“Where are we going?” I ask as Physician Bing walks me back through the house and into the front. He wastes no time as we walk through his large gate and back onto the streets outside.

“To provide you some reference.” He then makes a wide, domed hat appear out of nowhere and tosses it to me. I catch it as he says, “Wear that and keep your voice down. You don’t want to draw any attention to yourself just yet.”

I nod my head and put the hat on but my confusion only grows. What reference do I need? Can’t he just tell me whether or not I hit hard? It sure felt like I had it significantly harder.

We move quickly down the roads, far faster than I had ever moved outside of a vehicle. At first, it is difficult to keep up with the physician. But as he adjusts his pace to allow me to barely match his speed I find myself falling into a rhythm of movement and noticing the qi throughout my body flowing in a different pattern to allow me to keep up the pace.

Soon after we start, I find the limits of my speed increasing and Physician Bing increases his own speed to just above them. It is exhausting to be sure, but it is also very satisfying to know that a little qi running throughout my body is enough to put me above the level of professional sprinters back on Earth. If those guys could only get a little bit of qi they’d set new records every day.

We run for about forty or fifty minutes passing through the gloomy and quiet Outer City and into the beautiful, pristine, and lively Inner City. In the Outer City, few people were walking about and all lights save for the street lanterns were out. But here in the Inner City there were numerous people walking about even in the dead of night with dozens of shops and stalls open shouting out their goods to passersby.

Everyone here is dressed in robes far nicer than my own and of a lesser to Physician Bing’s. They also all know how to properly tie their sashes so that their chests aren’t uncovered.

Physician Bing and I catch a few gazes here and there, but for the most part we are unbothered as we race through the Inner City to a place with even more people than what I had seen so far.

We arrive at an outdoor stone arena with hundreds or even thousands of open seats in the surrounding auditorium circling it. Very few people are actually sitting down with most of them up close to the arena watching various fights take place.

We head to one of the lower areas of seating close to the arena and I notice that it is impressive. It is a massive square made of some unknown stone around three soccer fields wide.

“I assume you know how to form your spiritual awareness now, correct?” Physician Bing raises his eye at me and I nod once. “Good. Is your spiritual awareness capable of picking out qi fluctuations?”

“I don’t know. I can see the qi in my body with it, but I didn’t really pay attention when I was looking outward with it.”

He nods his head and says, “Try it out. Your spiritual awareness is an invaluable tool, one most cultivators have a difficult time acquiring until they are at the peak of the Mortal Foundation or early Mortal Core Realm.”

Listening to his advice, I open up the Dragon’s Third Eye and look out at the world. It is… different.

As I still have my eyes open, I can see everything normally. But, with my spiritual awareness open I’m also able to see a level of detail that is almost mind-boggling.

I can see the heat coming off bodies, the wisps of air coming out of people’s noses as they exhale, the flutter of wind lifting dust off the ground, the beat of someone’s pulse against their neck, and even qi floating unencumbered throughout the air.

The qi I can see with the Dragon’s Third Eye is different from the opalescent stuff I can see with the Heaven’s Gaze hand sign. Rather than being streams of opalescent energy, the qi looks like different colored clouds floating through the air and occasionally colliding with one another and the physical world in unexpected ways. Sometimes there are small flashes of energy where they come together, other times they flow through one another entirely.

Much of the qi is centered around the arena where I can now see various runes carved into the rock. It almost seems as though the runes are drawing it in and keeping it there. I don’t understand how that works, but it certainly leaves a cool impression if you were going to watch a fight and qi clouds were hanging above everyone’s head.

Another large portion of qi of all different colors is surrounding Physician Bing and I. It looks like a series of rainbow thunderclouds gathering above us to release their energy. I’m even able to watch the energy enter my body through my nose and pores as my breathing technique constantly runs. While there are similar clouds of qi around all of the other people present, they are significantly less when it comes to volume and typically only of a single color.

I ask Physician Bing why this is and his mouth nearly drops open before he can catch himself.

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He hisses at me in a whisper, “You can see qi? Not just see its fluctuations?”

I nod my head. “Isn’t that why you told my to use my spiritual awareness in the first place?”

“No, I…” He pauses and continues, looking slightly guilty, “What was the process you used when awakening your spiritual awareness?”

I ignore his appearance and tell him about the Dragon’s Third Eye as well as the steps the webpage gave me.

Physician Bing grows silent as he closes his eyes and seems to focus on something. Several seconds later, an audible pop resounds through the air and several people milling around nearby turn their heads in different directions to see where it came from.

No one seems to look toward us, but Physician Bing looks disturbed somehow anyways.

“Are you okay?” I ask, concerned that I somehow made a mistake when telling him the steps.

“I’m…” Physician Bing opens his eyes and shakes his head. “This is beyond anything I have ever heard of. I didn’t even believe it was possible to see qi—“

As he turns his head toward me his eyes grow wide and he gasps. “You— You aren’t!— How?”

I scratch my head at his behavior and ask, “Huh?”

“Never mind, never mind. For now, just pay attention to the fighters on the arena. Examine the speed and force of their movements while paying special attention to how they revolve their qi within their bodies.”

“Okay?” I shake my head and turn back to the arena where two young men are facing each other from thirty feet apart.

The one of the left is on the taller side for men with his long black hair held in a knot by a pair of golden sticks. His qi is a dull green and seems to be moving through his body at a slow pace.

Facing him is a shorter man with a bit of a belly to him. He has the first tellings of facial hair growing on his face and a patchy beard starting to grow in. His qi is an ugly yellow color but is moving slightly faster than the taller man’s.

I notice that neither of them have qi running through them in the same way that I do. This must have been what Physician Bing was talking about when he mentioned me connecting my meridians. Instead, it’s flowing through their bodies in what appears an unnatural, forced manner.

Back on the arena, the two men say something to one another that I miss before they bow their heads and take up fighting stances. The fight is slow to start and, in a way, slightly ridiculous.

I find myself getting bored while waiting for something to happen and, when I’m about to look away, the short man finally strikes while shouting out “Iron Tiger Dancing Dragon”. He lunges toward the tall man while a small amount of his qi collects in his right hand.

The tall man blocks the blow while loudly announcing, “Bark of the Elder Oak”.

They then separate once more while slowly pacing around each other.

The whole process is a little dumb, but I figure Physician Bing doesn’t seem like the type of person to screw around with his own time even if he might screw around with someone else’s.

So I look for things that I might have missed and remember his explanation of revolving qi when I was playing around with the Foundation Stone earlier.

Shifting my gaze to the two men’s dantians, I finally realize what ‘reference’ Physician Bing is trying to show me. Their qi is flowing from their dantians!

It isn’t like me where my qi flows to my dantian from my extremities before being cycled elsewhere, all of their qi is flowing outward. They have their dantian, which holds all of their qi, and they have to twist it through their bodies in unusual pathways in order to get it to do what they want. What’s more, once it leaves their dantian, it begins to stagnate in their body.

I tell Physician Bing what I see and he nods his head. “That,” he points to the two men, “is normal. Qi flows in one direction at a time, or at least, that is what my impression of it has been for the span of my life.

When cultivating qi you start from your comprehensions of your cultivation. With those comprehensions you are able to influence the fluctuations of qi around you so that it follows your intent. Regardless of your cultivation, that is simply how it works.

While it is possible to gain a greater understanding and even a feel for qi and its fluctuations, it is impossible for humans to directly influence it or even see it. Or so I thought.” He finishes off his explanation in a much quieter tone of voice while glancing at me for a brief moment.

Thinking over his words baffles me is I can’t tell if I did something wrong or not, but it also makes me wonder how I compare to others if I can control my qi directly and they can’t.

“How strong am I compared to them?” I ask.

“You only just reached the first stage of the Mortal Foundation Realm. Those two are at the fourth and fifth stages. If we apply common sense, they are much stronger than you. On the other hand, your entire body acts as your dantian and you can mobilize all of that qi at once. If we take that into account, your second punch from earlier could severely harm or even kill any average cultivator below the fifth stage of the Mortal Foundation Realm. Of course, you’d be out of qi and unable to defend yourself afterward.”

I nod my head and wonder aloud, “Is that good?”

Physician Bing scoffs and says, “It is freakish and abnormal, but yes. In a sense, it is outstanding. Of course, it is only outstanding if you ignore the fact that you would likely never hit them in the first place.”

“Why not?”

“When in a battle against other cultivators, there are several key elements that come into play. Namely, strength, speed, control, and awareness. There are other elements that are even more important such as martial techniques, treasures, and movement abilities, but I prefer to believe that those elements merely reinforce the four that I mentioned first.

While your output of power and the potential for you to employ your awareness is better than those you might consider your peers, your control is still unrefined and your speed is significantly less due to your lack of a movement ability. Therefore, someone with more experience than you would be unlikely to be struck by your fist.”

Nodding my head along with his words, I find myself agreeing but largely unaffected by disappointment. I’ve only been cultivating for a few hours and most of that time was spent trying weird things or running while my breathing technique picked up the slack for me.

In the future, if I get better at everything and find one of the movement abilities that the physician mentioned, I might actually be pretty amazing! I don’t want to seriously fight anyone, but maybe a couple of rounds in the arena once in a while would be something to look forward to.