The Difficulty of Cultivation

Han Li slowly drew the stream of energy in his meridians back into his Dantian. This was the seventh consecutive Greater Celestial Circuit he had completed today. He knew his body had reached the limit of what it could bear. If he attempted another Greater Celestial Circuit, his meridians would most likely rupture again, and he would once more taste what it was like to wish for death. At the mere thought of the pain of his meridians tearing apart strand by strand, Han Li, bold as he usually was, could not stop beads of cold sweat from breaking out on his back.

More than half a year had passed since Han Li joined the sect, and the formal entrance examination for Registered Disciples had ended over two months ago.

Only a small portion of the Registered Disciples had been able to formally join the inner sect. Most of those examined had failed to pass, and those who failed had no choice but to shoulder their bundles and descend the mountain to become outer disciples.

Most of the boys who failed were assigned to the Treasure Gathering Hall or the Flying Bird Hall. The more outstanding among them would probably receive further training, giving them a chance to be recruited into the Outer Blade Hall, where the treatment was better. Of course, the Four Seas Hall offered the best treatment in the outer sect, but unfortunately it recruited only established figures of the martial world. Anyone without a trick or two worth showing off could forget about getting in, let alone these boys who still smelled of their mothers' milk.

Even now, whenever Han Li thought about what the other Registered Disciples had been tested on two months ago, he could not help feeling a little frightened.

They had to run a lap around the Rosy Cloud Mountain Range, which stretched for more than ten li, then immediately form teams and fight one another in a sparsely populated mountain forest. Finally, they had to withstand a certain number of moves under the frenzied attacks of senior brothers with formidable martial skills. All these tests made Han Li feel a little schadenfreude despite himself.

Han Li and Zhang Tie had not taken those terrifying tests. Just as Doctor Mo himself had said, he had only tested their progress in cultivating that Mnemonic. But this hurdle was not as easy to clear as Han Li had imagined. Even now, Han Li remembered the circumstances of his cultivation at the time with perfect clarity.

According to Doctor Mo, this nameless Mnemonic was divided into several levels, and Han Li and Zhang Tie had received only the cultivation method for the first. In other words, as long as they made progress in cultivating the first level of the Mnemonic within six months, Doctor Mo would consider them to have passed. They could then become his formal disciples and receive the same favorable treatment as the Seven Mysteries Sect's other inner disciples.

After Han Li learned from others about the difference in treatment between inner and outer disciples, he completely abandoned his idea of muddling through the six months, becoming an outer disciple, and then going home. To him at the time, everything else seemed less important than drawing more silver from the Seven Mysteries Sect and having it sent home. He had suffered enough from poverty when he lived at home to fear it, and he knew that for every extra bit of silver he received, his parents, brothers, and sisters could live a little better.

After receiving the Mnemonic from Doctor Mo, Han Li stayed in his room and stopped going out. He began cultivating day and night, spending every moment he could spare on it. Since Doctor Mo had given them no guidance whatsoever, Han Li could only find his own way, using the other boys' methods of cultivating the Seven Mysteries Sect's basic internal art, the Righteous Yang Art, as a reference to work out a cultivation method for himself.

After three months of painstaking cultivation by this method, Han Li was stunned to discover that his progress with the Mnemonic was frighteningly slow. Even after exerting the strength of nine oxen and two tigers, he could produce only a faint, slightly cool stream of energy inside his body. It was so subtle that it seemed to flicker in and out of existence; without careful internal observation, he could not detect it at all.

This is probably the internal True Qi the instructors spoke of, isn't it? Han Li naturally took it for granted.

But the other boys cultivating the Seven Mysteries Sect's Righteous Yang Art said that the True Qi they produced was a very distinct, warm current of heat, while what he produced was a cool current. The difference between the effects of circulating the two was even greater.

After using the True Qi of the Righteous Yang Art within them, the other boys could already break a young tree as thick as a bowl with one punch and leap more than a zhang into the air. Han Li, on the other hand, was hardly any different after circulating his strange True Qi than before. The only difference was that he seemed much more energetic than before, and his appetite was much better than it had been before he came up the mountain. But what use was that? Watching the other boys who had come up the mountain with him display their great prowess before his eyes, Han Li grew dejected.

This unexpected discovery nearly made Han Li abandon the efforts he had put in over the past few months. He believed his aptitude was too poor for him to pass Doctor Mo's examination in the time remaining, and he had even made plans to descend the mountain.

Then one day, Han Li happened to learn from Zhang Tie, who was cultivating alongside him, that Zhang Tie had experienced no change whatsoever in his body since he began cultivating the Mnemonic. It had had no effect at all, and unlike Han Li, he had not produced even a trace of True Qi.

Learning this by chance restored some of the confidence Han Li had lost, and for the rest of the time, he resumed his former arduous cultivation.

No, he worked even harder, even more frantically than before.

Han Li now spent every quarter of an hour sitting in meditation and cultivating. When he went to bed at night, he even began maintaining his cultivation posture, hoping to gain a little more from his practice. Of course, this frantic approach died an early death after only a few days. He was not getting enough sleep and could not maintain his cultivation efficiency during the day.

What puzzled Han Li was that, ever since Doctor Mo taught the two of them the Mnemonic, he had paid them no attention. He never asked about their progress or any problems they encountered in cultivation, as though he had completely forgotten they existed.

Every day, Doctor Mo spent the entire day bent over that book with three black characters on its cover, studying it so diligently that one might think there really was a beauty like jade and a house of gold to be found within its pages. At first, Han Li and Zhang Tie even thought Doctor Mo no longer intended to be a physician who saved lives and tended the injured, and was studying hard to take the scholar's examination instead. Later, after the two learned to read, they recognized the three characters as "Longevity Scripture." It was a book about cultivating one's character and prolonging one's life.

Only then did the two suddenly understand that Doctor Mo did not want to take the scholar's examination. He wanted to be like the turtles in the river, growing old without dying and living for thousands upon thousands of years.