3. A Recalled Horror
The elders tried to trick me with the seeds. Instead of only one live seed in a handful of dead ones, I was given a bowl with mixed seeds and I had to separate those with the spark of life from those which were fit only for sustenance. It was a tedious task, but I worked without complaint. Ironically, it took the elders longer to check my work than it took me to complete the task. They verified that my pile of dead seeds had not a spark among them fast enough, but they had to individually sort the living ones, and it turned out that my senses were even sharper than some of theirs.
This, it turned out, was a very big deal. According to the path of the Six Mountain Sect, the opening of spiritual senses wasn’t supposed to happen naturally on its own. Not until the third stage of the foundation stage. After a bit of prodding, they figured that I was still mortal. The little bit of cultivation I had managed with the merchant’s stone had not been enough to raise me into the foundation stage, as they saw things. Of course, I had used the energy in the rock to purify my body rather than strengthen my core, and they weren’t checking for that.
Eventually it was decided that I would have two hours of personal tutelage from Brother Phon each day to teach me how to cultivate, six hours of classes to learn to read and write, with the rest of the day being my own to do with as I pleased, although it was suggested that if I was wise I would do independent cultivation based on Pi Phon’s teachings for at least another four hours every day. With eight hours set aside for sleeping, that still left me with four hours of leisure time, which was a generous allotment according to my elders.
I was housed in a dormitory with eleven other boys my age, given three sets of robes with the sect’s colors of gold and green and symbol on them, and told that my lessons would begin on the morrow. Then I was left alone.
The boys weren’t in the dormitory when I’d arrived, so I changed into the robes and spent a few hours cultivating. The Qi was so thick in the air compared to my village that I was able to simply reach out and grab it. Like before, I focused on driving the energy through my natural pathways, picking up the impurities along the way. Except this time, instead of the impurities passively slipping out of my skin as I lost control over the Qi, I actively exuded them.
The impurities in a mortal’s body were one of the largest roadblocks to cultivation. They naturally resisted the flow of Qi. They increased the amount of time it took to recover from exercise and injury. They even reduced the mortal’s lifespan.
While I was technically supposed to focus on getting to the foundation stage before entering the body strengthening stage, I didn’t need to open my core or meridians to start on this path, and it could only pay dividends later on. There are several reasons to teach the foundation stage first; most notably that the foundation stage focuses on the manipulation of Qi, which you need in order to actually purify your body in the body strengthening stage.
But I didn’t need help with that. I wasn’t certain where I fit compared to most of the children my age, but I’d been sensitive to Qi all my life, and I could manipulate it with ease. While I would need to use the much denser Qi that I would obtain after surpassing the foundation realm in order to truly purify my body, I could start the process now.
It was like sweeping the floors before scrubbing them down with soap and water. I had a broom now, so I might as well get as much dirt out as I can.
“Ew, gross!”
I blinked, opening my eyes for the first time in hours to realize that I was no longer alone in the dormitory. Five of my peers had entered the room while I had been cultivating.
“You stink! Why are you doing that inside?” A second boy asked. “And where we sleep? That is not good!”
“Oh. I apologize. I wasn’t thinking about the smell I would make when I started,” I admitted. “I was just so excited to finally be somewhere with dense Qi, so I started cultivating the moment the adults left me alone.”
“Well go stink up somewhere else, stinky!” A third boy taunted. “Now we’re going to have to smell your rot for weeks!”
“No we won’t. I’ll get Brother Tien to ventilate the rooms for us after we get him cleaned up. Who wants to show him where the bath is?” A fourth boy, clearly the leader, said. Nobody volunteered. “Fine then. I’ll do it myself. Come with me, new boy. What’s your name?”
“Everyone calls me Little Bug. I kind of like it,” I answered, getting up to follow him.
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“Well if you don’t watch out they’re going to call you stinky instead. And what do you mean, dense Qi? We’re in the lowest density zone on the mountain!” He said.
“Is that so?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t lie about something like that,” he pleaded. “By the way, my name is Hien Ro. You can call me Brother Ro. I’m in the body cleansing stage as well, and I know how much better you feel after a good cleanse, but you still shouldn’t do it inside or where other people have to smell the aftermath.”
“Oh,” I said stupidly. “I wasn’t thinking. From now on I will make certain to only do this outside.”
“Yeah, well, by the looks of it you’ll be done with body cleansing before much longer anyway,” he said. He leaned closer to me and sniffed, then made a disgusted look and shook his head. “Ugh. How did you get so many impurities out in one session? I’d kill for your technique.”
I frowned, because what I had been doing had just felt natural. If Ro was working on body cleansing, then he should already have a firm grasp on his own Qi, which made it strange that he would have difficulty cleansing himself. “I guess I’m not sworn to secrecy or anything. But I’m not really sure how to teach you.”
“Really? That would be great,” he said eagerly. “While you’re in the bath, I’m going to get a scroll to take notes, okay?”
The baths were a large, open room with hot water piped in and heated by a formation that ran on ambient energy. Because of my body being covered in impurities, I was expected to sluice off in a corner to get the worst of the mess, and unfortunately that water wasn’t heated. But afterward I was treated to my first full-body hot water soak while Ro picked my brain about body cleansing.
He never really thought it strange that he had been cultivating since he was six years old, while I had literally only just started, yet I was giving him advice. Especially once I let it slip that I was to receive personal tutelage from Pi Phon. He was so excited to try out my insights that he stripped down to a loincloth right there in the baths and began trying to cultivate as well. That was normal, he said, and encouraged me to do the same in my towel. I didn’t want to sluice off again, however, so I decided to call it a night.
~~~~~~~
I looked at my chubby little hand. This body was strange, with four fingers and large eyes. I was neither male nor female, but a gestator, for this species had three sexes. With green skin filled with chloroplasts, I looked like a woodland spirit, but I was born into a large bustling city.
“Good morning Sweet One,” my mother-gestator said to me. “Did you have a nice sleep?”
I made sounds of agreement, unable to form words quite yet. I thought that this was going to be a good life. The world was not overripe with spirituality, or at least the lands around my home were not. Perhaps there were places where the energy was denser, places that I could travel when I was older, where I could reach the bronze or silver path. Once that happened, I would perhaps be able to construct an array to allow me to journey to another world, to connect this one to one of the many trade nexuses that lined the cosmos and find my way to a world where I could reach the gold and platinum paths.
My mother-gestator lifted me and held me close, singing the songs of learning. She carried me through our small apartment and placed me in the play area with my litter-mates. One of the clumsy females walked over and pushed me, and I playfully pushed her back. We got into a wrestling match as my mother-gestator went to wake my brother.
“I don’t trust them,” My father told my egg-donor-mother. “They say that they come in peace, but why do they demand our lands? Our sacred ancestral hunting grounds? They travel between stars, and they offer us miracles for the metal in our earth. I do not trust them.”
“The humans have promised us much good fortune,” my mother argued. “Surely they mean us no ill-intent. Besides, it is in the hands of our leaders, not small people like us, to decide the details of our relationships with the human empire.”
“I do not trust our leaders to make the right decisions,” my father argued.
“It is out of our hands,” my egg-donor mother insisted. “All you are accomplishing is giving yourself heart-ache.”
“You are right. And I still do not trust them,” My father said again.
I wrestled with my siblings, and I was happy. This was going to be a good life, I thought.
The sirens began out of nowhere. I looked at my parents, who looked out the window in confusion. The massive ship in the sky that had brought the humans to our planet moved, and suddenly a bright light connected heaven and earth as the humans fired their world-ending weapons upon our city. The blastwave obliterated our apartment, and I--