Chương 54: Chapter 53 — Holy Land Preparations (2)

Another twenty minutes later, the meeting had concluded and Lin Che was already being escorted onto a jet in the direction of the farm which contained the Holy Land. He was to be given accommodation for a week, which he had been told was 'plenty of time' for someone of his stage to understand the principles of innate Qi manipulation, before he would be expected to enter the holy land.

Thankfully, as he had packed spare clothing and his incense when meeting Xu Fang and Guo Mingzhe, he had most of his belongings already on him for this trip. Shen Yue would visit within four days to provide him with anything else he'd left at home. The plane journey with Elder Mao was not as awkward as he had expected it to be, as the man was full of genuine kindness and looked at him like an old man would a child.

They shared a short conversation about music, where Elder Mao revealed that he had been to some concerts from rock musicians Lin Che loved listening to but stopped touring before he was even born. Afterwards, Elder Mao excused himself from the conversation to deal with some important documents, which left Lin Che twiddling his thumbs. Eventually, however, the boredom got to him, so he decided to open the link Shen Yue had provided him during the meeting.

Lin Che double checked Shen Yue had sent him the correct thing — this was a scientific paper with graphs and contributors! It made sense that there were researchers trying to figure out certain things about the properties of Qi, and that things had modernised enough for there to be video tutorials and pdf guides to cultivation techniques, but a scientific paper was just too much! Innate Qi behaved like an invariant attractor of the body's dynamical system, persisting regardless of how the system was perturbed.

Cultivated Qi, in contrast, was path-dependent, evolving along trajectories that could amplify or reshape it depending on how and where energy was introduced. In other words: innate Qi simply remained itself. Therefore, the technique was built around this property: rather than trying to move innate Qi the way you moved cultivated Qi, you identified its invariant signature and then created conditions in which it would naturally concentrate.

There were a couple of graphs and data points provided on the next page, which Lin Che would indubitably have to go through at a later time. Right now, however, the plane was getting ready for landing.

Elder Mao led Lin Che through a field of wheat much shorter than Lin Che had recognised, which was to be expected as he had only seen the farm in a future state from now. After a short journey on a tractor, the accommodation — a converted farmhouse — came into view. A Shen Clan member he didn't recognise had shown him around and confirmed that someone would bring meals three times a day.

"Do you require any assistance unpacking?" asked Elder Mao, once they had entered Lin Che's room.

"No thank you, Elder Mao," he replied.

"You've done a lot for me today already. I couldn't possibly ask for anything further."

"Well, anything for our Shen Clan's son-in-law," he laughed, before giving Lin Che a hug and leaving. Once the door shut, Lin Che unpacked his incense and the notebook he'd been using to track his progress through the Boundless Intake Sutra. He sat on the bed and looked out the window at the field.

Day two was when it started to get a bit problematic. The technique was clear about the initial step: locate the innate Qi signature by finding the invariant under internal circulation. You ran your cultivated Qi through the standard pathways, and observed what changed and what didn't. What didn't change was the innate Qi. Lin Che ran the circulation and watched for invariants, but he found nothing consistent.

He tried it over and over again, each time more slowly than before whilst paying close attention to the methodology. The text had a worked example on page four with a diagram showing expected variance patterns. The main issue with this, however, was that his internal landscape didn't match the diagram. The shaded region in the graph was, in his case, occupied by something in between variance and invariance, which usually felt more like interference than anything else.

The signature he was looking for was there, maybe, but it was obscured. Page seven had a brief section on common reasons a practitioner might fail to locate their innate Qi signature, but most of them were structural issues dealing with the anatomy of the cultivator themselves — for example if they had been born with a specific constitution or used an incompatible foundation technique. He wasn't sure if either of these applied for him.

The last one on the list was far more general: external interferences from accumulated impurities may mask the innate signature. We recommend purification before attempting initial location. Lin Che sighed in defeat. He had been using the Boundless Intake Sutra intensively in the past twenty four hours, and the technique absorbed everything indiscriminately. In a Qi-dense environment, what it could take in was extraordinary.

What it took in, however, was not refined, and the Returning Mirror Refinement Art existed precisely because the Boundless Intake Sutra generated a purification problem. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. Only, the art he needed was an entire loop away. And, instead, he had used fourteen sticks of high-grade incense in combination with his own Hollow Bell Resonance, which had multiplied the effective intake by a significant factor.

It wasn't contamination, per se, as the Hollow Bell itself had been filtering incoming Qi and discarding anything actively hostile, which meant he wasn't carrying foreign energy so much as he was carrying a great quantity of his own Qi in an unrefined state. He thought back to the term ' grain' which was mentioned in the description of the Returning Mirror Refinement Art.

The Hollow Bell had kept things from being harmful, but had not kept the grain from being dense enough to sit like a fog over the deeper layer where his innate Qi lived. He was, in a sense, too full. The obvious solution therefore was to purge the cultivated Qi, but that would undo progress in order to test a theory. Sure, he could theoretically do it again, but Lin Che intended on learning everything he could in one life before starting another loop, so this would still be a setback.

What he could do, maybe, was navigate around it. If he managed to find a point deep enough in the constitutional layer where the cultivated Qi interference was thinner, there may be a chance for some innate Qi to escape. And if it escaped for long enough, he could analyse its properties and determine the conditions required to allow it to flow.

Lin Che spent the rest of the evening looking inwards for this thin layer, but the expanse of his internal domain was now so large that an evening was not long enough to fully work his way through it and determine the thickness of the layers.

Xu Fang texted his daily update report to Lin Che every evening at around midnight. On day two, he sent the following messages: Found some Lin Clan adjacent references in Qing dynasty local records. Not confirmed yet but interesting. Mingzhe did something that smelled worse than your apartment Apparently he's stronger now To which Lin Che replied with a congratulatory message for Guo Mingzhe for achieving body refinement.

He asked Xu Fang to keep looking into the local records, and Xu Fang said he wouldn't be available the next evening because he had a date planned. On day three, Xu Fang gave him another update. Cross-referencing the Qing records with something I found through a contact at a university archive in Shenyang. Seems like the Lin Clan, or something that looks like it, appears consistently in Liaoning near the southern coastal region Kinda close to Dalian Bought train tickets.

Will go in person once I've finished what I need to do here. Lin Che replied: no need to rush. I'm sure there are plenty of other fish in the sea, which ended up being left on read.

On day four, Shen Yue arrived with Lin Che's laptop and remaining clothing. He opened the door to her and immediately offered her a cup of tea.

"I can't stay, I'm afraid," she said.

"I have work tomorrow."

"Not even for a cup of tea?" he asked.

"We can have plenty of tea during our honeymoon," she replied.

"Speaking of which, I wanted to ask a bit more about it. I've been putting it off because, well, I'm sure you understand, but my uncle's been pushing me to plan it for us." Honeymoon. In all these lives, Lin Che and Shen Yue had never had a honeymoon. They were essentially flatmates married on paper, and both of them were okay with just that. A honeymoon, however, was an excellent chance for the two to bond a bit more, and, more importantly, spend someone else's money.

"Do you have any preferences?" he asked her.

"No, but we'll need to give the clan a location for funding purposes."

"Liaoning," he said. Shen Yue looked at him.

"The coastal region," he added.

"Specifically around Dalian to spend some time around the coast."

"Alright," she said, not reading into things any further.

"I'll notify the clan for the funding." Shen Yue turned and left the building, leaving behind the suitcase containing Lin Che's belongings. Lin Che looked inwards once again. And he found something in the corner of his focus and held his attention on it. Deep within the layers of interference, there was a sliver of something invariant — something his.

The technique at this point recommended consolidation before attempting directed movement, and so, for the remainder of the evening, Lin Che attempted to learn the quality of his own innate Qi. Before he lay down to sleep, he tried one additional thing: he gathered the awareness of the signature upward and concentrated it within his skull right where the brain was.

To him, it was sound reasoning to store all of his innate Qi — something unique to himself — right where his self existed, and Lin Che was very much a subscriber to the theory that humans are their brains and the flesh robot is simply how the brain interacts with the world.

The next few days, until day seven, were spent consuming more and more incense. Now that he had identified his innate Qi, Lin Che cared much less about accumulating grain from the Boundless Intake Sutra, as his plans for using the sutra within the Qi-dense holy land could potentially lead to his death anyway. And, if he died, he would have the purification art. If he survived, he would simply be stronger, and future him could deal with the consequences.

Finally, he got out his phone and alerted Elder Mao that he was ready to enter the holy land.