I’m going to be honest, what Merlin outlined to me as his ‘cunning plan’ was such colossal bullshit that I’m not sure I’m going to be able to narrate it sensibly with a straight face.

*

Despite your low starting position, my dear, you have achieved some rather impressive things in our brief time together. Now, most of these successes have needed me to, as we have discussed, direct your Qi into powering techniques of which you have no knowledge. But the fact remains, you have had the raw power to do them and - and this is absolutely not the case with many cultivators - the iron will to see things through.

“I’ve had my personality described in many ways over the years. I’m not sure anyone would ever have noted I had an iron will.”

Perhaps ‘cussed, bloody-minded stubbornness’ would be a better description?

I think I preferred ‘iron will’.

With that in mind, it seems logical to me that – given sufficient time to train – it is not inconceivable you would have eventually been able to walk that cultivation journey yourself.

“Mate, literally every conversation we’ve had since you brought me here has been that we have ‘no time, no time, no time’ like some sort of amphetamine-fulled White Rabbit. Are you now saying that was bollocks?”

Not quite. But it occurs that these things are not quite as cut and dry as I may have suggested initially. Few things are entirely black and white in the world of cultivation. Indeed, I have reflected that we do indeed have a very limited window of opportunity where there is potential for you to make huge gains in developing a sensible foundation.

“There’s more than a whiff of second-hand car salesman about your patter here, Big M. What are you getting at?”

I’m saying that I know of a spell - an exceptionally complex and challenging spell - which, in certain conditions and with significant caveats, can repeat a single day, allowing the opportunity for substantial training in the fundamentals of cultivation during that time.

As I said. Colossal bullshit.

*

Let’s start with the conditions.

It turns out - in a deux ex machina kind of way - Merlin could cast a spell to make me exist in a perpetual Groundhog Day of training. So far, so good. However, for this spell not to cause the end of the universe, I needed to have no interactions that would alter anyone’s settled destiny.

So, no saving Ealdgyð.

Apparently, it’s absolutely fine for me to be fucking around in dark age history to sort out Merlin’s personal project, but heaven forfend I help out a poor woman who got her family killed and her head blown off.

That’s not quite how I put it, my dear.

It doesn’t matter how he put it; it’s what he means.

As I tried to explain . . .

Anyway, to avoid being remotely helpful to humanity during my training day, it turns out I have to find a solitary place in the woods and give up any thoughts of being Bill Murray, catching boys falling out of trees.

So, here I am. In a cave. Alone.

Awesome.

The second condition is that, although Merlin might be the one to actually cast the spell, all of the Qi being used for this little venture would have to come from me. And it would take all of what I had right now to make it work. So, I would be starting my ‘day’ of intensive cultivation training with zero Qi.

When the Big M first explained this to me, I was fine with it. After all, I was just over a day into this cultivation lark, so it hardly felt like much of a backward step.

It was when Merlin explained that the pathetic amount of Qi to which I had access at the moment was the result of it building up over thirty-seven years that I began to feel . . . concerned.

It’s not as bad as it sounds, my dear. By developing a proper Qi-cycling routine, things will refresh pretty quickly. It will just put a hard ceiling on how much improvement you can achieve on each reset day. Because you’ll be starting empty, you’ll need to cycle for long enough to have the reserves back by the end of the evening to reset things all over again.

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So, basically, it looked like I’d be spending most of my training ‘day’ getting enough energy together to restart the day again without making any tangible gains. Apparently, Qi cultivation is basically the model for late-stage, carceral capitalism.

And then there was the final condition.

“Seriously?”

Seriously.

“This seems like a lot of effort to make if you’re saying the maximum amount of cultivation improvement I can achieve with this method is to end up with the foundations of . . . how did you put it?”

A slightly slow ten-year-old.

“Awesome. So, days upon days of isolation and deprivation, and all I can expect is to reach the level of a thick ginger kid preparing for his first day at Hogwarts.”

Well, as most of the time will be spent cultivating rather than training, I can’t help but think ten years of improvement is not too bad. To really develop as a cultivator of power, you will need time to move forward correctly. However, your options will be much broader if we can get the groundwork done this way.

Colossal. Bullshit.

*

Are you ready, my dear?

I looked around the crappy little cave we’d scoped out in the middle of nowhere to train. “Sure. Looking forward to it. Rarely have I so anticipated being so fulfilled by a day’s work.”

My dear, I know you are feeling frustrated, but let us remember that we are doing this for your own good. We cannot use this technique to turn you into the powerhouse you need to be to save your sister, but it can at least give you a starting point. But I appreciate it is going to be difficult.

“Dude, I have been on every diet known to mankind ‘for my own good’. I’m the world expert in doing things to myself that make me miserable in the hope they’ll eventually make me better. Although, you probably need to understand that I usually find myself tits deep in KFC a few hours in.”

I have no idea how to respond to that. Here we go.

*

So, fun fact.

If you are sat in a dark cave, and your wizard mentor casts a complicated spell to reboot time, very little changes. You are still, basically, in a dark cave. Just a few hours earlier.

Well, not quite the same.

Because this spell needed every last drop of my Qi, I now felt like absolute shit.

I’d become very used to having my purple paint sloshing around my veins - channels, my dear. If we’re going to do this, let’s at least try to get the terminology correct - the absence of it was like having the world’s worst hangover, but without the deep feeling of contentment and pride from knowing what you’d got up to in the club’s toilets.

Right, here we go. You have twenty-four hours to generate enough Qi to be able to cast the spell again.

I settled in for the long haul.

*

I lost count of the number of times Merlin had to reset the day before I started to have any spare Qi left over to actually begin some training . . . You really are ridiculously overdramatic, my dear. It’s been two days. We’re hardly talking about One Hundred Years of Solitude here.

Two days I spent sitting on my arse doing fuck-all. Do you have any idea how torturous that was?

You forget I have access to your memories, my dear. There have been many occasions across your life when you have spent days lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, doing nothing whatsoever. In many ways, I may suggest you have the perfect experiential skill set for what we are attempting.

Fuck you, Merlin.

*

We eventually got to the stage where I had generated enough Qi to restart things about an hour before the end of the day.

This did not, as I had hoped, lead to ‘Morgan’s Hour of Chill and Pampering’. Rather, it appeared to be an opportunity for Merlin to engage his drillmaster fantasies.

As someone who found any cardio more strenuous than hunting around the living room for the remote utterly impossible, this was not a joy.

It wasn’t even anything as interesting as jumping around a swamp with my wizard mentor strapped to my back.

I spent that hour doing lots and lots of press-ups - Five. You can manage five before you start crying - followed by hundreds - two - of star jumps.

What is particularly impressive here, my dear, is that you are currently in the body of someone at the peak of human fitness and endurance. The very fact your mind is managing to convince your body you cannot do any more exercise demonstrates the iron will of which I was speaking.

I didn’t get a chance to share my thoughts on this before the patronising judgemental wanker restarted the day again.

*

I lost track of time.

It’s impossible not to, really, when every day is the same, and you spend most of it meditating anyway.

The only thing I could really use to judge my progress was the amount of time it took me to reach the level of Qi required to power the restart. On the one hand, I was pretty pleased to see the effectiveness of my cycling improve, but considering this meant the amount of time I spent Rocky-montaging increased, I guess I was ambivalent at best about it.

Actually, I did find cycling to be an increasingly enjoyable experience. The process would start from my palette - your dantian - where my paint - your Qi - would collect. I’d carefully ensure that all impurities were removed, filtering out lumps to achieve a smooth consistency so that the paint’s purple colour was as vibrant and pure as possible.

With each breath, I’d then direct the paint with a brushstroke around my meridians - meri . . . oh, you got that right. You do listen, after all - and then rinse and repeat. I could tell, in a very, very, very small way, that each cycle made slight improvements.

As the days went by, it made sense to me that missing out on this experience - even if it wasn’t making any real difference to how good a cultivator I was - would probably leave me the poorer.

Sorry, was that you saying this was actually a good idea?

Fuck you, Merlin.