After sensing around inside his own body, Zhang Xiaohua could not help but feel like crying without tears. This was too much bullying. It was bad enough that his aptitude was poor and he could not, as described in the Carefree Heart Sutra, sense the inexhaustible Primordial Qi between heaven and earth. Yet after he had painstakingly worked at it for so long and finally managed Qi Introduction today, how could that wisp of qi suddenly vanish?
Unfortunately, Zhang Xiaohua had not grown another pair of eyes inside his body, so naturally he had no way to search for it. All he could do was try again.
With his first success as experience, sensing it afterward became familiar territory. Before long, Zhang Xiaohua found another wisp of qi. It likewise descended from above, and at his pull, it switched allegiance and threw itself into Zhang Xiaohua's embrace. Yet the gates of a noble house ran as deep as the sea; once it entered Zhang Xiaohua's body, it vanished without a trace.
After several such attempts, Zhang Xiaohua no longer felt aggrieved. Primordial Qi outside his body was not his, but once he drew it into his body, it bore the Zhang name. Who cared where it went? So long as it did not escape again, he would discover it someday. Besides, the cultivation method in the Carefree Heart Sutra had not said how qi emerged in the first place. Watching He Tianshu and the others practice, he had never heard that internal energy could run out on its own either.
Could it be that he had "released" it himself?
Strangely enough, Zhang Xiaohua simply sat cross-legged on the ridge of the medicinal field and drew quite a bit of Primordial Qi into his body over the course of an afternoon.