Xu Long spent the next few hours watching the sky brighten with the coming of dawn, not moving a muscle so as to let the heartbroken spirit fox on his lap sleep as much as she could. When it was well and truly morning his mother walked into the grove, she smiled at him but didn’t otherwise say anything lest she wake the sleeping Xu Xing, she retrieved the body of Xu Xing’s mother into her ring before simply nodding and walking back out of the grove, leaving Xu Long sitting there, whose legs where all but certain to be asleep by now. He had considered cultivating while he waited but ultimately discarded the idea. He didn’t want Xu Xing to wake up and see that he wasn’t there for her, so he sat and he waited.
Luckily for his legs, he didn’t have to wait for much longer, as he was watching Xu Xing sleep on his lap he saw her eyes flutter slightly and then suddenly open with a start as if she had just woken from a nightmare.
“It’s alright, I’m here.” He reassured her.
When she heard his voice she looked up at him and then looked over at the slight divot in the ground where her mothers body had sat not that long ago.
“Mother came and retrieved her a few hours ago.”
She just stared at the spot for a while before turning around and snuggling into Xu Long’s embrace, he hugged the little spirit fox, and they stayed that way for quite a while, until finally Xu Long’s leg situation got to be untenable.
“How about we go for a walk around the valley Xiao Xing, I need to get the blood flowing in my legs again after sitting like this all night.”
Looking down at the spirit fox in his arms for approval, he got a nod of her little head and started moving right away, which was a bit of a mistake in hindsight. As soon as went to stand up he fell straight back on his backside and ended up laying flat on his back with Xu Xing sitting on his chest looking at him with a little cheeky mirth in her eyes.
“I’m glad you found that funny, how about we just stay like this for a while? At least until I can feel my legs again.”
As Xu Long was asking the question he saw an evil little glint in her eyes, he knew what was coming, but it was too late to stop it, she pounced. And Xu Long found himself curled up reeling from the hit to his testicles, he hadn’t been caught off guard in years. As the pain subsided he looked up slightly to see Xu Xing sitting on the ground next to his head, not even the decency to run off.
“Fine, I suppose you get a free one today.” Sighing he pulled himself up off the ground slowly getting his legs in working order. “Come on Xu Xing, I could still use that walk.”
He picked her up and placed her in the front of his robes and walked out into the valley slowly petting her head.
The next couple of days Xu Long took off from training and simply hung out with Xu Xing, they didn’t do much, not even their customary game of ‘chase the impossible to catch spirit fox’, they mostly just walked the valley or layed in bed with Xu Xing snuggling on Xu Long’s chest.
As they were laying in bed at dusk on the second day they were both awoken from their listlessness by a voice.
“I think it is well past time for the two of you to get out of this funk.”
Xu Long turned his head to see his mother standing over the both of them, she reached her hand out, palm up.
“Come along Xiao Xing, you have classes to get back to and my son has cultivation to do if he wants to have any chance at being able to protect you before you can cultivate yourself.” Xu Xing was just about to ignore the scary woman when she heard that last part, that was true, Xu Long had been neglecting his cultivation these past couple of days, for her, something he had never done for any reason. She looked over at his face that was looking at her with a smile that said whatever she chose was fine.
It didn’t take long for her to decide, and she walked over Xu Long’s chest and then jumped into the outstretched hand of his mother.
“I suggest you use this last week before Wu Zhong arrives wisely Long’er, he is not going to go easy on you because you have decided to wear a blindfold indefinitely.”
She turned and walked off leaving that statement hanging in the air. Xu Long looked up at the sky that was still busy turning from day to night, he let out a sigh. “Well, better get back to it.” He sat up and slowly untied the blindfold that was wrapped around his wrist before placing it over his eyes and returning to that familiar darkness.
It had already been a week since he had that feeling described in the Clear Spring Manual that would indicate that he was ready to advance a minor realm, but he had taken both his mother’s advice and the promise he had made to her seriously and was waiting. Not that he doubted her, he didn’t, but he was surprised by the effect of waiting, not only had he been able to fractionally add to his qi reserves that he was absolutely positive were full just days before, but he felt like the time taken while at the peak of this minor realm had the effect of smoothing out wrinkles in his cultivation. He couldn’t point to any one thing as a demonstration, it was just a feeling he had.
Regardless, after his experiences having waited a single week, he decided to do the full two and advance his minor realm just before Old Wu was due back in the valley. That meant that his final week in the valley ended up being quite the unfocused assortment of different training. He would cultivate while running through his sword forms, take runs through the valley, meditate on the sword, and even a new addition to his blindfold training his mother devised in which she would place him in a random location in the valley and then give him another random location that he needed to get to. Needless to say a lot of his week had been taken up by that particular exercise.
The world as viewed through the lens of qi was a fluid and ever changing place, and it took him quite a while before he could focus his attention on just the landmarks with a degree of permanence, but once he did he found that he was traversing the environment quite a bit more like someone who could see instead of someone who was merely interpreting a picture of the world that was influx and thus unreliable and not worth remembering. Xu Long had to hand it to his mother, even though she didn’t like what he was subjecting himself to, she certainly had prepared him well to not just survive, but thrive whilst doing it.
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Finally, the day arrived and Xu Long was prepared to breakthrough his first minor realm, a small occasion to be sure, but he was quite excited nonetheless. HIs mother had already warned about what to expect from the experience so instead of his usual grove he found himself at the waterfall that marked the far end of the valley and also the start of the river that flowed through it. He was sitting in the lotus position on a patch of grass with the bottom of the falls and the torrent of water that it created flowing in front of him, completely naked.
This breakthrough was a somewhat delicate procedure, especially for his first attempt, concentration was a must. The lead up to the breakthrough involved Xu Long expanding the capacity of both his meridians and his dantian until they were strained and could not proceed any further, whilst simultaneously refining his qi to increase its potency. Once all of these tasks were accomplished and his dantian was flush with qi that was as potent as he could make it in this minor realm, it was time for the breakthrough.
Xu Long closed his eyes and began. His first task was to flood his meridians with the qi from his dantian, which was a simple affair. What came next however was anything but simple, with all the precise control that he could muster he had to push outward, evenly in every direction and simultaneously throughout every meridian and his dantian. Most importantly, however, he was also required to control the pressure that he exerted, too much and it would burst through in single or multiple spots, the breakthrough would be an instant failure and would require him to not only fix the breach or breaches, but also recultivate to the point of being prepared for breakthrough once again. What he was looking for was for all the qi to permeate out of every part of his meridians and his dantian evenly, from there it would spread throughout his whole body.
The Clear Spring Manual had stated that slow but perfect was much preferable to fast and incomplete, a certain threshold of incomplete even resulting in a different and worse kind of failure to the burst meridians in which any further advancement would be even more difficult than the already complex regular advancement. Xu Long, however, from his intuition and talks with his mother was both well aware that fast and perfect would yield the best results and that he was more than capable of achieving it. In light of this, instead of slowly increasing the pressure until he could feel the qi seeping out uniformly and then incrementally increasing the pressure from that point, he would take the reverse course. He quickly upped the pressure uniformly until he felt that he was ready to burst and then he incrementally dialed it back until he quickly found the point that a burst meridian was not possible but that qi was still seeping out of his meridians and dantian at the highest rate he could manage.
Sweat dripped down his brow after he had completed that maneuver, he knew that he had the control to pull it off, but that was far more nerve wracking than he had anticipated. Having chosen this course and seemingly succeeded, his advancement to Rank 2 of the Qi Condensation Realm proceeded both smoothly and at a rapid pace. The qi seeping through the walls of his meridians and dantian would strengthen them, ready for the next round of incremental expansion, but the most visible and immediately impactful consequence of this process was from the qi flooding through every part of his body. He could feel the change permeating his entire body as every muscle, organ and bone was flooded with qi, it felt exhilarating and powerful.
But as the qi kept pushing outwards the warning that his mother had given him came to pass as the qi that was pushed out of his body brought with it the impurities that it had flushed out along the way. A pungent sickly black tar like ooze started to seep out of every pore of his skin, all over his body, all at once. Xu Long forced himself to ignore it and continue to keep his focus inward, even though the process was rather simple for him by this point and he could more than likely finish the process with very little conscious effort, he knew from his Awakening that inattentiveness was the enemy of cultivation and he had no plans for a repeat of having his mother, who was no doubt watching from somewhere, intervene to stop him from doing something stupid.
His diligence this time around, however, made for quite the smooth breakthrough in the end, as the last of Xu Long’s qi left his dantian and meridians and slowly left his body. A black tar monster sat in the lotus position by the side of a waterfall and let out a long and deep breath that he was unaware that he had been holding. He then slowly rose to his feet and trudged over to the waterfall, going slowly so as to ensure that he was sure footed as he traversed the wet and slippery rocks with his feet covered in sludge, he finally made his way to a relatively flat rock that was directly under the waterfall and plunged his whole body into the deluge, standing tall as the torrent of water fell on him and washed the filth from his body.
Xu Long stayed under the waterfall for about 10 minutes, his eyes closed, luxuriating in the feeling of his first advancement and thus his first flushing of the body with qi. Until eventually he took a step out of the direct path of the water and dived into the river, he surfaced a few meters down the river and simply lay on his back floating down the river and looking at the sky above him, a big smile on his face. His reverie was short lived though as he heard a voice to his side from the river bank.
“Congratulations Long’er, now scrub up.”
He then felt two objects flying in his direction and he plucked them out of the air still floating on his back, when he looked at what he had caught he had to chuckle, it was a bar of soap and a pumice stone. ‘I guess the smell of that black stuff doesn’t come out easy.’ He turned his head and saw his mother who was sitting at her table drinking tea with Xu Xing sitting on her shoulder looking at him, he sighed as he knew his float had come to an abrupt end and righted himself and then swam towards his mother at the shore. When he could stand on the bottom of the river with relative ease he began to scrub. It was three whole cycles of soap and pumice stone scrubbing before his mother stopped telling him to do it again. As Xu Long started walking out of the river his mother materialized a privacy screen in between the table and Xu Long and threw his robe, pants and blindfold to drape over the top.
He put his pants and robe on despite still being wet, as he knew that the cleaning formations that his mother placed on all his clothes would take care of it and wrapped his blindfold around his wrist for the time being. After he dressed he sat down opposite of her and leaned back on the two back legs of his chair, his head tilted back with the sun on his face, he was feeling good.
“Enjoy that feeling Long’er, it is never as good as the first time, it is also never quite as messy as the first time either…”
Xu Long tilted his head down slightly to look at his mother raising an eyebrow, trying to figure out if she was making the joke he thought she was, in the end he couldn’t penetrate her impeccable mask of neutrality and had to give a snort of a laugh before returning his head to looking upwards at the sky.
“So do you have any critiques for me on where I can improve in the future?”
This time it was her turn to let out a snort of a laugh. “Come now Long’er, it is utterly beneath you to fish for compliments. You know very well that that was an utterly perfect breakthrough.”
Xu Xing who had been patiently waiting from his mother’s shoulder apparently couldn’t wait another second and leaped off her shoulder perch straight at his crotch. Xu Long didn’t even look back down at her, he merely caught her with one hand and lifted her above his face and looked up at her.
“Hello to you too Xiao Xing, in the future I would prefer a congratulations rather than an attempt on my testicles.” Looking at the cheeky and unapologetic spirit fox looking back at him, a thought popped into his head, looking straight into Xu Xing’s starry eyes, he commented. “You know I really could have used some moral support during my breakthrough, perhaps next time I do so I will hold on tight to you Xiao Xing, you don’t mind getting your pristine white coat covered in a bit of smelly black ooze do you?”
The little foxes eyes went wide with fear as she struggled to get out of his grip like he was about to do so right now, when she couldn’t get out she hung her head and conceded that this was her loss.
Xu Long smiled. “I am glad we have an understanding.” He then brought her closer and kissed her on the head before setting her on his lap and starting to slowly pet her back.