The walk to the bathhouse was quick and quiet. There wasn’t enough time for it to be awkward and I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to be bothered by the silence.
I am actually pretty sketched out by everything going on. Unless I’m dumb or there are just that many differences between home and here, then I’m pretty sure I just witnessed a city guard getting bribed and no one cared. It might just be that I was coming to false conclusions based on my own preconceptions, but I would think that gold is worth more than silver. If so, then if two silver was enough to repair a dent in a house then one gold should be worth a hell of a lot more than a bath and a robe, right?
If I’m correct, then Physician Bing is bribing Sergeant Lin for my sake… or is he? Sergeant Lin said he was a good physician, but I don’t know anything about his character. On the other hand, I could be wrong and one gold could be the less valuable of the two currencies. However, Sergeant Lin’s expression when he saw the coins makes me believe otherwise.
So, Sergeant Lin was probably bribed for something, and presumably I will be going back to the physician’s house after this. It doesn’t seem as though he’d need to clean me up and get me clothes if he wanted to harm me, but I don’t actually know why Physician Bing is going out of his way for a stranger.
We arrive at the bathhouse while I’m still pondering and I’m forced to reign my attention back in. The bathhouse is a large building hidden behind a stone wall with an open wooden gate with bronze studs in it. Separating the gate from the wall is a large stone courtyard with a fountain in the center and a few trees with low-hanging branches off to the sides. Under the trees and by the fountain are several stone benches without backs. No one else is here at this time of night and, when Sergeant Lin brings me inside and rings a bell, I’m not surprised to not be greeted by any staff.
Several minutes later, a tired young man comes walking down the hallway, his eyes surrounded by dark circles. I feel bad at having obviously woken him up, but I also didn’t know why the gate out front would be open if the bathhouse was closed.
“Well if it isn’t the young bathhouse master!” Sergeant Lin greets the man. “I’m terribly sorry for disturbing you this late, but I’m here as a personal favor to Physician Bing. Would you mind ensuring this young man gets a proper bath?”
“I— it’s late, and I’m tired, but I suppose allowing him to bathe isn’t out of the question. Does this favor extend to us or will you be paying for his bath?” The tired man asks.
Sergeant Lin grins, “Of course I’ll be paying!” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a handful of copper coins before saying, “And Physician Bing mentioned he wanted him clean. Would you mind making sure he got some of the better soaps?”
The young man looks at me and winces before turning back to the sergeant and his handful of copper. “At any other time I’d thank you for your generosity… Oh well, at least I won’t be losing out with this.”
Turning to me, the young man says, “Well then, come this way. We’ll retrieve your bathing sundries on the way to the bath.”
“Thank you,” I say and the man nods his head once.
As we leave Sergeant Lin behind I ask the man, “Are there any rules of etiquette that I need to know about? Where I’m from bathhouses are pretty scarce. We normally have private bathing.”
The man looks at me for a second and nods his head, “Nothing really outside of the usual, but we’d prefer it if you used the soaps outside of the bath itself. You can pour the oils into the water or apply them directly onto your skin if you’d prefer, but please use the bucket and bathing rag I provide you to scrub clean before entering the baths.”
“Thank you. I would have made a mistake if you hadn’t told me.”
The man blinks and asks, “What mistake could you have made? I would think bathing is the same even in private bathhouses.””
“Uh… Well, normally I get into the bath dirty and flush all the water down a drain as it cleans me off. If I want more water, I just get more water.”
“This… Young sir, I apologize if I have offended you in any way. Your current appearance misled by appraisal of you.” The young man turns around and begins to bow his head but I stop him by putting my hands on his shoulders.
“I’m not a sir. My house just had some things that made bathing convenient.” I quickly respond. “You can call me Lan Jin by the way.”
“Ah, then, Mister Lan Jin, I welcome you to our bathhouse. My name is Fei Guang.” The man nods his head once and turns around before walking to a cabinet hidden in the wall. “Normally, these things are up front, but, with the hour, I moved yesterday’s remaining stock here.” Pulling out a key and unlocking the cabinet, he opens it before grabbing several items, placing them in a bucket, and handing everything to me. “If you’d prefer, I would have you use one of the closed baths rather than the larger communal bath.”
“Is it because I’m stinky?” I joke.
“Yes,” Fei Guang replies, “very much so.”
I snort in amusement and nod my head. “Whatever works best for you. I already feel bad enough at having woken you up at this ungodly hour. No need to make you work even harder to clean up what I’m guessing is a big bath.”
“I thank you for your consideration.” He bows his head again and I begin to wonder if that’s a really important part of etiquette here. Then, he walks me further down the hall and opens a wooden door leading into a room recessed into the ground.
The room is comfortably sized if a bit dark due to the low-burning flame in a brazier in one corner of the room. Little light is coming through a paper window at the top of one wall and I’m glad for it as I’m pretty sure that wall leads out into the courtyard. I’d suffer a little darkness rather than have to worry about whether or not someone is peeking in on my package.
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Without any further ado, I put down my bucket of stuff and rip off my nasty shoes, clothes, and underwear and throw them as far as I can possibly get them from anything else. If the fire were high enough, I’d try burning them.
I empty my bucket onto the ground near a small stone bench and grab a bottle of what look to be the oils mentioned by Fei Guang. Bring the bucket along with me, I plunge it into the water before bringing it back up and setting it to the side. Then I uncork the bottle and pour all of the oils into the bath — if someone paid extra for me to get em, I’m going to use em!
Taking my bucket back to the small stone bench, I grab a cloth full of soap chunks off the ground where I’d dumped them, and snatch the rag meant for helping me wash myself. Seeing that there is still a larger towel, I grab and chuck toss it under the brazier so that maybe it will be warm when I’m done bathing.
Nothing better than having a warm towel after a bath!
I grab a few chunks of soap before tossing them into the bucket and mixing them with the water. Once done, I take a handful and pour it over my head. I scrub my hands through my hair and cringe as I feel the nastiness of soapy water mixed with literal shit running down my scalp and it is all I can manage to not gag.
It takes meticulous focus to work through and clean everything from my head to toes. It is the nastiest I have ever felt and I have a new sense of sympathy for parents who have had to deal with a diaper blowout before. Sometimes I use my hands, other times I use the now ruined rag, but mostly I use a lot of soap and a lot of water. When I’m finally finished, I breathe a sigh of relief at not being in such a horrible condition anymore.
“Whatever God, Goddess, Buddha, or whatever exists up there, I thank you for soap!” With my impromptu prayer session done with, I grin at the bath and take two large steps before vaulting into it with a large splash.
“Ah!” I sigh, “This is good!” The water is still hot despite how long I took to clean myself off beforehand.
Allowing myself a minute or two to simply relax after my hellishly weird day, I vent out all of my body’s stress into the water and become one with my inner sloth. Life, for this one moment, is good!
Unfortunately, all good things had to come to an end and I needed to fix my dantian. Opening up the Omega Browser once more, I search ‘essence, body, and soul cultivation practices for humans’.
Naturally, all of the results I can see contain results that have any one of the three types of cultivation practices so I change the order of my words around and search for ‘cultivation practices that combine essence, body, and soul cultivation’ instead. I am honestly shocked when, instead of trillions of results, I receive hundreds.
“Holy crap”, I mutter. “Is there some sort of problem with all three of them being in one cultivation practice?”
The answer to that question comes up fairly quickly in the first cultivation practice I come across, the ‘Nine Divine Totems Manuscript’. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the cultivation practices, it’s just that they are apparently extremely hard to make. The ‘Nine Divine Totems’ took its original practitioner two billions years to perfect! Who the hell spends so much time on a freaking book and how did they live so long to begin with?
I begin looking through the results and find ‘The Heavenly Yin Fairy Scroll’ (written out in a not-scroll kinda way), the ‘Devil God Slaughter Path’, the ‘Pill Dao’ which was apparently a supreme pill refining art that somehow worked all three forms of energy, the ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’ that let someone literally become a dragon, and dozens of others. I even use the Heaven’s Gaze hand sign in order to figure out which of them are best only to find out that they are all equally bad ass in their own ways. In fact, it’s frustrating that they are all equal because it makes choosing one even harder.
For several minutes, I simply soak in the pleasantly fragrant water while wondering which I should choose. Fortunately, or unfortunately because it limits me, close to a third of the cultivation practices are women only. There’s even one that would turn a guy into a girl if he tried to practice it! All of them went into the ‘nope’ bin.
After that, it became a question of which ones sounded cooler than the others. If they were all equal and would all allow me to practice all three types of energy, then content didn’t matter. Only looking cool did!
The ‘Devil God Slaughter Path’ got its chances slaughtered when I realized I would have to kill people in order to cultivate it. The ‘Dan Dao’ sounded cool, but I didn’t want to have to study hard in order to be good at anything — too boring.
On and on my decision process went with most cultivation practices being rejected for knee-jerk superficial reasons until the last two remained: the ‘Nine Divine Totems Manuscript’ and the ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’. Both sounded really bad ass. One would let me manifest apparitions of the nine totems I create during its practice. The other would let me become an actual dragon. So, hypothetically, either one would let me look really cool and, if I could make a totem that looks like a dragon, I could summon a dragon rather than be a dragon.
It was a really hard choice up until I read the descriptions for how to practice them. The ‘Nine Divine Totems Manuscript’ required me to find rare and priceless treasures to manifest into my personal strength while the ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’ only required me to ‘infuse snake blood into my body and overcome tribulations in order to gradually ascend and become a true, Divine Dragon.’
I’ve had duck blood soup. It isn’t bad, not my favorite, but I can suck it down if I need to. I can take some snake blood. And who doesn’t go through hardships? So tribulations are no big deal. But finding, in the manuscript’s own words, priceless treasures? Yeah, no. I can barely find my shoes some days.
I favorite the ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’ webpage and read into how to cultivate it. The first step is actually fairly simple: Laying a foundation for the absorption of snake beast blood or forming an egg in my dantian. Either way, all I have to do is absorb qi and let it spread throughout my body until I am saturated with it or… absorb snake blood.
The snake blood is currently a non-option, but the other one isn’t. All I have to do is learn how to absorb qi, and I have just the tool!
Performing the Haven’s Gaze hand sign once more, I will myself to know how to cultivate qi and wait expectantly as the vision appears between my fingers before me. I look at myself sitting in the bath much like I am right now, except in the vision I am surrounded by a strange opalescent energy that is like a gas but somehow flows like a river and either ignores physical things completely, going right through them, or collides with them before deviating into different directions.
I assume that this substance is the qi I want to cultivate and, as I watch, the me in my vision begins to breathe in and I feel the qi!
A disturbance forms in the ambient qi in the vision and it shifts to flow up my vision nostrils. It is like breathing in a fluffy white cloud and drinking down a mouthful of water.
Then, the vision goes grayscale and I watch the qi travel down my body in twisting loops and spirals before arriving somewhere below my stomach, my dantian, before entering it, depositing some qi, and leaving once more.
It then diverges from the original path and heads to all of my extremities. I can feel the way my vision body responds to the presence of the qi and I’m able to recreate it perfectly in my mind, requiring only a little practice before I have it down.
The process repeats itself over and over, each time my understanding of the process and even the feel for it increases as the qi in my vision body starts to self-regulate. Once the qi in my body is self-regulating and the feel for doing the process in cemented into my mind, the vision ends and my head throbs hard.