Lu fell. He couldn’t have said how long he fell, just that he did. Down, down, through a place that wasn’t a place, toward a bottom that wasn’t a bottom. Lu hit it, hard, and broke though into a place that was.
----------------------------------------
The first thing Lu did, upon entering an entirely new land, was roll over onto his front and expel what little acid was still left in his stomach. Dear Heavens, that was unpleasant.
He stood, retreating from his mess, and was shocked by the state of his health. I feel great! The nausea, the weakness, everything is gone. Even my qi exhaustion feels fine…
Indeed, looking inside himself Lu could see his dantian was up to a tenth its total capacity, and was continuing to fill itself without any mental effort on his part at all. He could see qi flowing through every part of his body, becoming fuller and denser by the moment.
What’s happening, am I still hallucinating? Bull must have gotten me to the medical wing and fed me a qi pill, that’s the only explanation I can think of.
Lu pulled away from examining his own body, and for the first time truly observed his surroundings. He was standing on familiar territory, the polished grey stone of the training grounds, but that familiarity extended less than two meters around him. Very abruptly, the stone melted away into wet bog, a stinking field of decaying mud and water that filled his vison all the way to the horizon – and above that horizon was an even more alien visual.
Rather than the pleasant evening blue he had known, a violent, roiling mass of purple clouds covered the entire sky. The clouds sparked with strange lightning, small tines appearing and disappearing from his sight, illuminating but not producing any flash. Or thunder. Indeed, this strange electricity was the only light at all; the clouds were so thick, Lu had no idea if it was day or night.
I must still be hallucinating, right? But it feels so real, I can smell the stagnant water, feel the moisture in the air… Surely, the difference between a hallucination and a mere dream is that the hallucination feels real, yes? Otherwise, madmen would simply ignore their delusions, and ailments of the mind would be trivially overcome…
Lu nodded to himself. He had suffered an injury while training, and now he was being treated while unconscious. A perfectly logical explanation. That barbarian, pushing me so hard as to damage my mind! When I awaken, I’ll have to make him beg for forgiveness. How brutish, thinking he could force me into the fourth realm with his methods…
Lu’s thoughts froze. The fourth realm, wasn’t that when..?
Heart Demons! Heart Demons can begin appearing when one transitions from the outer realm, the first three, to the inner realm, four through six. Could I be experiencing the transition right now?
Lu knew almost nothing about Heart Demons, having little interest in the subject. He knew they were manifestations of irreconcilable contradictions in a cultivator’s personality, that they had to be battled in the mind and destroyed, but he didn’t know the practicalities of how to detect one. I would know if I had a Heart Demon, wouldn’t I? And besides, this fetid swamp can’t possibly be my enlightened mind!
Lu firmly discarded all thoughts of Heart Demons. I simply don’t have enough information to know what’s going on. Demon or dream or whatever else, I have nothing to discern them from one another!
Lu nodded to himself, again. Thinking in circles wouldn’t get him anywhere; if he wanted to understand his situation, he would need to act. Lu looked at the swamp, shuddering. If I step in that I’ll never get the smell out. I’d have to burn everything I’m wearing to ever feel clean again. But that wouldn’t be a problem; Lu had learned the perfect spell for this exact situation, a second realm water-walking art.
He flexed his dantian, preparing to mold qi into the complicated forms necessary to cast the spell. I haven’t cast this one in a while, but I have plenty of qi to practice with. Lu willed the spell to form-
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
And his dantian completely failed to expel any qi. Lu flexed harder, nothing. He tried to move the qi in his spiritual veins, nothing. His body was replete with qi, his reserves completely filled during the short conversation he’d had with himself, yet it refused to budge an inch. Lu strained his mind hard, harder, harder, and a single drop of qi exited his dantian.
Before it was immediately drawn back in. What?
Lu was beyond confusion. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Even his long string of failures when advancing to second realm were more attributable to an inability to draw qi into his dantian; he had never had the slightest trouble controlling it once it was already in his body. He kept trying, the slightest bit of qi being expelled and reabsorbed over and over.
And all the while, more qi continued to flow into his body. His dantian trembled, his spiritual veins pulsed, overfull. He held his breath, tried to block himself off, to deliberately not absorb any qi – something he had never had reason to attempt before – but his effort slowed the tide not at all. Qi wasn’t just coming into his body with his breath, it was seeping into him through his skin.
How could this be happening? Just how dense is the qi of this place that it can saturate my body so thoroughly? Lu turned his spiritual sense outwards, and looked at the swamp.
The spiritual sense is different from sight, from sound, from touch and taste and any other sense. Though it shares some similarities, it is completely separate from physical sensation. Indeed, saying that the spiritual sense ‘sees’ or ‘looks at’ things is merely a shortcut of language, a metaphor, comparing something understood with something not to bridge the gap.
So when Lu turned his spiritual sense to the swamp, it would not be strictly correct to say he was blinded, or that he burst into flame, or that his brain was stabbed by ten thousand needles. These are metaphors. What Lu experienced cannot be communicated to anyone who does not have a spiritual sense, so these imperfect comparisons will have to suffice.
What is not a metaphor, is that Lu dropped to the ground, screamed loudly and continuously until his breath ran out, and then mercifully lost consciousness.
----------------------------------------
Eventually, Lu woke up. He opened his eyes, sat upright, and very carefully closed his spiritual sense off from both the world and himself. Only then did he regain the capacity for thought.
What? What? What the Hell? What the Hell was that? What the fuck?
…Not necessarily a large capacity for thought. But eventually, his pain-induced fugue retreated.
…Okay. Okay. It’s over, I’m alive, I need to analyze what just happened before my dantian explodes. Lu stood up and began pacing around the small circle of stone. Wherever I am, there’s a lot of qi. An impossible amount. Impossible might even not be hyperbole; the qi he had felt around him had been denser than his own dantian, far past the point it should have manifested into a real, physical object.
Spirit stones were a common cultivation aid: small stones of crystalized qi that contained thousands of breaths worth of qi, condensed into a space no larger than a knucklebone. The qi he had felt was like a thousand spirit stones, packed into every square centimetre.
Trying to hold it back would be beyond his abilities. He could think of only two possible paths to survival.
One: he could try and cultivate using this impossible qi, integrate it into his dantian and reinforce it using this theoretically stronger material.
Two: he could disperse his cultivation base, destroying his dantian but leaving his body unharmed.
He would prefer option one, but he had no idea if he could even cycle with this much strain on his dantian. It was possible that the moment he began forming the whirlpool, it would rupture. And even if he could start the process, he didn’t know how much pressure was necessary to force this strange qi to crystalize. Did it even have a physical form at all, or would he keep squeezing it down and down, never actually completing a cycle?
Lu’s nerves were completely shot, more anxious than he’d ever been. If he didn’t do something to fix this right now, he would die. Gently, haltingly, he opened up his spiritual sense and looked inside-
His veins had ruptured completely, becoming ragged strips of spirit that would never hold qi again. Even if he succeeded, he’d need to rebuild them from scratch. His dantian was whole, but cracks had spread through the entire structure, and sections bulged ominously. Here goes…
He exerted his will, and his cracked, asymmetrical dantian began to spin. Slowly, the whirlpool took shape, and Lu began to hope. The strange qi was sucked in, adhering to the surface. Lu flexed his mind, and the first kneading motio-
PAIN
Lu spasmed, blood fountaining from his mouth and the new openings in his chest. His dantian had failed, a section explosively shattering and propelling jagged shards of crystal into his lungs and through his ribs. Even now, the damage was compounding, in moments the whole thing would come apart and surely kill him. There was only one option left.
Lu said goodbye to his cultivation. Twenty years. Two-thirds of his life.
With an exertion of will, Lu dispersed his dantian. The hard crystal dissolved back into qi, harmless. His body was suddenly heavier, his thoughts slower, his spiritual sense winked out like a snuffed candle.
Lu was now a mortal, with a grievous chest wound, sitting in a small stone circle among an endless swamp.