BWFoster78
patreon
Chapter 120 – Nervous
🕑 Added 2024-10-27 22:01:25 +0000 UTCYang Xiu was a little concerned. Master had said that consolidating her gains could take an hour or a week. She took that to mean that it was likely to take an extended period of time.
After an hour, though, she felt … good.
She’d advanced through nine minor realms and Mastery of two different techniques. She knew what it was supposed to feel like when she was ready to continue with the next step.
She was ready.
Well, he had said that she would know. She shrugged and made her way to the Guard House, telling them she needed a room to consume pills Master gave her.
Her mind flashed back to when her and her brother had taken the pills that improved their spiritual roots. She really hoped that whatever was about to happen didn’t hurt as much as that had. Regardless, she would endure, but she could hope.
The other thing that struck her was how helpless they both had been while under the influence of the medication. It was nice that Master had thought to set up a place guarded by people they could trust just for such a purpose.
A guard quickly led to a small room, and she cupped her hands and bowed low to him.
“Senior Sister, you don’t have to do that!”
“Nonsense,” she said. “This one thanks your for your service to the sect.”
Despite his protestations, the man left smiling.
The room had everything she might need—separate containers of water for drinking and for washing, cleaning materials, rags, and a set of old clothes.
Though she wasn’t sure what was about to happen, she didn’t think disrobing would be necessary. She threw the three pills in her mouth, swigged some water, and gulped them down.
Dropping into a lotus position, she waited.
The process was painful, of course. Everything about cultivation seemed to involve pain in some manner. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as the spiritual root refinement.
Best of all, the entire process seemed to only take about an hour or so.
After the pain had gone away and the burning in her channels had subsided, she dove her consciousness into her body to examine it.
Her qi pool was larger. She was already struggling to come to terms with how much more she had available compared to the peak of Qi Gathering, and now she had even more. Master was truly unfathomable.
After returning to the house she shared with her brother, she pulled out the jade slip containing her new Foundation Establishment realm cultivation method from her storage ring.
Her Foundation Establishment realm cultivation method. Her storage ring.
Yang Xiu grinned.
That day in the woods when Fang Wei had caught up to her and Yang Ru, she had thought everything was over. The spoiled wretch was about to kill her brother and do unspeakable things to her. Even if they somehow survived, their parents were dead. They had no food and no place to go.
Now, she was a real cultivator, one who would soon be able to do amazing things with her qi. She had a place to belong, a new family.
Yang Xiu couldn’t wait to take the next step.
She dove her consciousness into the jade slip just like she’d done dozens, maybe hundreds, of times with other treasures and began assimilating the contents.
Information flooded her brain.
The root of the method was similar to her old one. The qi aspect was exactly the same, matched to hers.
And wasn’t that something she and her brother had marveled over many times. It was obvious from their interactions with the members of the Poison Claw Sect that no one, literally no one, had cultivation methods uniquely tuned to their qi aspect just handed to them. The only people who used such things were Golden Core and higher elders who were able to develop their own cultivation methods after years and years of study.
She put aside that thought, concentrating on the task before her.
The purpose of Qi Gathering had been to gather in motes of qi and condense it into a liquid. Her new cultivation was similar in that she was still condensing the qi, but the goal was to make the liquid more and more dense until she could finally form a core in her dantian, which would trigger her ascension into the Golden Core realm.
Everything about the new method was the same but slightly different from the one she’d previously used, variations on a theme so to speak. The cycles were a slightly different pattern, and she’d be handling a lot, lot more qi at once than before, ten times more. The task was daunting.
Yang Xiu took a deep breath.
It would be fine. She could do it. She would do it.
She would not let down her master.
Slowly, carefully, deliberately, she absorbed qi from her environment and cycled it, using it to minutely compress the liquid qi flowing through her channels.
When she finished the cycle, she felt the change. Minor realm one. A small change, but she could detect it because her control and sense of her body were much more developed than it ever had been when she’d been a mortal.
After reaching that milestone, she switched to working on her new archery technique. It was, in a word, difficult. Moving qi outside her body was quite different from moving it inside. The change was something like how she imagined learning to use a new limb might be.
One really good thing about advancing to Foundation Establishment was that her need for sleep was reduced even further, so she stayed up all night practicing. By dawn, she could coat her arrow tips in qi and maintain it until they hit their target.
The process did slow her rate of fire, however. Before, she’d been able to pull an arrow, nock it, and smoothly pull back and release in a fraction of a second. The new technique required her to stop when the bowstring was pulled back and concentrate for up to several seconds to get the qi to move into place.
Still, she hadn’t expected it to be easy. Learning to shoot a bow in the first place hadn’t been easy, either, but she’d well and truly conquered that task.
Dawn brought the need to meet the others in the plaza, though, so she reluctantly stopped practicing. As she and Yang Ru walked toward the gate, she experimented with her spiritual sense. Her brother immediately flared before her more than just to her eyes. Even closing them, she knew exactly where he was and that there were more cultivators ahead of them.
The best she could guess was that she could detect any cultivator in about a hundred yards radius from her. Additionally, they felt more or less solid to her based on their cultivation level. Yang Ru was by far the firmest feeling of all of them. There was a definite difference between him and someone like Shi Long and again between him and one of the newest inductees.
Because she knew the realm of each of the people present, she was able to start associating a feeling of firmness with a certain minor realm. The only exception was Zou Tian, who barely felt like a cultivator at all. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought he had just learned to cultivate last night instead of being in the sixth minor realm.
Everyone arrived except for Master, which was strange. He hated being late and was almost always one of the first ones there. By the time he showed up around a half hour later, the sect members were starting to get worried.
“Sorry about being tardy,” he said. “I’m expecting Kang Lin and her group today, so I spent some extra time clearing out the worst of the beasts along their path.”
Yang Xiu glanced at her brother, who tried hard to act like the girl’s imminent arrival didn’t bother him, but it was obvious to someone who’d known him for his entire life that he was nervous.
“I went far enough to sense them as well,” Master continued, “and I’ll meet them on the road in about four hours. I’ll patrol an extra long distance around the Wood before I leave and will try to be gone as short a time as possible.”
No one had any problem with that, of course, and they all proceeded to the Wood.
The interesting thing for Yang Xiu was that Master didn’t appear at all to her spiritual senses. He’d told her about that ability of his in the past, but it was interesting to experience it for herself. Of course, she also remembered him saying that any higher realm cultivator would be similarly hidden, so she looked forward to seeing what such cultivators felt like in future encounters.
About four hours after the start of their daily cultivating, Master arrived to take her and her brother to meet with the newcomers. She was excited, eager to get to know her potential new sister.
In contrast, Yang Ru had to grip his spear tightly to stop his hands from shaking.
Yang Xiu stifled a laugh, and he glared at her.
Oops.
###
Kang Lin had hoped to make the distance from Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town to the Prosperous Gray Forest Village in a single day, about twelve hours of running full out. That had seemed like a reasonable goal. After all, that was the time the trip had taken her both coming and going on her previous trip.
She hadn’t counted on two factors, however. First of all, the spirit beasts were a lot more numerous and aggressive than they were on the previous journey. She and the other five Poison Claw Sect members had to stop multiple times to fight, though fortunately not against any rank four or higher. Her techniques were barely at Small Success, and though she was willing to try, she did not feel at all confident about fighting such a high ranked creature on her own.
The second delay came from her fellow sect members. The slowest of the bunch, Deng Meixiang, could barely sustain forty miles per hour, a good twenty percent slower than Kang Lin when she’d been in the Qi Gathering realm.
Normally, a trip taking fifteen hours instead of twelve would have been no big deal, but with all the spirit beasts and the overgrown path, travel in darkness was not a good idea. Which meant they had to camp for the night. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, either, but for the spirit beasts.
She’d spent the entire night on edge because several rank threes with good stealth had been able to sneak all the way into the camp before anyone spotted them. It was quite stressful.
Kang Lin was also on edge the next morning as they traveled because she fully expected to encounter rank fours. Considering the density of rank threes they’d had to fight and the warning from Esteemed Master Cultivator Chao Su, her conclusion only made sense.
Therefore, it surprised and worried her when not a single one appeared. Her only thought was—if there were no rank fours, was it because there was an even more dangerous one nearby?
She really hoped her bravado in saying that she could escort Pan Jiang and the other four wouldn’t cost her or any of them their lives.
The further they traveled, the more nervous she became. Thus, when shortly before noon, two spiritual presences suddenly appeared just beyond the next rise, she let out a panicked cry.
“Get ready! Beasts just over the next hill!”
Pan Jiang readied his sword. Deng Meixiang nocked an arrow.
All six of them were as tense as Deng Meixiang’s bowstring.
That was when Kang Lin realized her mistake. She was sensing one Foundation Establishment and one Qi Gathering cultivator over the rise, not beasts.
“Stop!” she yelled.
But it was too late.
At movement on the top of the hill, Deng Meixiang loosed.
Kang Lin winced. That was not good. Her grandfather was going to be so mad if what she thought was about to happen did, in fact, happen.
Esteemed Cultivator Chao Su suddenly appeared in front of them, holding Deng Meixiang’s arrow. “I think you lost this?”
At least he was smiling when he handed it back to the girl.
Kang Lin had never been so embarrassed in her life. To have one of her charges shoot an arrow at Grandfather’s friend was an incomprehensible loss of face. What a way to greet someone to whom she owed so much for such an amazingly easy breakthrough.
Worst of all, the incident was solely her fault. She should have known instantly that it was cultivators, allies, who had appeared.
She cupped her hands and bowed low. “This lowly one is so sorry, Esteemed Master Cultivator.”
“For what?” He seemed genuinely perplexed.
“For this lowly one’s sect mate shooting an arrow at our allies, Esteemed Master Cultivator. These lowly ones are sure to be punished when Elder Kang and Elder Dai learn of it, but any punishment the Esteemed Master Cultivator wants to add would be justified.”
In Kang Lin’s experience, the only way to gain any chance of leniency was to convince the master that one was absolutely willing to accept any punishment—not that they deserved lenience for that debacle.
“Don’t be silly. Even if that arrow had hit one of us, it couldn’t have possibly done any damage,” he said. “Now, come on. I have two disciples waiting for you, one eagerly and one anxiously.”
She’d had so much on her mind that she’d almost forgot about Yang Ru and their impending potential courtship. Suddenly, she was nervous for an entirely different reason.
Comments
RedFaux
I have a feeling Ru will come out of this with more conviction than ever. That or he'll develop a heart demon
BWFoster78 Last
Working on it. Hoping to have the entire week's worth published before I go to bed.
tonright
me here desperately needing the next chapter already lol
