For the next few days, as they practiced these techniques, he taught them of the history and geology of the world. The first day he told them about the world they were on. The region they were in was the Mountain region. It was at the northernmost part of the continent. To the southeast was the Jungle region, and to the east of it, across a few hundred li of ocean was the Island region. To the southwest of the Mountain region was the Grasslands region. To the south of the Mountain region was the Desert region. Most of the rivers that flowed out of the mountains came together to form the Great Dragon River, which flowed down the middle of the Desert region and ended to the south of it in the Swamp region. To the east of the Swamp region was the Forest region, and to the west of the Swamp region lied the Lakes region. South of the Lakes, Swamp, and Forest regions was the Tundra region, and it reached all the way to the planet’s southern pole. The Mountain, Jungle, Island, Grassland, Swamp, Forest, Lake, and Tundra regions were known as the Eight Regions, and the cultures of the world were divided into those eight regional types, as they were once ruled by the Eight Great Empires.
The next day he continued his lesson. “Who can tell me where our knowledge of Cultivation comes from?” Various children made guesses, but most simply named various ancestors, all the way back to the Mountain Empire, remembering the lesson from the day before. They were getting closer to the answer but none had guessed correctly yet. “Yes, but where did the first humans learn it?”
“Spirit Beasts?” asked one boy questioningly.
Teacher acted like this was closer, but was about to give up when Mo Shen spoke up. “The Dragons.” From what she had read about them, they were said to be the first true cultivators.
Teacher nodded. “Yes, the Dragons, or more specifically, one Dragon, the Immortal Dragon Philosopher Pai Wo.”
The students quieted down and readjusted the pressure on their dantians so that the pain wouldn’t distract them from the story.
“Dragons and Spirit Beasts have the natural ability to feel the chi within themselves and instinctively know of dantians. That instinctive knowledge is what separates a Spirit Beast from a normal Beast. While a wolf might learn to hunt and fight, a spirit wolf will understand the flow of chi within their bodies and, as mere pups, will have learned to alter that flow to make themselves stronger.
Unlike Spirit Beasts, however, full dragons are born intelligent, like humans are. They were able to understand the flow of chi better than the others, experiment with it, and teach it to others. They learned to move chi within their bodies, at first doing so just to relieve boredom as they waited to conserve energy, and found that doing so made them feel healthier, and removed nasty substances from their bodies. As these substances left, the chi could flow more easily. Soon all dragons were taught to do this. Once they had done so enough they noticed that they felt like they had unlimited energy, using that energy to move instead of the energy in their food. Some even learned to do tricks with it, like shooting bolts of chi at their prey. It was at that time that each race of dragons developed the ability to breath the element that they are naturally gifted with, using chi as the fuel.
Things continued like this for over one hundred thousand years until some dragons started wrapping chi around their dantians so that they could store more chi. Eventually one of them wrapped such a thick layer around their dantian that it started to compress and solidify, until it became a shell. They discovered that this hardening had awakened a new sense within them, the Chi Sense, the ability to detect chi outside themselves. They taught this to others and soon most dragons had taken this step as well, stepping into what we call the Chi Gathering Stage.
With this knowledge many dragons started learning how to effect the world outside of themselves in new ways, like moving objects or communicating with their mind, developing what we call Chi Magic. Many others started learning to manipulate the chi inside of themselves, drawing chi from around them and around the outer shell of their dantian. This let them store far more chi. Eventually some in them started noticing the familiar feeling of unlimited energy, and, based on the previous discovery, they started wrapping it around their dantians, forming a second layer. Only a few of them managed to get that shell to solidify, however, becoming the first Foundation Stage Cultivators.
They studied this fact and learned that most of them primarily had the element that they had the most talent with, but that the ones who managed to get it to solidify were almost balanced in the type of chi. They concluded that too much of one or more elements would prevent the solidification process, and some of them worked to balance the elements. Eventually all of these managed to get a shell to form.
Once the shell was formed they found that they could feel all of their bodies much more accurately. By manipulating the chi within themselves they could grow new chi pathways where none existed before, making the chi flow freely through their entire bodies. Those that liked to fight found that they could instantly tell where they were damaged and how bad it was in much greater detail, and had a limited ability to focus chi on certain areas of the body to maximize the effects of the chi, repairing damaged areas at a much greater rate and more completely than their bodies naturally did so.
As their knowledge of their bodies grew they were even able to feel their own souls within them, but barely touch it. Eventually, some of them tried to wrap another shell around their dantian and when one of them managed to get the shell to solidify they began to fully feel their soul. They could send chi into the soul, relieving psychological issues or stress, or draw it out, causing those problems. They could force a huge amount of energy into it and eventually it would grow, much like a restricted dantian. Some of them even learned to take small pieces of it and place those pieces in objects, at which point the object just became a second body for them. These were the first Nascent Soul cultivators.
Some of them tried to continued the layering of shells around the dantian, but for thousands of years no one was able to get it to solidify no matter how perfect the elemental balance. Then one day one of them, having shoved all of the chi they could into their soul, felt their soul reach the point where it would normally grow, but it didn’t. Instead it started leaking the chi back out faster than they could put it into the soul. Realizing that the chi wrapped around the dantian caused it to draw in chi faster than it leaked out, thus recharging automatically, he wrapped chi around his soul and, after several years, managed to get a shell to solidify.
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When it finally did so, he realized that he was connected to his body and soul to such a degree that every cell in his body could be his body in the same way any object could if he put some of his soul into it. He had gained full control of his body, and was able to reshape it and repair it at will. With this knowledge, he stopped his own aging process and returned himself to a youthful state, though he kept his size. His name was Pai Wo.
He taught the other dragons of this method so that they could use it, then the Spirit beasts, who had followed in the dragon’s footsteps, learning their cultivation techniques. He developed a means to make oneself look like another race when they were in the Foundation stage, as well as a superior version for the Nascent Soul and Immortal stage. For the next several thousand years he meditated, having reached a point where he no longer needed food or water or air, surviving entirely off of chi. Then he left his cultivation and announced that he would be setting off to teach the ways of cultivation to the humans, the only intelligent beings on this world which he hadn’t taught yet. The Dragons saw us as savages, and therefore, rather than eliminate us as many dragons wished, he would teach us to be better.
He traveled to each of the eight regions, selecting a student from among the tribes of humanity, one in each region, and transferring his knowledge of philosophy and cultivation to each of them. Each of them set about teaching the people near them and building great cities based on the concepts of justice and fairness, though each interpreted those concepts in their own way. Eventually these eight students, each having achieved immortality, became the eight Great Emperors and lead their nations for over eighty thousand years.
Then, around forty thousand years ago their was a war between the Desert Emperor and the Grassland Emperor. After both sides had lost millions of soldiers, the Desert Emperor entered the Grassland. The Grassland Emperor came out to stop him and a great battle was fought between the two of them. After fifteen days they were both almost out of chi when the Desert Emperor released a Relic he hadn’t wanted to use. It sent a massive blast of Death chi, gathered over thousands of years, at the Grassland Emperor, and killed him, though it left an area of death over a thousand li wide in the middle of the Grassland. Today we call that the Great Wasteland, and within it nothing can live, and the undead are the only things moving.
The other six Emperors couldn’t allow such a weapon to be used or to exist, so they captured the Desert Emperor and hurled him into the sun, where he was burnt so completely that he couldn’t put himself back together and his soul was forced to accept reincarnation. The six then had a meeting. If one of them could become so corrupt and kill so many, over fifty million in that one attack, then they themselves might be capable of doing the same. They made their children the new Emperors of their countries, as the Wasteland and Desert regions had been forced to do, and the six of them went into closed door cultivation together. Ten thousand years later they discovered how to Ascend to godhood and, after giving a copy of the method to each of their descendants, they left the cycle of rebirth and left to walk among the stars.
Around ten thousand years later, the empires collapsed, and after twenty thousand years society has become a group of sect based city-states and small countries, none of them having control over massive areas of the planet, and constantly bickering with each other.
Three thousand years ago, however, they were forced to work together as the demons appeared. Though that is a story for another day.”
While the students wanted to hear the story of the demons, the sun was getting low and they had been practicing the Restrict technique all day, so they agreed to wait.
It wasn’t until a week later that they were taught to feel and manipulate a specific element’s chi. Once they had a handle on all of the five elements, they were taught to draw it into themselves, then release it. To do so, one must focus on the type of energy they want, including all of the details of their knowledge of the element, and will it to separate from the other chi. This would filter out all of the chi that fits their view, causing it to move more easily than the chi which doesn’t fit.
To turn chi into the type they want was similar to how they formed balls with the chi. You merely needed to focus on a bit of chi and will it to be as you see that element. This was more difficult than refining it from another source, however, as any mistakes in your view would decrease the purity and quantity created. For that reason, most people focused on refining chi from common sources.
Shen was the only one that was outside of the cleansing phase, and therefore the only one that could store elemental chi in their dantian, so they weren’t instructed on that yet. After all, teaching them that now would be worthless, as all chi within the lowest level of the dantian, the cleansing level, is automatically purified into neutral chi.
A few days later, however, he gave them their final lesson. This time he taught them three Cleansing stage techniques, telling them that they could learn the higher stage forms of them at the library. Normally, the Sect wouldn’t require him to teach these, but recently he had seen that many of the new recruits went for weeks or months before they had an actual technique to practice, so three recruitment cycles ago he had started teaching these techniques to the students.
The first was called Self-substantiation. He explained that all food that you ate came from plants, which use the energy from the sun to grow and make nutrients which you would use after eating them, or the animals that ate those plants. This method would allow you to do some of that yourself. At the Cleansing stage, by cycling chi through the stomach, intestines, and other internal organs in a specific manner, one could cause them to extract useful nutrients from anything you ate that was from a plant or animal, or anything that was alive once one practiced enough, including dirt. At the Gathering stage it would lessen the amount of food one needed to eat by reconstructing the nutrients your body destroyed through use, until you no longer needed to eat. At Foundation stage it would lower the amount of water you needed to consume, and at Nascent it would limit how much air you needed to breath, eventually making it so that even someone that was buried alive could survive.
Teacher suggested that they practice this so that they could spend more time in meditation and therefore cultivate more quickly. After all, the longer one’s cultivation session lasted, the deeper one tended to go into the technique, and the more benefit one got from it. Most of the students rejected this idea, however, finding meditation to be boring. To Mo Shen, however, it was just what she needed to do to get stronger. She had sat for hours at the age of five while hunting with her father. Surely she could last for a day now that she was ten.
The next technique interested the children much more. It was called Movement. While it was limited to objects one was touching or, with enough practice, almost touching, it allowed one to move things outside their body. This allowed you to directly increase the force of a swing in a fight, move objects along the skin, or even, in desperate situations, remove arrows from your body.
The third technique also interested them, but for a much different reason. It was called “Spirit dust.” It turns out that there were rare crystals in nature which would form in areas of intense chi density. While inside the body chi would act like a liquid and flow, in the air it would become a solid and form crystals. By drawing the chi from the crystals into ones body, a technique which was part of the ‘Spirit Dust’ technique, these crystals could be used to replenish the chi within yourself or even power chi magic directly, though they were made of neutral chi and therefore weren’t great for elemental spells. The Spirit Dust technique allowed one to push liquid chi out of the body so that it solidified into a crystal powder, which could power Cleansing stage magic, letting you carry chi on you or give it to another.
At Chi Gathering the technique became Spirit Crystalization, which turned the dust into a poor grade spirit crystal which could fuel Gathering stage techniques. At every Stage above it the Spirit Crystalization technique could create one spirit crystal of low, medium, or high grade and cost anywhere from five to ten of the lower stage ones to make, acting as fuel for that stage’s chi magic or providing five times the chi energy as the level before if absorbed. This series of techniques would allow the disciples to earn a steady, but not lavish, amount of money, thus allowing them to meet their own needs and cultivate at the same time.