Chương 104: Chapter 102

For an instant I remain seated in the center of the deactivated formation, observing it carefully as I confirm I'm not mistaken. But no, the formation continues exactly as it was a moment ago, completely inert while the few scattered Qi particles that remain move toward my Yang Gate. I sigh mentally upon seeing it and decide to stop, since there isn't much sense in continuing, so I release the rune of neutral Qi to let the resonance fade away and then I release the concentration on the Yang Gate.

Finally, and with the calm of someone who has just starred in a small disaster and only wants to finish the day without further upsets, I open my eyes. The room reappears before me, but what immediately captures my attention isn't the room, it's Lianhua. Lianhua is no longer in her usual position beside the door, but exactly at the edge of the formation, right where the engraved runes stop marking the floor and the smooth wood begins.

She is standing, with that upright posture natural to her, but this time slightly leaning forward, as though she had been about to cross the boundary and had stopped herself at the last moment, with her gaze fixed on me and that very specific expression that only comes over her when something isn't going as it should, that mixture of professional alertness and contained concern she has learned not to display openly but which, after so many years, she no longer entirely bothers to disguise when we are alone.

I keep looking at her for an instant, and at the same time I feel that small pang of guilt that's already starting to be too familiar to me, the one that appears every time I have some brilliant idea during cultivation and, without meaning to, I drag Lianhua into the disaster that comes next.

"Lianhua", I tell her in a tone that tries to sound carefree but that I suspect doesn't fool anyone, and least of all her.

"I think I've done something to the formation." Lianhua holds my gaze for one more second, without varying her expression, and then lets out a sigh. It's not one of the short and professional ones, but rather one of the longer ones, of those she reserves for the occasions when the situation surpasses the usual catalogue of my eccentricities and enters directly into uncharted territory. And then, without saying anything, she steps inside the formation to approach where I am.

She stops at a prudent distance in front of me, and then speaks.

"What have you done now, Zhāohuán Wen?" she asks me with that particular cadence that comes out when she's already taken for granted that the answer isn't going to please her. And, frankly, I don't think I can blame her. I take a deep breath and tell her everything, trying to make the account come out in an orderly fashion despite the number of things that have happened in the short time I've been cultivating.

Lianhua listens to me in silence, without interrupting, maintaining throughout the entire account that neutral expression she uses when she's processing information and doesn't want her face to betray what she's thinking. But when I finish, there is an instant of pause, and then her eyebrows rise slightly.

"How is it possible for someone to be capable of emptying a Qi-gathering formation?" she asks me, and for the first time in a long while Lianhua's tone carries that note of pure incredulity that normally only appears when she stumbles upon something that doesn't even fit in her list of possible things.

"It sounds incredible, I know", I reply with a small grimace of apology that escapes me without my being able to help it.

"But that's exactly what has happened." Lianhua looks at me in silence, opens her mouth as though about to say something, closes it again, and finally, instead of speaking, limits herself to letting out another sigh, an even longer one than the previous. And upon seeing her like that, with that expression that oscillates between resignation and professional weariness, I once again feel a pang of guilt, because this isn't the first time this has happened and, knowing me, it isn't going to be the last.

Lianhua has spent years patiently putting up with my whims, my experiments, and my brilliant ideas, and every time something interesting occurs to me, she's the one who ends up having to bear the practical consequences, whether by cleaning up the damage, fixing what's broken, or, like today, looking at me with that face that says everything her mouth prefers not to say.

I therefore decide that the most sensible thing is to set aside the matter of the resonance and its absurd results, at least for the moment, and focus on what is most urgent.

"For now, let's leave the matter of the resonance and its effects for later", I tell her trying to sound more practical than I probably look.

"Right now what's important is to find out what has happened to the formation. Can you check it?" Lianhua nods with a short movement of her head and, without saying anything more, steps aside and begins to inspect the formation methodically, with the same diligence she applies to any task entrusted to her. In the end, after a wait that seems eternal to me but is probably no more than a few minutes, Lianhua finishes her circuit, straightens up, and approaches me with something in her hand.

When she reaches me, she extends her hand toward me, and I see that what she's holding is one of the spirit stones that were embedded in one of the nodes. Or, rather, what was a spirit stone. Because what I have before me is a stone that is completely translucent, of a dull color that has nothing to do with the characteristic glow that the stones I saw being installed when the formation was set up used to have.

"From what I've been able to see, Zhāohuán Wen, and bearing in mind that my opinion in this matter is by no means reliable, since I know absolutely nothing about formations, nothing strange has happened to the formation", she tells me with that professional cadence she uses when she's giving a report.

"The runes are all intact, there are no broken marks or loose fittings. The only thing I've found is this." And she moves her hand a bit so I can see the dull stone more clearly.

"This is the spirit stone I installed completely new yesterday", she continues.

"It's depleted." I take the stone between my fingers and examine it as my mind begins to consider all the possibilities by which something like this could have happened. My first thought, almost reflexive, is the most obvious. Perhaps when combining the Yang Gate with the resonance, my absorption speed was so exaggerated that the formation tried to compensate for the effect by overloading itself, depleting it much faster than would correspond under normal conditions.

But almost immediately I dismiss that idea, because from the little I know about formations, the formation has no overload function. And I doubt anyone would have thought it necessary in the first place, since emptying the formation isn't something one would think possible.

But then, as I keep turning it over in my head looking for some other plausible reason and discarding one after another because none holds up, my memory returns to the detail that had most disconcerted me during the session, that final wave of Qi that appeared with a much greater density than the meager current that had been entering until that moment and which vanished into the Yang Gate at the exact instant when the formation stopped working.

And suddenly, an idea that under any other circumstance I would have dismissed as completely absurd begins to make its way into my mind with an insistence I cannot manage to silence. Because, as Sherlock Holmes used to say in his novels, once the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And although my idea sounds absurd, it's also the only one that fits with what I have observed.

I lift my gaze toward Lianhua, who has remained standing in front of me waiting, and I speak to her trying not to let my tone betray the degree of eccentricity of what I'm about to ask her.

"Lianhua, I think I know what has happened", I tell her.

"But to verify whether I'm right I need a spirit stone. Do you have any on hand?" Lianhua looks at me with an expression that mixes professional caution with something that could be repressed curiosity, and nods only once.

"Yes, Zhāohuán Wen", she replies as her hand goes, almost reflexively, to the small pouch she carries hanging from her belt.

"I always carry a couple on me, in case they should be needed in some emergency." She opens the pouch, reaches inside, and after a moment pulls out, holding between her thumb and index finger, a spirit stone with that characteristic inner glow that completely new stones have. If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"Well done, Lianhua", I tell her sincerely as I extend my hand toward her.

"As always." Lianhua, however, does not hand it to me immediately. For an instant she keeps the stone between her fingers, observing me with that particular look she uses when she wants to make sure I know what I'm doing, and then speaks with that carefully neutral tone she uses when she tries not to sound worried and doesn't entirely succeed.

"Will it be dangerous, Zhāohuán Wen?" she asks me. The question pulls a small smile from me, because I understand perfectly where it comes from.

"Don't worry, Lianhua", I reply.

"If there was no danger before, there's no reason to expect anything dangerous to happen now." Lianhua doesn't seem especially convinced by the argument, since, knowing me, she has probably learned to distrust deeply the reassuring phrases that come out of my mouth, but she nods nonetheless and, with a certain reluctance she barely bothers to disguise, places the stone in the palm of my hand.

"Thank you", I tell her, and without wasting time I close my fingers over it. Next, I rest my hands on my lap again, slightly adjust my posture on the low chair, take a deep breath, and close my eyes. And in doing so, my inner vision reappears. The first thing I notice is that the surroundings remain practically empty of neutral Qi.

The few particles that can be seen, scattered here and there, move slowly following their natural flow, but that's not what I'm looking for now, so, with conscious effort, I ignore the surroundings and direct all my attention toward the spirit stone. To my senses, the spirit stone shines with a density of neutral Qi vastly greater than anything I have around me at this moment. It's as though I had turned off all the lights in a room and, in the middle of the darkness, there were a small point of light.

For an instant I hesitate. And I hesitate because, although my reasoning tells me this shouldn't be dangerous, I have also been wrong enough times to know that those kinds of certainties are, at the very least, optimistic. But in the end, after thinking it over for a couple more seconds, I decide that the test has to be done anyway, because if I don't do it, I'll never know whether what I suspect is true, and that would mean also not knowing when something similar to what just happened might happen again.

So, decided, I draw in my mind the rune of neutral Qi, and at the exact instant the rune is completed, I feel how the spirit stone in my palm begins to vibrate. It's a faint vibration, almost imperceptible, but perfectly clear for someone paying full attention to the spirit stone. It's exactly the same vibration that the neutral Qi gives off when I activate the resonance, but this time concentrated in a very specific point. I inhale slowly, exhale calmly and, without further delay, I activate the Yang Gate.

The effect is immediate and familiar. The little neutral Qi that remains in the air of the room begins to flow toward me as always, drawn by the Gate, but the quantity is so ridiculoysly low that it scarcely deserves my attention and, faithful to the plan, I ignore it and keep my inner gaze fixed on the spirit stone. At first, nothing new occurs, since the stone simply continues vibrating with that barely perceptible pulsation that began when the resonance was activated. But then, after an instant, that changes.

From the interior of the stone, a thin stream of Qi begins to flow forth. It's a very fine flow at first, a thin and hesitant current that emerges from the stone and heads without wavering toward the Yang Gate, where it merges with the same ease as the few particles I attract from the surroundings. I find myself contemplating it astonished, without entirely believing what I'm seeing, and I almost miss the moment when the flow, little by little, begins to grow thicker.

What was a thread becomes a small stream, what was a small stream becomes a continuous flow, and what was a continuous flow becomes something that already begins to resemble a respectable current, all in a matter of just a few seconds. And then, suddenly, what I had been waiting for happens.

The stone releases one final burst of neutral Qi much denser than everything before, a sort of contained eruption that lasts barely the blink of an eye, but that has exactly the same feel as the wave I perceived just before the formation stopped working.

The Yang Gate absorbs that final burst with its usual voracity, without distinguishing it from the rest, and at the very instant the last particle merges with it, the spirit stone I hold in the palm of my hand grows dark and completely loses its inner glow, reduced to that dull appearance the stone Lianhua took from the formation has.

I sigh slowly, with that mixture of satisfaction and resignation that always comes over me when I confirm a suspicion I would have preferred to be wrong about, because now everything fits. The wave of Qi I perceived just before the formation stopped working was no secondary mechanism of the formation, but rather it was the fault of the Qi resonance itself.

The resonance, when combined with the Yang Gate, and probably not only with that Gate, not only intensifies brutally the attraction of the surrounding Qi, but is also capable of extracting the Qi contained inside the spirit stones, drawing it out of the stone as though it were a liquid being squeezed from a sponge, until the stone is left completely dry. And that means that the resonance has an additional use that Master Mu never mentioned to me.

Because I very much doubt she didn't know it, since it seems too elementary to be unknown, so the question isn't whether she knew, but why she didn't tell me. And that question, frankly, intrigues me. I open my eyes slowly, letting the room reappear before me, and look at Lianhua, who is still standing in front of me waiting, although the look of concern still hasn't entirely faded from her face.

"I've got it", I tell her as I open my hand and show her the dull stone in my palm. Lianhua lowers her gaze to the stone, lifts her gaze toward me, and lowers it to the stone again, all with the same measured movement.

"The Qi resonance doesn't only absorb the surrounding Qi", I explain.

"It's also capable of extracting it from the spirit stones. What happened with the formation is exactly what I've just done now, but without my knowing it. The Yang Gate with the resonance activated didn't only empty the area of influence of the formation, but afterward it kept on pulling until it also emptied the spirit stone that was feeding it, and when that stone ran out of Qi, the formation went out."

Lianhua listens to me without interrupting, and when I finish speaking I see her relax her shoulders slightly in one of those almost imperceptible movements, but I also see that the alarm has been replaced by something else, a sort of serene resignation that I suspect she has been working toward for some time and which each incident like this adds another layer to.

"I understand, Zhāohuán Wen", she tells me simply. I nod, make a grimace and continue.

"Which, unfortunately, means I have to reconsider all my plans for the new room", I tell her in a tone that probably sounds more bitter than I would like.

"Because if activating the resonance with the Yang Gate inside the formation entails using up an entire spirit stone in each session, and the session, on top of that, lasts less time than it takes for a stick of incense to burn, then what I'm doing isn't cultivating, it's burning money. And no matter how much money I have, I don't think I'm in any position to sustain such an expense indefinitely." Lianhua doesn't answer, but from the way I see her nod very slightly with her head I know she is in complete agreement.

And then, while I'm still finishing pronouncing those words, a sudden idea crosses my mind with total clarity, since I recall, with complete precision, one of the many explanations Master Mu gave me about Qi Resonance.

Specifically, that one in which she mentioned, almost in passing, how the resonance of the elemental runes could help cultivators during the Harmonization of the Elemental Cores, a stage that at the time I had listened to with interest but without giving it further importance, since it pertains to phases of cultivation that are still very far from my immediate concerns. But now, with what I've just discovered, that explanation acquires a completely different dimension.

Because if the resonance of neutral Qi is capable of extracting neutral Qi from a spirit stone of neutral Qi, then, by simple analogy, the resonance of any elemental rune ought to be capable of extracting that same elemental Qi from the spirit stones of the corresponding element. And that, now that I think about it, changes everything.

"Lianhua", I tell her trying not to let my voice betray the current of implications that's crossing my head at this moment.

"Do there exist spirit stones that are not of neutral Qi, but of other elements? Of air, for example." The question seems to take her a bit by surprise, because she takes a moment longer than usual to reply, but when she does her tone returns to that measured and precise one she uses when she's giving information she considers important.

"Yes, Zhāohuán Wen, they exist", she replies.

"But they are extremely rare, at least within the Empire. For that reason they are considered a governmental resource and are subject to strict control. The few that reach the public market, escaping somehow from state hoarding, fetch truly prohibitive prices. And even so, finding one for sale can take months, or even years." I nod slowly as I listen to the answer, and immediately two understandings settle into my mind.

The first is that the advantage cultivators with the gift of Qi Resonance have during the Harmonization of the Elemental Cores is not reduced, by any means, to what Master Mu explained to me at the time, that is, that it costs them half the Qi to harmonize the cores. That's only half of the story.

The other half, the truly important one, is that those cultivators also have a much easier time increasing the potency of their cores, since they don't need to dedicate years of their lives to searching for natural treasures of the corresponding element.

Instead, all they need is to obtain spirit stones of the element they wish to reinforce, in any quantity, in any size, and extract the Qi directly from them, accumulating with relative ease quantities of pure elemental Qi that any other cultivator would take a lifetime to gather. And the second understanding is why Master Mu, despite being perfectly aware of all this, decided not to tell me.

And that is that, here in the Empire, where elemental spirit stones are so rare and so strictly controlled, attempting to accumulate enough quantity for that supposed advantage to be of any use is practically impossible. Master Mu, knowing me, probably preferred to spare me the frustration of knowing that there exists an extraordinarily efficient way to accelerate cultivation to which, in my circumstances, I am not going to be able to access in any realistic way.

And finally, after the two understandings settle into my mind and begin to unfold all their consequences, a final observation slips in among my thoughts, since, looking at it from a certain distance, what is happening with my cultivation has a certain familiar flavor. During the entire Body Tempering, I didn't need to spend a single coin. It was enough to sit, breathe, absorb the Qi from the air, repeat the cycle, and progress.

It was free cultivation, completely free, without entry cost, without maintenance cost and with a single requirement, time and effort. What in my previous life was known as a perfectly legitimate Free to Play, accessible for anyone who felt like investing hours in it. But now, starting with the Gate Opening, the rules of the game seem to have changed drastically. Although I can still cultivate for free, if I want to use the Qi-gathering formation intensively, I need to spend a spirit stone per session.

If I want to accelerate the Harmonization of the Elemental Cores with the resonance, I need to accumulate elemental spirit stones that practically cannot be found for sale and which, when found, are worth a fortune. And probably, if I want any of the many other things that are hinted at, or directly stated, that I'm going to need, in the information I have, the answer is almost certainly going to be, once again, money, money, and more money.

Which, translated into the language of my previous life, means that my cultivation has just made the transition from Free to Play to Pay to Win in a totally shameless manner. And, frankly, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry at that prospect.