Because the trip to the clothing store is about mid-distance between Physician Bing’s and the Inner City, I decide to return to his place first to try and let him know about my plans. I have no clue whether or not he’s still cultivating, but I figure that, even if he doesn’t appreciate me letting him know, I can check up on him. He really was acting weird this morning.
Everything is just as I left it, and Physician Bing just as he put himself, with the exception of my house being warmer than it was when I left, but considering how much fire qi is surrounding Physician Bing, I’m not surprised. I just hope that he’ll rein himself in before anything starts spontaneously combusting.
“Oh well,” I say, “at least the cultivation room is made of stone.” Even the walls and the door, I realize, as I tap on them a couple of times before I leave and close the door on the physician.
“I really hope he finishes up quickly. I still want to cultivate and try figuring out what that whole ‘Dao’ thing is. What does a sun got to do with a fire Dao?”
While there is quite some distance between the clothing store and here, I decide to walk for a while to see what I can understand of the sun from earlier and how it might relate to cultivation.
Logically, a sun should have absolutely nothing to do with my cultivation. I am trying to turn into a dragon, not a ball of perpetually burning gas. So, it simply doesn’t connect to being a dragon at all. If that’s what a fire Dao is, then there must be something that I’m just not linking correctly…
I think about it for a few minutes and wonder, “Are Daos more general than that? Maybe I’m thinking about it wrong because I’m trying to think how it relates to being a dragon rather than being fire?
But if that’s the case, then I should just focus on what the sun was doing, right? What was it doing?”
I look up the process of a star’s life cycle.
It’s fairly simple; stars form from gas that has reached significant enough volume to begin compressing in on itself due to its own gravity. Then, when a critical point is reached, the gas in the middle of the forming star is compressed to a super-heated degree and begins undergoing nuclear fusion or something... but that's pretty much combustion. I think. Maybe. I'll check into it some more later.
“Okay, so that’s pretty much elementary school science class plus some extra… but the only part about that relating to fire is the compression part. The video spent a lot more time focusing on the fire part of the sun as well as its rotation, so I’m thinking that, if there are Lesser and Great Daos, the compression part would definitely be much, much Lesser. Right?”
It makes sense in my mind. The compression part of forming a star is necessary, but it doesn’t really capture the ‘feeling’ I had when the tiny sun was right in front of me.
“If it isn’t about the combustion, then the feeling is more important than the science behind it, right? But how would I capture that feeling?”
I sort of recall what that sun being in front of me felt like, but even if I’m willing to focus on trying to understand the ‘Dao’ while walking down the middle of the road, I really don’t want to provide entertainment for the numerous horse-and-oxen-drawn carts travelling around me. Let alone the crowds of people that are already giving me looks for my weird ensemble and talking to myself.
“When I was in front of the sun, I’m pretty sure I felt… warmth, but also cold? Does that even make sense?” I think about how one of my buddies back on Earth had a fireplace. It was fun to sit in front of, but during the winter his parents wouldn’t light it outside of holidays because they said it made the rest of the house colder.
“So it probably does make sense, at least a little. But why would I feel warm and cold at the same time? I’m not moving, the sun was in the same spot, so what am I supposed to be getting from this?”
My curiosity begins to boil so I make a small ball of red qi in my hand and begin to rotate it like I had seen with the sun. I don’t further my understanding of the Dao because the heat of the qi just seems to radiate outward. Sure, parts of me feel colder than others, but the sun had me feeling cold while I was feeling warm. It was as though there were two layers of things going on.
“Daos suck,” I grumble. They need a ‘Daos for Dummies’ book series made for me. Trying to understand some esoteric nonsense about fire is going to give me a headache… and I still have four elements to go after this!
“Fire, fire, what do I know about fire?”
Fire is hot, it can burn through practically anything given enough time and fuel, and a lot of people are terrified of it because it can injure and kill. “But didn’t people used to worship the sun back on Earth because they believed it brought life? Could this be something similar?”
Thinking back to the brief experience with the sun, I recall the warmth I felt. “It was nice, I wouldn’t say it felt like being alive, but maybe a Dao doesn’t care about life on an emotional level? The cold I felt was the same way. It didn’t feel bad, but it didn’t feel good either. So maybe abstract concepts like life and death are just that? Concepts?
It would be one heck of a leap, but the sun is a force of nature and its presence can bring life or death, so maybe it makes sense?
And there was the whole dying and reforming thing, so maybe I’m not just blowing smoke out of my ass with this one?”
Thinking about the process I saw, I play the video again at an extremely high speed, but only on the webpage.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
I watch as the sun rotates in space once more, this time paying enough attention to see how it slowly gets smaller before erupting. Then, after a very long time, and in the exact same spot, the sun begins to form again. It defies what little I know about science, but so does a lot of what I’ve learned over the last day.
“Okay, so I’m probably right that thinking about this in terms of science is wrong. There might be some overlap, but as far as right now is concerned, that was a magic sun forming. Probably because of qi.”
Part of me wants to replicate the effect, so I acquiesce to my own impatience and search for somewhere I can hide myself real quick. For a moment, I even think about running back to my house until I remember that Physician Bing is occupying the only important room right now.
A minute later, I’m in a park. There are few people here this close to noon, so I find an area far away from what little foot traffic there is and take a seat on the grass near a small pond full of lotus flowers and a similar type of fish to what’s in the pond back at my place.
Before playing with any qi, I go over what I know one more time. Then, I slowly push a bit of red qi through my body toward my right hand and form it into a ball just above my palm. At this point I start acting a little more carefully because I know that the red qi generates heat, so I’m careful as I slowly add more and more qi to the ball while trying to keep it as compressed as I can.
When it gets to the point where it starts becoming difficult to add more qi, a spark forms in the center of the ball and the entire thing ignites above my palm. My immediate reaction is to wave my hand and throw the ball into the fire, so unfortunately anything else I could have learned from this attempt is ruined.
“I— could probably have done that a little more intelligently…” I try not to laugh as I look at a singed flower nearby. “Whoops… Let’s try that again.”
Repeating the same process, I calm my breathing to relax so I don’t act on impulse again. The whole thing is impressive, but knee-jerk reactions like the one I just had could go pretty bad since I’m, literally, playing with fire.
A second ball of flame forms and my entire arm twitches, but I manage to keep myself from behaving foolishly as I watch the flame.
It’s draining. I could probably keep this up for a decent amount of time, but compared to boiling a cup of tea, keeping a fireball floating above my hand uses a lot of red qi!
“Man, I don’t know how much I’m going to be able to learn from this if such a tiny fireball is taking upn this much energy!”
I am still only at the first level of the Mortal Foundation Realm, so I get that I’m probably going to be getting a lot more energy as I climb the cultivation ladder, but I still want to see some immediate results!
“Okay, I remember the sun was rotating and slowly compacting inward, so I’ve got to try that as well… but how long can I keep this up?”
It’s hard to introduce a forced movement into the fireball. Even though it’s my qi, it has a similar resistance that trying to manipulate the qi in the dragon egg has. I’m able to do it, barely, but it is far more difficult than the brainless maneuvering that I’m used to.
“Fuck you, rotate!” I hiss at the fireball as it, ever so slowly, begins to spin. There seems to be a much greater qi requirement for me to keep the fireball going and spinning at the same time, so I’m not entirely sure that I’m doing this right, but I also don’t know how efficient suns are at spinning, either.
Ten seconds, thirty seconds, an entire minute passes before I manage to get a significant amount of rotation going in the fireball, but the faster it goes, the more it seems to work with me as opposed to going against what I want. Unfortunately, just because it is working with me doesn’t mean it is getting easier.
Instead, even though I can normally freely command qi to go where I want it to, the qi in the fireball seems to want to expand. I’m still barely able to control it, but the faster it goes the more it wants to expand.
The red qi in my body begins to rapidly deplete as I urge the fireball faster. Finally, I can’t hold it anymore.
My first thought is to throw the fireball into the pond, but I don’t want to kill the fishes so I throw it into the air instead. The second it leaves my hand, it begins travelling a lot faster. What was formerly a tether connecting the qi to me becomes the tail of a comet as the fireball shoots nearly fifty feet up into the air, far past the tops of any of the trees in the area, and detonates.
The flames spin outward on a horizontal plane, probably because that’s how I was spinning the qi in the first place, and release a lot of warm wind and bright light into the sky directly above me. Unfortunately, the effect is short-lived as the fire escapes out into the greater world before quickly dissipating.
Even as far away from everyone as I am, I can still hear shouts of excitement.
“Okay, time to leave!” I quickly run away from my spot and, when I hear people getting closer to me, I look up into the air and dumbly point toward where the ball of fire detonated.
I’m just in time to look like a bystander as a city guard comes running past me at high speeds. He barely even looks at me other than to notice me pointing at the sky before he runs toward where I had been a moment ago.
After he had disappeared for a few seconds, I turn back around and bolt away, taking care to look ahead to make sure nobody is going to watch me leaving the scene. A minute later, I approach one of the entrances to the park and casually leave.
This area should be far enough away from the detonation that nobody should have seen what happened clearly, so I make sure not to act too curious about the no-longer-existent fire in the sky.
***
A woman with long black hair and light brown eyes standing in the air above the trees watches Lan Jin as he makes his way out of the park. The slight breeze in the air does nothing to disturb her red dress as she shakes her head in disbelief at the guard that so foolishly ran right past the man who drew so much attention to himself.
“How did such a childish ploy work?” She asks in disbelief, no one around to respond to her question. “The entire city should be more cautious due to that anomaly earlier, yet a city guard runs into the most suspicious man around and just ignores him? What kind of nonsense is this?”
“And his talk about the Dao… is he an idiot? My husband had a decent impression of him, but is this the same person he claimed to seem calm even in his presence? And what is this gaze of his that is so sharp? My husband frequently gives greater compliments than are deserved, but Yu’er does no such thing.”
The woman continues staring after Lan Jin with an expression of mild exasperation mixed with disbelief. “To think that my Sun Meirong would be following a boy because the old geezer finally began to cultivate again. Why would he choose now of all times to bring in an apprentice? Is he… he couldn’t possibly be implying that this boy would be a good match for my Yu’er, could he?
But that goes against his ways. If anything, that geezer has stayed silent about my affairs for so long, he should be ambivalent toward Yu’er as well. But then what sense does this situation make? And what about that error he claims Yu’er to have made in the arena?
My father might care about Yu’er’s marriage, but he doesn’t have the face to even appear in the same room as the geezer, so that boy shouldn’t have anything to do with the Sun Sect.
But then, is it even possible to uncover the geezer’s machinations without speaking to him?”
She lets out a light sigh before following Lan Jin, the people below unaware of her presence above them.