The squirrel looked disdainfully at the patterns I’d built up over the night, while Terra slept, manipulating the environment around us to the absolute limits of my Spiritual Sense. I could reach almost a hundred feet now while still achieving enough detail of perception to control the environmental Qi.
Ugh. The critics. I know what I’m doing, alright? I had these Formations inscribed on my body, I knew they worked. Even now I could feel them working, observe it directly. They passively gathered Qi with tremendous efficiency. The scale though, was very small.
Now, scale it up to about a 100 foot radius sphere?
That’s right, buddy! I made this bad boy Formation in the trees, under the earth, in that patch of moss. It was either going to work... or quite possibly set the forest on fire. And us. Perhaps liquify our organs.
It’ll be fiiiiine.
Time to start it up!
<...now that I look at it sideways while squinting it does almost look like an organ liquifying Formation and a nightmarish mutation inducing Formation ate each other and vomited out-> The squirrel didn’t finish, because I risked stressing out Terra’s body to send out a pulse of my own Qi into the Formation.
Startup... looking good... 27%… 38.5%…
“Nnng. Finish. Quickly. Pill.”
Just a bit more Qi to get it going. Achieving Qiclear Fusion in 3 seconds. Yeah, I was totally making that up. Also these numbers. Because frankly I had no idea when or if this thing was going to start working.
“Pill!”
Oh, look, it worked!
--
An ancient crane stirred a bubbling pool at the edge of a certain bog. Long beak twisting this way and that, the crane considered her creation. It was not often that the legendarily handsome Tortoise came to visit. She may be well past her prime and he a married man, but still.
The very un-crane-like growl caught Tortoise’s attention, one scaley eyebrow raising in inquiry. Crane begged it off as her stomach growling, thankful she wasn’t in her molting season and that her furious blush was hidden. With his typical stoicism, Tortoise plodded off to fetch her some fish.
Ugh, she must be getting even more ancient than she’d thought, losing control over herself like some young chick! Now, the tricky part of the concoction and the most likely point of failure. She needed to drain out the impurities and Fire Qi from the bubbling mixture so that it would condense down into the paste that would help Tortoise with his dysfunction.
Taking a deep breath, the old crane opened her beak wide and prepared to inhale the Qi. The world around her shuddered.
That hadn’t been her. What could it have been?
When all of the loose Qi around them began to flow, it wasn’t in a trickle.
It was a massive tearing pulse, momentarily dropping the temperature and ripping at her very being. Impurities and unprocessed Qi streamed out from under her feathers and orifices, joining the wave that passed. After the moment had gone, the old crane breathed deeply. The air had never felt so clean, the bog water never looked so fresh and inviting. Her feathers were a vibrant, youthful white, her usual aches and pains gone, and her joints more flexible than they’d been in millennia.
Oh! The paste had condensed nicely, and with better purity than she could usually manage! Maybe she could convince Tortoise to... test some out. Sister Tortoise never needed to know.
--
The tsunami of heavily impure Qi that crushed inwards pressed up against the shell of my Will. The squirrel screaming in our minds as the energy layered itself in a sphere around us. It was taking everything I had to hold it back.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Had I done something wrong? Had I created the Formation incorrectly? Maybe I didn’t really understand the purpose? None of that mattered. My Soul began to vibrate inside of Terra’s center, the strain of exerting purely my Will to protect her from a devastating flood of raw environmental Qi pushing me to breaking.
The claw and the pressure of the Qi onslaught both vanished in the next instant.
At that point, Terra found the wherewithal to take a deep breath.
Don’t freak out! Just cultivate!
With nothing actively pushing the massive amount of Qi towards us, I went from holding it back to pulling it in. Instead of just shoving it into Terra though, I constructed a phantom of my cultivation method around her, purifying and stripping the bulk of the impurities.
To her credit, Terra suppressed her awe and terror for another time. Instead, she dove into her inner space and began compressing Qi from her pseudo-Dantian, seeking to form the first Meridian path. I was able to spare just enough attention and Will to guide her. The branching complexity and density we were targeting was far beyond the mental processing capacity of a Qi Gathering Cultivator. For myself as a Nascent Soul?
It was barely within my limits. At least I had so much practice with external cultivation that the refinement process took up my Willpower, but not much of my Mental energies.
Won’t he shut up yet!?
--
Her breath drew in sharply, a pulse of already highly pure Mundane Qi flowing into her through new, different, and yet intimately familiar pathways. Before they had formed, the breathing was the manner of bringing the Qi closer to her core, before it had to filter through her tissues. Pill had helped her to guide it, not directly to her forming center, but into her body, through her Beast blood. Only when her body would become totally saturated and the Qi almost pristine in its purity, did she draw it into that flexible place within her abdomen.
She did not take even a moment now to marvel at how that center had stretched until its esoteric form completely filled her. Many dozens of times larger than she had ever dreamed was even possible. She’d had little to no real education in cultivation, yet she was certain that if this was a common practice, there would at least be legends of it. How many, if any, of the Cultivators on this world even knew this was possible? Especially since it could only be done to full effectiveness during the Qi Gathering state?
Some Master of at least Nascent Soul, with their Spiritual Sense and the ability to manipulate Qi that was not their own, would have to guide it. How many Qi Gathering Cultivators had such a Master?
How many of those Masters would dare to make a Qi Gathering student who would likely outstrip their power in scant few years? Pill didn’t seem to even think twice about it. At the rate she was growing, she would overwhelm Pill’s own stability, absorb him Soul and all, truly. No longer a passenger within her body. She’d known him for very little time, and he terrified her, but he was also funny in his weird ways, and completely without hesitation in helping her.
The Meridians she had been taught about before followed specific pathways. The liver, providing longevity and toxin resistance. The lungs, improving endurance and recover. The brain, boosting Mental ability. The digestive system, decreasing the need for food and increasing the gains from herbs, pills, and medicines. The groin, improving… groin… things. The heart, the most important in the view of most Cultivators who fought, improving nearly everything. The eyes, the muscles and skeleton, the skin. The more Meridians that were formed during the Qi Condensation stage, the more detailed and complete the improvements to the body Qi imparted.
It was said that not one single Meridian was required to achieve Immortality, if one had infinite longevity, infinite time undisturbed, and access to infinite Qi.
In other words, Meridians were the first true step on the Path.
Or so it was said. Now with her, frankly, disturbingly massive center waiting to form into a full Dantian, she thought it was perhaps the second step. But oh, OH, what a second step it was! Pill insisted she was barely a tenth of the way through forming the complete Meridian network, but it was built upon her veins, her nerves, her every connective tissue. The framework that was laid was already an intricacy that rivaled the most delicate lace and yet it was so far from complete!
The Pill had said that the Meridians were a Spiritual system which connected the Mundane body to the Spiritual body. It was the blood and nerves and skeleton that formed before the Spiritual body itself formed around them.
So, rather than construct a simplistic set of loops, she would ‘just’ create copies of the networks of the Mundane body. She’d started with the vascular system from her lungs on. She’d barely mimicked a quarter of it and it was already so much.
Now she guided this latest pulse of Qi through these partial Meridians, letting them mingle freely with her Beast blood, purifying them further, feeding her Beast side a small amount. Her Meridians grew a little more. What impurities could not be processed by her Beast side were true waste. Pill said they were actually not really different to his mind than other impurities, but for some reason they simply could not be made suitable for her to absorb again.
A long, continuous breath out released those few wastes into the air, swept away no doubt by the Pill’s Will. Once the Qi left her body, she could no longer sense it.
Another sharp breath in, another pulse of the mostly pure Qi. A little more growth on her Meridians.
On third day, she completed the vascular system.
Three days later, the Meridian mimicking her nervous system.
On the ninth day, the last fragment of bone, marrow, and cartilage, and ligament was copied, and Terra opened her eyes, letting out the last long breath with the final bits of waste Qi.
“I feel incredible.”
A fluffy tail slapped her right between the eyes from above, followed by a grumpy squirrel face just inches from hers, upside down.