I sat beside the qi pool in our room, meditating on everything that had happened over the last few days. For four days in a row we had met with the sect master, yet we hadn’t been able or willing to offer the deal that the master had wanted. Even with all of the side deals that were negotiated, including offering twice the market rate for any level one through three alchemical ingredients they are willing to ship back to the fort during the siege and buying out their entire stock of spirit plant seeds, giving them one of those one cubic meter quartz blocks as a signing bonus, we had only been able to keep him interested for this long. It didn’t take the trained negotiation skills of an ambassador to see that he wasn’t willing to continue unless we either offered him a massive deal or the deal he wanted. That meant that, while we could probably extend our stay in the sect for another week or two if we wanted, it was unlikely that he would be willing to give the ambassador another audience. So Ambassador Johnson decided that, rather than overstay our welcome, we would be heading out tomorrow morning, and hopefully reach High River by nightfall.
For that reason he had purchased a jade sword for flying on, so that we could make better time, and was currently being taught how to use it by Green Butterfly. They had met up every day, at least once a day, and the Ambassador’s cultivation had skyrocketed. Even with her now being in the middle of the fourth level, his advancement seemed remarkably fast to me, though I had to admit that my only comparison was Dave and Maria, as they were likewise separated by over a major realm when they first started dual cultivating. In fact, the Ambassador would be spending the night in her cultivation cave tonight, leaving me alone tonight, rather than having me leave the room for two hours like last night.
I had decided to use the opportunity to practice the new techniques, and had managed to make great progress. At first, I found that over 95% of the qi I absorbed was going through my old false meridians, which was severely limiting the speed at which I could advance the true meridians. Then I developed a technique to coat my blood vessels and nerves in a barrier, limiting the qi which could enter them. After a night of practice I was able to all but completely block the qi, only allowing a trickle comparable to level one qi levels, to keep them from weakening due to qi depletion, as they had grown used to using qi as part of the cell’s metabolism and function.
Once I did that, over 99% of the qi I drew in went through the true meridians and started to form a soul sea. The last few nights I had replaced sleep with the mental rest technique and worked on drawing qi into these true meridians. At first they were extremely fine, like spider web. Over time, however, they grew more pronounced. Now, all of the core ones, such as the ones connecting the dantians and the main lines off of them, were like yarn, with bits of twine coming off of them, slowly working its way down to fishing line along the least used lines. While I didn’t yet have a Soul Sea, I did have a soul puddle that was just waiting to be filled. Now my ability to gather qi had almost reach the speed of the qi cloud I used when breaking through to the second level.
Now that I had finished the preparation I would be spending the night attempting the main cultivation technique within the book. The method for gathering qi was only a fraction of the technique, the easiest one to learn. There were two main parts that could be added together to create the true technique. The first is to draw tribulation, which every cultivator can already do by accident, but which the book contained better methods for purposefully doing so, essentially pushing the gathering technique to it’s extreme level. The second was preparing the body by building a ‘seed’.
The majority of the text was about how to create specific transformation ‘seeds’ within the body. Essentially, one would prepare the body to have a massive change once the qi was available, what was refered to as a ‘seed’, then trigger the tribulation. This would cause the tribulation to be absorbed by the ‘seed’, causing massive changes instead of massive damage. The method wasn’t perfect, and there were several methods for recovering from tribulation damage in the book as well, in order to handle the inevitable damage, but if one was competent with the technique they would benefit from it far faster than a more conventional technique. This would also allow them to push their conditioning far higher than a typical cultivator could, as they wouldn’t reach a point at which the conditioning required too much qi for them to gather. This meant that one could reach the theoretical maximum of conditioning across their whole body instead of having to settle for half of that due to exponentially increasing qi costs. With such high levels of conditioning, bottlenecks would be so weak that most cultivators who practice this method would accidentally break through to new levels before reaching the theoretical maximum, sometimes even during their sleep.
I had used the techniques within the book to construct the largest seeds I could within my true meridians and soul sea, as they needed to be expanded to absorb any overflow of qi from the technique. This would be my initial test, and would allow me to hold far more qi while also more easily using techniques, thus greatly improving my performance. I also placed seeds in my brain, nervous system, and blood vessels, but still used my block. While I wanted to limit the flow of qi to only traveling to the true meridians and soul sea, I wasn’t sure if the block on the false meridians would hold, so I wanted to take precautions. I also prepared a much larger seed than I thought I would need in all of those areas, just in case I drew in too much qi.
The second I triggered the tribulation I knew that was a wise idea. The first pulse of qi was enough to cause third degree burns if you hadn’t prepared for it, but when the first bits of qi hit the seeds in my true meridians and soul sea, they seemed to rapidly inflate. This allowed the scorching intensity of the qi lightning to be absorbed quickly enough in the first few milliseconds that I only received second degree burns. I gritted my teeth and endured the pain, putting my Willpower training to the test. Even those burns were only formed with the first few bolts, as with each injection of qi the meridians became stronger.
The book hadn’t mentioned this possibility in the first few tribulations. I assumed it was because they hadn’t anticipated combining it with a qi gathering formation. Still, I ignored it, stopping the tribulations long enough to take two skin recovery pills, then doing my best to build a seed for my skin, but failing to build more than the smallest seed due to the pain. Still, it was enough to slowly lower the severity of the burns. I continued the tribulations, slowly increasing the intensity of the bolts of tribulation lightning until they almost made me unconscious, and kept working on the skin seed between each bolt. Over the next two hours my skin was slowly tempered until it was impervious to any tribulation damage at this level, and I had reached my current limit for the intensity of the tribulation. Thus the skin recovery pills were able to get ahead of the burns, causing them to slowly heal.
For the rest of the night I allowed the tribulation qi to flow into my true meridians and watched as they and the soul sea grew. At first the barriers around my false meridians let some of the excess qi leak through, but as time passed the true meridians grew even stronger than the false ones, and even without the barrier they were absorbing more than 90% of the qi. Once I realized this, I let the barrier fall so that the incoming qi could reinforce my false meridians as well. About an hour before sunrise, though, my seeds within the blood vessels, nerves and brain had fully developed, and only the much larger ones in my true meridians and soul sea were left.
The brain was an interesting seed to create. Rather than improve each individual type of thinking, the way the orthodox techniques did, Chasing Tribulation had a means of conditioning the entire brain at once. It would essentially condition whatever it saw as the weakest area, though there wasn’t a concrete way for it to judge this. Essentially, it relied on the opinion of your subconscious mind, your conscious mind being too slow to react, to make the decisions on how exactly to split the growth. This meant that if two people each used the identical seeds, they might have radically different results. I suspected that it was judging based on what would be the easiest to improve, or sending proportional amounts to all areas. I would use different methods to condition specific areas in the future, but for now the seed was mostly created as a way to deal with overflows of qi, so which area it conditioned didn’t matter.
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One of the main flaws of the technique was the difficulty of knowing exactly how much qi was needed for the change you wanted, as it varied wildly between people and between different levels of conditioning within a single person, so it was always recommended to have overflow seeds prepared. If one failed to prepare them and the changes one wanted to make used too little qi, the damage to the body would greatly increase once the seeds were fully matured, as their would be large amounts of tribulation qi forcing its way into the meridians, both true and false, as well as much of the body’s tissue.
Around sunrise I noticed that my skin was starting to get slightly burned again, as the last dregs of conditioning couldn’t absorb the qi fast enough, and decreased the strength of the tribulation, continuing to decrease it slowly for the next hour as the last of the seed’s development finished. I would need to get into the habit of keeping at least one seed inside of me, essentially a semi-permanent overflow seed, so that I didn’t run into that situation, where I couldn’t use the qi fast enough, again. After all, my ability to draw in a larger tribulation would improve faster than my body, so I would always run the risk of drawing in more qi than I can use.
I finished my meditation and looked over the areas I had placed seeds in. The largest improvements were in the true meridians and soul sea. The main lines, which had been like yarn before, were now line small ropes, with the other meridians slowly becoming line twine as they spread out from the main lines and the soul sea. This would allow me to use qi at at least five times the previous rate, allowing me to hit harder in a fight at the expense of stamina. This issue was partially offset, however, as the soul puddle from earlier was now the size of a small pond, holding slightly more than my dantian. This more than doubled the amount of qi I could store.
Outside of that, my blood vessels seemed to have the most improvement. While the combat from several days ago had greatly improved their conditioning, they were still the weakest part of my physical body, and therefore had the greatest improvement. They were now roughly comparable to the other systems which I didn’t condition with seeds, such as bones and muscles, putting me solidly in the realm of a pre-qi professional athlete. Just after that was my skin, which, while not as good as those skin toughening creams I had seen but not used, could withstand almost as much. The nerves were also improved to a good extent, giving me an estimated 5% faster reaction speed. The brain was the slowest to improve, giving me less than a one percent improvement in most areas, though that was likely because I had largely reached a bottleneck in my mental development before leaving Earth, and therefore decided that I had gone far enough in my training in that area.
Opening my eyes, I noticed that the pool of liquid qi beside me was empty. Apparently I had overtaxed the gathering array to the point that it couldn’t keep up, causing the liquid qi to evaporate and eventually causing the background levels in the room to drop drastically. Now that I was paying attention, I could tell that the level in the air was only about four times what it would be outside the room, instead of the thirty times it should be. This explained why the frequency of strikes slowed near the end of my meditation, as the speed at which the lightning could gather was related to the density of qi around the one experiencing the tribulation.
The use of the seal plate to seal the room was likely a contributing factor, as it slowed the flow of qi into the room, and when I deactivated it I noticed that the gathering array was able to double the rate at which it refilled the room.
I looked down at my body and noticed that my clothes were covered in burn marks from the lightning, revealing my too-white skin underneath, a result of spending too much time indoors. Next time I used this method to cultivate I would have to either wear cheap clothes or no clothes. Judging from the fact that several of the several hundred burn marks exposed parts of my anatomy that I wasn’t comfortable showing in public, outside the baths, I decided to go with no clothing. If it couldn’t perform the most basic function of clothing, then why attempt to do so? Besides, next time’s level of lightning would likely be far higher, so I might not have any clothing left afterwards anyway.
I put on a set of clean clothes, throwing the old ones in the garbage, and grabbed my bath supplies, then headed for the men’s bath. Thirty minutes later I had scrubbed a large amount of dead skin and nasty body oils off of myself, something that was common when conditioning the body, and got out. I dried off, put on my clean clothes, and went to the library. There I thanked the assistant woman, let her view a few of the technique jades I had brought with me, and said goodbye. While she had made advancements at me several times, I had tactfully turned her down each time. I was pretty sure that the locals treated dual cultivation as more of a training exercise, and that monogamy was more of an exception than the rule here, as she seemed to think I was weird for turning her down, but hopefully it didn’t cause too much of an issue.
Once I was done I went by the room again. The Ambassador was there gathering his things. Green Butterfly would be notifying the sect master that we were leaving and then see us off, so she wasn’t here with him. He was about sixty percent through the third level, so I could tell that their last night together had been a fun one.
After he had packed all of his belongings, we went to the front gate. There he said goodbye to Green Butterfly and, after promising to return in time for the next transfer array activation, we stepped on our swords. I had a metal one from Earth and he had the Jade one from here, as I had a metal root and he had an Earth root. Both of us could have used the Flight technique instead, and would use less qi doing so, but that would risk revealing our identities to others, so we chose the inferior local method of flight that was available to those under fifth level who lacked Heavenly roots.
We made our way towards the city, following the road most of the time. About an hour after we left, around thirty kilometers closer to the city, we saw a few dozen wagons stopped ahead of us on the road. As we neared them we noticed that there were people laying around them. I focused on these people, enhancing my eyesight, and saw that they were covered in blood, many of them too much blood to still live, and some had been cut open so badly that I could see organs. In one case the organs even left the man’s body. I didn’t see any women, however, despite the fact that caravans rarely traveled without women, even hired comfort women.
“Sir.” I said, pointing to the wagons.
“Yes. I saw it, probably bandits.”
“Should we look for survivors?” I asked. His safety was my top priority, but I didn’t see any bandits in the area, so it was likely safe to do so.
The Ambassador nodded and flew towards the wagons, and I followed. Once on the ground we both started checking for pulses and breathing. Most of the bodies were already cold and some were starting to get rigor mortis, revealing that this happened hours ago, but we did find three that were still warm. One had passed away only minutes ago, but the others were severely injured. We carried the least injured one beside the other one and pulled out all of our world-appropriate medical supplies. While the ambassador worked on the nicely clothed one that had a sword wound through one of his lungs, I worked on the lightly armored one with five different slashes across his body.
He appeared to be in the middle of the second level of cultivation, and had likely used that to save his life while still conscious. Cultivators on this world rarely properly cleaned wounds, relying instead on their improved immune systems and cheap immune boosting pills, but after removing his armor I poured a bit of water from my canteen across the wounds, then a shot of spirit rice wine just to be safe. The man moved slightly from the pain, even though he was unconscious and weak, so I knew he was lively enough to still feel pain. I pulled out a bone needle and thread, then started stitching up the wounds. Some of them were quite deep and I saw a rib in two different places, but it didn’t look like either of the bones were damaged.
Ten minutes later I pulled a skin, muscle, tendon, and blood pill from my kit and put the four of them in his mouth. I poured what little water was left in my canteen in there as well and he instinctively swallowed. Now that I was finished I laid his down and went to check if the Ambassador was finished. He had a much deeper wound to deal with and had been force to use his weak Water root to remove the blood from the lung. Fortunately, Green Butterfly had insisted that he train it or he wouldn’t have been able to succeed, even with his much larger qi pool. He was just finishing up the stitches when I got to him, however, so I brought the kit of pills over.
“Skin, muscle, blood, and internal organ?” I asked, and he nodded.
“I would add in a tendon one too. His shoulder is dislocated too.” the Ambassador answered, then grabbed the man’s arm and pulled on it, putting it back in its socket. I nodded and handed him the five pills, and he put them in the man’s mouth, rubbing his throat to cause an instinctive swallowing reflex.
After laying the man down on the ground to recover, we put up the medical supplies and started searching for clues. This seemed an obvious bandit attack, but bandit attacks had been used to cover for other types of attacks too often to be sure.
