“Could you please bring me a selection of beginner materials relating to sword cultivation?“
It was an innocuous request. The sort of request one usually got from initiates who had just earned their first session of access to the library. The kind of thing asked by bumpkins who did not understand that this was a sect repository, not the local township’s archives, and they did not simply get to peruse a few dozen manuals before selecting their favorite, and they certainly did not get to waste an inner disciple’s time to do so.
Except this time it wasn’t an outer disciple asking, it was the Saint in Crimson. Inner Disciple Liang Tao had never spoken to the man before, had never even seen him except for disciple initiation and new year ceremonies. The man usually floated high above, so high the mortal initiates probably couldn’t even make him out except as a red speck. He never taught, or took on any as disciples. Tao had only ever heard his voice once, when he answered a question directly posed to him by the sect master with a single word. He just cultivated, emerged every few years to utterly eradicate some threat the sect master pointed him at, and then returned to cultivation.
And today, he’d just wandered into the Repository of Long Night, sat down at a table intended for outer disciples to wait for service, rather than wander the shelves directly, as was his right as an elder.
Core Disciple Meng Ying had given him a look that clearly communicated the old monster was his problem, not hers, and he was almost as scared of her as he was of the Saint. And so, here he found himself, fetching books for the second most dangerous man in the sect.
“I’m done with this stack.” Elder Hu said, gesturing at a pile of precious manuals carelessly stacked nearly two feet high. “More please. Fewer of the cultivation manuals, more technique ones, and any more supplementary materials you can find, especially related to the natures of air and metal qi.”
The polite phrasing aside, it was very clearly not a request. The man had been here almost twelve hours, his shift should have ended an hour ago. And yet Liang Tao leapt to obey. There was never any question. Disappointing an Elder was bad. Disappointing this Elder was… A fate too terrible to contemplate.
He desperately hoped his next selections would hold whatever the man was looking for. He racked his brain for the most powerful, esoteric early stage manuals he’d ever come across. Whatever technique or method the saint was looking for would surely be in one of those.
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In the privacy of my own mind, I could admit to myself that my circumstances terrified me. I’d been transmigrated into some sort of Xianxia setting. Sure, I’d occasionally enjoyed that sort of trashy literature in my past life, and I’d never been the sort of person to shy away from violence. I was, perhaps, a little better prepared for such a fate than most.
I was not going to trust my life to genre savviness and plot armor in a world where failure might mean having my soul torn apart, being stuck in a jar for ten thousand years, or being exsanguinated from every orifice by some unfathomable ancestor’s spiritual pressure. And my starting position was probably not ideal. I was an elder of some sort. Apparently not the most important of elders, from the reaction I’d gotten from the man teaching those children. That wasn’t generally the sort of starting position that heaven defying protagonists began from. Closer to the position one of their stepping stones on the way to heaven might occupy. The only story I could even think of that began like this, was the one with the disfavored teacher who was the reincarnation of Confucius or something.
Somehow, I didn’t think I’d be getting some sort of magical library cheat code like him. That was rather how my luck had always been, good enough to eke out a good life with care and effort, but remarkable in neither direction. I would have to be careful to avoid offending any young protagonist types. Even if my sword could shake the skies, I wasn’t keen on sowing the seeds of a hostile encounter with some chosen whippersnapper who snorted tribulation lightning and destroyed secret realms by passing wind. Caution would be the name of the game, I’d already made one enemy through carelessness, I’d need to avoid offending anyone else, disciple or elder, if it was at all possible. And yet, I had to do something. Sitting in my little manor, letting the world pass me by, would gain me nothing, even if the boredom didn’t drive me mad. The only way to learn about the world was to be in it after all. My musings rather ran in circles after that thought, it was hard to make productive plans on so little information.
So, old habits resurfaced, and I did what I’d always done when I wanted to avoid actually taking action. I read. I’d found the library by accident, passing the clearing in which it stood alone as I zoomed through the woods. The shock of being able to read the sign, to see vaguely Chinese characters and yet somehow know that they meant ‘The Repository of Long Night’s Memory’, brought me to a standstill. Curiosity had drawn me closer, but the emptiness of the building, the wide halls of dark wooden panels so clearly devoid of important people to offend, had sealed the deal.
I’d wandered in, finding myself in a massive pavilion filled with tables surrounded by three walls filled with bookshelves.
And yet, the moment I sat down at a table to get my bearings, an attendant had zoomed down to ask what I needed. The young man had taken the stairs three at a time, in a furious rush to reach my table. I’d made the elementary mistake of not looking up. All the attendants seemed to be on the second floor, looking down to monitor the sort of lobby space of the first. But, with him already here, staring at me, turning back hadn’t been an option.
I hadn’t been sure what I was authorized to access, so I erred on the side of caution, asking for beginner materials. Those at least should be well within the clearance of even the lowest of elders. In the worst case, I had the excuse of wanting to brush up before teaching other disciples. I somehow doubted Su Li would be the last to beg pointers from me. The helpful attendant had obliged, nearly burying me in books, and for the first time since I’d woken up this morning, I felt in my element.
Much of what I was reading might as well have been Greek to me. Many authors buried the deeper meaning of their work beneath a hundred layers of tortured metaphor. Others assumed a large body of preexisting knowledge, referring to meridians by number, or making reference to other texts I assumed they expected the reader to have at hand. Some of it, I could puzzle out. One technique that called for the reader to ‘alloy their will with lightning, to make one their eyes and hands’ clearly seemed to be a sort of nervous system overclocking technique. Others left me stumped, I had no idea how one was meant to ‘imbibe the smoke of revelry, and let joy enter the second palace, while condemning memory to the fourth tomb’. From context, it seemed like a cultivation technique for absorbing energy from a bar or party, but the mechanics of it were far beyond me. Most of the cultivation manuals fell into that latter category, but eventually, I was able to put together a basic understanding of at least what the early stages of cultivation looked like from the outside.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The initiate’s realm was the twin stages of qi gathering and qi condensation, which were simultaneously pursued, and used almost interchangeably as names for the stage. It was characterized by the cultivator slowly deepening their control of and capacity for qi. Initiates were intensely dependent on external sources of qi, being both unable to generate their own, and their dantians tending to slowly leak what qi they did hold. In the first stage, they filled their meridians and a single dantian with qi, then in the second, they sought to compress it until it achieved a liquid state. It seemed simple enough, but I’d seen references in manuals to meridians by both name and number, and some of those numbers had been in the low hundreds. Apparently which dantian was used mattered, and the pattern of meridians qi entered and exited through was determined by both the aspect of the qi and the technique in question. I’d read more than a dozen manuals for initiates, but I still hadn’t the foggiest idea of the principles by which those patterns operated.
The second realm was the disciple’s, which consisted of the stage of foundation establishment. Becoming a disciple required one to solidify their qi into a state where it no longer slowly trickled away from their control. Graduating the stage required one to form a core, which would generate qi of their own, turning their cultivation from a well, however deep, to a spring that could renew itself. Each manual promised different superhuman talents to disciples that cultivated it, but most of them were very light on details, so it was hard to tell exactly how powerful disciples were, compared to baseline mortals.
After core formation, there was nothing. Almost nothing in the manuals, or reference materials. Perhaps the manuals were all too low level, but I suspected it was more complicated than that. One of the only manuals that included instructions for forming a core, the Path of the Endless Sword, had made reference to ‘the myriad paths to the heavens’ in its concluding chapter. The only reference text that mentioned the subject simply noted that ‘it is in attaining core formation, that one truly earns the right to call themselves a cultivator’.
I had no real idea where my new body stood beneath the heavens. Not qi condensation certainly, I could feel the power beneath my skin, a barely restrained violence longing to inflict itself upon the world. I didn’t know for certain my body held a core, but it seemed like a safe bet. I’d reached carelessly into the power within me, and for all that I’d thrown about hurricane winds and traversed the mountain at superhuman speeds, I didn’t feel any worse for it. Either my foundation was unfathomably deep, or I had a core.
Idly, I poked at my belly. Was it a physical object? A great big marble buried in there? Could I touch it if I cut myself open? Would my new powers heal me?
Questions for another day. Still, even after hours of pouring over scrolls, there was so much basic information I didn’t know. Even now, I wouldn’t have been able to answer the question that Elder put to me, I didn’t know what the Empty Breath was, let alone how to perform it. From context, it seemed to be the cultivation-concealing technique he’d mentioned, but nothing I’d read had told me anything about it. And asking for a copy of my own sect’s foundational cultivation method, which as an Elder I’d be expected to teach to others, seemed like a bad idea. Maybe I could pass it off as being for Su Li, once I confirmed that she wouldn’t already have been given a paper copy.
Still, any information was better than none. The attendant, probably an outer disciple from the stories I’d read, had been remarkably helpful. And he hadn’t asked me a single question about what I was doing, or tried to make small talk, which I was even more thankful for. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tip the library staff, but when in doubt, it usually paid to err on the side of generosity. One of the books had clued me in to the fact that the ring on my finger was a storage treasure, and provided a very beginner friendly guide to accessing it. I imagined money, and reached out to it with the strange new sort of pseudo-sense that was apparently my qi. It responded with a rock, a clear translucent blue stone that somehow felt like the land after a storm.
“Thank you, for your assistance. I’m done with all of these.” I told the attendant, gesturing at the massive pile that had sprouted from the table I’d planted myself at.
I handed the spirit stone to the disciple as I left.
I stood and exited the library, wondering how long I’d spent poring over tomes. An afternoon perhaps? I’d gone through an impressive amount of material, but perhaps that was this body’s cultivation aiding my already prodigious ability to read? It couldn’t have been too long, it was still light outside. I’d been able to tear through nearly a thousand words a minute as a mortal, I was quite curious to know how much I’d improved. I would need to time it later, after I nailed down how the density of text compared between the two languages.
As I exited the library, I realized I had no idea how to get back to my house. That was… Decidedly suboptimal. Oh well, I supposed I would simply need to wander about a while longer.
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Liang Tao stared down at his hand. Elder Hu’s hand had been shockingly warm, and at the same time felt wet, as if slicked with fresh blood, and yet so dry they left not a trace of oil or moisture behind at the contact.
Twenty hours. A foundation establishment cultivator could go days without sleep, but he’d been awake for two already before Elder Hu showed up. He’d read almost an entire day and night, forced an inner disciple to wait on him like a servant because he couldn’t be bothered to learn how the library organized manuals. He’d spent an entire day hovering just at the appropriate distance to be there in a moment if the monster needed more books, but far enough away to avoid even the intimation of spying. He’d neglected all his other duties, spent hours guiding his breath along the forms of Scripture of the Hollow Sky, not cultivating, just keeping his exterior utterly calm.
And he’d given him a high grade spirit stone, ‘for his assistance’. Liang Tao had never even seen one of this quality, the closest comparison he had was his master’s set of calligraphy brushes, which had dust of a similar potency mixed into the enamel. And it was aspected to Heaven. It was nearly the perfect gift for a student of the Hollow Sky like him. He could spend a year cultivating off this without the need for any other resources, or keep it only for breakthroughs and open a dozen meridians without buying a single pill.
In other circumstances, he might have been tempted to sell information about what the elder had been looking for to the brokers of the sect’s rumor mill. Anything related to Elder Hu would draw interest. That he was looking into beginner manuals? The very suggestion that he might be considering taking a student? It was world shaking, compared to most of what flowed through the rumor mill. Every high ranking outer disciple, and more than a few of the inner ones, would be vying for that honor. However, in the face of such generosity? He would tell Master Liang, the matter was too public not to. But he would otherwise take the most mundane of the Saint’s secrets to his grave.