The rest of the night was uneventful, and the next morning we set out north again. I agreed to give Sin Bai 70% of the reward money for the bandit, and he would split it with Mongu. They had done much of the combat against him and deserved a cut of the reward. As large as the reward was, even if I gave him seventy percent of the reward I would get three hundred thousand taels, the equivalent of more than two thousand stones if I could find someone willing to sell them. They would get three hundred and fifty thousand each, which would be enough to pay the operating expenses of their temple or shrine for over a decade, even with all of the charity they did.
After we set off I pulled out the daoism manual. The first technique it mentioned was a means to increase your willpower through what amounted to self torture. Essentially you would do things that you disliked, whether they were physical or emotional discomforts. While doing that you should focus on doing something else, and do your best to keep doing it no matter what happened in the world around you or what happened to you. It wouldn’t directly allow you to alter the physical world, but willpower was an important part of developing a reservoir of mental power.
The second was the development of a Dao Heart. This was essentially a word or motto that described your motivation. In Earth culture, this would be like a certain spider themed young adult’s belief the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, or a certain blue suited alien from a different franchise fighting for ‘truth, justice, and the American Way.’ Well, maybe not the last one. How do you define the ‘way’ of an entire country’s population? Perhaps you might base it on a founding principle like ‘self determination’ or ‘freedom’, but it needed to be a solid concept within your mind to work, the more solid the better. Once you tied your own actions to this principle, it would reinforce your actions if they matched the principle or weaken your resolve if it contradicted the principle. The main problem with doing this is that if you encountered a situation where you had to violate them to also uphold them, a catch 22 situation, you would be unable to act at best. At worst it would shatter your mental resolve and you would lose most of your ability to act until you established a new dao heart.
The third technique was the actual means to effect the real world. The first half was to focus on a specific effect you wanted to happen outside yourself. It needed to be outside of yourself because if you wanted something to happen within you badly enough, the mind could often make it happen. Apparently the locals had understood the placebo effect pretty well for centuries or even millennia, and wanted to avoid it if possible. After you focused on something outside yourself you had to make a small effect occur in the object. This was the hardest part of the training, and some people tried for years before they could make it happen, training in the other two methods in between the attempts.
There was also a supplementary training method in which you focused inside yourself and tried to fix any issues that you found. If you felt pain, you would focus on the area that hurt and will the pain to go away. If you itched, you would focus on the area that itched and will it to stop itching. This method was thought to help you develop your will toward causing effects to occur, but wasn’t part of the main three methods for two reasons. First, there were many cases of people who were excellent at this, but couldn’t effect the physical world, and there were many examples of people that couldn’t do this but could effect the physical world. The second was that if a person had a spirit root or just a natural talent with qi they would often be able to effect themselves using qi, as it naturally mixed with your Presence when you focused on an area that contained qi.
I suspected that when the Human Slag technique talked about using your Mind Fire, they were just using another term for mental power. There were techniques in the book for using it to control qi and to mix it with qi to make the qi easier to control, which lined up with Sin Bai’s assessment that cultivators mixed their mental power and qi together in order to control the qi. Once I could use mental strength to effect the world without qi I would look into finding a proper mixture of the two. It was unlikely that mixing them was always a bad thing. After all, Mongu had mixed his soul power with qi in order to use that vine binding technique which had held the ghost, and I suspected that Sin Bai also had a spirit root and did something similar with his mental power. I didn’t have much evidence for this last part, however, other than the fact that he seemed very familiar with cultivators and their techniques, as judged by the fact that he acted as if he had learned to see yin qi just like me.
I couldn’t create a scientific theory about how mental or soul strength could effect the physical world yet, but that was likely just because I didn’t understand it well enough. Perhaps after I collected the bounty for the bandit’s corpse I could buy books on more advanced Daoist and Buddhist teachings. If I could find scientific texts on the subject that would be even better, but I had seen few texts that appeared to have been written primarily for scientific pursuits, the False Roots book that Randy had brought back being one of the few. Most simply explained the principles and perhaps a basic proof, then moved on to more philosophical or mystic explanations. Sure, philosophy had a place in learning, but you couldn’t really create a rigid, testable hypothesis based on philosophical grounds, even if it used the framework of logic just like science.
Without much to do on this trip I decided to try the first training method, perhaps mixed with the auxiliary method. I took my sword and sat it in the seat, then sat on the handle. I considered sitting on the blade, but it was regular enough that I could probably ignore it. The handle, though, was too uneven, and therefore any slight movement would change how it pressed into my back side.
“That looks uncomfortable.” said the Ambassador, looking up from his book.
“That’s the point. I’m training my willpower by not reacting to it.” I said, then pointed at the book. “So, what are you reading?”
“Basically the local version of ‘The Art of War’.” he responded. “I bought it from the Inn. It’s called ‘Reflections on Military Strategy’ and is basically a memoir of a general’s battles and what he learned from them. According to the inn’s owner, this is required reading for all military officers in the kingdom.”
“In that case, can I borrow it when you are done? I’m not exactly a military strategist, but it couldn’t hurt to learn.”
“If nothing else it will make you better at dual cultivation.” he said, smiling, and I smiled too. “Sure. But weren’t you going to borrow this first?” He pulled out the Core formation book.
“Yes, I was. If you are done with it?”
He nodded and handed the book to me. “I’ll reread it once we get to Crystal Summit, just so it’s fresh in my mind when I break through, but I’ve already read it twice, so I don’t mind for now.”
I nodded and thanked him, then started to read, making sure to test for every level that I could as I read it. There were likely still levels that I couldn’t read, but for now I wanted to get everything out of it that I could. From time to time I would become extremely uncomfortable thanks to what I was sitting on, and would start to correct it, only to remember that I was uncomfortable on purpose.
When we stopped around mid day, about sixty percent of the way to the capital, the constant pain was starting to reach my limit. I decided to finally try mixing in the auxiliary training technique. I focused on the area and willed the pain to go away. Instantly the nerves in the area were numbed. That seemed too fast, so I examined the area, only to find that the nerves in that area had higher that normal levels of qi. I had inadvertently used a minor qi healing technique instead of mental strength to fix the issue, likely because I was so used to using qi. I would have to be careful not to use qi to do that while training in the future.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I stored the book, got out of the wagon, and looked around. We were in the middle of a dense forest, but the trees had been cleared to leave a twenty meter wide clearing on the side of the road. Most of the trees in the area were evergreens, and the smell reminded me of my childhood when I used to visit my grandparents out in the countryside. I could smell the distinct scent of a cedar tree, and thought of the cedar they had in their front yard.
“Food should be ready in half an hour.” called Ji Wan, addressing all of the gathered people. Jiang had unloaded the cook pots and was starting to pour water into them. The pots were designed to be used much like an alchemy cauldron, and even seal tightly enough to be put under another half atmosphere of pressure, allowing pressure cooking, so Jiang could easily use them without the need for an outside fire. This fact had also given her a head start when learning alchemy.
Most of the men were either on watch or bringing out various board games, as the wagon ride was too bumpy for them to play while riding. I wanted to keep training, however, so I looked around for an uncomfortable place to sit. After a few seconds I spotted the perfect place. There was a half meter tall ant hill just outside the clearing. The men had mostly avoided the area so that they didn’t have to deal with them, but I knew that doing so would let me quickly train.
I sat down beside the hill and started to meditate. Thankfully they weren’t fire ants, as I wasn’t sure I could handle getting bitten hundreds of times at this point, but they still quickly swarmed over me. As a mortal I might not even be able to feel them, but with my enhanced sense of touch I could feel tiny feet brushing against my skin. It was as if I was being tickled by a minuscule feather. There were soon hundreds of them crawling on me, and every one slightly distracted me as I tried to meditate.
The meditation wasn’t that deep, as if I reached a point where I could ignore the body even partially it would defeat the purpose of this exercise. Instead it only focused on having a good overview of my physical state. I started scanning myself again, much like I had a few days ago, looking for flaws. I didn’t fix them, though, as that would use qi, which I was trying to avoid. At the moment I was just trying to see how much of my body I could remain conscious of at one time without letting the details slip into my unconscious mind. I wasn’t sure what mental metric this would train, but it seemed to have a benefit to my training the last time I tried something similar, so I decided to try it again.
I barely got past my head before I noticed information starting to slip from my mind. I tried to refocus, to bring all of my concentration onto the flaws I had found and recall all of the details, but the ants crawling across my legs pulled my attention away. I forced myself to ignore the ants and it seemed to help, but the more I focused, the more the minor nuisance of the ants tried to pull me away.
A few minutes later Jiang brought me a bowl and I took it, thanking her. After she left I quickly ate it in order to get back to my training. I ate so quickly that I dropped a piece of local potato onto the ground between my legs. I was about to pick it up and throw it into the woods to keep the ants from swarming the area when I realized that this could help my training. A minute later one of the ants found it and thirty seconds after that a thousand ants were crawling across my legs. I set my bowl down and started meditating again, and realized that the difficulty had greatly increased. Not only were the ants crawling across my legs, but some of them had even gotten inside my pants and were crawling across even more sensitive parts of my anatomy.
I did my best to ignore it, trying to focus on the flaws in my shoulders, but the ones on my nether regions were far too distracting. I used the cleaning technique to push them off, and they fell on the ground, running off to look for food elsewhere. I knew that doing so would stunt my progress, but I just couldn’t handle such a strange feeling at the moment.
I went back to meditating, making some progress despite all of the ants on me and soon they were calling for everyone to return to the carts. I stood and used the cleaning technique to knock all of the ants off of me without harming them, the smallest reaction I could think of at the moment, and returned to the carriage. I knew that stronger reactions would have more of a negative effect on my training than weak reactions from the daoist manual, but wasn’t sure why. Perhaps taking less action required more willpower. I knew that there was a principle of inaction within the teaching, which I didn’t fully understand, but which seemed to work well with this training method. I would have to research it further in the future.
I wasn’t sure how to continue my training in the carriage. Obviously I couldn’t bring ants into the carriage, but I needed something equally annoying. Just before we set out I had an idea. I picked up a few pebbles from the ground and put a few in each shoe. That way they would constantly be moving around and changing how they annoyed me. Once inside the Ambassador pulled out a book and started writing. “Taking notes about something?” I asked, not really interested but wanting to talk about something.
“Yes, actually, I was trying to figure out exactly what to buy once we get to the capital. Obviously there won’t be many, if any, spirit plants or animals, but there might be resources which we can use. This valley seems to produce a large variety of food, so it may be possible for them to help feed the troops.” I told him my thoughts on the situation, and we started to discuss the local markets. This wasn’t the most interesting subject for me, but I didn’t mind talking about it too much. Eventually the topic went to local politics and legal regulations. I actually hated this topic, but forced myself to stay engaged. After all, anything that you would naturally try to avoid could be used as training.
Occasionally I would shift my feet and the rocks in my shoes would move enough to start hurting a different part of my foot, but I kept ignoring it. The hardest one to ignore was when a stone got between my middle and second toe on my left foot. I almost couldn’t concentrate on the topic of trade regulations due to this, and the Ambassador noticed. He asked if the topic was boring and I shrugged. “Honestly, yes. I try to avoid politics as much as possible. But you seem to like the topic, and I’m trying a new training method for my willpower in which I do things that I dislike and try to ignore or come to terms with the discomfort, so this discussion is actually good training for me.”
The Ambassador nodded. “In that case, let me teach you about the relations between the various sects and city states in this region as far as I understand them. I think the most important recent event was when the queen of High River had twins three hundred years ago.” He spent the rest of the trip describing how the different paths of the two brothers lead to a war between the Eternal Fire sect and its allies and High River, and the major political ramifications of those events. It was one of the most boring conversations I had ever had, but with a judicious use of willpower I managed to get through it.
Around sunset we reached the capital city of Trilon. It was surrounded by a huge number of farms, starting dozens of li from the actual city. The city itself had massive walls made of stone, with guard towers every fifty meters around the perimeter. The city was at least a few li across, and there appeared to be only a few gates to allow people to move in and out of the city.
Once we got to the gate Ji Bo talked with the city guard and we were allowed inside. The carts traveled to a large parking area meant for traveling traders, and we parked all of them. After I got out of the carriage Ji Bo came over to me. “I asked the guard about your bounty and he said that you needed to turn them in at the main guard building.”
After setting up the formation and leaving a few guards behind, he sent Ji Wan to arrange rooms for everyone and boarding for the animals, then lead me to the guard building. There was some discussion when I pulled a charred corpse out of my bag, but after explaining how he was possessed due to being a spirit cultivator, and how I had to work with a monk and a priest to defeat him, the guards checked his identity. After verifying that this was, in fact, the body of Liu Fan, they handed me several paper notes. The amount was too large for them to hand out in cash, but these could be exchanged, ten thousand at a time, with local businesses or any business in the nation for an equal amount of goods. They essentially performed the role of checks, but were in set amounts.
