What to do if you find out that you are a cannon fodder in a cultivation novel?

Fullname82

Nerd alert!

Be warned, there are some nerdy theories for 2 or 3 paragraphs in this chapters.

I still had time before sleeping so I distributed the writing kits I bought yesterday to the trio for practice. I added some candles to avoid straining their eyes and let them retire early.

I reviewed what I learned today and wrote down some ideas I got from novels in my previous life. 

I had 3 spiritual roots; wood, water and thunder. 

Actually it should not be named thunder but lightning but in this world it was called thunder. It was the same in many cultivation books I’ve read so far but I don’t understand why¹During a storm, thunder was the sound that comes after lightning. Just like the gold system should be called the metal system in apocalypse books...

Moving on

My parents planned for me to wait until I was 12 years old to take root washing pills to turn me into a single wood root cultivator. I had to wait until then for my body to be mature enough to sustain their side effects. I had those pills already and I did use them in my first life but I was hesitating to do the same in this life. 

You see, it was widely known that the less spiritual root you had the faster you could increase your cultivation but after my past life I didn't think it was the only correct path.

In apocalypse books, the more systems you have the better. Most protagonists would either increase each system level at the same time or independently. They used crystal nuclei and and/or practiced with their system to increase in levels. 

I wanted to try it out. What if I used my roots instead of spiritual energy? I wanted to test this theory. See if I could use my roots the same way as apocalyptic system abilities to try to improve them. If it worked, I would use spiritual stones as crystal nuclei to replenish my roots as needed. 

I had a good idea for the meridians thanks to today’s self study. If I used the Dantian as an engine, I would need them to rotate (along my spiritual roots). That would make the spiritual energy circulate throughout my body using Meridian paths. The circulation speed would affect the absorption and purification of the spiritual energy. That was the secret of the Bai’s family technique; use speed to remove impurities just like a centrifuge to separate spiritual energy from other substances.  

What if I tried to make the roots follow three spheres or infinity loops ∞? Mmm… I like the infinity loop idea. How about moving the spiritual roots into 3 infinity loops sing a 3D ax; one infinity loop per spiritual root per ax (x,y,z) . It would even create a nice flower pattern …  

If I could master it, I would create a second rotation by moving the origin point of the 3D ax to create a circle… I could also add a deviation in the rotation of less than a degree²My head hurts 

I wanted to try out all these theories. Lucky me, I was still young and had 2 years before making the final decision of removing 2 roots. I also had two additional years for a total of 4 to change rotation patterns. setting up the meridians path was the first stage so I could start with that while tweaking this idea a bit more.            

To increase the spiritual roots like system abilities, I could use potted plants and seeds for the wood manipulation. Water was easy, try to stir a cup filled with water then move to creating water. If I kept my water root in my first life, I would have never gone thirsty in the end… let’s forget that. 

As for thunder, - I am gonna change it to the term ‘lightning’ from now on - I could start right away! 

I sat on my bed in a lotus position. I looked at my roots with my senses. I was trying to use my roots and not the spiritual energy so it was harder. The wood one was a bit bigger than water but not by much. Lightning was the weakest being half the size of the wood root. I focused on lightning…and nothing happened. 

Good. I didn’t want to electrocute myself -not that I would have thanks to the root I had some natural resistance to lightning - 

Let’s try to create lightning or electricity on my fingertips using my root. I put the thumb and index of my right hand an inch apart and tried to call in the lightning root from within me. After a while it worked! an electric arc was created between my fingers for a split of a second. I tried again and I was able to get it going for longer. I tried it a bit more until I could keep it running for at least half a minute. Then I changed it to be created between both my hands. At the end I could make a blue electric arc as thick as a finger and as long as 50 cm between my hands for at least a minute. 

That was then that I started to feel the strain so I took a low level spiritual stone and I absorbed it to recuperate faster. I was able to take in about 10% of the stone so I kept it next to me. I looked at my body and found out that the lightning root did not change much. Maybe I had to practice more. My cultivation base increased more than the usual cultivation session though so I was satisfied for now. 

I continued training by increasing the thickness and duration of the lightning. I wanted to try to send the lightning toward an object to see the effect but I preferred doing it in another environment to avoid accidents. I repeated the cycle of absorbing that spiritual stone next to me and training a few times until the stone crumbled. It took 3 hours and it was pretty late so I decided to turn off the light and go to sleep.