Chương 18: Physical Awakening

The first significant change was the introduction of sect rankings. Elder Chu announced this as she waved a hand, and a leaderboard appeared in the air in front of the class. Paike recognized the top ten names—they were the ones announced in that dream where he received his library token. But below them were several other names, dipping well into the hundreds. Not all of them he could make out.

"Your spot will be classified by many things. Initially, it's based on the time it took you to ascend the stairs, but it can change quickly," she explained. She described how duels and general combat performance would influence the ranking. The mere mention of general combat made Paike nervous. Were they expecting pitched battles or something? Perhaps, or maybe, it was just for those who didn't have time for formal declarations of duels.

Regardless, all of it would be taken into account, and the rankings would be updated daily.

"Now for the part I'm sure you all care about," Elder Chu continued.

"Sect points. Points can be used to purchase many things. These pills, for example," she said, gesturing to the three students standing in front of her. Paike looked down at the pill bottle he held.

"These pills are meridian cleansing pills. They're one of the more valuable items that can be purchased with sect points. Each one will aid in the creation of meridians. Whether you use them now to get a leg up on your competition and snowball your advantage or save them until opening meridians becomes more difficult is up to you. But each is worth 100 points, which should give you a general idea of how much a single sect point is worth."

She continued to explain how rewards for the sect rankings would affect their stipend. Apparently, if they ever advanced to the inner sect, these rankings would become more critical as they affected things like housing and what jobs were available. Paike wasn't sure how to feel about the rankings. He was still busy considering his bottle of pills. He remembered that he still had to open a meridian. It was amazing how busy he had been that learning his first art had completely slipped his mind.

Even if it was just a single technique art, he hadn't even thought about it for almost a week. He would try opening his meridians without the pill, but if he failed, well, Paike expected he would need a lot of treasures to get his cultivation progressing anyway, so he might as well start now. It was just going to take a lot of work, a lot of money, and a lot of luck to get where he wanted to be. But anything but going all out would not get him anywhere.

That was something he had learned after his first attempt in cultivation, he could never hold anything back, no risk was too big. If anything, the physical cultivation class looming in the evening worried him more than opening his first meridian. If it was anything like the spiritual cultivation class, awakening his physical cultivation would be a must if he even wanted a chance at receiving some sort of prize.

Though he thought that was unlikely, as getting to the second stage of Ruby had only barely earned him recognition in the spiritual cultivation class. To be fair, he was confident no one had reached past the awakening of their physical cultivation. But, well, more than half the class had already awakened their physical cultivation. It meant that doing so wasn't particularly special, and he hadn't had a lucky encounter with something that would help boost his physical cultivation even further.

So the competition was going to be stiff. He wasn't sure what ElderJi would even use to decide who would get rewarded if he ever did. The metrics of physical cultivation were more obscure. But progress was still a measure of the sheer amount of time spent on it, at least at the early stages. Meridians weren't a thing for physical cultivation, so far as he knew. Maybe it would be a competition. That might not bode well for him. He hadn't slept very well or much at all for the past week, and he was drained.

Paike, though, pushed his weariness away as he headed back home. Instead of purifying more of the qi in his dantian he decided to make some progress in his physical cultivation instead. He continually worked on layering string after string of tinged qi into his muscles. He was almost done. He could feel that all his limbs were reinforced, as well as most of his bones. There were just some muscles in his torso that needed reinforcing.

As he laid one final string along the side of his spine, he felt a strange, buzzing sensation take hold of him. It was like all 200 or so bones in his body had been suddenly replaced with beehives. The vibrations rattled his teeth, and he quickly grew uncomfortable. Then, a rumbling in his stomach overtook the buzzing as every single one of his muscles cramped at once. Paike fell forward from his position, face-planting into the floor of the cultivation chamber.

His stomach tried to retch, but his throat muscles didn't allow it. He started sweating and felt ooze dripping down his forehead, a black gunk running from his cheek, barely managing to avoid dripping into his eye. His shuddering hand reached towards his face, attempting to wipe it off, but it was covered in gunk as well. As he ran it over his face and head, it was full of hair. Paike moaned. Trying to speak intelligibly wasn't even on his mind; just getting his body to accommodate a scream was beyond asking.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. He lay there, half-hoping he would die, half-struggling to move, to call for help, to drink his pill for meridian cleansing, as if that would help. Any little thing that might bring him relief, he grasped for like a man sinking in a bog. Eventually, though, his brain became numb, and he just withdrew into himself, looking at his dantian as his body tore itself apart around him.

But even as he watched from the shelter of his core, distancing himself from the physical sensations, he saw that his body wasn't being damaged. It was changing, shifting. All his hair had fallen out, and his skin was stretched taut. His muscles became corded and denser, and his bones lengthened ever so slightly. His tendons seemed to tighten, connecting even more thoroughly at their insertion points, and his blood flowed even faster. But those weren't the only improvements.

Something else was going on beneath the skin. Odd diamond-shaped patterns of something formed. It wasn't anything he was familiar with in the human body, but neither was it chitin. The mysterious patterns were just below his skin and with each one that formed felt like he was being flayed. Eventually, everything subsided, and he could stretch out a trembling hand and inject a tiny amount of qi into a panel on the wall.

It took a few minutes for his qi to make it there, but eventually, the character for "clean" lit up with a dim glow. Each one of these cultivation stations was set up for instances like this, maybe not to this extreme, as the blackened gunk coating every visible surface seemed far worse than he'd seen so far. Even the awakening he had witnessed in class that first day didn't come close to this.

But still, various artifacts spewed water and other cleansing fluids all throughout the room, washing away the acrid stench of physical impurities and other things that Paike had expelled during his awakening. He choked and spluttered, but the drains quickly took it away, preventing him from doing more than getting a few mouthfuls. This cycle repeated as Paike struggled to roll onto his back and let everything be washed away as he closed his eyes.

He was just about to drift off to sleep when a pounding at the door brought him back to full wakefulness. Paike wasn't quite able to speak intelligibly but managed to call out something that resembled the word "Help." Guan Li opened the door and stopped for a split second, staring down at Paike's drenched form.

"What happened to you?" Guan Li asked, clearly confused.

"Where is your hair?"

"Physical.... awakening," Paike managed to semi-intelligently explain over the protests of his clumsy tongue.

"This is ten times worse than what I went through!" Guan Li exclaimed as he stepped forward, carefully avoiding the drainage carved into the room's floor, and crouched down next to him. He touched his shoulder with one hand, finding it mostly washed clean. With some help, he got Paike to sit up and shrug out of his soaked robe. Paike looked down at his uncovered upper body and was surprised. It was very different now.

He hadn't been out of shape before—he practiced martial arts regularly—but it had always been more of a wiry strength beneath a slight softness from having to consume enough food to fuel his activities. But now it was like all that had been peeled away. The excessive food to feed the demanding regimen he put his body through was no longer needed. Fat was a vestigial organ that had sloughed away. When he touched his skin, he could feel the small, hard shapes just beneath the flesh.

Even if he couldn't see them, they were clearly still there. Paike poked at the striations in his chest muscles, trying to get used to his new body. Guan Li studied him for a moment as Paike caught his breath. After Paike could sit up by himself, Guan Li stood up.

"I'm going to get you a change of clothes real quick. Stay right there. Don't move." Paike watched as his roommate and friend left. He was back in a handful of seconds, but Paike used that moment to think.

"Thank you," he said.

"I just wanted to say—you're a good friend, Guan Li. I don't know what I've done to deserve your friendship, but thank you." Guan Li didn't respond. Paike slipped on the clean robe and stood up with some help from Guan Li. They walked outside of the chamber, which began its deep cleaning cycle that was only activated when there was no one inside. Then they sat around the table as Paike continued to collect himself. Physically, he felt good now, but mentally, it was still an adjustment.

His body was reacting a little bit quicker than he was used to, but even as he sat there and just breathed, slight shifts of his body helped him calibrate his responsiveness. Guan Li was quiet, studying his face from across the table.

"I suppose you don't know my story," Guan Li eventually said. Paike looked up, confused about what the other boy was getting at.

"I won't go into it now, but you know that I'm not from a family like you or most of the other disciples," Guan Li said, pausing for breath. Paike didn't interrupt, simply waiting for the rest of what he wanted to say.

"You say you don't know what you've done to deserve my loyalty— my friendship. But I would have been very lost without you willing to take a chance to have this place with me. This is by far the nicest place I've ever lived and the most secure I've ever been," Guan Li said, gesturing to their small home.

"You and your sister and some of her friends have explained so much to me about how this society works and how cultivators behave... I would have been so lost and confused in every interaction. And you've never held my ignorance against me," Guan Li said with an intense face and a slight pinching of his brows. Paike wasn't sure how to respond. He hadn't done what his friend said he had. He had only ever had casual conversations, answering some questions here and there about how the world worked.

Sure, but that stuff was obvious, right? It wasn't deserving of what he'd offered in return.

"Anyways," Guan Li said, "we need to get moving. There's a cultivation class starting soon. That's why I went and checked on you."

"Yeah. Let's go," Paike said.