Chương 92: Chapter 91: Qi Division

The banquet felt like a different world already. Yang sat on the meditation platform in his cultivation cave, after getting clean and refreshed, the wall lamps lit low. Outside the cave the sect was quiet. He had come back, washed, and now he was here, preparing for the next step.. He had been yanked into the Cardwright World on the day he opened his Inner Eye. Seventeen years had passed there while no time had passed here.

His soul cultivation had been sitting at that first step since the morning of the soul journey, waiting for him to return to it, and now he was back and there was no reason to wait further. He thought through what he had ahead of him. Cultivation first, which meant continuing with the Heaven-Refining Soul Sutra.

Talisman work alongside it, and within that the project he had been quietly turning over since returning: finding ways to merge what he had learned of card inscription in the Cardwright World with talisman craft here. The two disciplines operated on different materials and energies but the underlying logic and principles were not entirely dissimilar.

He had already proved to himself that what basic talisman knowledge he had could be translated into card inscription so it must hold true that the other way as well, either way it was definitely something worth exploring. But that was for later. Cultivation first. He picked up the Heaven-Refining Soul Sutra from where it sat on the meditation platform beside him and opened it to the section he had read before. The next step after opening the Inner Eye was the establishment of what the sutra called the Qi Division.

He read through the instructions carefully, ensuring he missed out nothing. The core challenge of the technique, the sutra explained, was redirecting the majority of gathered qi away from orthodox cultivation channels and into the soul to refine it. This was not accomplished through force. It required patient restructuring of the body's natural energy channels.

The sutra provided a technique for this called the Heavenly Diversion, which created new pathways for qi to flow from the lower body directly to the upper dantian. The process began with the Du meridian, the channel that ran from the tailbone to the crown of the head. Its acupoints along the spine normally served as minor pathways during standard cultivation, allowing small amounts of energy to nourish the brain and upper body.

The Heaven-Refining Soul Sutra's method widened these pathways dramatically, transforming them from what the sutra described as trickling streams into rushing rivers. Yang set the manual down and closed his eyes. He gathered qi as the sutra instructed, accumulating it in the lower dantian through the basic qi absorption method he had learned in his first week at the sect. He let it build until the pressure was comfortable and full. Then he began the redirection. He used the visualisation the sutra described.

Qi rising from the lower dantian like steam from boiling water, travelling up the front of the body along the Ren meridian, crossing over at the crown of the head, descending down the Du meridian along the spine. The normal orbit would return it to the lower dantian. Instead, at specific points along the spine, he tried to divert it. Not all of it. Seventy percent, flowing inward toward the Sea of Consciousness. His body immediately rejected it. The resistance was not subtle.

It hit like pressure building behind the eyes, a sharp headache forming at the base of his skull as the qi met the narrow unwidened channels and pushed back against the instruction to go somewhere it had never been forced through before in such quantities. He held the visualisation steady. The qi moved forward by degrees, reluctantly. His lower dantian felt the loss almost at once, a hollow hungry sensation as the energy that normally filled it was redirected elsewhere.

He maintained it for as long as he could before the headache forced him to release and let the qi settle back into its natural pattern. He sat quietly for a moment, the discomfort fading slowly. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. The sutra had been clear about this. The body instinctively treated the Heavenly Diversion as unnatural. The resistance at every diversion point was expected.

Sharp headaches, dizziness, disorientation as the body adapted. The lower dantian would feel perpetually empty during the adjustment period. Physical weakness would follow, the muscles and organs receiving less nourishment than they had gotten used to. He was not surprised by any of it. The sutra had described it plainly and Yang had learned long ago that a thing described in advance was easier to bear than a thing that arrived unexpectedly. He had spent seventeen years in a mortal body in the Cardwright World.

He knew what it was to function at a reduced level and keep working anyway. He opened his eyes, rolled his shoulders, and tried again. The second attempt went no further than the first. The resistance came at the same points, the headache built at the same rate, the lower dantian ached with the same hollow urgency. He held it fractionally longer before releasing. He would do this every night before sleeping, as the sutra instructed.

Three to six months of nightly practice before the new pathways would accept the Heavenly Diversion as normal. Three to six months before the redirection would happen automatically, no longer requiring conscious effort to maintain. After that the Qi Division would be established and the body would have fully restructured itself around the new pattern allowing him to began actual cultivation of the soul.

From the outside, the sutra noted, the practitioner would appear to be advancing more slowly than their peers throughout this period. The qi that would normally accelerate ordinary cultivation was being spent elsewhere. He would need to be patient with his realm advancement and not let the apparent stagnation concern him. Yang considered this without particular distress. He had spent seventeen years in a world where he had no cultivation at all. Slower progress was not something that troubled him.

He performed the Heavenly Diversion one more time, held it until the headache peaked, released it. He sat in silence for a while after, listening to the wind outside the cave. Before beginning his fourth attempt of the qi division. He woke to light coming through the cave entrance at the wrong angle. Too high and too bright. He had slept well past dawn. He had left the physical barrier left open last night to let the fresh air in.

Yang sat up stretching out his arms and checked the incense stick to see how much time had passed. It's almost noon. He thought back over the night. After his initial attempts at the Heavenly Diversion he had kept going, each attempt pushing a few more wisps of qi through the unwidened pathways, each attempt rewarded with a greater and greater headache for his persistence. He had kept at it until a few hours before dawn before his body had simply had enough and he had collapsed onto the bed to sleep it off.

If this was what practicing Qi Division felt like, the next few months were going to be difficult. He decided then that from now on he would practice the Heavenly Diversion each night so he could sleep off the headache afterward rather than fighting through it. He got up, relieved himself, and changed into a fresh set of sect robes before leaving the cave. Breakfast had long since ended by the time he reached the food hall.

It was just turning to lunch, the hall quiet and mostly empty with only a handful of disciples scattered around, some alone and some in small groups, inner and outer sect mixed together. He did not recognise anyone so he filled his tray and took a seat alone at an empty table. Today's lunch was rice with roasted chicken, several side dishes, and a small fruit tart as dessert. He ate slowly, still feeling the residual dullness from the night's headaches behind his eyes. The food helped.

It was nothing like the feast at the banquet yesterday, no elaborate presentations and no server describing cultivation properties, but it was clearly spirit food made with cultivators in mind and it showed. Filling in a way that went beyond volume. He had eaten well enough in the Cardwright World for most of his time there, Lucien's body fed on ordinary mortal food, but that food had always left something slightly unresolved, a faint insufficiency he had never quite been able to name. He understood it now.

A mortal body running on mortal food was adequate. A cultivator's body running on spirit food was something else entirely. He thought about it as he worked through the chicken. He had not been able to consciously feel the qi in the food as he ate it, no sense of energy entering him the way cultivation produced. But the effect was there regardless, operating below the level of awareness, settling into him on some level his conscious mind did not have access to.

The deprivation he had felt in Lucien's body all those years must have been felt not by the body itself but by his soul inhabiting it. A soul accustomed to this, going without. He wonders how it works. Was it because he was in a qi less environment that he felt the loss even more? So many question and so few answers. If cultivation knowledge was an ocean then what Yang had must amount to a drops worth at most. He wonders how many surprises he will get small and big as he walks the cultivation path.