As the sun rose I floated over the center of the camp, practicing Tai Chi moves from a fitness video while standing on the sword. Believe it or not, this was actually part of training the sword technique and not just an exotic way to practice a slow moving martial arts style. Not that I wasn’t feeling the effects of the exercise. Most people assume that such slow movements can’t cause any exhaustion, but ask them to hold a bucket of water at arms length without moving for a minute and you’ll see how that idea fails. A cultivator will fair better, but without using qi it will still be difficult to accomplish. Besides, the moves were about altering the flow of qi through your body, not striking, blocking or parrying, so they didn’t need to be fast, just accurate.
One of the main problems that many people faced when learning the flying sword technique was that their weapon would drift off of the target. Natural tendencies within the flow of qi would throw off the aim of the person, and any attempt to compensate would succeed erratically, causing them to have accuracy issues. You could see this if you watched a sword rider try to float in place. Their sword will usually drift slightly, usually to the right, but sometimes to the left, up, down, or even forward or back. This means that they have to exert effort to actually stay in place. I was attempting to overcome this tendency by multitasking. If I could get it to remain in one location with only half my concentration, then I could slowly decrease the amount of concentration I was placing on it. If it started to move at all, though, it would draw my attention back to it, so I was constantly pushing the level of concentration down. At the moment the sword had about as much of my attention as listening to background music. I knew it was there, but largely ignored it.
This exercise was also working on my balance, letting me push it even further than the goat meat had taken it. I suspected that, like the speed Xiao effect gave me, the balance effect from the goat was multiplicative, not additive. There was a major difference was in scale, though. Xiao’s effect could more than double my flight speed and half my reaction time if I pushed it, while this improved my balance by one to two percent at best.
Seeing people below me start to leave their tents, I floated towards the ground, using only Strafe movements. The simplified sword technique I had been given only included three moves needed while flying. Forward and Reverse just increased or decreased its speed in the direction the blade was facing. Rotate moved the sword around its balance point. Without a person this would be just in front of the cross guard, but while carrying a person it would usually be between the person’s feet. Finally, Strafe made it move directly to the side, up, or down without changing its orientation. This was usually used as an evasive action while being pursued or to more accurately reach a landing location, but I was using it to turn the blade into an elevator.
After I landed I realized that the sword had used almost ninety percent of its qi reserves during last night’s practice, so I sheathed it and hung it on my side. I didn’t want to put it in my storage bag, as the bag’s function to block changes in an object’s qi would prevent it from recovering. I pulled the Earth shard out and verified that it was at less than half of full. Strange. I was certain that I refilled it to more than half full last night. Had the will inside the crystal used some of the qi to cultivate after realizing that it couldn’t recharge? Energy was flowing into the shard again, however, so I put in in my belt, then used the cleaning technique to clean myself and my clothes.
I went to my tent to try and quickly cultivate last night’s experience into myself, and saw Jiang leaving the tent. “Good morning.” I said, “Are you making everyone breakfast? Bacon and eggs?”
“Only rice porridge, I’m afraid.” she responded. “I don’t have any eggs and the only bacon or ham is meant for supper.”
I nodded. “In that case, I’m going to meditate on last night’s exercise, then I’ll get some porridge.” She nodded and I entered the tent.
It only took me a few minutes to turn the Tai Chi exercise into seeds, and only a minute for the sword technique practice. The last one didn’t really use the body, and my brain was mostly refined enough to handle the mental stress it caused, but there were several minor changes that had occurred in perception, motor control, and willpower, so I was wondering if I might have some flaws in my training or cultivation that resulted in weaknesses. I was almost certain that the tai chi had revealed some issues which I needed to work on. I spent another five minutes restoring the qi I had spent last night, but I was down only a few percent, so it wasn’t really necessary.
Once I was done I stored the tent, stood up and stepped off of the skins before storing them as well. I went to get a bowl of porridge, then brought Xiao out, waking him from his sleep. I dipped my finger in the bowl and held it in front of him. “Time to eat. I’ll need you to scout for us today.”
Xaio shook his head and looked away from me. “You don’t want porridge? Then what do you want?” He gave me a serious look and chirped. “You want to go hunting?” He nodded. “Fine,” I said with a sigh, “Just don’t be gone long. I need you to fly ahead of us and look out for danger, okay?” He nodded and flew off, taking his much larger hawk sized form once he was fifty meters away.
“Can you really talk to your bird?” Ask the oldest of the comfort women, walking over to where I was standing. “Or, I guess it would be better to ask if he can really talk back to you, as you could talk to an object if you wanted to.”
“Yes, he mostly understands me.” I said. “He’s my beast companion, and is middle level two with a legendary Roc bloodline, so he’s about as smart as a six or seven year old. I just haven’t taught him to use telepathy yet, so I can only talk to him using our bond.”
She nodded. “Interesting. I read in a book on spirit beasts that the Roc bloodline no longer existed, that it died off around two thousand years ago because they tended to be too territorial. Now, the only legendary bloodlines left are Dragon and Phoenix, who are more social, and a few semi-legendaries like the various stone primates that live around here.”
“I actually found him in a hidden realm about two weeks ago.” I said. “Nursed him back to health after an attack in which he lost his parents, and now he pretty much sees me as his father.”
“Congratulations.” she said, jokingly. “I was thinking about getting my own spirit beast. Are they expensive?”
“Depends on the type.” I said, and pulled out a Treasure Caterpillar. “This is also a pure blood spirit beast from a secret realm, but it and its twenty nine friends have only eaten about a tenth of a stone in spirit herbs in the last week, and that’s only because I give them the best stuff to rush their development. They can survive on spirit cabbage.” She nodded, and I stored the caterpillar. “Something bigger, like a wolf, might cost a bit more than you can spare, though. They don’t have to eat spirit beast meat, but it really helps their cultivation. Something like a horse or most other herbivores can be perfectly happy eating non spirit plants or just common spirit plants. Many spirit livestock are fed the stalks of the spirit rice and wheat after the harvest, which is supplemented with mundane grass because straw isn’t as nutritious. That way they develop just as fast as on a spirit plant diet but don’t cost that much.”
“I was thinking something that would make me look like I had class. Maybe something that accentuates my beauty and mystery.”
I nodded. “Well, I’m not sure what would be the right fit for you, maybe a fine bird or some butterflies, but if you happen to catch something during the trip or buy one in Crystal Summit, I’ll do the contract for you for free.” She nodded, and we both returned to eating our breakfast. Just as I finished Xiao returned in his larger size, with a squirrel tail poking out of his mouth. “I didn’t mean to rush you. Finish your meal and we can set out.” A few seconds later he had finished swallowing the squirrel and shrunk back down to small size. I briefly wondered if his stomach functioned like a storage bag, and if the stomachs of spirit beasts had been the original method of making storage bags before humans discovered the modern effect.
Xiao hopped onto my shoulder and I went over to Ji Bo. “I kind of felt useless on the trip yesterday.” I started, and he held up a hand.
“You are a bodyguard for a passenger. You only need to fight if he is in danger, not perform guard duties for the caravan.”
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Still, I think we were lucky to not be attacked yesterday, and that I should try to identify threats before they appear.”
“Well, if you have a means of scouting, I won’t turn you down, but there was no luck or divine favor involved with us not being attacked yesterday. We weren’t attacked because the road is too busy. Bandits need to be able to kill everyone and loot the caravan before witnesses show up. Because this road is so much busier than the southern road, bandits rarely operate within one hundred li of High River on the northern road, but will get within ten li on the southern road. We are now on the edge of that range, so it’s possible that we will need to face them today.”
Now that I thought about it, we passed many villages yesterday, and many more signs for them. Most of the people on the road were commoners, likely from those villages. Now that they had left it to return home, the road likely wouldn’t see more than one group an hour, likely less. That made it possible for bandits to function.
I pointed to my shoulder. “This is Maque Xiao, which means ‘little sparrow’ in one of the languages of my homeland. He’ll fly ahead by a li and tell me if any people or spirit beasts are near our path. I can then share his vision and see if they are a threat.”
Ji Bo nodded. “So he’ll function like a scouting pigeon?” I looked confused, having never heard of that kind of spirit beast. “Militaries sometimes give their scouts spirit pigeons or other common spirit birds and have them contract with the beasts. This lets them scout out enemy locations from the air and share the information with the scout. If they are shot down, the military loses a few stones instead of a man.”
I nodded. “I suppose he’ll be doing the same, but I doubt he’ll get hurt. He’s extremely fast and smart, so he will likely be able to dodge any attacks and the enemy will just give away its position.”
Ji Bo nodded and handed me a talisman. “In that case, take this. It’s a communication talisman. Feed it a bit of qi and speak into it and it will send me the sound. Use it to report if you see anything.”
I nodded and inspected it. It was a level two talisman that would gather sound and send it to another almost identical talisman that would repeat the sound. That explained why this world had a demand for cell phones, as they would seem to be a variation of these talismans. From the amount of qi it seemed to use it appeared to only have a range of one hundred li or so, but could be used for hundreds of messages. I could probably make something similar if I tried, but would like go with a telepathic object instead of sound, for stealth. Allowing the device to translate the telepathy into sound might be possible with technology, but it wouldn’t be a simple technique, so my version wouldn’t be useful if other needed to hear. At best I could transmit into a telepathic network so that multiple devices could send and receive signals. For battlefield communications, though, it would be more useful than sound, as the sound could confuse your sense of hearing, allowed eavesdropping, and could give away your position during stealth.
I put the talisman in my belt. “Will do,” I said. He nodded and I went to the carriage. The Ambassador showed up a few minutes later and I stood out of the way. When we were ready to leave a few minutes later, I asked Xiao to fly out and check the path ahead, then got into the carriage. “Hello, sir.” I said, as Ji Wan stepped in behind me.
“So, we should make it to Mortal Valley today, assuming nothing slows us down.” Ji Wan said. “Make sure all of your equipment is fully charged and that your qi is full before we enter, and don’t pull out any spirit stones there unless you are ready to lose money. The background qi level is so low that it drains spirit stones.”
The Ambassador nodded. “Do I have to worry about that happening to other items?” He asked.
“Not if they can refill themselves. They might drain some, but they won’t completely deplete themselves like spirit stones. They hold onto qi a lot better.”
I nodded. “Good. It would be bad if my sword dies. I’ll keep everything in my storage bag if I don’t need it, though. That way only the bag will be drained.”
We set off and I connected my left eye to Xiao’s before closing both of mine and meditating. There was a technique for inspecting the body for inefficiencies and stressed areas so that one could refine them, but it was slow. Essentially, the effect required that one focus on a tiny area of their entire body, searching for flaws in every area. The smaller the area, the better it was at finding flaws which existed on the small scale, but it took exponentially longer to scan your body the smaller the scanning area. Most people only had the patience to spend a few hours scanning with a search area the size of a fist or baseball. The experts could probably get the area down to the size of a thumb or a large marble, two or three centimeters across, and scan at a reasonable speed. I wanted to use a field that was no more than one centimeter across, meaning that the area I covered was one eighth the size of the one the experts used. There wasn’t a sensory reason one couldn’t do that, as the senses of a level three body could be used to view individual cells if they wanted to focus on them and could spare the mental effort, but the amount of time needed to do so was too great to be efficient.
In my case, however, I had a theory I was working on. What allowed a person to advance to the next level? It couldn’t be the density of their qi, or bottlenecks wouldn’t exist, as the density on each side of the bottleneck is the same, or even slightly greater before if one forces their way through. It also couldn’t be the amount of qi they had. A person had the same amount of qi at the peak of one level as when breaking through to the next level, sometime more as their qi was consumed during the breakthrough, like how most of mine had went into the dantian’s initial growth when I broke through to level two. The leading theory was that it was linked to the refinement of the body’s various systems, a theory which this world seemed to share. This was why the military had spent money on research to quantify the refinement levels, so that they could use these refinement levels to better assess and train their troops. But those numbers were only an estimate, and I suspected that there were cases where someone could have levels much higher than another person, but be unable to break through even though the other person could. That would explain why they said that breaking through would be of average difficulty for me before I came here, and not that I would be able to break through. The uncertain nature of the measurements made definitive answers impossible.
If the assessment of these parts wasn’t the full answer, though, what was missing? I thought that the answer might lie in the fact that all orthodox paths in this world put a final ‘full body refinement’ step at the end of every advancement through a level, after the person’s qi pressure and levels had reached peak. The existence of such a step, to fix the interactions between the body’s systems and to fix minor, overlooked systems, meant that they knew that there were flaws in the method, and they were attempting to overcome these flaws by having a lower efficiency blanket refinement to iron out the worst of the problems.
Earth methods didn’t use such a step, or any steps, however. They simply sent qi through the body in various patterns, which caused the body to absorb the qi and naturally refine itself, as the flaw were repaired by the higher qi levels and improved cellular function. To use an analogy, on Earth the body was like a gemstone that was tumbled to slowly polish away the flaws, while here the protruding bits of stone are removed and only then polished by hand. While both methods would end up with a gemstone, one took far more work and time. Neither of them could fix cloudiness or cracks in the crystal, only polish the surface until it shined.
What I was hoping to do was find a way to remove those cracks, and the only way I currently knew how to do that was to manually remove what I saw as a flaw and hope that it didn’t cause further problems or get reversed the next time I went through Rebirth. I would need to check either during or afterwards to see if the changes I made were returning to how they were. I would also need to let any flaws I caused be repaired by the process.
I started by focusing my senses on my furthest extremities, my toes. One tiny area at a time, I looked for flaws in the tissue. Every time I found one I would apply qi until the flaw went away. Sometimes I would guide it further, to repair specific areas like deficient or blocked blood vessels, or remove toxins from a specific area. Normally, one would assume that undergoing Rebirth could fix all of these things, as the entire body could be reconstructed to remove all flaws, but the changes only restored a person to what their DNA could allow. A person with a genetic flaw which caused blindness often couldn’t be cured of blindness by simply circulating qi. It usually only worked if the gene existed but wasn’t expressed well enough. The body couldn’t do what it didn’t know how to do. If the brain was used, however, the body could be modified directly, and people with poor or partial vision had been instructed how to reconnect optic nerves, adjust retinas, grow cones to solve colorblindness, and repair flaws in the visual cortex before.
Before I had even finished with all of my toes, however, Xiao alerted me. I pulled my attention from my internal senses to my left eye, then expanded the link to share all of his senses. Below us was a tree that had fallen across the path. As we were in forested area, that wasn’t surprising, as trees fall across paths sometimes. We would just need to move it. When I looked at the base of the tree, however, I realized why he had alerted me. It was too flat. Someone had used a tool or technique to cut this tree down so that it fell on the path. As it didn’t appear that a lumberjack was working on the tree, that only meant that someone wanted to block the path.
I pulled myself out of meditation, returning to only communicating with and sharing one eye of information Xiao, and brought out the talisman, activating it. “Someone has dropped a tree on the road ahead. It’s at least two steps across.” A Step was approximately half a meter, one thousandth of a li. I had Xiao look around tree for signs of people, but he didn’t see any at first. Then there was a bit of movement and a fire bolt flew at him, essentially a more stable and compressed form of a fire qi blast. “Xiao is under attack.” I said, as Xiao banked to the right, the fire bolt flying past him.
