Without being able to get rid of the irrelevant information offered up by the website, I decide to use my available resources to help me find a starting point. I minimize the browser with a thought and turn my attention to Sergeant Lin before asking, “Hey Sergeant Lin, what kind of cultivators live here?”

Sergeant Lin looks over his right shoulder at me and responds with a question, “What good will it do to ask something like that when you don’t know what a cultivator is? You should just wait until we get to the Outer City Guard House so you can talk with Physician Bing. He can answer all of your questions.”

“That’s the thing, though.” I respond. “I’m starting to remember a few things and I remembered what cultivators are.”

“Really?” He asks. “What do you remember about cultivators?”

“I remember that there are three types: Body, Essence, and Soul cultivators. I also remember that humans have to follow cultivation practices in order to cultivate themselves.” I basically give him a quick summary of the two webpages I had read. It seems to me that it was pretty basic information, so hopefully he can start filling in the gaps in my knowledge from there.

To my shock, Sergeant Lin looks confused. “I’ve never heard of Body Cultivators before, but I know Physician Bing sometimes makes pills and he uses his Soul Energy for that, so maybe that’s what you’re thinking about when you say Soul Cultivator, but I think whoever taught you about cultivation did you a great disservice. You should try to forget that stuff and just talk to Physician Bing.”

Seriously? I’ve barely even started learning about this stuff and I am already getting screwed over by wiki trolls? What the hell!

I mentally glower at the minimized web page while wondering what else I’m supposed to be doing on this long walk if not for reading! As I’m pondering that question, one of the other guards speaks up.

“Sergeant Lin, that might not be true.” I don’t recognize this guy. He must have been one of the two new guys that showed up with barrels of water because I never had a chance to look him over. “My cousin once told me that a friend of his from the frontlines heard a story from a General once about how he had fought with a Demonic Path Cultivator who cultivated his body. Apparently it was the toughest fight he had ever been in.”

“Seriously?” Sergeant Lin asks, a look of surprise on his face. With the other guard’s confirmation, Sergeant Lin then turns back to me. “Maybe you shouldn’t forget what you know. There might just be different ways of describing the same thing. After all, I knew about Soul Energy and that should be what you call a Soul Cultivator.”

“I think you might be right.” I nod my head, glad that the wiki didn’t completely mislead me.

“What else do you know about cultivation? Can you remember anything about the Mortal Foundation Realm?” He asks and I immediately restore the web page to look for the cultivation ranks. I find them quickly thanks to a ‘find’ function and quickly locate the Mortal Foundation Realm.

“Mortal Foundation Realm: The Mortal Foundation Realm is the first level of Essence Cultivation. The Mortal Foundation Realm is divided into nine ranks with the first rank being the weakest and the ninth rank being the strongest. There is a large degree of variation in these ranks based on the classification of one’s dantian. In general, the weakest rank one cultivator with a Mortal dantian will have strength three times greater than an adult man, irrespective of the cultivator’s gender. A cultivator with an Origin dantian at the same rank would have strength thirty times greater than an adult man, irrespective of the cultivator’s gender.”

I quickly regurgitate this information to Sergeant Lin and he nods his head in agreement with my statement up until I begin talking about the Origin dantian. At that point his mouth drops and he looks at me like I just killed his family.

“I’ve never even heard of something called an ‘Origin dantian’ kid! What the hell kind of shit do you think you’re making up?” He looks offended at what I said and I realize that he might believe I was screwing with him.

“I’m just telling you what I have read!” I defend myself. “I’ve never actually seen an Origin dantian or heard about anyone with one, but you asked me what I know about the Mortal Foundation Realm and I told you. Why are you getting upset for me answering you as truthfully as I can?”

Sergeant Lin looks surprised at my outburst and then a little guilty. “You’re right. Anyone who says they haven’t ‘seen’ a dantian… I’d believe them.” For whatever reason, this gets a chuckle out of the other guards and it really irks me. I opened up this line of conversation so I could have some sort of starting point for this place and all I’m getting is a bunch of ridicule.

A moment of silence is what it takes for Sergeant Lin to add something to the conversation. “As far as dantians go, there are Mortal Grade, Bronze, Silver, and Gold dantians. There’s also some variation between grades with each dantian being divided into lower, middle, and upper levels. I’ve even heard some rumors about there being something called a Variant dantian, but those are so rare that they might as well not exist. In the entire city, only one person, maybe two, have a Variant dantian and… well, there’s a bunch of politics behind that so I’m not going to speak on it.”

I nod my head along with Sergeant Lin’s explanation but find myself even more confused as I compare it to the wiki. The wiki also covers those four grades of dantians, but after them are Earth, Heaven, Supreme, and Origin dantians.

“How do you know which type of dantian you have?” I ask, curious whether I might have one even though cultivation wasn’t exactly a thing I’d heard of back in America.

Sergeant Lin turns his head to look at me out of the corner of his eye and I get the impression that I said something he found stupid again. Nevertheless, he answers as we walk.

“Physician Bing can help you with that. He, and several other people in the city, have instruments for testing various things to do with cultivation. I don’t understand half of it, but he might be willing to check your qualifications if you leave a good impression on him.” Sergeant Lin pauses for several seconds before continuing, “Though, you look a bit old to start cultivating. It may be wise to forget about cultivation and consider what other options you have available to you…” He trails off and shrugs his shoulders as silence descends upon the group.

His words seem noncommittal somehow. I can’t tell if it’s because he doesn’t really care for the advice he gave me or if there is some other reason that I’m not grasping. Maybe both?

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I decide to forgo any other questions for now. Sergeant Lin really hasn’t helped me out much in the first place and it almost seems as though he is screening everything he says before his words leave his mouth. He probably doesn’t trust me. Considering the circumstances, I can understand that. It doesn’t make me feel good, but I might do the same thing if some random dude showed up on my proverbial doorstep and began to ask me a bunch of things that may or may not be common sense.

Instead of asking questions, I decide to look up ‘Physician Bing’s’ on the map. The map pings in a way that I can feel more than hear and a star appears in a section of the city not too far away from where we are now. After clicking directions, a silver line is drawn in a zig-zagging manner between me and the star. Interestingly, there are multiple methods of travel including walking, artifact, spirit animal, vicious beast, god beast, and even palanquin. Some of those options even have a drop down list miles long with all the various subcategories. Needless to say, I select walking and receive the notification that it will take me about 17 minutes at my current pace.

With nothing else to do for the next quarter of an hour, I decide to figure a few more things out. First, I type in ‘how to know dantian type??’. It bothers me as the text comes out in something other than English, but I can honestly say that reading and typing in a different language was only about the fourth or fifth weirdest thing to happen to me today.

The list of available websites pops up after my search and I browse through their descriptions as I decide which one to follow. There is everything from individual biographies covering how some random person discovered their innate potential and did something cool after the fact, to generic self-help sites and even pages that seem obnoxiously mystical. Considering the fact that me being here wasn’t normal, I opt for one of the mystical sites: TheDaoGuru.Omega.

As I open up the page I am baffled by how sleek it is. The background is an off-white with silver leaves fluttering in a breeze as rays of golden light slowly fall from the top of the page to the bottom before disappearing into nothingness.

The top of the page has a very short introductory paragraph stating ‘The Dao Guru was a powerful cultivator who long ago reached the peak of his Martial Path. Along his journey he sampled every variety of life that he could and accustomed himself to the cultures of countless species under the heavens. Before his death in a great war at the Eternal Devil Chasm, he was worshiped as one of the most powerful and benevolent beings in existence. He left two parting gifts to all who exist under the heavens. The first was a period of respite from the eternal war with the Devils; though the war has begun and stalled multiple times since then, his actions saved an untold number of lives. The second was a monumental stele containing all of his knowledge. Though this stele has since been shattered and scattered to the edges of the known universe, a copy of that information is held here.’

That guy is pretty fucking solid. Respect.

My positive sentiments for the random dead dude last for a few seconds before I zoom down the page looking for something that could answer my question. After scrolling for a very, very, very long time… about a minute, I give up and try something different. Considering that this is a browser that responds to my thoughts, I think ‘find’ and am delighted when a small text input bar opens up waiting for my query. I type in ‘dantian type’ and am lead to something that looks peculiarly similar to the wiki I was at not too long ago. Unfortunately, there is too much information here and I cannot reason out how an answer to my current question.

I use the find function again, but this time I search for ‘find dantian’. There are results, but there are simultaneously too many answers for very specific questions and techniques which require things that I do not have for any of them to be useful.

My next search is for ‘index’ as I hope to find a list of things available on the site to maybe help me narrow down my search terms. Surprisingly, it works. Unsurprisingly, the index is very long. I scan through a narrow section of the index looking for terms that might inspire me, and eventually I hit something that I sort of recognize, but only in the abstract. Divination.

I know that plenty of cultures on Earth used divination throughout various periods of time to differing levels of coincidentally stumbling upon the right answer, but I figure if this dead dude thought he had something important to offer, it might not be completely useless. So I clicked on it.

It brought me to a section of the website that was overly complicated to a degree I hadn’t previously thought possible. There were graphs, star charts, weird looking symbols that I somehow recognized but couldn’t really comprehend, and so much jargon that my brain immediately turned to mush.

The level of complexity for everything I was seeing was so astounding that I honestly wanted to laugh while scanning through the content. It took me rapidly doing the mental equivalent of scrolling down to finally get through the brain mincing content and into something I could get behind: weird looking hand signs.

There were several divination methods that relied on doing tens, hundreds, thousands, of even millions of hand signs in a short period of time in order for them to work. I skipped all of those and I kept skipping until I found a divination method that only had one hand sign and a very firm warning attached to it.

The title of the hand sign is ‘Heaven’s Gaze’ and the warning attached to it seemed needlessly grand. ‘The ‘Heaven’s Gaze’ hand sign is perhaps the most simple yet most dangerous hand sign in existence. While someone can theoretically find any information under the heavens with this single hand sign, it is at the cost of disturbing the will of the heavens. Anyone who uses it will bring about increasingly fierce backlash from the heavens including judgment and tribulation. The more difficult the information would be to acquire, the greater the backlash. Unless one’s life is at great risk and all other avenues have been exhausted, it is ill-advised to use this method of divination.’

After reading the warning, I skip straight to the hand sign itself as well as the process of using it. It really is simple. Outside of making a hand sign that I’m pretty sure I’ve seen on anime once upon a time, the only thing I have to do is look through a hole that takes shape between my fingers as I do it and ‘will’ for the answers to my questions to come to me.

As my focus leaves the website, I try out the hand sign and find myself surprised with how easy it is to do even though it makes my fingers ache and it takes a few seconds of shifting my left hand up and down to get the hole mentioned in the description. The hardest part of the entire thing is trying not to look like a dumb ass surrounded by a handful of city guards. Thankfully, now that I’m not talking, the only attention they’re giving me is to make sure I’m not wandering off somewhere.

I take a quick, deep breath in order to bury my awkwardness at doing something so peculiar-looking, and then fold my hands into the proper sign. Bringing my hands up to an inch or two from my face, I look through the hole between my fingers and focus on the blurry space formed from the minuscule amount of light and space not allowing me to actually make anything out. Then, starting with a simple question and with a level of focus I rarely employ outside of exams, I will for an answer as to the grade of my dantian.

At first, I’m about to write it off as a failure until I realize that my muscles are locked into position. And, apparently, it isn’t just me. From the corners of my eyes, I can see that all of the guards around me are frozen in various states of movement and the world itself has taken on a peculiar hue. If I had to describe it, I would say it was somewhere between a dusty blue color and the haze of a thick fog.

I look at everything in my limited range of vision for several seconds before returning my focus to my hand sign. In the gap between my fingers I can see a small, empty field of barren land and twisting shadows. In that field there is a glimmer of light floating above the untilled soil taking the indistinct shape of the hand sign I was holding right now. What’s more, as I look at the destroyed earth and peculiar light, I can feel something around the lower portion of my stomach aching.

I continue to watch the field and quickly come to the realization that, whatever grade of dantian I might have, it is fucked. It looks like something out of a black and white World War 2 documentary and I’m pretty sure the only reason it looks that good is because of the light put out by the hand sign floating above it.