Drawing Qi into the Body

Unlike strength training, where he could eat spirit beast meat to increase his strength and soak in medicinal baths to strengthen his body, training his control relied entirely on himself.

The process required intense concentration, without the slightest carelessness. In the eldest senior sister's words, he had to "find the right feeling and use his body to control the strength, rather than his spiritual platform."

What Lu Yang had to do was grasp the tofu naturally, without forcing it.

By the end of the day, Lu Yang reeked of soy from head to toe. His eyes had been fixed on the tofu for so long that they had nearly gone cross-eyed.

Fortunately, the puppet was experienced. It gave Lu Yang two slaps, and his eyes returned to normal.

When it was time to eat, Lu Yang stared at the table piled high with tofu and fell silent.

Stir-fried tofu, fried tofu, steamed tofu, tofu pudding, tofu boiled in soy milk...

The ingredients were all tofu that Lu Yang had mangled during the day. Lu Yang heard that the tofu pudding and soy milk had been gifts from a warmhearted shopkeeper.

Lu Yang thanked his ancestors for eight generations.

Lu Yang knew that until he could control his strength properly, he would not be allowed to change dishes.

In other words, either he or the tofu was destined to meet its end.

Tofu was not an ordinary food, either. Consumed over a long period, it could regulate a cultivator's balance of the five elements, make their breath long and steady, and increase their endurance in battle. Its benefits were too numerous to count.

But even so, no one could stand eating tofu every day.

Lu Yang had no choice. He lowered his head and ate, wondering how he could control his strength better the next day.

As Lu Yang slept soundly, he felt a dazzling white light shining on his face, pressing his upper and lower eyelids tightly together and twisting his features. After slowly adapting to the intense light, he tentatively opened his eyes.

It was a pure white space, surrounded by dense mist. Only a small area around Lu Yang was clearly visible, and he could not find the source of the light.

"Where is this?" Lu Yang asked in some panic. He had been sleeping in the Ask Dao Sect, where countless experts lived, with his eldest senior sister right next door. Who could have silently dragged him into this mysterious space?

Was this person friend or foe?

A grand voice emerged from the mist. It was distant and profound, as though it had spoken from the primordial past, echoing through the river of time.

"Young man, this is a temporary space I constructed. No one can detect it."

Lu Yang's heart tightened. His opponent's methods were unfathomable, and he could only hope that they harbored no ill will toward him.

"I have witnessed the passage of countless ages and seen innumerable mighty experts whose cultivation stood unrivaled beneath the heavens. In the end, none escaped the fate of being eroded by time. Their fervent blood, with which they battled heaven and earth, turned into a sigh upon their deathbed."

"No matter how peerless their elegance, I remain carefree and at ease, existing eternally." The voice was ancient and hoarse, carrying a faint weariness born of seeing ten thousand ages turn to nothing.

The existence of this peerless mighty expert had already exceeded Lu Yang's imagination.

"Today, I was seized by a sudden impulse. After calculating with my fingers, I discovered that you and I were fated to meet, so I summoned your soul to this temporarily constructed inheritance space."

"This space contains all the cultivation methods, pills, secret manuals, cultivation insights, and more needed from the Qi Refining stage to the Tribulation Transcendence stage. Whenever you reach a new stage, you will be able to unlock part of my inheritance."

Lu Yang breathed a sigh of relief. His opponent seemed quite friendly. He clasped his fists and asked politely, "Senior, who are you?"

The senior laughed three times before pacing out of the dense mist.

The senior had a clean, fair face and a square head—he was a piece of tofu.

As Senior Tofu drew closer, his speech grew faster and faster. "I am the Tofu Heavenly Venerable. This is everything I learned in my lifetime. The more tofu you eat, the faster your cultivation will rise. With a solid foundation, the ability to challenge those above your level, and beauties on both arms, reaching the pinnacle of the continent will be no problem..."

Lu Yang broke out in a cold sweat and abruptly opened his eyes. He sat up from the head of the bed and looked around in confusion. Everything was pitch-black and as silent as the grave. Only then did he relax.

"So it was a dream. Fortunately, it was only a dream."

Feeling the cold sweat chilling his back, Lu Yang remained shaken.

Yun Zhi slowly opened her eyes. A blue ray of light withdrew from Lu Yang's room, retracting from her fingertip.

"This way, he should cultivate even more diligently." Yun Zhi murmured to herself.

When her master had taught her, he had once said that appropriate pressure could be transformed into motivation, inspiring people to strive with all their might.

Yun Zhi herself was a successful example, so she felt her master's words made perfect sense. Thus, she had used a dream-entry spell to give Lu Yang a little pressure.

"The lines Elder Eighth provided are rather embarrassing. I wonder how he usually manages to say them."

Yun Zhi was good at seeking advice from others. Every step and line in the dream had been written by Elder Eighth, who had also guaranteed that it would work.

After some more time passed, Yun Zhi saw that Lu Yang could pinch the tofu effortlessly, toss it high into the air, and catch it steadily. He could even use the tofu as a sandbag, trading throws back and forth with the puppet.

The soft tofu seemed like a part of his body, controlled with perfect ease.

"Lifting something light as though it were heavy—you have achieved it. This stage is over."

Lu Yang smiled. He was no longer the person he had been before. As he continuously practiced pinching tofu, his restless heart had gradually calmed.

He had managed all this without any mental cultivation formula or incantation.

"What do I practice next?"

Lu Yang no longer pursued the same pace as his fellow disciples. He believed that the eldest senior sister must have had a reason for arranging things this way.

Yun Zhi rarely revealed a trace of a smile. "Consolidating your cultivation in the Qi Refining stage."

Lu Yang froze and pointed at himself. "The Qi Refining stage? Me?"

He did not know when he had become a Qi Refining cultivator. Did the books not say that drawing Qi into the body required guidance from a senior, instruction in a cultivation method, closing the five senses, and regulating the meridians before one could succeed?

Those with poor aptitude even needed pills as an aid.

He had met none of those conditions.

His eldest senior sister had never told him how to draw Qi into his body, nor taught him some astonishing immortal cultivation technique. He had never closed his five senses, instead using a sixth sense whose whereabouts he did not know. As for his meridians, he did not remember regulating them.

Disciples of the Ask Dao Sect did not need pills to draw Qi into their bodies. They were all geniuses selected from a thousand candidates. If they needed pills to help them enter the Qi Refining stage, they might as well withdraw from the Ask Dao Sect themselves.

Lu Yang believed he would not need pills either, but the question was: how had he become a Qi Refining cultivator?

"Three mornings ago." The eldest senior sister offered a hint.

Lu Yang suddenly remembered the morning three days ago.

He had risen very early that day. Facing the morning light, he had closed his eyes and pondered how he could possibly pinch the tofu.

As his thoughts grew deeper, he had gradually lost all perception of the things around him. It was as if he had transformed into a stream of rising, pure qi, drifting through heaven and earth. Then his consciousness had sunk and returned to his body, and everything had suddenly become clear, as though a warm current were flowing through his dantian.

That was also when he had successfully pinched the tofu.

He remembered that his eldest senior sister had not been present while he practiced pinching tofu. So she had actually been observing him from somewhere he did not know.

"So that feeling must have been drawing Qi into the body." Lu Yang murmured to himself, sinking into the memory.

That feeling had truly been wonderful, as though he were floating among the clouds, wrapped in warmth, so comfortable that he did not want to open his eyes.

Before he knew it, he had fulfilled his small wish: drawing Qi into his body and becoming a Qi Refining cultivator.