Goudanzi slowly tucked the sheet of paper back beneath his bedding, pulled the quilt over himself, and drew a long breath. Closing his eyes, he began mentally tracing the circulation route of the Flameheart Method.
If Goudanzi had only just transmigrated, even obtaining the complete Flameheart Method and memorizing every word would not have enabled him to practice it. He had not known the key to cultivating internal energy.
Now things were different. He knew the key. Though Great Strength Vajra Qigong was among the most rudimentary internal cultivation methods, it was still an orthodox one. Its initial steps were no different from those of other internal cultivation methods, and the essential principles were much the same.
The Flameheart Method was clearly a cut above Great Strength Vajra Qigong. In its depth and finer details, it might have surpassed it by several levels, but the essentials for getting started were not very different.
After carefully reviewing the Flameheart Method's entire circulation route and cultivation instructions in his mind, Goudanzi gained a rough understanding of it. This internal cultivation method differed from Great Strength Vajra Qigong in two respects. The first was its circulation route. The Flameheart Method's route was more than twice as complex, so completing a full circuit naturally took much longer. More importantly, the longer route demanded far more intricate control over his internal energy. With his current control, Goudanzi could manage no more than two circuits. The second difference was the way it absorbed the primal energy of heaven and earth. Internal cultivation, in essence, meant drawing that energy into one's body and assimilating it through special methods, turning it into one's own strength. That was its most fundamental principle. No matter how profound a method was, it could not escape that foundation. Great Strength Vajra Qigong worked this way, and so did the Flameheart Method. The difference was that Great Strength Vajra Qigong resembled a potbellied glutton with indigestion, swallowing everything in one gulp, edible or otherwise. Once it reached his belly, he could not digest it properly, and after a bout of vomiting and diarrhea, both the nourishing and the poisonous were left inside him, making the resulting energy impure and mixed. The Flameheart Method was different. From the initial absorption to refinement within the body, every stage had a clear purpose. It seemed to absorb only primal energy of a particular attribute, rejecting all others. Its circulation route was more complex precisely because digesting this single-attribute energy was far more difficult than processing the mixed energy obtained by indiscriminately gobbling everything down.
Flameheart, Flameheart... obviously, it just absorbs fire-attributed primal energy from heaven and earth and refines it!
Lying in bed, Goudanzi opened his eyes, which gleamed brilliantly in the darkness. Though the Flameheart Method is much more profound than Great Strength Vajra Qigong, it's clearly still an introductory method. Otherwise, a rookie like me couldn't possibly understand it. Wang Tianlei said he took it as spoils on the battlefield, which means he got it from someone he killed. Anyone he could kill couldn't have been all that skilled, which itself proves they couldn't have possessed some incredibly profound manual. Still, this really worked out in my favor. If the method were any more profound, I wouldn't understand it, and having it would do me no good. If it were any simpler, it wouldn't be much different from Great Strength Vajra Qigong. This level is just right!
At that thought, Goudanzi smiled. He suddenly remembered how, when he had attended school as a child in his previous life, his teachers had always liked making them set learning goals-goals they could reach if they put in the effort to jump a little higher. After he grew up, those so-called learning goals had become a joke in his eyes. Yet he had never expected that, after another turn of the wheel and another birth, those legendary goals he could reach with a little jump would gradually become reality.
Legend had it that cultivating internal energy strengthened the body and prolonged life. Back when he read martial arts novels in his previous life,
Wang Bo had believed the same. In this life, however, having cultivated internal energy himself, Goudanzi knew that at least half of those rumors were false.
Cultivating internal energy could indeed strengthen the body and prolong life, but only after one's external cultivation had reached full mastery of bone tempering. Otherwise, the more powerful one's internal energy became, the shorter one's life would be, because the body simply could not bear too much internal energy. It was like a vessel: once the liquid inside exceeded its capacity, it would overflow. If the vessel was sealed, it would rupture. The relationship between the body and internal energy was precisely that of a sealed vessel and its contents. Thus, to hold more internal energy, one had to strengthen the body. Otherwise, as that energy increased, all that awaited was a bang as the body exploded.
The Flameheart Method produced orthodox, pure fire-attributed internal energy, so it naturally placed greater demands on the body's meridians than Great Strength Vajra Qigong did.
It was therefore easy to imagine that progress would be slower than with Great Strength Vajra Qigong. Before that, however, Goudanzi's task was not to absorb fire-attributed primal energy from heaven and earth, but to convert all the impure, mixed internal energy he had cultivated through Great Strength Vajra Qigong into fire-attributed Flameheart Inner Qi.
Once he truly understood how internal energy cultivation worked, beneath his happiness, Goudanzi felt an even stronger trace of worry.
All I've obtained are the most rudimentary internal cultivation and body-tempering methods, yet even from those, I can deduce what sort of power I'll possess in the near future. What about people with more profound internal cultivation and body-tempering methods? Just how strong could they become? Damn, this world really is frightening. Right now, I'm nothing but a country bumpkin holed up in a tiny mountain village. A man has but one lifetime, as grass and trees have but one autumn. Unless I really activate that legendary protagonist mode and stumble into one extraordinary encounter after another, I'd better take it easy!
Staying holed up in this little mountain village isn't a solution. The old man wants me to become an apprentice. Perhaps that's an opportunity. Green Ram Market... heh, I really am looking forward to it!
As he lay in bed thinking about Green Ram Market, someone in Green Ram Market was likewise thinking about this little mountain village.
Green Ram Market was a small town on the outermost edge of the Vast Cang Mountains in Cloud Province, Great Jin. Though remote, it was prosperous, because it offered the most convenient passage into the Vast Cang Mountains and served as a trading point between the Hundred Thousand Mountains and Cloud Province.
Cloud Province was one of the most outlying of Great Jin's thirteen provinces, while the Vast Cang Mountains formed the natural boundary between Great Jin and Northern Yuan.
Yet despite the centuries-long confrontation between Great Jin and Northern Yuan, not a single war had taken place in the Vast Cang Mountains. The main reason was that the range stretched for ten thousand li and was known as the Hundred Thousand Mountains. Not only did its snakes, insects, and savage beasts number as thickly as hairs on an ox, but it even harbored powerful Demon Beasts that human strength simply could not contend with. If someone claimed that a supreme expert could rely on extraordinary personal strength to cross the Vast Cang Mountains from Great Jin into Northern Yuan, the odds might have been slim, but it was not impossible. If someone claimed they could lead tens of thousands of soldiers across, however, that was a joke.
Thus, neither Great Jin nor Northern Yuan established fortresses or military installations along the edges of the Vast Cang Mountains. Some merchants, however, took a keen interest in the pelts, beast cores, and medicinal herbs produced there. That was what made the remote Green Ram Market prosperous.
Prosperous though it was, Green Ram Market was still only a small town, and not a particularly large one. Its four broadest streets, two running in each direction, divided the town into a pattern resembling the character 井. Naturally, the busiest district lay at the center of that grid, where all the major trading warehouses clustered-the so-called Well-Center Ward. Incidentally, this grid layout was characteristic of every small town in Cloud Province, Great Jin. Aside from the central Well-Center Ward, the town had two entrances, one east and one west. Directly north stood the government offices, while directly south were small workshops and shops. The town's trading warehouses and inns were concentrated in the northeastern district, close to the entrance into the Vast Cang Mountains. The southeastern district housed the town's prominent figures and could be called its wealthy residential quarter. Small peddlers and ordinary townsfolk lived in the northwest. The southwestern district, like the government offices to the north, was off-limits. That was the Black Dragon Society's territory.
The Black Dragon Society was a medium-sized society in Cloud Province, Great Jin. It controlled more than a dozen small market towns, including Green Ram Market, and held sway over their land and water transport terminals. Whether people shipped goods out or brought them in, they had to pay the Black Dragon Society a considerable fee. This was one of its principal sources of income.
The societies in this world were not entirely criminal organizations. In a sense, they were monopolies that relied on formidable strength to control productive resources-economic entities with an underworld character. Their main income did not come from collecting protection money or chasing debts, as Goudanzi had seen on television in his previous life. Those were jobs for petty thugs.
What they did was control the economic lifeblood of an entire area. Needed to transport your goods by water? You needed boats, didn't you? Docks? Workers to load and unload? All of those were in their hands. As for goods brought out of the Vast Cang Mountains, outside merchants could not simply buy whatever they wanted. Generally, when little mountain villages like Goudanzi's brought their year's hunting haul to Green Ram Market, they could sell most of it only to the trading houses and local merchants. Those merchants were largely connected to the Black Dragon Society by a thousand tangled threads; many were members themselves. The largest trading warehouses in Green Ram Market were also in the society's hands. Thus, the Black Dragon Society was the town's true ruler. In Goudanzi's village, for instance, the harvest had indeed increased greatly after Wang Tianlei arrived. Yet once they reached Green Ram Market, they still had to sell their goods to these local merchants with their countless ties to the Black Dragon Society. They merely had a little more room to bargain now. Those were the unwritten rules, accepted by everyone. As for the government, it was like the chairman of a large company: it needed to do nothing except collect taxes when the time came.
Thus, although the Black Dragon Society behaved somewhat arrogantly, it strictly observed the boundaries respected by all societies in the martial world and had always coexisted peacefully with the government offices. More than peacefully, in fact: there was even a hint of the army-and-people bond, close as fish and water. Put plainly, they were wolves and jackals working hand in glove.
This was not hard to understand. The government offices in Green Ram Market had only a handful of people, and their chief was replaced every few years. To manage the town properly and avoid trouble, they still needed help from local powers like the Black Dragon Society. Such arrangements existed throughout Cloud Province and even elsewhere in Great Jin. They could be called the unwritten rules of Great Jin's entire officialdom. Small market towns relied on grassroots societies like the Black Dragon Society, while large cities relied on renowned martial sects. As for Great Jin's handful of great and prestigious sects, they maintained close ties with the imperial family and the powerful aristocratic clans.
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