Unintended Cultivator

Chapter 67: Quick Fix

When Sen came to, he was still sprawled out on the floor. He tried to gauge what time it was, or even what day it was, but it was a hopeless task beyond a general assessment that it was dark out. He pushed himself up and was happy to discover that, once again, his breakthrough did not involve his body expelling vast amounts of impurities. Master Feng had assured him that those were over unless something drastic changed in Sen’s body cultivation. Still, it was always a relief to come out of a breakthrough and not find himself and everything around him covered with stinking filth. Wanting to reassure himself that everything went as planned, Sen turned his perception inward and examined his dantian and channels. Everything looked fine. In fact, his channels looked stronger than they had before his spur-of-the-moment experiment. With a quick mental effort, he cycled qi through all his channels. There was a moment of disorientation as a whole new level of strength coursed through him. Sen recognized that he would need to spend a little time getting used to that feeling. Disorientation at the beginning of a fight could only end badly for him.

Sen also realized something he hadn’t truly accounted for during his hasty, desperate decision-making process. He had just slowed his own progress down. Where his dantian had been around half-full with liquid qi before, it was somewhere between a quarter and a third full now. The misty qi that took up the rest of that space looked thin, very thin to Sen. A horrifying thought crashed down on Sen. Did I unintentionally step my cultivation back? He hastily ran through some techniques that were safe to do inside. They didn’t seem any weaker to him. If anything, they seemed meaningfully stronger. He checked his dantian again. The misty qi had thinned out to the point that it looked more like a haze than a mist. Sen’s racing heart slowed down.

“Okay, this is a problem, but it’s not a catastrophe,” he said aloud, mostly to reassure himself.

If he’d had the idea of expanding his dantian and widening his channels when he didn’t have to make the choice immediately, and when he hadn’t been distracted with pain, none of this would have surprised him. He suspected that he didn’t have substantially less qi than he did the day before. It was just that the same amount of qi was occupying a larger space. Filling that dantian with enough qi to form more liquid qi, however, was going to take longer and more effort than it had before. Sen recognized that meaningful insights could trigger a big influx of qi and even a breakthrough, but he couldn’t plan around having those on a predictable schedule. It could happen again the next week, or not for a year, or possibly even never again.

The problem in front of him was those expanded qi channels. They would be useful, so very useful, in crisis moments. It’d take some testing, but he guessed that he could probably work with two different kinds of qi at around sixty or seventy percent of his old limit using just one kind of qi. Of course, that also meant that every time he used qi, those channels were sucking away way more qi than he was used to. It would be all too easy to run himself dry. He could always fall back on using that liquid qi, but that was a desperate measure. That truly would step his cultivation backward. The more of that liquid qi he used up, the farther back he would step. Sen thought about the problem for a while before he came to two conclusions.

First things first, he needed to master how much qi he let into those channels at any given time. Before, the channels provided their own limits with their size. Now, it was on him to regulate that flow so he got enough qi to do what he needed but didn’t waste qi overpowering techniques unnecessarily. The second thing he needed to address was at least a short-term problem. He needed to refill his dantian at least partially with some environmental qi. Testing new methods for flow control would prove a terrible idea if he didn’t give himself some breathing room to make mistakes. Unfortunately, the qi concentration in the town was definitely not on par with the qi concentration at Uncle Kho’s house on the mountain. Sen could set up something like the formation Uncle Kho used, but it wouldn’t have nearly the same efficiency. He might get the concentration in one room up by five or ten percent, but that was it.

He needed some other way of gathering qi or some other source of attributed qi. As he pondered that problem, he idly twisted one of the storage rings on his finger. He still had a lot of attributed qi herbs, plants, and minerals. Could he mix himself a one-time elixir to boost his qi reserves? He thought he probably could, but it struck him as a bad solution. To make a real difference, he’d probably need to use up half of his stores. More importantly, he didn’t know how difficult it would be to replace them once they were gone. No, he much preferred to keep those for other uses, like treating the injuries he felt certain were in his future. He started going through a mental inventory of what was in the rings, then sat up straight. He did have a fix for the problem. Withdrawing some formation flags from his storage ring, he placed them around the room. Instead of drawing in more ambient qi, that formation would contain any qi in the room. Once he had the formation up and activated, Sen started pulling spirit beast cores out of his ring by the handful. He scattered them across the floor but within the boundaries of the formation flags.

Auntie Caihong had given him a rather in-depth explanation about spirit beast cores, but the highlight was that they were, in effect, solidified qi. She also told him that you want to keep them in a storage ring until you’re ready to use or sell them. If you just leave them out, they’ll radiate qi and slowly, but surely, become less potent. Sen accepted that he’d be reducing the value of the cores, if only marginally, but it was the best quick fix he had available to him. Dropping down onto the floor in the center of the formation, Sen could sense how much thicker the qi was around him. He took active control of his cycling, rather than letting it happen passively in the background. That background method worked, but it was slower. Something about active participation in the process made it more efficient.

For the next several hours, Sen soaked up the qi that the cores slowly trickled into the room. Individually, no one core could make that much of a difference. With dozens of them around him, Sen was able to increase that misty environmental qi in his dantian by around 20 percent. It wasn’t a perfect fix, of course. The qi wasn’t balanced in quite the same ratios as it was in nature. In some cases, the qi types were rare enough that they weren’t found in regular environmental qi. If Sen had been pushed into focusing on a particular type of qi, taking those kinds of unusual qi into his dantian might have proven a disaster. Since Sen wasn’t committed to any one kind of qi, he could process those unusual qi types. It would take more work, but it wouldn’t set him on a collision course with qi deviation.

When caught hints of morning light through the window, he sighed and gathered up the cores. His dantian wasn’t as full as he would have liked it, but he wasn’t worried any more that any random qi technique would leave him utterly spent. Then, he put away the formation flags with a silent word of thanks for Uncle Kho. Sen was sure that at least some of the qi had escaped the formation. He wasn’t skilled enough or experienced enough to have prevented that entirely. Still, it had worked well enough to get Sen what he needed. Of course, after the night he’d had, what he really needed was a cup of tea. Stretching his back and neck, he heard a few pops that offered immediate relief to some aches he’d been feeling. Smiling, Sen opened the door and went looking for the kitchen.