Heavenly Shae

Chapter 16: "Whooah, We're Halfway There."

She set a grueling pace for the rest of the day. Not particularly fast, it was grueling mainly because she was so sore. She was fairly certain she was still moving faster than when she was a mortal. Finding a walking stick helped significantly by supporting her weaker side.

She had set out to find the branch she snapped off at the top of the cliff. With little to go on, she was just searching along the cliff until she found something fresh enough, and looking like it was snapped off by force. She failed to find anything that met that description, but did find a very nice dark-wood stick of the perfect size.

She decided that even if she could run as fast as yesterday, she wouldn't. There was clearly too much risk. The forest had kept her so busy dodging trees that she hadn't kept a close enough eye out ahead. At least, that was her reasoning for what happened.

At a slower pace she was able to keep a much closer eye on her surroundings. Which was good because she wanted to be on the lookout for food. Berries and nuts and edible root plants might have been in abundance in the sect formation clearing, but that was probably because wild varieties had been planted there. Spread out enough to form a naturally replenishing harvest.

Her trip down the mountain had seen far less edible options. Largely worsened by the season. All the fruit and berry trees had long since ripened, their bounty falling to the ground to spoil when left unharvested. The nut trees, she hoped, might fare better, and should keep longer. She wasn't an expert ranger or wilderness hunter, so knowing which were edible was a gamble.

She spotted mushrooms, but those were much riskier in her opinion. Anything really edible shouldn't last long, if being scavenged by the wildlife. This made large clumps of mushrooms very suspicious.

As the day crossed into afternoon, she decided to stop for a break, a rock outcropping making for a convenient seat and side table. She was encouraged by her strained and sore body.

Sorting through her pack, most of the damage from the fall had been suffered by the ember cherries. They had been mashed into pulp. Their juices partly soaked into the waxed cloth used to wrap them, and coated the plant's edible flowers that she had also collected. The whole mixture made for a very spicy jam.

The bitter roots were also damaged, but their bruises and breaks didn't really affect their taste. The bitter carrots made for an odd pairing with the jam. She only suffered a small amount of each before chasing the flavors off with some smoked rabbit meat.

She really wanted to find a stream. Not just for water, she really wanted a wash after that fall.

"Hmmmmgh." She whined to herself. "I really want a hot bath or shower!" Looking over her lunch she also wanted something sour and salty. "Aagh, and a pickle. A whole jar of pickles!" Knowing that wasn't exactly a local option, she tried to think of what was, pickled ginger maybe? or kimchi, she made a face, more spicy was not what she needed right now.

That also reminded her of the ginseng. Probably not good pickled, it was too bland and the earth taste it did have might clash with the sour, like pickling a potato. She had pickled carrots before, but those were sweet to begin with, and they were usually pickled with spice. She shook herself away from the distraction. Ginseng! She meant to try cultivating with it, like she was told to.

Slicing off a sliver of the root, she then placed it under her tongue to dissolve. She tried to enter meditation. It took her a few minutes to get comfortable, and to ignore all her aches and pains. She considered lying down flat to make that easier, but settled for using some of the golden larch foliage as cushioning for her back.

The ginseng hadn't dissolved yet, seemingly at all. She wondered if she sliced it too thick again.

A few more deep breaths later, she reached that familiar state of meditation. The first thing she realized was that she didn't know what to do.

The bulk of her practice had been drawing in specific elemental qi, just for the control practice. Now she didn't have a specific element to aim for, and she didn't really want one. Divine or lightning would be her pick, but those were exceptionally rare, and she would need to find much more to cultivate quickly and properly.

She didn't even have a cultivation manual to tell her what to do with neutral qi. "Ah, right, neutral qi." She paused. "What do I do with neutral qi?" She mentally asked no one.

She relaxed back into her meditation. She'd have to collect some first.

She reached out to the qi around her and was briefly surprised. The mountain's earth element qi was weaker here. Still very present and all around her, but a little weaker. She still had trouble trying to move it. She thought she got a little shifting out of it after focusing for a while, but it was hard to tell.

Thinking back to her first week indoors with the old monster, she remembered her metaphor. The air between the boulders of earth qi, that was what she was looking for. Not air qi specifically, that was just the metaphor.

She also realized at this point that she didn't have a good method of grabbing the qi around her. With the elemental qi, it was infusing the room so she just had to kind of call out to it and it would funnel towards her, escaping the pressure of the mountain's qi.

Wait. No. That wasn't quite correct. she thought. She did have to fight the mountain for the earth qi. First separating it out then drawing it in.

She could try something similar now. Separation was easy, she just grabbed at everything that wasn't earth qi. Then slowly thought about drawing it in, imploring it towards her with feelings of need and warmth, like she had with the fire qi.

It barely moved, a small trickle of fire qi dripped in. The qi associated with the thoughts she was expressing.

After what felt like hours, but could have been only a few breaths, she gave up on that avenue. Instead, she thought back to how the old monster had instructed her before they started on elemental qi.

He had talked about it without all the elaborate metaphors for emotions that she was using. That just made her first steps difficult as Shae was trying to translate his explanations into something that fit her own methods. Then she stopped herself, and took a mental step back.

His explanation had been for neutral qi, not elemental qi. Maybe I'm overcomplicating things?

A bit of trial and error later, she determined that yes, she had been making it more difficult. She thought that this was related to what he had said about the mountain being a bad location to learn. If she picked up weird habits to deal with it, they would be hard to break.

She was glad she tried to do this so early, waiting longer would have made it more difficult. Both because the habit would sink in, and as the local qi environment changed.

Trying properly now, she reached out and grabbed the qi around her. She didn't try to feel anything at it. She didn't plead with it to approach her. She just pulled; yanked it into her channels.

It didn't all move. The mountain's qi held strong and other bits of elemental qi were left behind, but the neutral qi rushed in. She almost lost concentration from her surprise.

A moment of discomfort as she felt her channels were overstuffed. It was focused within her left arm and leg, as that is where she had learned to draw it in, to avoid the divine lightning. She pushed it along, smoothing out the distribution. Again, Shae realized she had no clue what she was doing. Pulling it all into just a subset of her channels felt sloppy.

She focused and stuck with what she had learned. Simply moving it through her channels, getting used to the flow, and the shape of her channels. She moved it slowly, because she had so much compared to the trickle of elemental qi she was used to.

She pushed it into the nooks and side passages she could find. Tiny offshoots and branches that were invisible before began to show up, spreading her mental map of her channels. She also found her impurity filled meridians. They were like large caverns; subway stations that would one day house massive flows of traffic, but which were now packed with rubble and garbage.

The meridian below her Dantian stood out as different. Like work crews had already been in to clean up the place. Only a few large boulders blocked the space, the smaller rubble and trash was missing. However, it also looked like fire had ravaged the place, or some kind of explosion.

She realized it was the lightning qi. The storm saved up in her leg had to get to her Dantian somehow, and it felt like this place was in its path.

She threw the subway station metaphor away. Metaphors are dangerous, she had already seen how they could affect her qi. Sticking to the idea that the tribulation had only been lightning had almost killed her. Also, she thought, it is just a terrible metaphor.

She knew from elder Ghon's book that meridians were not a single point, they were a whole series connected together. Not a single subway station but the whole line of stations and the tunnels connecting them. Dammit! She cursed herself for falling back into the metaphor.

If she remembered the diagrams in that book correctly this was either the bladder or gall bladder meridian. She considered that it would be extremely on point for the divinely judgemental lightning to have passed through her gall bladder meridian.

Letting the idea sink in. She accepted that it would have been impossibly unlikely for any other meridian to be used. It just fit too well.

A shiver of premonition rippled through her as she connected what sorts of reading may lay in her future. The meridian book had a lot of mind numbing diagrams and information to memorize. Yet, the most interesting part of it was the lore and stories associated with the various meridians. How they were seen in culture and what sayings connected them.

In this culture, the word gall and its idioms were very connected to that meridian.

She sighed and let her worries pass, an easy feat when she was already meditating.

She pulled and neutral qi continued to stream in from outside her, a little slower now that she had taken the nearby stuff. It packed in and flowed throughout her channels, sometimes bumbling painfully into a wall. A kind of pain that was almost entirely mental strain.

She was fairly sure there was a way for her to imprint on the qi, make it hers, but she didn't know how. With much uncertainty she decided to not allow it into her Dantian. She feared it would dilute her divine qi. It also refused to soak into the formation like the elemental qi had.

She could not tell what the ginseng was doing, if anything. It had dissolved by now, a while ago, really. Which she took as a good enough sign to stop for today.

So, now she had a new problem. What to do with all the qi she collected. Storing it in her Dantian would have been the obvious answer, but she had just decided against that.

Cleansing would also be a valid option, but she hadn't been given clear instruction on how to do that. The lightning had a mind of its own, so she hadn't learned anything from it.

She picked a spot on her right side, and pushed the qi at it. Even after sending thoughts of cleansing nothing changed. The qi hit her channel walls and hurt. She could feel them stretching under the pressure and had to stop.

While taking a short break to cycle qi and recover from the added mental strain, she decided to try something risky.

It would need her to keep some of her qi separate, so she started by leaving gaps in the circular cultivation cycle she had settled into. Once comfortable, she made some space around her Dantian and withdrew a small cloud of divine qi.

She kept it separate, moving it slowly along her channels to the site she wanted to cleanse. About half way there, she slipped up and the cloud was overwhelmed. The neutral qi crushed in, breaking it apart.

Shae was disappointed, but she had seen something just before it broke down completely. A little bit of the neutral qi had vibrated and changed, she might have imagined it, but it was worth another attempt.

She doubled the size of the divine qi cloud. Drew it out of her Dantian and into the clearing around it. Then slowly trickled in neutral qi.

It was a challenge to do this and manage the rest of the qi in her body. She nearly lost the balance a few times, but it was working. The neutral qi was being converted to... not divine qi.

It had a similar feel and look, but was missing a bit of the punch and self importance the divine qi held. Shae got a sense that it might be purified qi, if neutral was a general mix of everything, this was a puree, so smooth and clean it felt like nothing. As she watched, she saw something worse, the divine qi was becoming lost in the larger cloud of pure qi.

While she thought about what to do she shuffled it around the outside of her Dantian, she still did not want to bring it inside. A flash of lightning appeared across her Dantian, no, not really lightning. The faux lightning ribbons that roiled through the clouds inside her Dantian. Moving much slower and in a visually pleasing dance. Like a gymnast doing a ribbon routine, or throwing toilet paper rolls into the wind.

The humorous comparison almost caused Shae to break out of meditation in laughter. She felt herself buckling from her lungs suddenly trying to breathe erratically.

She got serious and forced herself out of it when the mass of neutral qi started slamming around. Unguided, it had started to do its own thing. The migraine-like feedback instantly broke all of her humor.

She looked to her divine qi to soothe the pain and noticed it had done nothing special in the same timeframe. It was happily drifting around her Dantian. This urged her to convert more of the neutral qi, she clearly couldn't leave it alone like she could the pure qi.

The ribbon lighting flashed again and she had a thought. Maybe the divine qi needs a bit more than just the calm clouds to form properly? She resisted the idea of withdrawing the ribbons. She had too few, and the biggest one was probably too powerful, who knows what it might do.

The cat's eye marbles roamed around in her Dantian too. She had more of those, weaker but more sealed into themselves than the ribbon. They might survive her channels and be much more controllable.

She pulled one out immediately and winced. They hurt when removed from her inner world. Both the act itself hurt and just having them in her channels, like they knew they shouldn't be out here.

She surrounded it in the cloud of pure and divine qi. The effect was almost immediate. The whole cloud strengthened. Small ghostly sparks flying through it.

Emboldened, she rushed a bunch of neutral qi into it, not so much to overwhelm it, just to see how much it could handle. It did well against the flurry, a lightning storm in a tornado. Exaggeration, yes, but Shae was not above that.

Before her laughing fit, she hadn't realized she was in danger. The neutral qi was a waiting threat inside her channels. She saw so much work ahead to control it all. Even with a solution, it was now a marathon.

Throughout the marathon, the little marble didn't waver. Undiminished, it reinforced the divine qi by making it last longer and moving the purified qi just a little closer to the divine. She had to take many breaks. It hurt just to have the marble outside her Dantian, further wearing away her mental fortitude.

The new qi still wasn't divine. It was missing the anger, the wrath and the uncompromising judgment, if she had to guess. Yet, it felt about half way there. Probably the better half, she wasn't sure she wanted the extra baggage of wrath stomping around in her channels.

It still refused to go outside her channels and cleanse her, but it didn't hurt as much when it bumped into them. Another benefit, it only moved suddenly when pushed; otherwise drifting steadily without slamming into her channels. The lightning marble seemed to have given it some movement, and it wouldn't sit still.

What must have been hours later, she reached halfway. Half the neutral qi she had collected was converted. A curious equilibrium had formed at this balanced point. The two qi forms weren't eating each other away, weren't diluting into each other. The half divine qi was drifting through her channels on its own and the neutral qi was following obediently, and not rioting when she looked away.

Half. That was important. Halfway to the divine, half from the mortal world. Demigod. That was what she would call it. Demigod qi. She chuckled to herself, "Heh! Seems like a great way to get halfway to immortality."

She passed out shortly after, only cracking an eye open to lay down safely and see the sun rising, marking a new day.