Early in the morning, I wake up looking at an unfamiliar bed located in an unfamiliar room. The events of the previous night temporarily escape my mind as I start up the wooden canopy of my new, lavishly carved bed.
I’m laying down in a slightly curved, red wooden box with a thin mattress covering a wooden platform beneath me. It looks nice, and it is fairly private considering it has an archway leading to the greater room outside, but it is odd and not what I’m used to.
There is plenty of light coming in through the carvings in the walls of the bed, so I know it is daytime, or at least morning, but it is so odd to my half-woken mind that I cannot help but stare at the many tiny beams of light cutting through the nimbus-like clouds of colorful qi above my body.
Seeing the clouds of qi is what reminds me of my situation.
“Right,” I mutter. “I got yeeted into cultivation town.”
There’s something I know I’m supposed to do after waking up, so I lay in bed trying to remember what it is for a solid minute.
“Cultivating. I need to understand the dao… but bathroom first.” A sudden urge makes itself known from my bladder and I jump out of bed while trying to remember where the bathroom is.
At the moment, all I’m wearing are the pair of thinner pants that go under the rest of my clothes so it is a bit chilly and I notice goosebumps on my arms and chest as I make my way into the bathroom.
When I finish in the bathroom, I head outside to the pond Physician Bing showed me last night to wash my face. He said it was clean water, and I believe him since he’s a physician, but it is one of the more peculiar experiences in my life as I look into a pond full of pretty plants, flowers, and golden fish and wash my face.
The water really is sparkling clean, but I bet this will get old fast if my morning routine starts with pond bathing.
After my hands and face are thoroughly scrubbed, I head to the cultivation room. I’m a little hungry, but I want to start my morning off right so I don’t have a chance to fall into procrastination.
Sitting back on the cushion in the middle of the room, I begin to focus on my breathing technique for a few minutes as I actively absorb the qi surrounding me rather than just passively taking it in. I notice that, compared to whatever time I went to bed this morning, my qi is thicker and more vibrant.
My dantian doesn’t appear to have had any changes outside of looking more moist than dry, but the egg inside of my dantian looks to have absorbed enough qi to begin illuminating one of the symbols on it.
This symbol is located near the base of the egg and seems to be two or three times brighter than any of the other symbols. I don’t know exactly how bright they get, but supposedly I will know which level of the Mortal Foundation Realm I’m in based on the number of symbols lit up on the egg. One symbol means that I am just in the first level, but after a single night’s progress I can see some improvement.
The qi that is dancing around inside of the egg also seems to have mellow out a tiny bit, but I’m still unsure of what exactly it is doing. I wish I knew so that maybe I could help it out or speed it along, but I think it has something to do with the symbols and, despite understanding that they are meant to aid in the growth of my eventual dragon body, for me to interfere with the process would be like someone watching a video of a surgery and then trying to direct a surgeon. In other words, I’m not dumb enough to think myself capable of managing the qi inside the egg.
Since I can’t do anything as far as the egg is concerned, I slowly inject more of my soul’s energy into the egg until I feel the beginnings of a headache. Then I stop and move onto manipulating the elemental energy in my body.
I actually enjoy doing this because it is something that makes sense to me. The Divine Dragon Ascension is nearly impossible for me to understand, but this? This I can do.
Inside my body, qi slowly separates and becomes individual elements as I command it through my meridians. It’s a nice, soothing process as it travels everywhere in my body under my guidance and then pops out of my hands and feet.
Just like earlier in the morning, I have the elemental energies play around on my hands, but this time my feet are included in my cultivation as I send small amounts of red energy into them to warm them up. It’s a nice feeling, being warmed from the inside by my own energy. So, soon, I am sending the red energy all throughout my body until my goosebumps have completely disappeared and my skin has taken on a light pink coloring from the heat inside it.
“That’s cool!” I grin, happy I found a new trick to make life more convenient.
“I wonder what the rest of the elements would do…”
With that thought in mind, I switch to using the other elements within my body.
The green wood element seems to sooth and loosen up my muscles while simultaneously massing away bits of my headache. It isn’t fast, and I assume that’s because it is related to my soul and not a physical headache, but it’s a good feeling that lasts until I get curious about the other elements.
I switch from green to brown as I begin trying out the earth element. Almost immediately, my body feels more dense and my limbs heavier than normal. I don’t feel as though it is any more difficult to move, but I’d have to actually try stretching and running to see how true that statement is.
Seeing as I don’t want to run in the cultivation room, I don’t. But stretching is something I can do here and so I do and find, just as I’d thought, my body isn’t any more difficult to move. It feels a little odd being as heavy as it is, but I wouldn’t say it is a bad feeling.
From brown, I move on to gold, the element of metal. For a moment, a radiant golden energy covers my skin as I channel my qi through my body, but I don’t actually know what the physical effects of it are. Curious, I drag my finger nail across my skin and stare wide-eyed as tiny sparks leap up from the contact.
“That is bad ass!” I shout, excited. “My skin and finger nails are metal!” I grin, more interested in the golden energy than any of the others so far, but I can’t think of anything else to do with my new metal skin.
Letting the golden energy fade, I still have a smile on my face as I begin circulating the blue energy throughout my body. Almost instantly, the warmth that had filled my body moments prior drains away and is left with a cold feeling running through my veins. It’s as though I just stepped into the frigid waters of a lake during a dark winter’s night.
My body feels more fluid, for lack of a better word, but I am not particularly fond of the… rather immediate effects of my entire body getting cold. This is definitely not an element I’d use in the locker room.
I quickly switch from running the water element through my body to running the fire element. My body is quickly restored to normalcy as the heat fills me once more and I relax, letting out an exhale full of steam.
“Okay,” I state aloud, “I’ve checked up on my dantian and the egg, I’ve poured soul energy into the egg, and I’ve practiced with my elements. I’ve still got to figure out the whole body thing, but I think for now I should check up on daos to see what exactly they are before I call it quits and get breakfast.”
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With a plan I can actually work with, I quickly open the Omega Browser and search for any general information I can find on daos. Naturally, there is a lot! Thankfully, I’m completely clueless about them so I just open up the first webpage and read through the brief introductory information I find.
‘To study a Dao is to aim toward understanding Heaven. There are countless Daos, but Great Daos are few and magnificent while Lesser Daos are plentiful but less significant. No two individual’s understanding of any Dao will be the same, for we all see Heaven through different eyes. What one may see as a Great Dao, others may see as the least of Daos. Only through greater comprehension and a broader worldview can we determine for ourselves what is Great and what is Lesser.’
“That was fucking useless!” I scoff at the webpage and look for a better one after refining my search.
Instead of looking up something so general as ‘daos’, I look up ‘fire dao’ because I still have fire energy running through my body.
I immediately find a website that interests me as the title is ‘Collapsing Sun, Rising Star — Comprehensions of the Great Fire Dao’.
It’s a bid wordy, but that’s not important. The important thing is that I learn the Omega Browser has videos!
I quickly open up the webpage and look for the play button only to realize there are two of them. There is an option for a normal video player, but also one for 3-D viewing! Naturally, I select the 3-D viewing. As I do, a sun appears in the middle of my cultivation room centered right in front of my eyes. I can’t actually feel its heat, but there is a phantom presence filling my body as its rays land on my skin and I can feel the fire energy within me responding to it.
While I am not really sure what’s happening, the sun in the room fills me with a sense of awe as I watch it rotating in front of me. Then, my awe ends abruptly as Physician Bing runs into the room with wide eyes and a frantic appearance. His robes are covered in soot as is his beard and parts of his face.
“Physician Bing?” I ask, shocked.
He says nothing as he stares at the sun in front of me and I realize that, whatever the Omega Browser did to play this video, apparently it isn’t an individual experience.
“Can you get rid of that?” He whispers, his voice shaky and his normal composure is completely gone.
I don’t really get what’s going on, but I quickly pause the video and minimize the plugin before asking, “You were able to see that?”
“Yes,” Physician Bing responds after a moment of silence. “What was that? I felt it calling out to the fire energy within me… I’ve never felt anything so profound before.” He shakes his head, not even paying attention to me as I try to begin speaking. Instead, he stares off into the distance as if thinking about something.
Finally, Physician Bing sits down and begins to meditate in the room with me. I don’t know what to do considering the peculiarities of this situation.
Not wanting to interrupt him, I play the video in the webpage instead of the 3-D version. It lacks the same phantom feeling of the sun being in the same room, but at least it looks cool and Physician Bing’s silence gives me some time to try to figure out what a ‘Dao’ actually is.
It’s honestly surprising that the Omega Browser can apparently work as a projector that other people can see. I’ll have to be careful about that in the future, but thankfully it was only Physician Bing around this time. I can’t even imagine how awkward explaining that to a random person would have been.
It doesn’t take me too long to get bored watching the sun rotating on the webpage, so I set it to 2x speed. When that gets me nowhere I up the speed to 4x, 8x, 16x, all the way to over 1,000,000x. Finally, I watch as the sun collapses in on itself before exploding outward in a single instant of glory. Shockingly, the video isn’t over so I increase the speed over and over again until I see the sun reforming.
“Oh, so it was just a star dying and being born again. That’s neat. I wonder how someone even got that video.” I notice that, by the time the video ends, I have it playing at over one hundred billion times its normal speed.
That would have taken forever to watch at normal speed! Actually, I’d be dead long before it finished. So would everyone else alive right now.
I look up at Physician Bing, but he seems to have all of his focus pointed inward so I decide I’ve comprehended enough for now. It was time for my stomach to comprehend this city’s food.
***
I head back to my room where I get dressed and realize that I really will need more sets of clothes. I don’t like wearing the same thing twice in two days, so after I finish finding something to eat I’ll need to figure out where I can get some good clothes. It should be easy with the Omega Browser, but it’s still a chore that I’ll have to do.
Not wanting to make my stomach suffer any further, I head out of my my house and stretch while looking up into the sky above me. My stretching freezes as I see someone standing on air in the distance and my mouth drops open.
“That person can fly?” I ask myself, bewildered at the sight of someone freely standing in the air. They’re a good distance away from me and I only really noticed them because of the massive brown qi clouds I can see surrounding them with the Dragon’s Third Eye. They notice me looking at them and travel what must be dozens of miles in a second as they appear before me.
The person is a male around his late thirties or maybe even into his forties, but I’m not completely certain how old he actually is because Physician Bing is more than a century old and is still healthy and kicking.
This man has strong features and is several inches taller than me, has long brown hair that somehow isn’t fluttering in the wind he created getting here, as well as light brown eyes that seem to glow in the morning sun.
“You must be the Great Physician’s new apprentice?” The man asks, curiosity filling his gaze as he examines me.
It takes me a minute to remember that my public self is supposed to be Physician Bing’s apprentice so I end up looking dumb as I respond, “Yeah, I am. Er— sorry, but I don’t seem to know who you are.”
He blinks once before smiling, “No one important. I merely noticed your gaze while surveying the city.” Then he looks around the courtyard and frowns, “Is the Great Physician not here?”
“He’s here,” I reply, “But I’m pretty sure he’s cultivating right now. Do you want me to try getting him?”
“No, no—“ The man trails off. “If he is cultivating right now, it must be that he cannot afford to stop.”
‘I highly doubt that’s the case,’ I think to myself. He just dropped and started cultivating in my cultivation room!
“Then, would you like me to give him a message?” I ask, wanting to get out of the situation so I can go eat some breakfast.
“No, it’s unlikely that he hasn’t felt my presence. If he intends to speak with me, he will do so of his own accord and on his own time.” He trails off while looking at the guest house behind me and then asks, “It’s impressive that the Great Physician finally chose an apprentice. You must be fairly talented, correct?”
“That couldn’t be farther from the truth,” I respond. And I meant it. The only reason I could even cultivate was because of the Omega Browser introducing me to the Heaven’s Gaze. Without that, at least according to Physician Bing, my dantian wouldn’t even let me cultivate, it was in such a bad shape.
“Modesty is a good trait to have,” the man replies, taking my honesty for something more than what it actually is, “but it is important to know your own talents, as well as your own limits. Always strive for the heavens, but keep your feet firmly planted under you at all times. Don’t let foolish mistakes be your undoing.”
“Okay?” I don’t really get where the guy is going with this, but the conversation took a turn for the weird and serious real fast. “Well, it was nice meeting you, no one important, but I haven’t had breakfast yet so I’m going to go. Have a nice day!”
He nods his head at me after a moment of confusion so I take off and put the couple of weird old guys behind me as I open the Omega Browser to look for good places to eat.
***
Marquis Qiang Dashan watches the departing form of Lan Jin as he leaves through the gates of the Great Physician’s courtyard and heads to the Outer City. The boy, just as his daughter mentioned hours prior, has a very strong gaze, one that the Marquis could clearly feel from dozens of miles away.
The Marquis hadn’t even intended to check up on the matter of that boy using his spiritual awareness on his daughter, as his wife had mentioned talking to the Great Physician about it personally, but that strange cultivation anomaly that appeared and disappeared within the span of seconds demanded his personal attention.
The Marquis knew that the anomaly arose from within the general vicinity of the city, but it was so powerful that he couldn’t determine its actual location. What’s more, it seemed to lack any actual energy, almost as though only its meaning was here but not its substance.
Not knowing what to do after the anomaly disappeared, the Marquis decided to speak with that young boy, but never had he expected someone so odd. While the boy’s hat seemed to block most of the Marquis’ spiritual awareness, it wasn’t able to stop him from seeing the boy’s blue eyes as he carried on a conversation with him, completely disregarding their difference in power.
What’s more, the boy’s behavior, and the fact that he seemed to casually use his spiritual awareness even on someone who had reached the Mortal Gathering Realm, didn’t seem to depict him as a pervert. Instead, it made him seem uncaring of the world around him.
Was this the pervert of his daughter’s own words?