Chương 38: Progress

The elder had taken in Blicks story and decide to bring him along during their normal day so he could learn their people's ways. They traveled together to hunt nearby, they gathered fruits from a tree, he carried the elders water skin back from the well, and they shared crafts. It was peaceful even while they both kept an eye on their surroundings. Blick noticed his companion was never nervous but always aware. It took a certain form of diligence to remain alive in this environment for as long as this person had.

The slight white hair around the edges of their face indicated age that he didn't know how to measure. Understanding time measurements of the humans just didn't translate when the days were longer here and the years didn't hold the same timeline. it was hard to find an equal way to track time here. This train of thought lead Blick to the realization that he didn't know how old he currently was. Not that it mattered. His race was built different than the humans.

With a smile and a shoulder pat the two went their separate ways. Blick tied up a small sack for his story slips. He would work on threading them together later mimicking the books the humans tried to get him to read. Something to do between nearly dying trying to push his meridians open. He paused realizing he hadn't even tried to figure out what the elder knew about cultivation. With a shrug he just put it on the list for the next interaction.

Walking the path back to his tree he ran into a pack of four familiar animals. Last time he had seen these things there were fewer, but he was smaller. As he was now these things didn't actually scare him. The memory did. Not even reaching his waste in height, each of them slowly circled him as they made a YIP YIP noise. He remembered this. It had his hair raise as soon as he heard it. And then he shook his head to clear the feeling. Blick wasn't a pup. These things were in over their heads.

Blick didn't wait for them to complete surround him and dashed at the one directly in front of him. He dropped low to the ground on hands and feet dodging one from the side, and he threw himself with reinforcement up to snatch the front one by the throat. Spinning with the dog thing in his hand he used it like a club to bash another one from the air before swinging it around with a crunch against a tree. Three left and one was whimpering and limping.

The two healthy ones slowly circled him and both charged at him together. Blick had two hands. Easily enough he reached out and with reinforcements grasped the dog things mid leap. One he caught by the front leg and it bit into his arm, while the other he caught by the neck. So it was a bit more difficult to catch two moving objects at one time. With a growl of pain he smashed them together repeatedly till neither moved. Tossing them aside he walked over to the one limping away as fast as it could.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel. Confidence swelled in Blick as he roasted the creature that had once hunted him… well maybe not the exact creature. With the crackle of the fire and the dimming light of day he sat down to push his circulation further. He wasn't expecting anything new so when he felt a snap of pain in his left palm and the flow of mana spiked through it he immediately stopped what he was doing.

Looking at his hand helped in no way as he couldn't actually see his meridians. He held his hand out over the last spots of his injury from earlier and pushed. With a slight ache he could feel the flow exiting at a tremendous rate, and he watched the injury close up. Resuming his circulation practice lead to him having almost no pain in that single palm while all three of his other meridians still hurt excruciatingly. Taking a break to eat some of his freshly cooked meat he sat to think.

If he had pushed one meridian to its limit today then he was years ahead of schedule. Was it due to his specific circulation technique. Maybe the fact he used the push and pull training all day long most days. He wasn't sure. From what he understood most people just spent maybe an hour using the normal method each day. If that took years then he was definitely fitting weeks of training into a day.

But given his specific circulation technique being much more painful he could assume he was rushing through even faster. And if he reached the limit for one hand, then the other would be right behind. Maybe the feet had a similar limit and would follow soon? Nobody had explained as he wouldn't have been their student that long. Grabing his food and kicking the fire down, Blick went back up into his tree bed. He sat down in the bed and circulated with a feverish determination.

Not long into this one he felt the right hand snap and he shook away the pain. He sat and struggled through another hour or so of the feet before accepting the progress he had made and going to sleep. With morning came more trial and error. He tried circulating with his hands and found an easy smooth flow without any pain whatsoever. It was a strange sensation after months of searing pain every day. He used his mana to push plants to grow around his tree bed.

They grew at a visibly faster rate as he could clearly move more mana at any given time. This wouldn't affect his reinforcement techniques because they didn't rely on the meridians flow, but instead relied on the cores potency. What it would affect was how fast he could draw from a source of mana to compress more drops. Blick decided to spend another couple of days focusing on his feet to hopefully finish expanding those also. It only took one day.

The feet meridians snapped open nearly at the same time only a few breaths apart. He knew they would be tinder like his palms were so he climbed down from his tree and went to gather some water for himself. With his meridians complete he could focus back on finding his family. Compressing drops would likely take him out to the glowing grove again and that was another direction entirely.