“Take off my clothes?” Xu Yuan asked reflexively.
Ran Qingmo’s expression did not change in the slightest as she replied softly, “My injuries are serious. My control over qi has weakened a lot. If you keep your clothes on, I might hurt you.”
Hearing that, Xu Yuan did not put on any pointless embarrassment. He simply took off the ornate robe he was wearing. Only after stripping it off for the first time, under the faint glow of the luminous pearl embedded in the stone wall, did Xu Yuan finally realize just how thin this body of his was now. He was over six feet tall, but probably weighed less than 110 lb, thin enough that his ribs were clearly visible. Years of drinking and debauchery had hollowed this body out completely.
Xu Yuan withdrew his gaze, looked at Ran Qingmo with a calm expression, and asked, “The underwear too?”
Ran Qingmo lifted her eyes to look at him, her cool gaze resting on him in silence.
All right. Apparently not. Xu Yuan sat down cross-legged in front of Ran Qingmo, just about to speak.
“Lie down,” she instructed softly.
Silently, Xu Yuan adjusted his posture and lay flat in front of her.
Ran Qingmo raised one slender jade-like finger, and a faint blue glow appeared at her fingertip. “My qi will enter your body.”
“Nothing will go wrong?” Xu Yuan turned his head slightly. He remembered Ran Qingmo saying before that if her qi entered his body directly, it would tear apart his narrow channels on contact.
Ran Qingmo was almost getting used to this mighty expert at the Source Awakener Realm asking her idiot-level beginner questions about cultivation.
After a pause, she shook her head and explained, “The qi will stay near the surface. It will not enter your meridians.”
Xu Yuan nodded for her to continue.
In the dim cave dwelling, the woman’s slender fingers moved slightly. The pale blue light at her fingertip instantly scattered into hundreds, thousands of tiny motes, drifting down like fireflies and settling gently across the surface of Xu Yuan’s body.
The touch was a little cold. Those motes slipped through his skin as easily as stones sinking into the sea and entered his body directly.
At that moment, Xu Yuan suddenly saw his own body turn into something like an anatomical diagram. The countless points of light connected into a web, and clear channels and acupoints appeared vividly before his eyes.
Before long, as more of those motes entered him, Xu Yuan felt his body gradually going numb. But mixed in with that numbness was a spreading, tingling prickle. Her qi was cool and icy, and surprisingly comfortable. “Ah...”
Ran Qingmo glanced over.
Xu Yuan immediately shut up.
Ran Qingmo withdrew her gaze and said in her clear voice, “I’ll teach you to identify acupoints first.”
“Acupoints?”
“Acupoints are important nodes within the meridian system,” she explained.
“Oh. All right.” Xu Yuan nodded.
“What comes next may hurt a little.” As she spoke, Ran Qingmo extended one slender finger and lightly pressed it against his neck. Her fingertip was not warm. If anything, it was slightly cold.
“This is the Converging Origin Point.”
The moment her words fell, the touch of her fingertip sent a sharp stab of pain lancing through the pleasant tingling from before.
The pain on the right side of his neck made Xu Yuan’s body twitch uncontrollably. Still, it was barely within what he could endure.
Ran Qingmo’s finger did not stop. At a steady pace of once every five seconds, she kept tapping different spots across Xu Yuan’s outstretched body.
Each time she tapped, Ran Qingmo would name the corresponding acupoint, and a sharp sting would flare up somewhere beneath the patch of skin she had touched.
Time slipped by little by little.
About 15 minutes later, she had gone through all several hundred acupoints in the human body.
Ran Qingmo slowly withdrew her hand, looked at Xu Yuan, and asked in a clear voice, “Did you remember them all?”
Xu Yuan opened his eyes. He met her gaze for a second, opened his mouth, and said, “Huh?”
She could not seriously think he could memorize all that in one pass, right?
Without saying anything else, Ran Qingmo silently extended her finger again and resumed tapping.
“This is the Converging Origin Point…”
The lesson on identifying acupoints repeated over and over, so many times Xu Yuan lost count.
Ran Qingmo withdrew her hand once more and looked at the man lying flat before her. "This time, did you remember them?”
Xu Yuan closed his eyes and carefully sensed the traces left behind by the qi Ran Qingmo had sent into his body. Then he gave a slight nod.
“I remembered most of them.”
“Most?”
“About eighty percent.”
Ran Qingmo looked at him with a strange expression, her eyes full of pure incomprehension. So dumb. She genuinely could not understand why the man in front of her could be this slow.
Xu Yuan more or less read the meaning in this iceberg of a woman’s eyes and opened his mouth, wanting to explain himself. Back in his previous life, he had been the kind of person others called a genius student. By his own standards, memorizing these acupoints this quickly was already impressive.
But in the end, Xu Yuan swallowed the words before they could leave his mouth. Compared to her, maybe that so-called genius from his past life really was just an ordinary person. He remembered that at this point in the story, Ran Qingmo seemed to be only seventeen.
And at seventeen, her cultivation had already reached the Grandmaster Realm, only a single step away from the Source Awakener Realm.
The gap between people really could be bigger than the gap between a person and a dog.
Ran Qingmo said nothing more. She simply raised her finger again. “We’ll continue.”
“Mhm.” Xu Yuan nodded and focused once more.
Time trickled by again.
There was no sky to be seen inside the cave dwelling, no way to tell how much time had passed.
By the time another round ended, Xu Yuan felt as though his entire body was about to turn into that deep blue source qi of Ran Qingmo’s.
Only then did Ran Qingmo speak. “If we continue any further, your body will be injured.”
Xu Yuan slowly opened his eyes. After a brief hesitation, he nodded and agreed.
Ran Qingmo’s qi was gentle, but it was still something foreign. Letting it remain inside his body for too long would eventually put a strain on him.
At that very moment, he could already feel a faint wave of nausea and dizziness. And the prolonged mental concentration had left his body with a kind of exhaustion he had never felt before. Willpower was important, yes, but the limits of the body were still there. No matter how strong one’s will was, it could not change that.
And so ended the day’s lesson.
Ran Qingmo did not rest. She continued sitting cross-legged, regulating her breath and healing her injuries.
Xu Yuan, meanwhile, climbed onto the only jade bed in the cave dwelling. The moment his head touched the pillow, his consciousness sank into sleep. And in his dreams, it was still her, teaching him how to identify acupoints.
Ran Qingmo seemed not to need rest. When Xu Yuan was awake, she taught him the fundamentals of cultivation. When Xu Yuan was resting, she silently sat in the corner, breathing evenly as she recuperated.
There was no food in the cave dwelling, but that small pool of water seemed to have formed from some heavenly treasure. A single sip was enough to sustain Xu Yuan for an entire day.
Life here felt untouched by time itself, and so the days passed one after another. And through those days without dawn or dusk, Xu Yuan gradually came to grasp the obscure and difficult knowledge of cultivation.