Chapter 5 - Try again

  Ryu woke with a start, the nightmarish experience between extreme hunger and pain he had was still fresh in his memory. As he rose back up he observed his surroundings. The forest was quiet, the light barely made it through the canopy and it gave him a sombre feeling. There was just the rabbit, still stuck in the tree, but now only a skull and bits and pieces of mangled pelt. Ryu pulled the rabbit out of the tree and bashed its head against the ground until the horn was freed from the rest of the carcass.

  Now armed with and impromptu dagger and feeling much safer, Ryu examined himself. The tiredness that had assailed him during his escape was now only a distant memory, gone as if it had never even been there in the first place. The hunger tough, the hunger stayed stronger than ever. He felt energized, as he had never felt since his fall at Rock City and oddly enough the rotten smell from his arm was now gone.

  Going back to his crevice by the river, that was starting to feel like home, Ryu mulled over these past events. The way he had frozen when his not so fool proof plan failed was pathetic and the fact that he had no contingency plan even more so. He could have died. He was weak and if was to survive and start growing strong in order to have his revenge he would have to be more careful, he would have to be smarter.

  And how come he missed that throw? At such a short distance? Feeling irritated Ryu picked a few stones and started throwing them against a tree a few steps away. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly he missed. He missed all the throws, turns out he had terrible aim, really terrible aim. And that was putting it mildly. 

  Also the disappearance of the rotten smell from his arm and his sudden energized feeling was weird. There was no soreness in his muscles as he would have expected after such escape. He had ran with all he had and yet nothing, no soreness. And it seemed as if his arm had healed a bit, but that was impossible. Horned rabbits didn't have healing properties. In fact, Ryu had read most of the books in his family library on magical beasts and none of them had any such properties, not without being first refined into pills. As far as he knew only healers could heal others. Healers were cultivators who were highly sought after cultivators because they specialised in...well, healing others and they could even mend wounds some cultivators couldn't on their on.

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  Then it clicked.

  Cultivators had naturally long lives and could heal small wounds themselves, sometimes even internal ones. Magical beasts had the same capabilities. Throughout the times and the lands ki had been called many things such as qi, chi, mana, heavenly energy and life force. Literally life force. Ki itself was said to be in everything, to be everything, including life. Therefore the ki from the rabbit must have healed him. 

  But how? He had no dantian, so how could he absorb ki to heal himself?

  There was only one explanation Ryu could think of. His body absorbed the ki directly. Even if he wasn't sure, it made sense. Bodily cultivators were rare, but the principle of it was to undergo hellishly difficult and taxing training to strengthen the body. The theory was that by repeatedly and systematically destroying and healing their cells, the cells would be forced to absorb increasingly amounts of ki in order to restore themselves and would therefore grow stronger and so would the cultivators’ bodies. Also magical beasts only got their dantian when they broke through to the elementary realm, so where did they keep their ki until then. The answer was simple their bodies, their flesh and bones. 

  So what Ryu thought was what if he could do the same. Instead of hard training to destroy and rebuild his cells he would just eat magical beasts. Since he had no dantian the ki would just flow out of his body, but only after it flowed through him and that was the important part, because it would allow him to store ki directly in his cells, allowing him to cultivate. What he was proposing would be more akin to ki poisoning or a beasts cultivating than actually bodily cultivating, but were it to work he could finally start walking the martial path again.

  Instead of growing back a dantian his whole body would become one. That would be his path. But he wasn't sure it would work and even if it did he would have to eat insane amounts of magical beasts.

  He had to make sure this would work. He had to try again. 

  And so Ryu turned back and headed back into the deep green looking for more prey, this time with a new resolution, a stronger one, this time it was not only to quench his hunger for food but also for power.