“I should look for Qi Sensing first. Even though I really want to look up the Great Desolates Body Transformation, that would be placing a lot of faith in something that has too much room for doubt. I can look it up later, but right now I need to focus on things that will benefit me in the future rather than gambling on things that might work now.”
With his decision made, he wastes no time in controlling his little purple star to write out, ‘Qi Sensing Techniques’.
Seconds later, the Omega Browser’s Space begins to writhe for the third time this day, but unlike the second time when Lan Jin just searched for a circle, this time he gives the Space his full attention. Countless images begin to appear before him and, soon, everywhere he looks is covered by countless records that have something to do with Qi Sensing Techniques.
Though he can clearly see that some of the choices only discuss the topic of Qi Sensing Techniques rather than give him an actual technique to work with, these are, surprisingly, in the minority. In fact, there are so many dense clusters of tomes, scrolls, jades, stone monuments, walls full of text, and other things that are entirely devoted to Qi Sensing Techniques that Lan Jin hardly knows where to start looking.
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What’s more surprising is that, unlike his earlier usages of the Omega Browser, this time there seems to be a certain level of depth to the choices he has available to him. He’s not so certain what that depth is as everything looks the same now as it had earlier, but if he had to put it in words, Lan Jin would say that some of the choices he can see seem more noticeable to him.
He doesn’t have enough time to think about why that is as choices continue to pop into existence before his consciousness, and he devotes all of his attention to trying to weed out the options that he thinks are less useful. For him, that means he completely disregards anything that is written in plain ink because he assumes it is of lower quality than most of the other options. Consequently, though Lan Jin still has numerous tomes and scrolls to work with that seem to have been made in the same fashion as the brown scroll from earlier, he spends most of his time considering the numerous jades, walls full of text, and stone monuments that are currently littering the Space.
After several seconds of stressful, panicked searching, Lan Jin finds something that resonates well with him. Both in a literal sense because something about it gives him a good feeling, and in a figurative sense because it is a stone monument with the caricature of a man carved into an alcove within it and in the middle of his brow, in the same spot where Lan Jin felt something pop earlier, there are two characters that read, ‘Spirit Gate’.
Glimpsing at the purple star, Lan Jin notices that it is looking depleted of its energy and so he chooses the stone monument while hoping he made the right choice.
Moments later, Lan Jin stares at the stone monument that solidifies within the Space and looks over it more closely. He finds that, at least compared to everything else within the Space, the stone monument is actually fairly large. Though he doesn’t have anything to compare it to, just basing the size of the entire monument off of the size of the man carved into the alcove within it makes Lan Jin believe it is a few hundred feet tall.
The alcove where the man is located is directly in the center of the base of the monument and between his legs there is an empty pot whereas his hands form a circle in front of his heart where a bronze mirror is located.
To the left and right of the alcove is the wall of the monument and it is entirely filled with hundreds of thousands of characters that constantly overlap one another. How anyone could read it, Lan Jin has no idea, but something about the mirror between the man’s hands gives Lan Jin a strong sense of awe and he’s pretty sure he’s meant to do something with it, he just doesn’t know what that something is.
Opening his eyes, Lan Jin takes one look at his fish roasting by the fire and decides it is done. The water containing the bamboo shoot doesn’t seem to be boiling yet so he decides to leave it be for now, but he takes the three fish he had skewered on sticks and plants one end of the skewers into the ground near enough to the fire that they won’t get cold but far enough that they won’t start burning. Then he grabs one of the skewers and does as best he can to pick at the fish’s flesh without burning himself.
As he eats, he thinks about the new monument in the Omega Browser’s Space and wonders how he’s meant to get it to work.
“That thing clearly can’t be read normally. It’s both too large for anyone to see all of the text and even if someone could see all of it, they still wouldn’t be able to read it because it all overlaps. I’m not even sure how someone managed to do that in the first place, but it’s clear that there has to be some sort of trick to reading it.”
Lan Jin quickly finishes off one grilled fish and starts working on another while he thinks it over.
“The only things I really have to work with are the monument itself, the bronze mirror, and the pot. What I know is that Qi Sensing is the first stage of cultivation so unless someone else is supposed to do something for me, then whatever I’m supposed to do to read the text is something that I should be able to figure out myself as a non-cultivator.”
He picks through his food some more and thinks over everything he knows about cultivation which, admittedly, isn’t much. When that fails, he begins thinking over the objects present on the monument and how he might be able to use them to make something happen.
“If I’m being fair to myself, then the only things I’ve actually got to work with are the empty pot and the bronze mirror. No normal person should be expected to do something with a monument they can’t even see the entirety of unless they’re hundreds of feet away from it. Oh, and there are also those two characters on the guy’s forehead that read, ‘Spirit Gate’.
I’ve already looked at the bronze mirror and nothing seemed to happen— unless I’m supposed to look at it in person in which case I’m fucked— so whatever I’m supposed to do should have to do with the empty pot and the two characters might be a hint. Am I supposed to put something inside of the pot?”
Lan Jin believes his thought process is reasonable, but he still doesn’t know what to put into the pot and he is a little nervous about trying it with his own things to start out.
“Should I throw Qingshui’s ribbon into the pot? The last time I messed around, Moxian seemed to suffer for it. Maybe if I do it to Qingshui’s ribbon something will happen to her also.”
He begins to fantasize about Qingshui flying through the air and, just as she’s relaxed and enjoying herself, she gets distracted by something appearing inside of her soul and ends up running into a mountain.
“I doubt that’ll happen, but it would be funny. And she’d deserve it.”
After convincing himself of the necessity of using Qingshui as a guinea pig, Lan Jin uses his thoughts to shove the silver ribbon floating carelessly around the Space into the pot between the man’s legs. The moment he does, the entire monument seems to light up and emits a blinding brilliance that stuns Lan Jin even from within the Omega Browser’s Space.
He can’t help but turn his attention to the bronze mirror in the man’s hands and stare at it closely as it seems to have changed. Instead of reflecting the darkness of the Space, it is now a window peering down onto the same man that is carved into the stone monument.
Within the window, the man seems to be sitting silently, just like his caricature carved into the monument. But as he watches the man, Lan Jin begins to feel something is off. At first, he can’t quite put his finger on it, but then he realizes that his body is subconsciously shifting to take the same seated pose as the man within the alcove. His hands form a circle in front of his heart, his fish abandoned at the side, his legs cross in front of him, and his face takes on a relaxed look as he continues watching through the window.
Minutes pass, and Lan Jin notices that his breathing is beginning to slow. In and out, a single breath lasts a minute, but Lan Jin doesn’t think his lungs are bothered by it. His heart begins to slow to a crawl and he can hear each individual beat within his chest.
His body begins to feel things more clearly, much the same as right after he absorbed all of the purple mist into his soul. He feels the warmth of the fire against his skin, the dampness of the air coming off the stream not so far away, the slight chill of the wind brushing against him, and the gritty dirt pressing against him from below.
Beneath all of these feelings, he begins to sense something, and as he senses it, the man’s eyes within the window open and Lan Jin’s eyes are forced open as well. Except, instead of looking at the world as he knew it, he sees everything that he couldn’t before. The vibrancy of life that had filled his vision and thoughts after absorbing the purple mist becomes so much clearer for him now and everywhere he looks there is a misty energy not dissimilar to the purple mist.
Except, instead of being purple, this mist is the color of nature. And as he sees it running through the bamboo, the ground, the sky, the pears to his side, and even himself, Lan Jin is terrified.
Because there is more Qi inside of the pears than anything else around him.
At least, anything else other than himself. Because he’d been eating them as his source of food and water for the last day and a half.