Dave continued to cultivate for three weeks.
Until Xun pulled him aside and said: “You are ready to break through now. I can teach you what you need to know. This is arguably the hardest breakthrough cultivators make, since their use of qi it is what definitively is what separates them from mortals.”
“What do you mean.”
“This breakthrough is all about sensing and manipulating qi. Monstrous beasts naturally develop the ability to sense qi and use it in attacks. Humans do not naturally posses such an ability and they do not automatically gain the ability to use qi.”
“What should I do then?”
“Now that you are at the peak of body strengthening you have enough qi in your body to start reaching out and touching other qi. You will use this ability to pull in qi and gather it in your spiritual body. It will enter the 'shadow' of your physical body in the spiritual realm and burn meridians into it until it reaches your dantian. In your dantian you will compress it into a liquid. Easy, right?” Xun remarked sarcastically.
“I got that I need to sense qi and pull it in.”
“Good enough.”
Dave took a sip of tea and asked: “And, how do I do that?”
“Normally we would bring the initiate to a place with a high concentration of fire and earth qi. In the case of our sect it would be the caldera of the active volcano our sect is named after. Then they meditate there until they figure it out.”
“So we have to go on a trip?”
“No, this place is even better. You saturated the entire area with ice qi, you should be able to sense it with relative ease. It will be uncomfortable though.”
“Then let's begin.” Dave said enthusiastically.
“Okay, leave your jacket here and go outside.
“Understood.” He grumbled.
Dave took off his jacket and dropped it on the floor next to the table.
Walking outside he looked at the hut that had been his home for the last three weeks. It had a low thatch roof, shutters on the windows and mud walls. It was robust in its construction.
Everything outside had been covered in a coffin of clear ice. It was breathtakingly beautiful as it was deadly.
Lydia came running from behind the house and wanted pets. He obliged for a few moments, before he sat down and crossed his legs.
At first he only felt the cold of the ice below him, but as he concentrated he could feel something evaporating off him along with the residual heat. He tried to influence it with just his thoughts but it just wavered out the way like a slippery gas. He continued his attempt until he had to give up and go back inside.
“No luck yet?” Xun asked.
“Nah, I think I can sense qi, but can't pull it in yet.”
“You could try drawing it in instead of pushing it around, at least that worked for me.”
“Thanks for the help.” Dave said sincerely.
Dave waited for a bit until he had warmed up, then he went outside again.
He tried to apply a suction from inside his body, but he did not know how to get he started. A whirlpool might be what he needed, so he tried it and surprisingly it worked. It slowly drew in the qi that was rising from his spiritual body. What followed was a sudden and intense pain coming from everywhere all at once. He watched as the incoming qi slowly carved its way inside his spiritual body towards the whirlpool. Dave tried everything to make the pain stop. It did not. He was spasming from the pain. It kept going until he blacked out.
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Dave woke up to Xun standing above him and talking with Li.
“So you are telling me that he is supposed to faint in pain?”
“No, while qi gathering is fairly unpleasant it is not supposed to make him react like this. It is a slow process where he was supposed to carve out meridians so he can proceed to foundation establishment.”
“What went wrong?” Li asked.
“It must have something to do with his physique. It might have fed him so much qi that he shot through qi gathering and he got hit with all the pain you would normally receive over a few months or years at once.”
“Is that good?”
“I'm awake.” Dave interjected.
“On one hand it is very speedy process, especially for someone who started cultivating as late as he did, but the pain must have been overwhelming.”
“Fuck, yea it was!” Dave said with a wince.
“Can you look inwards and tell me what you see?”
Dave focused at himself in his mind's eye and described what he saw.
“I see squiggly lines going from my skin to the whirlpool in my center, near my navel.”
“Congratulations, you have completed qi gathering as the fastest person in history... probably.” Xun raised an eyebrow.
“What is the next step. Please, I'm already starting to feel bloated.” Dave begged.
“Well, you have to compress the qi into a liquid in your dantian. The bloated feeling is a good thing, but normally you would have to be actively drawing in qi, not while yammering at each other like this. There are also cultivation techniques that help with this step, but us normal people do not have access to something like that.”
“Okay, so it's a good thing, then?”
“Yes, it is very enviable. I myself am only at the sixth step of foundation establishment. You are catching up extremely quickly.”
They sat down for some more tea, Dave wondered why Li had stored so much tea away, but he figured it might just be the difference in culture.
“I guess I can start repaying my dept to you two now.”
“Here, these are exhausted spiritual stones, they can be refilled, most of the time.”
“What's with 'most of the time'?”
“Sometimes points of failure in the rock make them explode while refilling them, but do not worry, at your stage of cultivation they cannot hurt you unless you decided to hold it up to your eye.”
“Noted, how do I fill them?”
“You project a tendril of qi from your dantian to the spirit stone in your hand or other body part, then the stone should suck in as much as it can hold, on its own.” Xun explained.
Dave sat down, crossed his legs and tried it on the first stone. It was a raw unpolished piece of rock. Once his tendril hit the stone it sucked in a lot of qi and the jagged piece of rock glowed softly. No sudden explosion or any other problem.
Seeing that the stone was full, Xun said: “This should more than pay for your dept with Li. His harvest would have been worth, maybe five gold. A spirit stone of low quality, such as this will sell for at least ten gold. More, if the cultivator in question wants ice qi, which is what you primarily have.”
“Your dept with me is more complicated, but I am willing to let you go if you refill three more of these stones and join my sect. Otherwise it'll be ten spirit stones.” Xun said with a glint in his eyes.
“Before I can join your sect I want to check for a way back. Now that I no longer contaminate the entire area with ice qi, I can finally go and check where I arrived with Lydia.”
“I doubt you will find anything, travel between realms is very hard and only immortals attempt it. One of them probably plucked you up and put you down here without your knowledge. Some of them are weird like that.”
“I still wanna check, just in case.”
“Sure, I will come with you. Maybe I can learn something from this.”
Dave petted Lydia and they set off. Halfway there he already felt bloated again and recharged a spirit stone while walking.
Roughly two kilometers into their walk they ran into a wall of whipping snow. It was only a hundred meters thick, as they emerged on the other side colors of fall greeted them. With Lydia back at the house, the temperature anomaly had not followed them. It was a very surreal sight to see drifting snow to one side and a warm fall afternoon on the other.
They made it back to the grass plain where they had arrived, but there was no sign of the small white flower anywhere. Xun used a technique to jump far into the air, but he did not find anything.
“That's unfortunate.”
“Yes, guess you have no other choice than to join my sect now. Some immortal probably saw something in you and put you here to mix things up.”
“What do you gain from having me join your sect, you seem almost hellbent on it?”
“What, you mean besides a strong brother? Another hand to help these villagers? We are a righteous sect, every cultivator we recruit, is another cultivator that does not go to a orthodox or murderous faction.”
“Can you tell me a bit about those enemy factions?”
“They are not actually enemies, at least not the orthodox faction, they are more like a group of people that does not share our goal of protecting mortals from the actions of cultivators, which aligns with the interest of the heavens. Orthodox cultivators generally just do not care about mortals, cities in their territory have no cultivators to protect them and evil factions treat mortals like cattle, though only the worst of them use mortal deaths for cultivation, as such an act carries a heavy punishment from the heavens.
They crossed the snowy expanse and returned to Li's hut for the night.