After memorizing every detail of the flood dragon seed as best I could notice them, I amplified it tenfold and sent it into my meridians and soul sea. I then constructed seeds for what little stress the sword moves had caused, making sure to include all of the details I could find. Then, for good measure, I constructed generic mind and body seeds, as well as seeds in my true meridians and soul sea. I realized that I hadn’t read Chasing Tribulation since I entered level three, so I used the new means of layered reading I had access to now to read over the book again, especially the level three section, learning more about the proper structure of true meridians and soul seas. I could now read the sections in the later chapters that had caused migraines before without getting one quite as quickly, so I knew I was making progress. I integrated my new understandings of true meridians and the soul sea into their seeds. Greatly improving the seed quality.
There were two other possible areas mentioned in the end of the chapter, though I would need to study them again. While they would be covered in detail in the Level Four chapter, I now knew that there were possible areas known as the Mind Sea and Soul Space. These corresponded to the Mind and Body of a person. The Mind Sea could store mental strength. While it wasn’t a physical thing like qi, it could behave like one in that space, and could be used to further ones own mental endurance and fuel mental tasks. The Soul Space was like a storage bag. While it wasn’t part of the physical world, the same way true meridians and the Soul Sea weren’t, it could store physical objects. These objects could even travel with you between lifetimes, assuming that past versions of you had or future versions of you would also produce a Soul Space, as they were part of your soul and not the body which had died. Unfortunately I didn’t understand enough about how they or the non-physical space worked, so I couldn’t create either at this point.
I could, however, activate my cultivation seeds by rapidly drawing in qi. Unfortunately, however, I was in the middle of the camp, so using Call Tribulation on myself would only frighten and/or concern the others. I had no choice but to use the inferior means of creating a negative qi zone around myself and channeling all of the qi which rushed into it directly into myself as fast as I could without triggering the full qi lightning effect. My skin tingled slightly, sometimes more and sometimes less, though I eventually managed to stabilize the fluctuations.
I’m not sure how many hours I spent in that meditation, but the seed from the flood dragon was one of the first to be fully activated, and I felt all of my meridians improve, though I wasn’t sure how at the moment. After that the Soul Sea and True Meridian ones activated, then the others all seemed to activate proportionally. When they were only half finished, however, I heard Jiang speaking outside. “Kev?” she asked. “Can I come in?”
I let the last of the qi flow into me and safely canceled the gathering technique so she didn’t sense the change in qi density. “Yes, you can.” I said.
She opened the tent flap and crawled inside before removing her shoes and laying them at the entrance. “I just realized that I forgot to bring a tent with me.” she said. “I was wondering if I could stay with you tonight.”
I considered the question for a few seconds. While the others would assume that something was going on between us, that wasn’t a social stigma here the way it used to be on Earth. And I was kind of responsible for this situation, as I checked her supplies and forgot that she needed one as well. “Fine, you can stay here.” I said. “I was just about to go to bed anyway.” I truth I wanted to finish meditating, but I didn’t want to make her wait outside, possibly for hours, and the tent wasn’t large enough for one person to meditate while another slept. Either both needed to meditate or both needed to lay down.
I took off my boots, having forgotten to do so earlier, and took off my outer robes before climbing under the covers. She did the same. I laid there for a few minutes with my back to her, with my eyes closed, trying to go to sleep, when Jiang put her arm across my chest. I ignored it and the arm started moving further down to my stomach. I assumed she was having trouble getting comfortable. When her hand got below my stomach, however, I caught her arm and turned to my back. “I can’t let your hand move down any further.” I said, “My dao companion made me promise not to be with another woman while I was on this trip, so even if I wanted to I couldn’t.”
“You don’t want to?” she asked, looking a bit disappointed.
“Do you? I thought you and Ding were only interested in each other.”
She nodded. “We only love each other, but he knows I need to get stronger as fast as possible, so while I’m on this trip he has suggested that I could get some training in, and said that he would be fine with me doing so. I’ve never actually dual cultivated before, as Ding is a rootless mortal and can’t do so, but while I’m pregnant I can learn to do it and get in as much practice as possible, and won’t risk getting pregnant with another man’s child, as I’m already pregnant.”
“You can almost guarantee that you won’t get pregnant again with the Birth Control Technique too.” I said, “so if he’s fine with you dual cultivating with others, you don’t have a limited time window.”
“There’s a birth control technique?” she asked, puzzled. “I’ve never actually heard of it.”
I nodded. “Yes, there are male and female versions of the technique. The male technique makes it almost impossible to get a woman pregnant in the short term, around fifteen minutes after using it, and the female version makes it almost impossible to get pregnant until after your next cycle starts.” Both version killed off haploid cells in and around the reproductive organs. The male version essentially killed all sperm in a way that your body didn’t realize they were dead, and the female version killed any egg cells that were the Fallopian tubes. The male body would produce more sperm after that, and the female body would release more egg cells after her period, but for a brief period of time it was closed to impossible for a pregnancy to result unless both of you failed to use the technique. “I can teach you the female technique, as I memorized it so I could learn how it works, but my understanding is only theoretical. You’ll need to ask a fellow female cultivator for instructions if you can’t make it work, though there are three that know the technique in this caravan.”
“That will be useful.” Jiang said. “I’ve been using a cream you can buy at the apothecary, as I can’t afford the actual alchemical pills, but it fails every two to four years.” Many plants on earth produced chemicals similar to progesterone, like yams and soy, so it wasn’t that much of a surprise that they had found a way to make decent birth control from natural sources.
I nodded. “Well, if you really want to dual cultivate, there is a non-sexual way to do so.”
“Really?” Jiang asked. “I’m learning all kinds of things tonight.”
I nodded. “Yes. Here, let me show you.” I moved my hand from her wrist to hold her hand, having already released it shortly after stopping her. I placed my forearm against hers and released just a tiny bit of qi to the surface of my skin. It leaked into her skin and she tensed, like she was in pain. I held onto her hand even more. “If we break the connection, that tiny spark I let enter you will escape my control, so I can’t let you pull away.” She gritted her teeth from the pain and stopped pulling away. “Now, You need to direct your qi to attack that tiny bit of qi.
“Tiny?” she asked through clenched teeth.
“I made sure to send only the tiniest bit of my qi into you.” I said. “I’m two full major realms higher than you. I likely have one hundred thousand times as much qi as you. If I sent a serious attack, I could burn out all of your meridians and instantly kill you without using even one thousandth of a percent of my qi. But I was careful to only send about one hundredth of a stone worth of fire qi into you so that you have a good chance of defeating it.” She looked surprised that I had put the situation so bluntly, but nodded. “Now, imagine you are an island and your meridians are canyons that are difficult to climb out of. The qi I sent is a hostile soldier that just landed. Now, I’m only going to have him scout, and not attack, as I don’t think you could defeat him if he was hostile, but you need to kill him or drive him away. Imagine that your own qi is soldiers and send them out to attack him.”
She nodded and I felt something bump up against my qi. “You are using fire qi to fight him.” I said, and she nodded. “In this case, though, your Earth qi will likely do more. Remember, Fire feeds Earth, so if you use earth qi soldiers, they can steal a bit of his strength with each attack they land.” She nodded and I felt Earth qi bump up against him. While the attack wasn’t any more effective, the next attack hit just a few percent harder, and I could feel him weakening slightly. When the earth qi soldier weakened too much, I advised her to pull it back and heal him, then use him to attack again, as he was more effective than a new fighter. She repeated the attacks several hundred times with dozens of earth qi soldiers, and eventually my own soldier was completely absorbed.
She panted slightly and opened her eyes. “I did it.” she said.
I nodded. “Good,” I said. “Now focus on integrating the strength and skill of that earth qi into your normal qi, and restore your reserves. Your qi pressure and earth root should both have improved by at least a few percent, and you are probably almost out of qi.” I estimated that her full reserves before we started were around thirty percent of a stone, and thus thirty times as large as my fire soldier, but due to the low quality of her root she was likely only barely able to defeat it.
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She nodded. “Sure, give me a few minutes.” She sat up to meditate and so did I, though I didn’t absorb any qi from the air this time, as she needed to recharge but I didn’t.
I hadn’t actually learned anything significant from that combat session, so I had no need to integrate the lessons the way she did. Instead, I pulled out the shard that the Ambassador had loaned me and started absorbing it. In my hand was a small earth soldier, and I sent a fire soldier up against it. While I knew that it would absorb my strength the way Jiang’s earth soldiers just had, fighting against a root type you were at a disadvantage against was a good way to improve your skills. I expected it to do nothing, but instead it brought up its sword to block mine. Somehow it was reacting to me, even though it was just a mass of qi as far as I knew. Could this crystal actually be some type of lifeform, or the remains of one? Or were these crystals actually the origin of elemental spirits, either an evolutionary ancestor or something that would eventually grow strong enough to function outside the crystal? I wasn’t sure, and would have to ask someone later.
The qi soldier’s moves seems weaker than mine, a bit sluggish, and I was able to land several blows against it. After about half of my qi had been absorbed, however, it grew too strong for me to challenge. I could have reinforced the fire soldier and kept fighting, but I let it win and absorb the rest of the soldier. After it was finished, it seemed to sit down and start meditating. I could feel the crystal start to slowly draw in qi from the environment, replenishing what it had lost. As it would take hours for it to finish, I sent my raw qi into the crystal, like recharging a normal spirit stone, and it quickly absorbed it, recovering to just above what I remembered its full strength being and having a slightly higher quality. This made me even more certain that it was a lifeform of some sort.
I sent another bit of qi to fight it, this time one made of metal qi. It raised its sword to fight him, but was at a disadvantage, as the metal soldier stole its strength. Eventually, when it was at around ten percent strength, what I would consider to be badly wounded for a human, it left my palm and returned to the crystal. I knew that I could follow it if I wanted, essentially forcibly dual cultivating with it, but I didn’t follow, instead sending neutral qi to restore it to half strength before returning it to my storage bag.
I studied then reabsorbed the metal qi. It had slightly improved in quality, but the Average quality of the opponent had made that improvement almost insignificant. The fire root had even less improvement. Perhaps if I practiced enough with it I could train it to be a suitable opponent, but it didn’t seem to be easy to do so. I might look for these crystals when I got to Crystal Summit, however, and buy a full set of elements so that I could experiment with them.
I opened my eyes and saw that Jiang was sitting in front of me, staring at me. “Want to try again?” I asked, and she nodded.
“My root will reach Average quality in a few more attempts, and my pressure improved better than several days of regular meditation.”
I reached out and grabbed both of her arms at the elbows before sending in two soldiers, one for each arm. “You’ll need to make sure that you fully integrate these lessons into your body and mind, so we shouldn’t overdo it, but a few more times shouldn’t outpace your foundation.” I said. “Now, this time you have two soldiers to deal with, at half the strength of the last one.” She nodded, and I continued with my lesson. “I will also make them block, instead of just letting you use them as a punching bag. Dual cultivation is usually a form of qi combat, in which you fight each other inside the bodies of the two people that are involved. From this you can learn to improve your control of qi and how to fight with qi, but to do that you actually need to challenge yourself. You will also need to multitask this time, as any real opponent won’t just attack from a single point. In actual dual cultivation I have attacked from fourteen paths simultaneously before, and my dao companion has attacked from seventeen, so you’ll need to eventually learn to do at least that. For now we are just doing two. You win by driving me out or destroying both of my soldiers, and I win if I reach your heart meridian, as that’s where a dantian will be when you reach level two. Normal dual cultivation ends when one person takes an opponent’s dantian, Any questions?”
She shook her head, looking a bit nervous, and I started marching my troops up her arm’s main meridians. A few seconds later hundreds of earth troops flooded down the corridor and ran into my troops. Every time they swung a weapon, however, I noticed that both sets of troops attacked with identical moves. I needed to prevent her from fighting like that, as it made her predictable and wasn’t actual multitasking, so I blocked on her left arm while parrying and disarming the soldier on the right. She seemed surprised and for and few seconds she struggled to have the two sides perform moves that would work well on both battlefields, but I continued to respond differently on each side. After about a minute, however, the soldier on the right side swiped upwards while the one on the left swiped downwards. She had finally figured out how to give the sides independent commands, so I allowed the one on the right to hit me in order to reward her for the achievement. After that the movements on each side became different with increasing frequency, and within five minutes they were two different battles entirely.
I could tell that she didn’t know how to properly fight with a sword by her moves, but that wasn’t important now. She could learn a proper sword style later. Right now, she just needed to fight back as best she could. I started advancing again, and she redoubled her efforts. I could tell that her troops were starting to get tired and their numbers were thinning. She had likely sent half of her energy down each arm in an attempt to fight me with brute force, and all but depleted her reserves. I was about to give her a break to regain her strength when I sensed the qi in the air start to move towards her. Had she learned the qi cloud technique and was now triple multitasking to use it? Something felt different about this, however. Almost familiar.
About ten seconds later I realized what it was. Out of desperation she was tapping into the latent qi in her body, the qi that was reinforcing it. While this could give her additional qi in the short term, if she overdid it she could trigger a tribulation. “Careful,” I said. “You are overusing your qi. If you keep going you will trigger a tribulation and hurt yourself. Right now you can’t do that and remain undamaged, but if you want to, after this I can teach you to absorb tribulation lightning and use it to temper your body.” I wouldn’t teach her how to use Cultivation Seeds, but there were simple body tempering techniques which didn’t require them and could make you better able to resist tribulation lightning. If nothing else, if she could improve her meridians to allow for massive influxes of qi, it would ionize on her skin less, thus decreasing the damage.
“Sorry, I didn’t realize I was doing that.” she said. “But I’m running out of qi. How should I deal with that?”
“Well, if you can manage telekinesis you can remove the qi gathering pills Five made from your bag and take one. That would help you rapidly restore your reserves. Or, you can take out your spirit stones. I would offer you one of mine, but I gave them all to the Ji family to buy some things for me, so I’m currently out.”
“I don’t know if I can spare the concentration right now.” she said, focusing on the battle without reinforcing her troops, her innate qi levels returning to normal.
“Do you mind if I access your bag?” I asked, and she shook her head. I focused on it and brought out several porcelain bottles of pills, the ones that the family had put the contest pills in. “Which bottle?” I asked.
“Third from the left.” she said, then pushed forward with her troops, hoping to take advantage of the distraction. I saw it coming, but let her push me back a few steps in order to reinforce the idea that she needed to look for openings and exploit them. Of course, I could pause the battle so that she could deal with this by herself, but she would benefit from having to fight even when exhausted, so I kept pushing forward. By that I literally meant pushing, as my soldiers were so much stronger that they were both able to force their way forward without attacking despite the resistance.
I made one of the pills float towards her mouth and she sucked it in before swallowing it. Upon dissolving, the heat of her body triggered the reaction that was put into stasis during the pill’s creation and qi started rapidly entering her body, quickly growing to the same level as what a middle level one qi cloud technique could do. It would continue gathering q at that rate for the next hour, at which point it would rapidly decrease in speed before ending.
She immediately started drawing on the new qi to reinforce and heal her troops. Those that had made contact with the fire troop were slightly stronger than the others, and they started pushing it back. Limiting myself to blocks, parries and disarming strikes, I wasn’t able to push back hard enough and was forced to start moving backwards. From where I had reached in the middle of her forearm she started pushing my fire soldiers towards her hand. Several times she tried to make them retreat into my forearm at the point where it touched hers, but I avoided the trap. After thirty minutes, however, my soldiers were standing on the tips of her middle finger, as far as I could fall back, and one was at less than ten percent strength while the other was at less than fifteen. She surged forward with her troops and in the imaginary world where we were two islands, her troops managed to push mine out with sheer numbers, sending my two troops off the cliff and into the sea below.
With my qi finally out of her body she let her exhaustion show and released my arms. She nodded in thanks for the battle, then started meditating to integrate all that she had learned. That combat had been quite stressful to her, and had taught her many things, so she would likely need all night to fully integrate all of the lessons.
I had also learned something from the battle. I learned that I was lacking in abilities that dealt with hordes of enemies. Against Liza our troops had always been of similar numbers, so I hadn’t needed to learn it. Against Jiang, though, with her swarm tactic, I needed a better method of dealing with large numbers of enemies. I left the tent and pulled out a small manual I had been given when I picked up my sword, the simplified version of the Flying Sword technique. While it only included the basic moves one needed to move in the six directions, mastering those would allow me to master the true technique once I reached Crystal Summit and bought a copy. There was also nothing stopping me from moving the sword without standing on it, thus sending it flying through weak enemies, or from turning in circles rapidly in order to slash at them.
After reading the manual twice I went to an empty area and laid my sword on the ground, then manipulated the qi around it to order it to rise. Nothing happened, so I reread the section, corrected a few mistakes, and tried again. This time it wobbled a bit. Once again I read over the manual, this time the entire thing, and tried again. The sword floated into the air using its own internal qi instead of mine. “Good,” I said, and nodded. Hopefully by the morning I would be able to properly fly on it.
