Tian and Hong settled in on the porch of the guest house. Tian was still lost in the echoes of memory, but he did his best to keep up his end of the conversation.
“I have no idea why you thought that would work.” Liren shook her head and sighed.
“I didn’t. Well, I didn’t think one way or the other about it.”
“Eh?”
“The master-disciple system, and by extension the Direct Disciple system, is all built around fear and affection.” Tian shrugged. “The Inner Court is a damn snake’s nest, where treachery seems routine. Too much fear. Not enough affection.”
“I think that’s more the Heavenly Realm generally, rather than just the Inner Court of our Monastery. You think it’s related. That everything is so messy because they… Oh, I see. The Monastery isolates itself to keep its core secrets from leaking, and to protect themselves from the Inner Court. They need the Inner Court to gather resources and protect territory, but they won’t be motivated without the promise of better skills. So they make most of their skills available to the Inner Court, with the hint that Core Disciples get full access to all the good stuff.”
“And you don’t need a true revelation of the dao to become a Core Disciple. It just takes ability, and I would assume, merit.” Tian smiled. It really did all make sense. “Which also explains why they don’t teach the Skytreading Art to everyone. It probably takes a degree of insight into the dao that not everyone gets.”
“Don’t rule out sheer snobbishness. Restricting the best cultivation art to the best cultivators is not the craziest thing I have ever heard. It would also mean the direct disciples are always the most powerful, letting them maintain control. They are the true heirs of the sect. Inheriting it from their masters. A master for a day, a father for life, or at least until it’s time to read the will.” Liren concluded.
“It’s all quite sensible. Reasonable, even.” Tian shook his head. Liren didn’t say anything. Yet another completely logical series of decisions with disastrous consequences.
“We should rename the Monastery. Instead of slandering the honorable Ancient Crane, we could be known as the ‘Unintended Consequences Sect,’ or the ‘Virtue-Seeking-Morons Monastery.’” Tian didn’t quite laugh.
“For once, we can’t hang it on Starsieve. I guarantee he got it from his teachers. It was probably traditional at the time. Maybe it still is, I don’t know.” Liren closed her eyes, her voice growing faint. “The Sect Master is going to be mad. Madder.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to accept the Skytreading art, or take a master.”
Tian let her words roll around for a moment. The stars were coming out. They looked so beautiful. Never losing their wonder.
“Why?”
“Because you are my Dao Companion. Because I’m determined to break this stupid cycle. Because I don’t really feel like trusting my future to a stranger either. Besides, I don’t think I will harm my path any.” She shared a meaningful glance with him. She hadn’t elaborated on where she got her Ten Suns Godslaying Body from, but it presumably came with a Qi and Shen cultivation method. Tian wondered if the Hell Suppressing Body did. He kind of doubted it. It didn’t really seem like what the art was for.
“Makes sense.”
“What will you do? Take a weaker art?”
“Maybe temporarily. I think I’ll do what any good Heavenly Person does, and go adventuring. Something will turn up.”
“That’s nonsense.” Liren rolled her eyes, then frowned. Then leaned in, frowning harder. “That is… definitely nonsense…”
“Mmm. The good news is I can complete the Heavenly Swallows to basic mastery very quickly, now that I’m at the Heavenly Realm. I only have the tenth dart to finish anyhow. Advent of Spring is working just fine. I’ll need to look into some combat arts, but we have merits for that kind of thing. Oh, speaking of.” He handed over the spirit stones. Liren took them without comment. Really, there was nothing left to say.
They watched the stars grow brighter, comfortable in each other's company.
“Hey, Liren?”
“Yes?”
“Wanna get naked and roll around on the ground together? For some reason it’s all I really want to do right now. I’m not really sure where things will go from there, but I am very eager to find out. Is that the same kind of urges you get? And… can we?”
Tian sat on the bed in his cell, looking at the painting on the wall. “She could have just said no.”
She did say ‘no.’ She just also said a lot of other things.
“I’m new to ‘urges.’ A little understanding would have been reasonable.”
A little naked understanding?
“I mean…” Tian found himself grinning, to his pleasant surprise. “A bit of naked understanding sounds wonderful.”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
Good news and bad news on that front, and it’s the same news.
“We will. Someday, but not today.”
Yep.
“Curse?”
Eeeh… she is assuming that a curse exists and it kinda sorta does. Think less like a spell and more like the world going out of its way to hurt you. Regardless, it’s up to her to decide when she is ready, just like you get to decide when you are ready. Your hormones are going crazy right now, and you don’t know how to deal with it. Give it time. Get used to the new you. Then see how she is doing. Also consider distracting yourself to keep from fixating on these new urges. For example, did you know you just broke through to the Heavenly Realm?
Tian laughed, and sent his awareness inwards. There really was a lot to explore.
“I need stronger swears. What am I looking at? I look like I’m on fire, but also made of boiling steam?”
Qi is interesting. It is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, as well as being, literally, air. Your predecessors in cultivation spent a ferociously long time trying to wrap words around what they were seeing, resulting in a lot of empirical observation and severely half baked theory to support it. It wasn’t worthless. I want to be very clear on that- it had value and meaning. It is just incomplete at best, often misleading and frequently flat out wrong.
“Alarming, but also doesn’t really answer my question.”
I have had some phenomenally irritating experiences with daoist cultivation. You are currently flush with qi. It’s integrating into your body, much more than it had previously. Essentially, all that atmospheric qi that you had been hauling in and turning into vital energy is now going through an additional step and converting into qi. More qi. Work with me here.
Tian nodded. The middle dantian had always been converting vital energy into qi. It was just doing an awful lot more of it now.
Qi is a sort of an energized ‘air,’ to use the terms everyone you talk to about this will be familiar with. The air is flowing through your meridians and flushing every scintilla of your body with buckets of energy.
“Sounds good. But why does it look like this?”
Because your body is immensely well developed. It has been repeatedly remade, repeatedly tempered, and your vital energy has been compacted and purified to a startling degree. You may have noticed that you just dog-walked a tribulation that would have wiped out an entire temple’s worth of ordinary Earthly Realm cultivators. It wasn’t all your accumulated merits or the ward. It was your body.
“Ah. And now that stored energy is leaving my muscles and being turned into qi.”
Think bigger. Remember, we are talking about bodily functions here. It doesn’t flow in one direction. It circulates. Your vital energy is being converted into qi and, essentially, becoming a lot more volatile and energetic. A portion of that is going to your upper dantian and being converted into shen, brainpower, but even more of it is completing the cycle through your meridian network and returning to your fleshy body.
“A body which has been repeatedly tempered and perfected.”
Which means it can hold a lot of energy. The various dantians hold the most energy, particularly the lower dantian, but the body does too. Congratulations. Your hard work paid off. You now have a body that could hardly be more suitable for qi cultivation. Always room to improve, of course, but other than Liren, I doubt there is a single person in the sect who had a better foundation at the start of the Heavenly Realm.
“So how does cultivation in the Heavenly Realm work?”
You have three kinds of energy in you, two of which you can now easily manipulate, and one you can slightly use.
“Vital energy, qi, and shen.”
Correct. Each needs to be developed. There are many ways in which they can be developed, and many directions they can be developed in. Qi cultivation, speaking very broadly, focuses on extracting the maximum amount of qi from the air and packing it into you as densely as possible. You build a pool of qi, essentially liquid qi, inside of you. Think of it as all that steam vapor you are seeing condensing, like humidity beading on a leaf and becoming dew. As you do that, you need to keep deepening the foundation of your body, and working on your shen… which I’m not going to get into for reasons.
“Cost?”
Yes, but it’s more than that. You just earned big. BIG. Haven’t seen so much energy since the day I met you, in fact. All the really fun things are still too expensive, but we are now in a place to do one of my very, very favorite things. Upgrades.
“Upgrades?”
Grandpa Jun chuckled, and Tian had the uncanny image of an old man laughing as he watched his enemies house burn.
Here’s what you are going to do. Get a hold of as many qi and shen cultivation arts as you can. You are owed copies of the arts you turned in, you may recall. The ones you got off Suneater? The sect should be done translating them. Now, full blown synthesis might be more than I can swing, but taking the fourth rate trash that bum had and turning it into something at least second rate? That I can definitely manage. It will hold you until you can go out adventuring and start running down the really good stuff.
“From the sound of it, you probably wouldn’t rate the Skytreading Art particularly highly?”
Third rate, given the quality of the sect. Upper Third rate at the absolute most. For comparison, the Hell Suppressing Body Sutra, idiotic design with the statue notwithstanding, I’d put at the upper end of second rate. Very good at what it does, but the implementation is damned fiddly, and it is somewhat limited in the final result. However, it can be used in a number of ways, and all those ways are all useful and powerful. The Ten Sun Godslaying Body Liren cultivates is on the low end of first rate, and I’d rate it higher if it wasn’t for all the side effects and restrictions.
“It’s that good?”
Better than either of you know. She thinks it only makes her stronger and tougher. Boy is she in for a surprise.
“Like what?”
That would be telling. And she is going to figure out the first part of it really, really soon, I suspect.
“What do you-”
There was a booming thud, something slamming into the walls hard enough to make the spells worked into them flare into angry life.
Tian ran out of his room, in time to see Liren’s door bang open.
“Zihao, Zihao, you have to see this!” Tian could hear Liren’s voice moving around the garden, but his eyes could barely follow her. There was just a blue and white blur, as she moved inhumanly quickly.
“What movement art is that?!”
She came to a crashing halt in front of him. “It’s my body cultivation. I can use qi to go faster. So much faster. Can you even imagine what this will be like with a proper yang movement art? Moon Crossing the Lake for evasion, and whatever this is for long distance travel or sudden charges. I’ll be unstoppable!”