Chương 46: Unstoppable in His Goals

The tome in front of Paike was making his head hurt. The only part of the art he had really looked at when his sister had suggested it was that it was easy to learn and could work with his aspect. It only required one meridian to open, which was rare for arts that contained more than one technique. The main issues with it were that it had been written in a practically archaic format. He hadn't noticed that when he had first looked at it. That the author, Hui Qing, was otherwise unknown made more sense now.

Both of those facts explained why it only needed one meridian to open. Long ago, before the Empire had standardized much of cultivation, things like the meridian opening pills he had received as a reward were not common. They might have already been invented, but you had to have access to an alchemist, and alchemists were highly coveted by families and clans. Now they were sold on the open market for the most part. In history, this meant that the number of meridians opened was much lower on average per cultivator.

This caused people to develop techniques using fewer meridians. That forced the required qi manipulation skills to be much more complicated and precise than necessary with today's knowledge. It was generally seen as a bit of a weakness now, because it could lead to techniques becoming slower or simpler than they needed to be. Though no less powerful. Modern cultivators simply added more meridians when they needed to.

This simplified the techniques, making them more accessible for cultivators with less fine control over their qi. Instead, the speed of qi became even more essential. More than one meridian per technique also allowed for more combinations of different aspects or attunements as well. There was the ancient tradition that the art was from, and then also whoever wrote this book clearly didn't have a very high opinion of fighting. These two oddities made it hard to wrap his head around.

The first line of the introduction said a lot:"I find it abhorrent to have to even acknowledge this fact. But it's come to my attention that, amongst the mortal plane, fighting is a necessity. It may seem contradictory to you that a spiritual man may also be a man of violence, and it has taken me some time to come to grips with this myself. But in attempting to write these out, I have found that I believe I have created the only three techniques a spiritual man needs when dealing with the mortal world.

In this text, we'll go over these techniques. First, a spiritual man must be unshakable in his faith; second, he must be unmovable in his convictions; and finally, he must be unstoppable in his goals. Each of these techniques is something that I believe you will find will serve any spiritual man in his desire to live righteously, but still survive the mortal plane. Learn them well. Practice them to perfection, and you will need no other techniques."

The author was clearly a powerful cultivator, but she was more along the lines of a pacifist or a diplomat, as silly as that sounded to Paike. She was not someone he recognized from history, but with how old this book might be, he likely wouldn't know her. Paike found that this series of thoughts was passing strange. They were coming from an entirely different worldview than his or his family's. Or any that he had ever considered. The idea that violence was not something to be perfected and pursued was simply nuts.

It was as if this person had never actually lived amongst the mortal world and only ever heard about it. On top of that, he wasn't even sure what a spiritual man was. It sounded like some sort of spirit cultivator, expert, or maybe someone who communed with the spirits in harmony rather than having to force them or trick them out of their lands. But it was not a term he knew. He read ahead and found the first technique to be just as baffling: Unshakable in His Faith.

It didn't say faith in what, but Paike chose to interpret it as faith in his path, in his own inevitable ascension to the heavens. That was not something that particularly spoke to him, but he could see how it was important. This technique was a general mental defense. Practicing the technique shielded one from practically all forms of intrusion to the mind and spirit. It actually fit him rather well. The qi shape he was supposed to create after passing his qi through his meridians was complicated.

Still, the hard part for most cultivators would be freezing it in place for a long period of time, as long as the technique was active. For him, that would be practically trivial. He didn't think he needed much help in protecting his spirit and qi from outside influences yet. All instructions hadn't been able to get past his unique qi, but mental defenses weren't something he had considered yet. For him, activating the technique might be a little bit slower than the average cultivator, but it worked well for him.

Unfortunately, the effect of the technique wasn't something that he would find useful in a lot of situations. Mental attacks were relatively rare from other cultivators in the early realms, though ordinary amongst spirits and other beasts. But he wasn't planning on being some adventurer. His plan was to protect his sister as she moved up in society. So most of his opponents would be other cultivators.

Though he supposed he would need to do something after she outstripped him, even considering that could distract him from his goal. Besides, his family could always use teachers. Against the cultivators he had fought so far, every attempt at invading his spirit had been turned against the attacker. However, it was a valid strategy to increase one's strengths to the point where they could cover one's weaknesses. Paike would learn it nonetheless.

With the ability to use meridian-breaking pills, adding one meridian that would serve three different techniques in the single art was not a very high commitment. If he really outgrew them, he could adjust them as needed, or maybe eventually convert them into something else. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. The next technique, Unmovable in His Convictions, was more useful. This was a similar thing, but for the body.

It would reinforce one's position in the world with qi. Not so much as to stop a sword from cutting him, but rather, if someone tried to push him back, he would not move. Locking him in space and time was a difficult thing to understand, but that was how the author described it. Paike could see very interesting scenarios where this would be useful. It wasn't a perfect defense, but well, again, it played towards his strengths. He was hard to move. His qi was hard to move. This technique would make it even harder.

He felt with the layer of armor under his skin, if he was able to improve that as he perfected his physical cultivation and this art, he would make an incredible bastion of defense. If he could stand there, unmoving, before his enemies, standing between them and his family. That was a path that Paike could live with. The last technique, though, was something that Paike could actually get excited about. Unstoppable in His Goals was essentially a combo of a movement and armor technique.

It allowed the cultivator to run forward in a straight line, becoming practically unstoppable, bashing through walls or people and, for a very limited amount of time, ignoring damage to one's body. Of course, the technique could be broken, so the protection effect couldn't be too powerful, or else the backlash of it being broken would be too powerful. But it offered some extra protection against slashing and piercing, and prevented anything from obstructing his charge.

It couldn't be used in concert with Unmovable in His Convictions, but Paike could see how these three could work together. They actually fit very well with his transient shield formation art as well. That and the nature of his qi. Well, Paike felt more confident than when he first started to read about the art. Paike read through the tome several times before he felt as if he knew it from cover to cover.

He still wasn't able to actually practice the arts until he could feel his qi and carve the meridian he needed to. He was already mapping out how the meridian would work. That lasted him for several hours, but eventually, he had reached a point where he needed his ability to interact with qi outside his own body again to progress. Paike needed to fill up his core, and the next step was to begin boring the hole of the meridian. But he couldn't do that without qi. He strained, trying to find anything.

It wasn't the same as if he had never awoken as a cultivator. No, that was like being blind. Here was like having sight, but wearing a blindfold. You could know that there was nothing there and be aware of what you were missing. Maybe less of a blindfold and more like in a totally white room with no features, not even a corner, nor a source of light that could tell him how far away the wall was. That was his qi sense.

To search for any way around this, he began investigating every single strand or thread of qi he had woven into his body for his physical cultivation. Even the hexagonal lattice mesh of small tiles in his subdermal layer was examined one at a time, each thousand completely inspected. But nothing resonated, and he found no way around it. He did find several imperfections. Each one he smoothed out, readjusting and optimizing the qi he already had in his body. Threads were untangled.

Strands were adjusted to provide better coverage. He could feel it slowly improving the condition of his body up to where he was before his injuries, and eventually even beyond it. When he opened his eyes, Elder Chu was sitting before him.

"That was indeed much faster than we were expecting. Four days." Was this what she had meant by finding equilibrium? He swallowed, his mouth dry as the desert. As he tried to work some moisture in it before answering, he gathered his thoughts.

"I think I have found the balance I needed." Elder Chu nodded.

"It appears you were not as injured as we had thought." Though it didn't sound like she believed her own words. She nonetheless laid a hand on his forehead, and he could feel something in the world twist around him, and then all of a sudden it was back. He could feel it everywhere, in every living thing, floating in the air all around him. He relaxed slightly, letting out some tension in his shoulders and neck that he didn't know he'd been carrying.

"I'll let you get back to your studies. Remember, you have one month to be able to demonstrate a combat trance with full control." Paike nodded.

"I will not forget, Elder. Thank you. This one thanks you for your assistance," he said, pressing his fists together and bowing as deeply as his position would allow. She snorted, waved her hand, and was gone without him being able to tell how she left. Paike looked around the room and did not find any of his things. He had been hoping to find his staff in a corner or something; he had forgotten to ask about it. Perhaps his sister knew where that went.

Without a second glance, he strode out of the medical pavilion and found that it was night outside. After his long bout of meditation, he did not feel the desire to sleep at all. He felt well rested and energetic. So instead of heading back towards home, he walked towards the training ground, slowly gathering qi as he went.

He wasn't able to cultivate it into his core, so he rather just packed it into the environment around him, dragging it along, pulling it from the ground and the air, trying to prefer earth and metal as he could, but wasn't exactly picky. Sitting down in the stands of an otherwise empty arena, he went about his cultivation in a slightly more intelligent way than previously. In his several days of forced contemplation, he had some ideas.

Taking his qi, he formed a razor, slitting the side of his dantian, and made an incision. It burned, but it was better than a tearing rip. He formed the qi around him into a thick rope. It didn't move quickly, and was not smooth like water, but rather goopy mud pressed together in the hands of a toddler, and he squeezed it into his dantian. It slowly filled up as he gathered more and pushed it in as a continuous stream instead of one giant blob at a time.

His hope was that it would create less damage to his dantian, and he could gather more in one sitting. He almost felt like a real cultivator, pulling in qi continuously. However, this required much more concentration and gritting his teeth against the pain of his spiritual wound. Before he could finish or even begin to heal his dantian, though, he was interrupted by a shadow falling across him, blocking the light of the moon.