Chương 50: Chapter 49 — Innate Qi Extraction

Armed with a hot cup of tea and an evening mostly to himself, Lin Che sat on a chair in his bedroom and placed the Boundless Intake Sutra in the centre of the table. Lin Che turned to the first page, which was empty. Understandable. After all, some books had redundant blank first pages for whatever reason — something to do with the printing process when batch-producing copies. Except the second and third pages were also empty. In fact, the entire book was empty.

Lin Che closed the book and turned it over in his hands, checking the spine in an increasingly more frantic fashion before simply staring at the blank pages and palming his face. Of course it wouldn't be so easy, he thought to himself as he sighed. He felt like a famous panda receiving a martial technique. Lin Che put down the book and drank some of his tea.

All of his earlier techniques had previously been digital, be it in the form of the ever-helpful videos created by the Shen Clan for the Liuhe Breathing method, or the annotated pdf files written in what felt like simple wording. That is to say, in this day and age, cultivators adapted with technology and preferred to keep things digital. Technological storage had its own form of protection — one could assign a password to a document or only provide access to a certain account.

Circumventing this issue, whilst difficult, was not impossible if one knew how the systems worked. It was safe to say that this tome was also 'password-protected', only that Lin Che had zero clue how the system worked. If it's for the Lin Clan, he thought to himself. Lin Che looked at his hand for a moment, and then went to the storage cupboard and found a sewing needle kept inside an old biscuit tin. He returned to the desk, sterilised the tip with a lighter, and pricked the pad of his index finger.

A small bead of blood formed, which he pressed into the corner of the first page. The page absorbed it immediately, the blood being drawn straight down. It wasn't like staining paper with blood, as it soon disappeared instead of spreading outwards, and, in its place, a single line appeared. One single line — not even a character. Lin Che took one more look at the thickness of the tome, which was large enough that he could not bother counting the number of pages. The arithmetic was not encouraging.

Assuming a healthy number of words per page, and being very kind with the complexity of the characters, with an extra hope that it was written in simplified and not traditional Chinese, he would need to fully exsanguinate himself somewhere between four and seven times to read the whole thing. Even accounting for his accelerated recovery from cultivation practice, that was not a viable approach. So he put the needle down.

Perhaps blood was a vector for something else — each drop may contain trace amounts of something this book required. The Shen Clan had been trying to extract his innate Qi in order to gain access to certain Lin Clan-related things, so it stood to reason that he would be able to access this technique if he fed the book his innate Qi. The only problem with this, however, was that Lin Che did not know how to access this Qi.

If he had, he would have been able to escape the car and not drown and not have ended up in this position in the first place. He looked inwards, hoping to gather some sense of where his innate Qi resided. Judging by its name, it was not the same as cultivated Qi, which he could move through pathways with relative control. In the cultivation novels he used to read, innate Qi was provided at birth and could not be increased, though novels were not real life.

In real life, only cultivators had Qi for whatever reason — either that or his ability to sense it was too limited to see it in mortals. Regardless, it was something entirely different to what he was used to, and, as such, he just flailed inwardly for a while hoping he would accidentally achieve enlightenment. After the hour, he opened his eyes and accepted that he was not going to solve this through intuition and luck alone.

He needed information on innate Qi, but asking the Shen Clan directly, including via Shen Yue, would reveal that he really knew nothing. The only reason they weren't currently married was because he supposedly detected how the contract could extract his innate Qi, so now revealing that he didn't know how to channel his innate Qi was akin to telling them directly that he was bluffing the entire time. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

If the contract can extract innate Qi, however…

Shen Bowen sat in his office staring at graphs on four different monitors he had on his desk, each looking at various different stocks. As someone with significant sway on the Shen Clan finances, a large part of his job was managing its investment portfolio, and usually no one was allowed to disturb him during this time of day. So when a knock came on his door, he presumed it was something urgent and called for the person to come inside. He had not, however, expected it to be Lin Che.

What, thought Shen Bowen, is he doing here.

"I won't take much of your time," said Lin Che, closing the door and taking his seat before Shen Bowen could even offer it to him.

"I just had a quick question about the wedding contract." Of course you do. Shen Bowen folded his hands on the desk and kept his expression neutral.

"Oh?"

"My mother's been asking about it. She wasn't able to be present for personal reasons, and you know how it is — she feels a little out of the loop. I thought rather than making her arrange a formal meeting, I must just bring it over for her to have a look at." Bullshit. He's here to take back the trace amount of innate Qi we got from when his pen touched the contract before he refused to sign it, came a voice in Shen Bowen's head.

"That's very considerate of you," said Shen Bowen.

"We can certainly arrange a copy. It may take a few days to have one properly prepared—""She's not particularly patient," said Lin Che, rubbing his head.

"The original would be fine, if you have it to hand — I'd bring it back within the week." He knows I have it on hand. He can sense it in my drawer. Shen Bowen looked at him. Lin Che looked back, pleasantly, in no apparent hurry. He's in no rush because he knows it's in this room.

"The thing is," said Shen Bowen, carefully, "the original is a formal document. Even if unsigned, for my own records, I'd prefer to keep it here."

"Of course," said Lin Che immediately.

"That's completely reasonable. I'll bring it back as soon as we're done." He won't take no for an answer.

"I suppose, if it's just for your mother to review very briefly," Shen Bowen said, "there's no real harm." He unlocked the desk drawer and retrieved the contract and slid it across the desk.

"I'd ask that you treat it carefully."

"Naturally," said Lin Che, picking it up and visibly scrutinising the document in confirmation. He folded it in half into an envelope and tucked it into his jacket.

"Thank you. I'll have it back to you soon." Shen Bowen stood to show him out and shook his hand at the door. Weak handshake must also be a part of his ploy.

"Give my regards to your mother," said Shen Bowen.

"I look forward to meeting her."

"She says the same," said Lin Che.

Back at the apartment, Lin Che laid the contract flat on the desk beside the tome. Before getting home, he had stopped by a printing shop and photocopied the contract once and swapped it for the original in the envelope. He pressed the contract to the cover of the tome and signed. The contract and tome got warmer, which was odd, as Lin Che couldn't sense himself losing any of his Qi. This also explained why he never noticed him losing his innate Qi in all of these lifetimes.

He opened the Boundless Intake Sutra and placed the contract in between the first two pages like a bookmark. A small radius around where the contract was had the words fully visible, but the rest of the book remained blank. It was like using UV light on invisible ink.

"Right," said Lin Che to no one as he took out his phone and began voice recording.

"This is going to be a long day." Lin Che moved through the tome page by page, holding the contract up against each one with one hand, reading into the phone in a low continuous voice almost entirely on autopilot. He didn't dare think about the words he was reading, in case some revelation or distracting thoughts came in and interrupted the process. By the end of it all, his phone had transcribed seventy pages of jargon for him to review. He closed the tome and made tea to soothe his voice.

Then, Lin Che came back to the desk and picked up the contract. He held it in his hands and looked at it for a moment, before deciding what to do with it. His leverage over the Shen Clan was, at its core, this document. It was what made him worth marrying into the family even back when he was a mortal. They desperately needed his innate Qi, and, since they had broken into his apartment once before, they could come back and collect this document just as easily.

He took out his lighter once again and held the paper up to the flames. It burnt orange, and Lin Che watched until it was completely done before he opened the window to let the smell out. He glanced at his phone — seventy pages safely kept in his notes. He was still of value to the Shen Clan. As far as they would ever know, the original document would be returned within the week after being left with his mother. They wouldn't dare accuse his mother of tampering with documents, right?

Lin Che closed the window, finished his tea, and began on page one of the Boundless Intake Sutra.