Chương 58: Chapter 9 — Full Playlist

The kitchen light was on. Shen Yue was at the counter with a glass of water and reading something on her phone. She looked up when he came in, but only for a brief moment before her eyes returned to her screen.

"Your location," she said.

"Give it to me 24/7."

"Right." Lin Che reached into his pocket for his phone. It slipped out of his fingers and avoided his drunken lunge to catch it, landing on the kitchen floor. Shen Yue shot a gaze of killing intent — nothing major, more akin to the annoyance one felt towards a mosquito.

"Sorry, I didn't expect you'd be home," he said.

"I was out with a friend."

"I can see that." Shen Yue turned off her phone and placed it on the table.

"You were attacked two days ago and started cultivation training right after. And instead of carrying on with that, you came home drunk."

"It was one friend and we went to karaoke." She raised an eyebrow.

"What's his name?"

"Xu Fang."

"Xu Fang won't keep you from getting killed." Shen Yue picked up her phone and left the kitchen.

"Pick up your phone," she called from the hallway. Lin Che picked up his phone, quickly checked it for any signs of cracks, and went to bed.

He woke up on Saturday with a headache that felt like a light had been beamed through his eyelids overnight. He lay still for a moment, before stumbling over to the kitchen sink to chug a couple of glasses of water. Lin Che decided to cultivate, reasoning that it was essentially a form of meditation, and meditation was meant to help with hangovers. He went to the living room, sat himself down on the mat, and closed his eyes.

From the other side of the wall, he could hear voices and music coming off from a television. From outside the window, he could hear the hum of passing cars and occasional bell rang by cyclists warning pedestrians to move out of their path. Lin Che wasn't sure why he bothered trying. The Qi scattered before it could move even an inch. He opened his eyes and looked at the wall. Shen Yue walked out of her office dressed in a suit, a folder in one hand, and a cup of tea in the other.

Intermittent pulses of Qi coming from the living room caught her attention, so she set her folder down on top of the shoe rack, and entered the living room to see a sighing Lin Che. He turned as soon as he felt her presence nearby.

"How do you deal with the noise?" he asked.

"What noise?" she replied, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear.

"When you cultivate. The neighbours, outside, everything really."

"My office has a sound array," she said, shrugging her shoulders.

"It seals the room completely. You can use it if you want." He waited to see if there was more to say, but Shen Yue's lips were covered with a steaming mug.

Despite his many lifetimes, Lin Che had never entered this room of his house. It's not like he wasn't curious about it or anything like that, but simply because he believed people needed some privacy and listening to his wife's singular demand of not entering was not a difficult ask of him. Arguably, she would have never known if he had entered, but that thought just didn't sit right with him.

The room was slightly larger than his bedroom, which felt like a bit of an insult to him, but all the stuff in it certainly required the space. Shelves ran along two walls from floor to ceiling with binders and loose folders and printed reports and bound documents of all types in some organised mess. There was clearly a system of sorts to it, but the kind that only the creator could possibly understand. The desk in the far back had a laptop, a cup full of pens, and a notepad.

Surprisingly minimal for the state of its environment. Along the right hand side, cleared of everything else, was a mat sized for one person, which reasonably was where Shen Yue would cultivate. She came in behind him and set a small candle in a ceramic holder at the head of the mat. She clicked her thumb and middle finger, and a spark lit the candle.

"The scent helps with Qi circulation," she said.

"Don't inhale the fumes directly." It smelt like pine resin and lavender.

"I'm going to my uncle's," she said.

"At the gathering last night, I brought up the mannequin attack to him, and he agreed to provide resources for self defence purposes."

"Shen Bowen?" asked Lin Che.

"Yes. The one who arranged our marriage," she said, the word marriage still not sounding right to either of them.

"I'll be back in the afternoon." She walked past the threshold of the door before pausing in the corridor.

"The silencing array activates when the door is closed." He couldn't even hear the door close: there was a complete absence of noise. It was just the sound of his breathing and the faint burning of a candle. Lin Che crossed his legs and opened his phone. The foundation video was still pulled up, but it was good practice to rewatch things until they stuck. He fat thumbed the full screen button and opened up the video description, which he had missed this entire time. Full series linked below.

He looked at this for a moment before clicking the link. It was a playlist of unlisted videos all by the same man in that garage-dojo-looking background of his. The titles were all progressions of the Liuhe Breathing Method, so Lin Che enqueued them all before starting his warm up. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. He closed his eyes and ran the foundation circulation twice.

He still struggled to guide the Qi past his shoulder blades, but the movements came much easier, and the Qi persisted for much longer than usual. He wasn't sure if this was due to practice or the candle in front of him, but he would have placed his money on the latter. Still, he focussed on what went wrong, and pressed play on the videos once he had his goal in mind.

The man sat cross-legged with his hands on his knees and got straight into it.

"Second harmony," he said.

"Form and breath." He held up one hand, palm flat and facing outwards, and drew it slowly downwards through the air in front of him.

"The first harmony tells you that you're not filling a vessel, but refining what it already contains. The second harmony is about giving that refinement a shape to move through." He brought his other hand up and positioned it parallel to the first, narrowing the space between them.

"When QI moves through you without direction, it scatters wide like smoke in a room." The hands moved apart.

"When you give it form, it moves like water through a channel." The hands came back together, closer now.

"The amount of Qi is the same, but smoke cannot break through rocks, whilst water erodes away mountains." He lowered both of his hands.

"The second harmony is breath and movement working in the same direction. You might think that this is a simultaneous movement, but no, that would be too difficult at this stage in your journey. Try to move sequentially until your body familiarises itself with the movements to do them without thinking, though, at that point, you will surely have moved onto another technique. Anyway, I digress." Both hands moved up again; his index fingers pointed towards his chest.

"On the exhale you draw, and on the inhale you hold the shape you drew." He demonstrated the movement, tracing the shape of the Qi with his fingers, editing shapes in post-production. Cameras could not capture internal Qi, just as how a phone cannot record X-rays, so this was the best they could manage.

"Start at the root gate. One breath per segment, and don't rush the inhale." Lin Che set the phone down and tried for himself. He recognised that the order of the playlist required one to master the previous video before moving on, but where was the harm in trying? At worst, he would be set back by a couple of weeks, and even that seemed unlikely. He wasn't sure why, but he had a gut feeling that failure at this stage was much more lenient to the body.

The first attempt broke on the third breath — the Qi held through two segments and diffused when he inhaled too quickly. The second attempt lasted to the fourth breath. Just eight attempts in, he felt as though he had gained basic proficiency in the second harmony. The main reason he found the second harmony much easier was that it was essentially a more controlled method of doing what he was already doing. He was fine with moving his Qi around his body, but failed the first harmony at a specific checkpoint.

He pressed play on the third video.

"Third harmony," the man said.

"Qi and structure." He stood up for this one and moved to the diagram on the wall: a diagram of the human body with some labels attached and a single curved line intersecting them all. He tapped three points along it: the root gate, the midpoint between the shoulder blades, and the base of the throat.

"These are your consolidation points. Think of each as a valve." He tapped each one again in sequence.

"Qi does not move continuously through you at large scale, but rather accumulates, holds, and then releases. In the first harmony, you were pushing past these points without knowing they were there. In the third harmony, we train these valves like muscles: to failure." He sat back down.

"At each consolidation point, you let the Qi gather fast and slam into the valve. Aim for as large an impact as possible, and hold there for eight seconds. Once you regain your strength and energy, repeat until you feel your consolidation points get stronger. You should eventually become familiar enough with them to open and close these valves at will." At this point, Lin Che was already familiar with the root gate, and let his Qi gather there.

He willed his Qi into a mass and held it there, compressing as much as he could. He counted to eight, verbally to make sure the timing was right, and repeated. Once he felt suitably worn out at the root gate, he opened his eyes. The candle had burnt down by a third, but he hadn't noticed the time passing. He moved onto his second consolidation point — the damned shoulder blades, and gathered there. Eventually, he succeeded, and moved onto his throat.

Soon enough, all three consolidation points held and released in sequence. He pressed play on the fourth video.

"We are now complete with the three external harmonies," the man said.

"Breath and intention, form and breath, and Qi and structure. These are the foundation of the method — everything else builds from them and refers back to them. If something goes wrong in the internal harmonies, you come back to these three external ones." He folded his hands in his lap.

"The internal harmonies are different. The external harmonies are about learning to move Qi, whilst the internal harmonies are about learning to know it. There's a difference between moving your hand and knowing where your hand is in a dark room. You can do both, and they are not the same skill."

"Fourth harmony: Qi and awareness. Up until now, you've been directing your Qi with attention and correcting it when it drifts. This works, but your attention has limits: you can get tired or distracted and losing your focus means the circulation breaks." He held up one finger.

"Awareness is what remains when attention moves on. It's the part of you that knows to keep you breathing without thinking about it. The fourth harmony asks you to circulate with awareness rather than attention. You are not watching the Qi move — you simply know that it is moving." He sat there in silence for a moment.

"Just as you cannot count your breathing rate without affecting it, you cannot watch your Qi without microadjusting it."

"The practical exercise for this is to run the full three-point circulation combining all three external harmonies, and, within seconds of the loop forming, let your attention move to something else. I, personally, prefer to read a book, but many beginners will struggle to do so. Some have had varying success with music, but whatever works for you works for you." Lin Che moved onto the next video, recognising that the fourth harmony was still out of depth to practice.

He decided that he should finish the playlist and let the teachings marinate in his mind until he would be able to use them himself.

"The fifth harmony is active intention operating below the level of thought." He looked directly at the camera for a moment.

"This is much harder to explain than the others, so I'll use an example."

"When you write your own name, you don't think about the individual strokes. You intend your name, and your hand produces it. The fifth harmony is the same principle applied to Qi. You intend the circulation as a single thing rather than a sequence of steps, doing it all at once." Lin Che stared blankly at the screen before moving onto the next video.

"Sixth harmony," the man said.

"Qi and self."

"The first five harmonies are techniques, but the sixth is not."

"Every practitioner's Qi has its own character, the way a person's handwriting is distinct even when they're writing the same characters as someone else. The sixth harmony is the practice of knowing your own Qi's character."

"There is no exercise for this one. It accumulates on its own as you practice the first five, but I'm telling you it exists so you know to pay attention to it. Notice what comes easily and what doesn't, and that is the sixth harmony — the foundation for more advanced techniques." He reached forward and the video ended.

Lin Che circulated the third harmony in a trance-like manner, feeling relief in the slight pain he felt when attacking each valve, sort of like getting a deep massage. The candle was mostly burnt up now, but the effect of the training outweighed the diminishing effects from the lack of smoke. The door to the office opened abruptly, causing Lin Che to jump ever so slightly in fright.

"I have some good news and some bad news," began Shen Yue.

"Which would you like to hear first?"