Two hours and three sudden breaches of bodily integrity later, I was forced to conclude cultivation wasn’t that simple. There was something to learn there, but the pain of expelling each tiny deviation was simply too much for me to bear. Even though they healed in thirty minutes, each sudden ejection of qi filled blood was worse than getting stabbed. It was the way they ripped the flesh on the way out, rather than cutting it. The sheer level of destruction set my nerves on fire, leaving me curled up in an insensate ball.

It didn’t help that recovering from each incident took a good ten percent of my qi. After all my practice, I was at well under half capacity. It didn’t feel great. It wasn’t painful, but I felt tired in a way that I hadn’t since arriving in this body. It also came with a weird sensation that straddled the line between hunger and nausea. My core was slowly dripping more qi into my system, but it would be hours until I was full again.

If all my attempts to cycle hadn’t ended so disastrously, I might have considered supplementing that with a spirit stone. As it was, I didn’t know how to absorb one.

I’d tried a variety of motions and patterns, everything from moving one strand within a flow faster than its surrounding qi, to trying to individually manage the qi within an entire section of my body. Every attempt had eventually resulted in some sort of rapidly accelerating snarl, even the ones where I’d just tried to freeze a bit of my qi in place. A few deviations I’d managed to isolate, slow down, and unwind, but the other three had to be ejected.

I considered myself a tough man, but there was only so much I could take. I’d been in enough fights to know I had limits. I was no superhuman protagonist who could be trapped in a torture formation for a hundred lifetimes and come out ready for more. I’d met men who regularly had to be reminded that struggling against a choke hold until they literally fell unconscious wasn’t good for their long term health. Shit, I’d rolled with a few regularly, they were very nice people. I wasn’t one of those.

I’d trained martial arts under a number of people in my last life. Like cultivators, most of them tended to be at least a little eccentric.

One older man I’d jiu-jitsu trained under had been a bit of a sadist. He had a habit of ending his rolls with students by sitting on their chests, letting them breathe just enough to stay conscious, not letting them tap out until he was satisfied they’d struggled as hard as they could.

When I’d watch other people get subjected to the exercise, I’d always imagined that I would struggle to the end. It just fit my image of who I was. I was the guy who could cut off a wart or skin tag with an x-acto knife without flinching. The guy who ran until he vomited at wrestling practice, then wiped his mouth off, got back up, and kept running.

When my turn finally came, I hadn't. I’d fought hard, I’d wriggled and pushed and tried every mount escape I knew. And then eventually I had nothing more to give.

I didn’t pass out. I could still breathe enough to stay conscious. Could still move my hands enough to tap frantically. But there came a point where I just couldn’t fight any longer. Where I just gave up.

Blasting those tiny deviations out was worse than that had been. I could do it. I could force myself to suffer through it again. But not without knowing there was a light at the end of the tunnel, that I was on the right track.

I sat up. My robes were a total write-off. I’d mostly directed my ejections out of my naked torso, but between individual razor sharp droplets, rolling about in the mud in agony, and the fact that the pain had been enough to make even my immortal constitution sweat, they were an absolute mess.

There was one more thing I wanted to try before I changed though. I shifted the shroud of qi around me, reaching out for my sword. Resonating with my qi, the little embers of sword qi that endured within it burst into life. I pulled, and it leapt to my hand.

I could live a thousand years, and I didn’t think that would ever get old.

I held the blade out before me, letting it fill once more with the will to cut. It felt a little ironic, that only now that I felt confident in my ability to swing this sword without destroying whatever stood before me. Only by understanding what it felt like to create sword qi without actively using the weapon, had I learned again how to swing something without creating sword qi. There was an element of intentionality to it, to making the decision that this swing should sever something, even if only the air. Elder Hu’s body and cultivation just reduced the threshold, making what would normally require absolute focus so easy as to be accidental.

I pulled once more on my shroud of qi. My aura? I set the whole thing rotating around me. It rose from my feet, then crossed above my head, before looping around behind me in a great wheel. I dropped my sword, and the updraft caught it at roughly knee level.

Carefully, I stepped onto the floating sword.

The hilt immediately dropped under the weight of my foot, hitting the earth. Then the sword shot forward, spinning off through the clearing.

I sighed. I immediately saw the stupid mistake. Spinning my qi in a wheel worked for levitation while the sword was in front of me, it was the wrong pattern for flight, where the sword would be beneath me. At least it was still charged, so I reached out and recalled it.

This time, I kept my aura still as I stepped on the sword first, feeling like an idiot as I did so. I needed upward pressure beneath my feet, so I shaped my qi into a sort of toroid. That was the fancy mathematical name for a donut, a torus. The shape you got when you took the surface generated by rotating a smaller circle around the circumference of a larger one. My qi followed the curve of the donut, rising from beneath my feet, passed upward around my body, then flowed back down at the edges of my aura, before rising again.

Slowly, I began to rise into the air. Then the sword slipped sideways, unceremoniously dumping me on my ass.

It was a finicky thing. Put the center of the stretched donut of qi a little too far to the left or right, and the sword would tip over. The correct spot wasn’t quite in the center either, depending on which foot I had in the lead it shifted around.

And yet, after a few tries navigating that balancing act came easily to me. Now that I was conscious of it, the aura of qi around me felt like a new set of limbs. In much the same way that we windmill our arms to keep our balance, it rapidly became almost second nature to shift and tilt my aura to keep the sword under me level.

Did humans here evolve neural circuitry to handle that sort of thing? Was that even the right frame of inquiry here? Surely there weren’t enough high level cultivators for natural selection to produce adaptations for better qi handling.

Every little thing I learned gave me a hundred more questions to wonder at.

Slowly, I sped up the rotation of the surface of the torus. Under the greater suction, the sword rose, and I rose with it.

I smiled. It was magical. The most casual defiance of the fundamental laws of physics I’d ever seen, save perhaps for the way my flesh magically knit itself back together. I was literally pulling myself up by my bootstraps. I wondered how the physics of it all worked. I was still heavier than air, but I wasn’t expelling anything to keep myself level like a rocket would. My qi flowed in an unbroken cycle, if I was losing power just keeping myself aloft, the drain was so light I couldn’t feel it.

This time, rather than moving on impulse and dropping myself on my ass, I thought before I tried to move forward. I’d done a great deal of 3D modeling in my last life, and those habits came in handy here with visualizing the shapes I was making my qi make. I could tilt the torus. Rotating the construct around the y axis would cause it to start pulling me forward, while still pulling upwards enough to keep me afloat. But it would also cause the back of the hilt to rise. I could lean backwards to deal with that, but it would limit the speed I could fly, I only had so much weight to put on it. It would also tie my altitude and forward speed together, the faster I accelerated, the more I would dip. I’d need to vary the strength of my cycling too, pulling harder when I wanted to accelerate laterally, in order to counteract that.

I tried to visualize all of that in my head. See the rotating donut, feel the speed at which it should turn. Remember to lean opposite the acceleration, to keep the sword level.

I took a deep breath, and tipped the donut.

I shot forwards, accelerating like a rocket. Leaning back I barely kept the sword level, but then I started climbing rapidly. The residual vertical momentum from my qi was greater than gravity’s acceleration downwards. Shit. I let up on the gas, but then the hilt of the sword immediately dropped under my back foot’s weight.

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For a single immortal moment, I watched helplessly as the now vertical sword kept moving forward faster than my body. With agonizing slowness, my feet detached from the blade, leaving me thirty feet in the air without a sword to stand on.

I hung in the air for a full second, as gravity slowly ate away at my momentum. My sword kept spinning off into the distance.

I landed with a heavy thump, my unbreakable legs digging into the soil like I’d fallen into soft cheese.

I got up, and surreptitiously looked around, making absolutely sure there was nobody nearby to witness my shame.

“That. Was awesome.” I muttered quietly. The mask of Hu Xin itched something fierce when you wore it all the time. That felt like a moment worth marking.

I gave it a few more tries. Then a few dozen more. Then I kept going, until the moon had reached its apex and began its descent. By the time I was finished, my robes had progressed well past write-off territory, approaching actively immodest, the silk resembling swiss cheese after all the high-speed impacts with trees and boulders.

If someone stumbled across me right now, I might literally have to kill them. That, or spin the most monstrous lie of my life about a nascent soul spirit beast wandering the outer sect. It was that thought that convinced me to find a stream and get changed.

But, dirty and exhausted as I was, I could fly. Not well. Not particularly fast either, by cultivator standards. I was capping out a bit shy of a hundred miles an hour, slower than my sprinting speed. My balance was less than perfect, I struggled with fast turns and even more with sudden deceleration. Going upside down or doing loops was absolutely out of the question, I hadn’t figured out how to get my feet to properly adhere to the sword, other than relying on gravity.

There was more to learn here. If I could figure out internal qi circulation, I was confident I could get my feet to stick to the sword. And I had a hundred ideas about how to accelerate myself further by actually expelling qi like a rocket, but I was already running low enough it would take me most of the next day to fully recover, even in the qi-dense bounds of the sect. Those ideas would have to wait.

I sighed. I was getting ahead of myself. This was excellent progress. I had a whole host of capabilities I didn't have yesterday. New tools that improved my ability to fight, flee, and act like Elder Hu.

I sat down in a small stream, still wearing the ghost of my robe. Bathing naked outdoors felt suspect, I might not exactly be a fairy, but I didn’t want some protagonist stumbling across me bathing naked either. And one of the nice things about having a storage ring is you could just stuff your wet clothes in there and deal with them months, or years, later. At least in theory.

As I methodically scrubbed myself down with water that would have been downright frigid for a mortal, I let myself think about the subject I’d been avoiding all day.

What was I going to do about Elder Li?

Even now, almost a day removed from first seeing Su Li’s waxy black and yellow bruises, my chest tightened in anger. My fingers reached out on instinct for the sword I’d left on the bank, and it quivered in response, eager to leap to my hand the moment it was called.

I got so very angry, so very easily, these days. Even though it faded as fast as it came on, it made me uncomfortable. Like I was balancing on the edge of a knife, one bad moment away from making a decision I could not take back. It was tempting to blame it on Elder Hu’s cultivation, or even just his body. It was plausible, modern biology had little to say about what could or could not happen when a mind was magically transplanted onto a completely computational substrate.

But a colder part of me wondered if I was just showing my true colors now that my self control was really being tested. My last life had not been some charmed existence, but it had been rare that anyone I cared about was so casually abused in front of me. I might be more influential now, for all that I treaded quietly, but I was also less insulated from the brutality of the world. I’d gotten so used to injustice being a thing that happened to other people that I forgot how galling it was.

In some ways, the fact that Su Li would make a full recovery in under a week with the right pills made the whole thing stranger. Beating a mortal like that was unforgivable, whether they would ever fully heal was a roll of the dice. But Su Li had sounded more resigned than terrified when she recounted her story. Even without my help, she’d fully expected to recover eventually.

And yet, something had to be done. I could have borne snide words forever, as long as they didn’t suggest I wasn’t who I said I was. But this demanded a response.

I was no expert in matters of face. But I’d already consulted the only resource available to me, Su Li.

Her idea hadn’t been bad. Shaming Li Ru and his master with the truth would be elegant, if I could pull it off. But I suspected she’d played down her desire for revenge so as to not inconvenience me. And even if she didn’t want blood, I did.

Challenging Elder Li immediately felt like a trap. He wouldn’t be aware I was weakened, so if he was being this confident, he was either offended enough not to care about the odds of victory, or thought he had an edge I wouldn’t know about, either in combat or in the social aftermath. The social optics weren’t great for me, but I thought they were doable if my victory was absolute. I’d look like a thin skinned brute for escalating the matter that hard, but that was fine if I won effortlessly. Unfortunately, I wasn’t confident in my ability to do that.

I reviewed what I knew about him. He was almost certainly in core formation. I was likely either in high core formation or low nascent soul. I probably about half a stage on him, judging from the social byplay at Elder Liang’s tea party. He favored puppets. I’d only seen the one, the great ape he’d had at his lecture. He almost certainly had more. I suspected that meant his offensive techniques would take the form of the natural synergies with puppetry. Hidden blades, probably poisoned. Possibly poison gas as well, it seemed like a natural thing to use with puppets who would be unaffected by it. He likely had some techniques to bind or manipulate his targets directly as well.

I had good answers for most of it. My new exproprioception for sharp objects would be very useful to deal with hidden blades. Stormbreaker would handle any poison cloud, though it took a full second of preparation to unleash. My naturally sharp qi would make trying to bind me difficult. The greatest danger would be in a battle of attrition, where multiple puppets that did not bleed slowly whittled me down.

In many ways, he seemed like an ideal opponent for me on paper. That was what scared me, unless I was a total unknown, he had to have some sort of technique he felt would be effective against me.

On top of all that, a close victory did not help my reputation. I was supposed to be substantially stronger than him, letting him land blows like Wang Li had would invite dangerous questions.

There was a part of me that wanted to say fuck it all, fight him and let the chips fall where they may. It was a persuasive voice, but it never really had a chance in the first place. I’d spent a lifetime denying those impulses, letting cold calculation alone guide my choices. The memory of the way Su Li had winced every time she moved was not nearly enough to break those habits.

A direct confrontation with him was an option, but not my first choice.

I wasn’t sure what Geng Ru’s deal was. I’d checked the record hall and he wasn’t one of Elder Li’s students, or one of Li Ru’s. He had no official connection with either of them I could find in the paperwork, he was just an uncommonly young, moderately talented, disciple with no background of note.

With a few small realms and a couple dirty tricks under her belt, I felt confident Su Li could handle him. Given a few months, I believed I could at least give her that much at least. Seeing as he fought with tonfas of all things, a good grappling foundation might actually help her escape his attempts to bring the fight in close.

I would leave him to her. To surpass him would be even sweeter than revenge.

That left Li Ru.

I couldn’t touch him directly. Doing anything physical to him would be bullying the younger generation. Any administrative punishment I levied could probably be undone by his master, who held the same official rank as me. The elegant thing would be to suppress him with my own foundation establishment disciple. If I had one.

I paused. That was an idea. I didn’t have one. I didn’t want one, really. But could I borrow one?

If I subjected Li Ru to the same ordeal he’d put Su Li through, his master could do nothing to complain. If he dared escalate and challenge me directly anyway, and I slapped him down, it would leave him looking like a fool who didn't understand the gulf between us. It still might end in a fight between elders, but it bought me more time to master my own powers, and improved the optics substantially.

I wasn’t sure if it would improve or destroy my odds of ending this feud peacefully. Elder Li seemed like a prideful man, so it was probably the latter. But I didn’t like the current chances of a man to man talk with him right now ending with us burying the hatchet.

That just left the question of who would act as my fist.

There were only really 3 candidates. Sun Ming. Liang Tao. And Fang Xiao.

Sun Ming was a near total unknown to me. Even if Su Li had faith in her goodness, her lack of action at the party didn’t fill me with confidence. If she was inclined to go to bat for Su Li, she would have spoken when Li Ru began insulting her.

I’d interacted with Liang Tao the most. He was apprehensive of me, but polite. And after my trip to Xianyang I was pretty sure I’d given him a far more valuable spirit stone than I’d intended for his help in the library. But involving Liang tao meant involving his master, and I didn’t want to navigate that.

Fang Xiao on the other hand, had potential. He appeared positively disposed towards my lecture, actually asking followup questions. He was considered a prodigy, strong enough to be within striking distance of Li Ru despite being a decade younger. He was known to accept financial gifts from elders, but steadfastly refused to accept a full disciple relationship.

I wondered how he would react to an offer of a few lessons with no strings attached, in exchange for dueling Li Ru and perhaps thoroughly breaking a few of his puppets.

It would be tricky, but I had plenty of material to draw from both my lives, and my recent personal experiences with sword qi to boot.

I wouldn’t mind another shot at influencing him anyway. I wasn’t sure what exactly he’d taken from kanye’s quote, but somehow I felt certain it was self destructive.

I stood from the stream and flicked my arm, the sheer power of the motion instantly clearing it of every trace of moisture.

It was time to get dressed, and go talk to a man about a beating.