CHAPTER 2: TALENT

Over dinner that night, Dan listened with rapt attention as his father carefully explained the pitfalls of cultivation. He explained the tricks he’d learned to use to keep his concentration, the methods he still worked on to enter meditation quickly, and what Dan should expect moving forward.

Dan couldn’t be considered a cultivator until he gathered enough spirit energy to kickstart his dantian. Once he’d done that, he’d be considered to have entered the Channel Building stage. He’d probably be stuck in intensive meditation until the tail end of his teenage years. Hopefully, by then, he’d be at the final – tenth – stage of the Channel Building stage, where he’d then breakthrough to the Refining realm, where his father sat at the peak. At least, that was roughly the timeline his father had ascribed to.

There was a myriad of bodily transformations along the way. Dan would theoretically become superhuman, and his lifespan would extend in an exaggerated manner. He would rarely encounter sickness, and in the refining stage, he would hardly need sleep. His father, in fact, didn’t truly need to eat. It was just helpful and saved him excess cultivation.

That wasn’t to mention the magics and mystical techniques, like the runecrafting his father enjoyed or the casual spells he used to light the fireplace or fill the bath.

Needless to say, a starstruck Dan was extremely enthusiastic to begin this cultivation in earnest. During his downtime for the following week, including several hours of scheduled cultivation his father pushed him into each day, Dan meditated alone in the cultivation chamber.

The mysterious flutters of spirit energies swept his bodily flesh day-in and day-out. In this way, however, the second stroke of misfortune seemed to have struck.

By the end of the second month, despite Dan’s diligent cultivation, he had yet to condense more than a few thin strands of spirit energy. The technique and its element were assuredly correct; his father vouched for that with certainty. In fact, Dan knew it too. He could feel it in his bones that he was doing everything correctly, and yet…

The results, obviously, were sub-par.

One day, his father gestured for Dan to remain still after dinner. His father rested his clasped hands on the silken tablecloth and stared hard into Dan’s eyes and spoke slowly and clearly.

“Dannie. In your future as a cultivator, there are many times that you will wonder what if. You will struggle to hold your motivation. You would consider the life that you could live or might have missed instead of pushing onward. One day, risking your life for small gains will wear you down, and you might very well settle and start a family, or a business. You might not regret it at first, but the journey of cultivation is a long and fruitless one, and you will find yourself wondering how much further you might have gone.”

“Father… why are you telling me this?”

It was a little bit too specific for Dan, and truth be told, entirely out of the blue.

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“Because, Dannie, I want you to understand that no matter far you get, and no matter how long it takes… well, a lacking talent won’t be the worst of your problems.”

“My talent is bad?”

“It is.”

Dan’s father had always been blunt. Dan felt himself used to it, but sometimes, it still got to him.

“So what if it’s bad?”

“Dan-”

“I’m still going to cultivate.”

“Of course you will.”

“Then- then what are you saying?”

His father didn’t answer. Instead, he bade goodnight and left the table.

Alone in his seat, empty plate long forgotten, Dan’s emotions tumbled furiously in his gut.

…

Months passed by in a blur. Soon, Dan turned ten, and the energy he’d accumulated in his body had grown to the size of an egg. It wasn’t enough to activate his dantian, the tiny but inestimably valuable spirit organ by his stomach, but he was relatively close.

In truth, it should only have taken a week or two to gather what he’d needed. Activating the dantian was supposed to be the easy part. He should already be on track for the much more time-consuming period of cultivation, wherein he would rapidly increase his bodily strength by circulating attuned energies formed from said spirit organ. He should be opening channels from his dantian to his meridians, but instead, he was stuck in the default state of gathering energy in an exaggeratedly slow manner.

His only solace was that he had begun cultivation a year earlier than his father, but that advantage was rapidly dwindling.

Today, Dan was in the midst of adding to his egg-sized clomp of energies, when the heavy groaning of the door to the cultivation chamber echoed through his ears.

He opened his eyes abruptly, somewhat confused and upset at being interrupted amidst his cultivation. The visage of his father, an unfamiliar but intensely excited smile across his face, only confused him moreso.

“Dad?”

“Dannie. What do you recall of alchemy?”

The seed of a small hope rapidly formed in Dan’s mind, and he spoke quickly.

“Pills and medicine!”

His father’s gaze tightened, and Dan’s heart constricted.

“I, uh, I mean, alchemists use spirit plants and pieces of rare beasts to make pills and potions. Like the Qi Refining pill, or the Channel Building elixir...”

Dan’s voice petered off to nothing. His heart thrummed loudly in his chest, and he was too excited to think of any other examples. His father didn’t play pointless games.

A short, silly sigh flew from his father’s lips. “Alright, okay. I was always terrible at keeping secrets.” The experienced immortal’s hand dipped for the hemp pouch tied to his waist. Despite himself, perhaps too excited to contain the random thought, Dan said something silly.

“Not about your age…”

As if he couldn’t believe the words were truly said, his father didn’t visibly react to them as he pulled a thin wooden vial from his bag. But then he did.

“What was that?” The older man’s brows wrinkled askew. “You don’t know how old I am? But I…”

An inkling of his mistake crossed Dan’s mind, but he ignored it. Instead, he jumped to his feet and extended his arm coquettishly.

“Can I… Can I have it?”

The carefully nurtured egg-sized energies in his gut were agitated merely being this close to the vial in his father’s hand. Dan watched his father lend it closer. He gulped, and outstretched his fingers with the eagerness of a starving traveller to freshly stewed meat.

“No.”

The winds left Dan’s sails and his arms flattened to his side. It was a tone he was long familiar with. His father was in the mood to teach.

The vial was pocketed. His father turned around and clasped his hands behind his back, before gazing up at the bare stone ceiling as if it held more purpose than as mere insulation.

“Once you can tell me my age, you might have this Spirit Gathering mix…”

Dan’s tongue dried. His eyes widened, and he instinctively reached for his father’s back.

“Wh- no, wait, I’m sorry, I really-”

Ch-clunk.

The door clicked to a close, and Dan felt like a real fool.