Physician Bing writes up our agreement as soon as I say I will agree. He does so in a way that makes it seem that I have all of the control over the arrangement: He words the agreement as me providing occasional assistance with questions of a medical nature while he would provide me financial compensation, residence in his guest house, and assistance where it may be found valuable.
His explanation for doing this was that he intended to treat me, publicly, as his new apprentice. In private, our partnership would stand but he thought it would be troublesome if his new partner was revealed to be a young man in his teens without any real means of protecting himself, his words, somehow had access to knowledge far more ‘encouraging’ to those who might ignore the law in order to acquire it.
I agree when he explained we would be safer if an imaginary senior partner was the one providing Physician Bing with priceless information. In essence, we would both be the lesser party of this partnership.
He didn’t even want to capitalize on his side of the deal immediately, as I thought he might.
“We will have to wait until your soul stabilizes. I’m concerned that you using your divination too frequently could lead to dangerous consequences,” he explains when I ask why.
“My soul?” I ask, mildly disturbed that he’s bringing up my soul when I feel fine outside of a little strained.
“Yes,” He nods his head once. “I noticed a mild strain on your soul before you want to the bathhouse. When I saw you again after you advanced your cultivation, I noticed it had gotten worse. I believe your divination technique may slowly damage your soul. If you use it too often it may cause trouble. Best to take it easy for now.”
“Oh.” I respond dumbly. “Are you sure it’s my soul that’s strained? I feel strained, but it seems more like a headache.”
“I’m certain. You only consider it to be a headache because you are unfamiliar with the differences. I’ve been a physician for over a century and have yet to find an adequate cure for soul injuries that does not hold the cost of a grand manor at the very least.
The best cure to soul injuries is to avoid them at all cost. Always remember that.”
“Okay, I think I understand. Thanks.” Over a century? This guy is that old?
I can’t shake the disbelief from my expression and he notices.
“You don’t need to worry. Your condition is very mild. Rest will fix it and even improve the strength of your soul, so long as you do not overextend yourself.”
He then stands up and says, “Come, before I show you to the guest house I would like to test a few things. I believe you may enjoy them.”
Standing up after him, I follow behind as he leads me through his house and out into another courtyard behind it. To both sides are small gardens with dozens of varieties of plants, but the main thing I’m supposed to be looking at is apparently a gray monolith crafted out of stone standing as tall as two average adults and placed directly in the center of the courtyard.
Outside of being fairly tall, the stone is flat at the top and thick at the bottom with a small blue crystal placed into a socket at around knee-height. At around the height of my chest is a circle chiseled out of the stone with lines leading up to five crystals embedded upward in a straight line.
There are also two similarly sized stone pillars to the left and right of the monolith, but Physician Bing doesn’t address them.
“This,” he begins, “is a Foundation Stone. It has the purpose of testing someone’s compatibility with qi. It will determine the quality and type of your dantian, the maximum qi capacity of your body, and your current maximum qi flow. It is powered by a qi crystal— an expensive item containing pure, concentrated qi. If you progress far enough, you will likely rely on these in the future to continue your training.
To use this stone,” he interrupts me as he sees me getting excited and impatient to try it out, “you must place your hand in this circular outline in the center. Then, you must revolve your qi according to your cultivation practice. The Foundation Stone will then follow your patterns and continuously stream qi into your body. The crystals at the top of the monolith will light up depending on your individual circumstances.
It is important that you mind your own limits when using this Foundation Stone. Unlike some of the better ones you might find at the Marquis’ Palace and belonging to various other factions, this one will not stop unless you do. You can hurt yourself and damage your cultivation if you are foolish.
Now, step up to the stone. I’d like to see the effects of such an unusual cultivation method.”
Physician Bing gestures for me to put my hand on the stone, but I already have a problem and I tell him as such, “I haven’t started using my cultivation practice yet.”
He gives me an amused, almost grandfatherly look.
“Your cultivation practice is the same thing as the method you took in order to step into the Mortal Foundation Realm. Just focus on the same imagery you were using when you broke into the realm and you will see the effects.”
“You sure? I thought I was just breathing in qi.” The only mental imagery I had when I was breathing in the qi to get it to flow through my body was remember the vision. Did I accidentally make a cultivation practice with the Heaven’s Gaze?
“I’m certain. Now, go ahead.”
I look at the stone and shrug my shoulders before stepping up to it and raising my hand. When I’m a foot away from it, the bottommost of the five crystals lights up before I can touch the stone and a faint haze comes from the stone and flows into my nose and pores.
I don’t notice as Physician Bing’s eyes nearly pop out of his skull when he witnesses this and, when I finally put my hand on the circle something weird starts to happen.
A rush of energy flows up my arm without any of my input. In addition, every time I breathe there is a fluctuation in the number of illuminated crystals. At first, one to two stones light up every time I inhale and the number goes down to one as I exhale.
However, as the rush of energy reaches my dantian and begins to follow the path laid out to me in the vision it increases in speed and size. It gradually thins out toward my extremities before returning to my dantian to repeat the cycle, but the speed maintains.
When I inhale again, the number of illuminated crystals increases to three. As I exhale, it falls back to one.
This pattern repeats several times and I find myself enjoying the rush of energy into my body even though I don’t really understand what’s going on. The qi going through out my body is getting faster and, even when it reaches my extremities and begins to travel back to my dantian, it is noticeably thicker than before.
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If I could see behind me, I would notice Physician Bing staring at me like he’d found a monster.
After several minutes, four crystals begin to illuminate as I inhale.
“Lan Jin,” Physician Bing interrupts my breathing, “if you are in pain, stop. There is no point to being prideful over a test.”
I blink in surprise and look at Physician Bing, but I leave my hand on the circle. “I’m not in pain. In fact, this actually feels nice. Kind of like getting a deep tissue massage all over my body at once. I don’t really get what’s going on, but I’d like to continue if you don’t mind.”
He gives me a weird look but merely says, “Very well. Mind your own limits.”
Another period of time passes and the fifth crystal flickers as though it is about to illuminate before all of the crystals darken at once and the rush of energy stops.
“What happened?” I ask, disappointed that the pleasurable feeling is gone.
“You drained the entire qi crystal.” Physician Bing sighs and shakes his head. “I can’t say I’ve ever heard of someone at the first rank of the Mortal Foundation Realm draining a qi crystal meant for the Mortal Core Realm, but tonight seems to be a night of firsts.
That being said,” Physician Bing examines the monolith with a pensive look on his face, “I can’t really claim to understand the results of this test. Normally, someone would absorb qi and it would go into their dantian until it was full. Then they would stop.
The number of lights would reflect the quality of your dantian, the speed at which you reached that number would affect the rate of your qi’s flow, and the length of time you could hold that light would determine your body’s maximum qi.
You broke this test in a way I can’t quite understand. Instead of starting at a higher number of lights, the test started at a one light before you even began. For a moment, I even thought you might be some monstrous genius.
Then you began the test and my hopes were dashed. You could barely absorb the qi at the level of a mid-grade Mortal Dantian. Then it dropped. Then it rose again, and it rose higher this time.
If the test had ended right when the qi crystal lost the rest of its energy I would have graded your Dantian at the very peak of Bronze Grade or at the lowest of the low Silver Grade. But I don’t even believe that was your limit, was it?”
“No, I don’t think so.” I sigh, still disappointed. “Honestly, I feel like I could have gone on forever. Half of me wish I had been allowed to.”
“Good!” Physician Bing lets out a laugh. “The young should be bold and fearless. If you gave up when I interrupted you then we never would have known how high your limits are. Now, for the next test.”
Physician Bing smiles and waves his hand at stone pillar on the right. “This is a Strength Testing Stone. It does exactly as its name implies, except in this case there are no gems to light up. Instead of light, it releases a tone based on your strength. The harder you hit, the clearer the tone. Go on, give it a try!”
I look at the stone in trepidation. I’m not a martial artist. I haven’t trained my body to break bricks. This looks like it will hurt if I do it.
Physician Bing notices my concern and explains, “Cultivators naturally have stronger bodies. While it is unlikely that punching the stone won’t hurt at all, as long as you have qi running through your body you will realize that you can put out a lot more force than you could before while also being impervious to certain lesser pains.”
“If you say so…” I mutter and walk up to the stone. None of my fear is abated, but at least if I hurt myself there is a physician here.
I know very little about punching and what I do know was taught to me by a friend who took a mixture of boxing and martial arts.
I take up my best imitation of a defensive stance with my left foot back and my right forward, spaced about shoulder-width apart. Raising my hands up to my temples, I inhale, take a short pause, and then exhale as I take a short step forward with my right foot and throw a jab with my right fist as I swing my upper body into the punch.
My fist collides with the stone and it lets off a low, undulating peal that I was not expecting. It is deep and resonates inside my chest as I drop my stance and take a step back to look at the physician.
He looks between my and the stone before saying, “That… was thoroughly unimpressive. With that force you barely meet the average of three men’s strength. Were you properly revolving your qi according to your cultivation method?”
“Uh…” I respond. “No. I just punched it.”
Physician Bing raises an eyebrow at me and asks, “Would you like to try it again?”
“Yeah, but can I have a second to look at my cultivation practice so I can see how I’m supposed to revolve it?”
“I don’t believe that would be wise. You mean to look at it through your divination, correct? Do not forget that your soul is already strained.” He advises me but I am not worried.
“It’s okay, I already saved it. Basically, it’s already in my head, I just need to look at it.”
“Hmm, very well. We will have to discuss your divination method more in the future, but for now let’s just see what benefits you can gain.” Physician Bing walks to a bench near the garden on the right side of the courtyard while I sit down and bring up ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’ webpage.
Ignoring the parts about body cultivation and soul cultivation for now, I look at the section of the webpage that introduces how to revolve qi for energy cultivation. The only prerequisite to begin is saturating my body with qi, and I’m pretty sure I did that with the first test. If not, oh well. I’ll just look like an idiot.
The process the ‘Divine Dragon Ascension’ has me take is to focus on my dantian. It explains that I have to use my ‘spiritual perception’ to send my mind into my dantian and begin to form a dragon’s egg out of my body’s qi. It even explains how I use ‘spiritual perception’ with a spiritual technique called the ‘Dragon’s Third Eye’.
In my mind, it sounds pretty lame when compared to something like the Heaven’s Gaze, but I don’t think I can use the Heaven’s Gaze for something like this so it will have to do.
I find it frustrating that I have to learn a technique just to learn something else, but this is the path I chose so I suck up my complaints and continue reading.
The webpage has my focus my attention at the spot between my eyes right where my nose touches my forehead. With my attention fixated at that point, I have to force my will into my qi and spiral it into the shape of an eye with a dragon’s pupil in the middle.
It takes a lot of effort for me and, had I not already had practice with breathing in qi and manipulating it to flow down the right paths in my body, I would have failed before I even began to open the eye.
As it stands, instead of being completely impossible, it merely takes me a few minutes of intense concentration. Finally, with an audible snap, I can ‘feel’ the eye open.
Naturally, it isn’t a real eye and no one can see it, but I can see with it even with my eyes closed. Even better, I can see around me without moving so I am able to notice Physician Bing’s baffled look as he stares at me.
I ignore it and continue to the next, actually the first, step of cultivating the Divine Dragon Ascension and plunge my new eye down and into my dantian.
My dantian is less vivid with this new technique than it was with the Heaven’s Gaze, but I can clearly make out the still largely-barren and devastated ground. There has been some improvement, if you can call it that, in the moisture seeping into the soil, but otherwise the area is exactly as I left it. I can even see the bright light coming from the Heaven’s Gaze hand sign even though I can’t see the hand sign itself. Weird.
Focusing my attention back on the task at hand, I begin to form my qi into the shape of an egg. It is supposed to be the qi already in my dantian, but as I try to pull some of it out of the soil, more qi floods in from throughout my body instead. I’m confused why that is happening, but I don’t look the gift horse in the mouth and use it instead.
Forming the egg is actually incredibly easy after having dealt with the Dragon’s Third Eye a moment ago. The hardest part is forming complex runes, but for what I assume is the same reason I’m able to read the new language present in the Omega Browser, I can clearly understand the runes as I form them in and on the egg.
Nine phantasmal runes get painted onto the egg. From my understanding, the runes will become more defined as I progress through the Mortal Foundation Realm while the egg itself will hatch after I’ve reached the peak of the Mortal Foundation Realm and have gone through the body and soul cultivation parts that I have yet to touch.
When I’m finally finished I bring my spiritual perception out of my dantian and open my eyes before standing up and looking back at the stone. This time, I’m ready!
I walk back up to the stone and take the same stance as before except, this time, I focus on both my breathing and the way the energy in my dantian is flowing into the barren field as well as the egg. For several seconds I stay as still as the stone in front of me before finally exhaling and tossing my fist forward.
Energy rapidly flows throughout my body and, in a blink of an eye, the twelve paths in my body deliver all of their energy to my dantian which in turns sends all of that energy down the one path straight to my right fist.
My fist collides with the stone and a loud boom sounds at the same time as the stone releases a single, high-pitched note that sounds like a large bell being struck.
I’m completely drained after that one punch, but I think I did a lot better this time compared to the first.
I turn back to Physician Bing and ask, “Was that better?”
Instead of answering he responds with, “Let’s go somewhere.”