Chapter 3 - The Journey of a Thousand Miles (Patreon)

The people in this world are weirdly healthy. Part of it is probably lifestyle-related - everybody is fairly active, having to walk everywhere, and no one he’s seen so far has the wealth necessary to afford enough food to get fat.

Still, he suspects that the majority of it comes from the faint traces of Qi he can sense from… well, everything. It’s in the food they eat, the water they drink, and the air they breathe. 

Interestingly, he can actually see the Qi working its way through people’s bodies as they eat, slowly melding with the small light that represents their dantians. He’s gotten good enough at sensing to be able to pick people apart using only his Qi senses now – everyone has a signature of sorts that sets them apart, a weird kind of feeling to them that is entirely unique. 

He has so many questions about Qi, such as how it works and what it does. 

For starters, everyone he’s seen so far clearly has a dantian of their own, so why are they not cultivators? Is it simply a matter of training or aptitude? 

It’s not impossible, he supposes, that people might simply not be willing to put in the effort to gain incredible power. It seems stupid to him, of course, but then he has the benefit of having grown up in a world where it was impossible, and familiarity does tend to breed contempt. 

Besides, technically speaking there were a lot of people in his old world that had the potential to become athletes, or masters of a craft, but just couldn’t be bothered to put in the work.

Still, he suspects that there’s more to it than simple apathy. Nobody he’s met so far shows any signs of being able to sense the things that he does, and while he hasn’t met that many people – he’s still only, like, three – there’s a reason the doctor suspected he might be a cultivator. There’s something different about his dantian that makes it feel… more profound somehow. Sort of like how a puddle and a well might be the same size on the surface, but a well contains much more water. 

Frustratingly, his senses are not powerful enough or refined enough to tell exactly what this difference actually is, but he’s sure it’s there.

The Mid-Autumn Festival is vibrant and lively. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to be celebrating, having been dragged along with little warning, but he could guess it had something to do with the harvest.

His tiny traditional outfit is a little uncomfortable, but he’s too busy gawking at everything around him to notice.

Lanterns of every colour hung along the streets, swaying gently in the evening breeze, casting a warm, inviting glow over the town. The scent of mooncakes, roasted meats, and other delicacies fills the air and his mouth waters.

He totters along behind his mother, her hand in his, making sure he doesn’t get left behind in the crowded streets. There are all sorts of smaller events going on, performers in bright costumes dancing and playing traditional instruments, puppet shows, and even a man making some paintings out of what looked like melted, coloured sugar.

The ambient Qi is almost more distracting than the events around him, strange colours that he’s never seen before twisting and dancing before his senses. The crowd of people should be giving him a headache with how the various unique Qi signatures are blending together, but somehow it’s more like watching paint mix and swirl than anything nauseating.

It’s enough to distract him.

“Zhuuuuuu!!” 

He winces, instinctively bracing himself. A moment later, a small comet impacts him, sending him staggering. His mother, the traitor, laughs at him as he flails as best he can with his arms pinned to his sides.

Meilan either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. He briefly considers going limp or playing dead in an attempt to get her to leave him alone, but bitter experience has taught him the folly of those thoughts. Instead, he resigns himself to hearing all about whatever inane thing she got up to in the few hours since he saw her last.

Despite himself, a corner of his mouth quirks as he tries to ignore his mother and Auntie Hua cooing. 

He supposes there are worse fates in the world.

He’s missing something about Qi. The frustrating thing is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, which makes it all but impossible to fix. Still, there has to be something wrong – almost every story he’s heard about cultivators involves them pulling Qi in from other sources and using it to advance through their stages.

It’s possible he’s been mistaken the whole time, and he’s not actually cultivator material at all, but he’s stubborn enough to keep trying anyway. He can feel the ambient Qi all around him, even reaching out with whatever mental grasp he uses to control his own Qi and affect it in small ways.

The problem is that he can’t seem to keep a hold of it – even when he drags it down into his dantian it doesn’t feel like it’s melding or absorbing or doing whatever it should be doing. As soon as he loses focus the Qi slips through his hands and he’s left at square one again.

He sags, running and hand down his face and letting the world intrude once more as he gives up on meditating. No change. He’s perilously close to running out of ideas at this point, and soon he’s either going to have to give up, come at the problem from another angle, or ask for help.

Giving up isn’t an option, and he doesn’t even know what angle he’s currently coming at the problem from, so really, there’s only one choice left. 

Maybe it’s time to start asking awkward questions.

His mother changes the topic whenever he tries talking to her about cultivating, so clearly she’s a bust for now. Unfortunately, being a three-and-a-half-year-old is not conducive to forming connections with people who may be able to help him – his entire social circle consists of his mother, Auntie Hua, and Meilan. His mother is obviously out, and Meilan is only five herself, not to mention she’s about as far away from studious as it’s possible to get, which leaves only one person.

Auntie Hua didn’t quite seem to know how to take his questions. His mother appears to be on board with his general ‘weirdness’, accepting that he doesn’t always act his age, but Auntie Hua hasn’t had as much exposure and is clearly trying to wrap her head around his sudden technical questions about Qi.

She visibly decides that he’s just dreaming of being a cultivator like in the stories – which, in fairness, isn’t totally inaccurate – and then cheerfully tells him she has no idea. 

Fortunately, before he feels too sorry for himself, she suggests that he might be able to find something helpful in the town archives. 

The next day, his mother agrees to take him to the archives. She seems a little taken aback at his sudden surge of enthusiasm for activities outside the house but is happy enough to go along with it.

The town archives were dusty, dimly lit, and crammed with old scrolls and books that seemed to have seen better days. The smell of paper and ink feels a little like coming home in a way that he can’t fully describe but brings tears to his eyes anyway. It’s incredible. 

Reading was one of the few things he’d been able to enjoy right up until the end – disappearing into a fantasy world made the pain of his failing body seem a little easier to bear, if only for while.

Learning that there are enough scrolls and books to require multiple buildings has him in near seizures of delight. When his mother somewhat resignedly mentions that there’s a whole section dedicated to Qi, he transcends this mortal plane into a higher existence.

He learns that while most towns have an archive – a curiously modern attitude towards spreading knowledge – this particular archive is located on a trade hub, and as such is much larger than usual. 

To his dismay, he also learns that while the archives are in many ways a modern concept, they unfortunately do not have a modern filing system. Scrolls are mostly just placed wherever there is space, though at least some effort has been made to place similar topics at least roughly in the same section.

There isn’t even a record of what scrolls the archive actually contains – apparently the only way to figure out if there’s a particular scroll is to head out into the shelves and find it. 

His inner librarian screeches with incoherent rage.

It only takes him a week of wandering through the shelves searching for scrolls on the nature of Qi for him to realise this isn’t going to work. It’s not even like the scrolls or occasional bound books follow any sort of structure – half of them aren’t even named. 

The ‘section’ that his mother had talked about was actually just a bunch of folklore and stories, and while they do involve Qi to a certain degree, most of them can’t help him much. It’s all well and good to know that he should be able to ‘draw in the vital essence of the world’, but it doesn’t help him actually do it. 

He plucks a random scroll off the shelf in front of him. This one is talking about the formation of the trading guilds in the empire, which is admittedly a somewhat interesting topic. The scroll was sandwiched between a list of poems and a recipe book.

He could easily spend the next five years in this damn building and still not find anything on Qi, or he could get lucky and it could be the next thing he picks up. 

It’s infuriating.

The whole concept of the archives is a weird mishmash of half-baked ideas. It’s like someone had the bright idea of collecting knowledge into a single accessible place, started to work on making it a reality before giving up halfway through and deciding to just dump everything in one building and call it a day.

If he’s going to have any success in finding what he needs, he’s going to have to create his own system – if nothing else so he can tell which scrolls he’s checked and which ones he hasn’t.

He eyes the rows of shelves stretching out in front of him, disappearing into the dimly lit recesses of the building and sighs. 

He’s going to go bald from stress before he even reaches double digits at this rate.

It takes him months to finally track down the first scroll on the nature of Qi. 

Months of sorting through shelves, tottering back and forth as he tries to create some kind of functional system. His mother is looking increasingly bewildered – he’s never been exactly normal even by the most generous definitions, but this is strange even by his standards. 

He overhears a few hushed conversations between her and Auntie Hua, apparently comparing notes on raising children. It’s amusing if nothing else, as Meilan is almost exactly opposite to him in pretty much every way – he can’t imagine much of Auntie Hua’s advice is applicable. 

Part of him wants to slow down, take things slowly and stop drawing so much attention. The other part of him is so bored that he can’t really bring himself to care, not to mention that the lure of throwing around fireballs is as potent as ever.

From the one useful scroll that he manages to find, he learns that Qi isn’t just a singular, uniform energy; it has different alignments depending on the source. It explains the commonalities he’s sensed between people – while everyone seems to have a unique signature, family members tend to have the same ‘flavour’, for lack of a better term.

It also gives him an idea on how to proceed – maybe the problem is that he’s trying to use Qi that’s incompatible with him? He looks at the shelves stretching out in front of him, considers the thousands of scrolls he has yet to sort through.

He’s a determined sort of guy, but…

If nothing else, experimenting with his new idea would be more interesting than that.

The forest outside the town is quiet, save for the crackling of the bonfire he painstakingly builds in a small clearing. The fire’s light flickers, casting dancing sparks up into the sky and sending shadows flickering among the trees.

The bonfire, and the clearing itself, are the result of several exhausting weeks of uprooting bushes, cutting down small trees, and gathering as much dry wood as he can find. So far, cultivation seems to mostly be a slow and painstaking process.

He sits cross-legged a few feet from the fire, eyes half-closed in concentration as he visualises the ambient Qi as tiny sparks of light floating in the air around him. He extends his senses, feeling the warmth of the fire and the energy it radiates. Slowly, he begins to draw the Qi towards him, guiding it into his body and channelling it towards his dantian.

He instantly feels the difference – whereas before trying to grasp the energy around him was like trying to catch the wind; this is like throwing tinder into a fire. The Qi floods into his dantian, a feeling of suppressed energy that makes him want to move, to fight, to live.

He visualises the energy racing through his body, wrapping it gently around his dantian in ever-increasing layers. The rush of frantic energy doesn’t abate, only growing harder to ignore as the process continues.

The hardest part of this whole process isn’t keeping still and focused; it is stopping himself from surrendering to the rush. It is like the world’s most potent sugar high.

The threads of energy winding their way through his body to his dantian waver for a moment, and he forces his attention back to them. The glowing ember of his dantian grows brighter every moment, flaring and fading rhythmically, matching his breathing pattern.

It’s beautiful.

Time seems to pass strangely when he is focused like this, so he isn’t entirely sure if minutes or hours have passed when something changes. The Qi he wraps around his dantian almost completely covers it, only faint light poking through the overlapping threads.

There is a sense of pressure as the energy seems to approach a threshold of some kind, a thrum reverberating through his dantian. His heart pounds in his chest, not from fear but from the sheer effort of maintaining his focus.

The sense of pressure within his dantian grows more intense, his whole body vibrating with the sheer effort of maintaining his focus. He feels as though he is on the brink of something monumental, every fibre of his being taut with anticipation. The energy swirls and coils tighter, pressing against the boundaries of his dantian with an almost palpable force.

Suddenly, there is a shift. The pressure builds to an almost unbearable peak, and then, with a sensation like a barrier breaking, the Qi surges forward. It is like a floodgate has opened, and the energy pours into his dantian in a rush. His entire body seems to light up, every nerve ending sparking with newfound vitality.

His eyes snap open, the forest around him coming into sharp, crystalline focus. He can see every leaf on every tree, each blade of grass swaying in the breeze. The flickering firelight seems brighter and more vivid, casting the world in stark relief. His senses expand beyond anything he has ever experienced, the world around him alive with a thousand details he has never noticed before.

He feels paradoxically as light as a feather and like he is being crushed by a wave of exhaustion at the same time. ‘If this is what cultivation feels like, I can see why people love it so much,’ he thinks, awed by the change.

He has never felt so alive.