After playing with the pistols, Li Xingkong had his fill of shooting, then tried his hand at the rifles.
Rifles were more powerful than ordinary pistols, but most of them didn't leave Li Xingkong as awestruck as his first time shooting the Desert Eagle.
Whether they were manually or automatically loaded, Li Xingkong had a blast trying them all. Deep down, everyone had a destructive urge that could suddenly make their hands itch when they encountered the right thing in the right setting. It was like walking through a field of rapeseed flowers and finding a supreme divine weapon-a three-foot wooden sword-and wanting nothing more than to sweep away ten miles of flowers.
Li Xingkong felt the same way when he first got his hands on a gun. He wanted to stuff himself into the barrel and shoot himself out.
Li Xingkong played for nearly two hours. If he hadn't been utterly exhausted, he still wouldn't have wanted to leave. Only when he'd had his fill and was too tired to lift his arms did he finally stop.
By the time he was ready to head back, it was already midnight. He drove alone along the road, the night sky overhead filled with stars.
The sky had always been just as vast, but it had been out of reach. Li Xingkong could never have touched its edges in his lifetime, but things were different now.
Now the sky lay beneath his gaze. Before long, it would become his garden.
Guided by the stars, Li Xingkong returned to his farm. After a day of fun, he had released all the hardship that had built up over the past year.
Before the Spiritual Qi had been created, he had worried about when he could begin Qi Refining.
The instability of the experiments, the system's unorthodox methods, and the seemingly unreliable synthesis plans had all posed risks to Li Xingkong. There had also been no way to predict when they would be completed, and he alone had to bear all the consequences.
If he had never glimpsed the world of immortal cultivation, his current life might have been all he pursued for the rest of his life. But he had caught sight of the tail of immortal cultivation and gained the slightest chance at it.
If he lived out his life so uneventfully, he would never forgive himself, even in old age.
Li Xingkong slept soundly that night. It had been a long time since he had slept so comfortably.
In his sleep, he didn't even feel time passing. It seemed as though he had only closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again, it was already the next morning.
Li Xingkong stretched, then began communicating with the system.
"I should be able to start Qi Refining now, right? When do we begin?"
"You're awfully eager today."
The system hadn't seen Li Xingkong behave like this in a long time. Ever since the experiments began and the materials had failed to appear for so long, it had rarely seen him this eager.
"The first actual step of Qi Refining is to establish a connection with the particle of Spiritual Qi inside you."
Without further delay, the system immediately began explaining things to Li Xingkong.
"The Spiritual Qi is already inside your body. The first thing you need to do is sense it, then activate it."
The theory was simple: sense the Spiritual Qi. But compared to Li Xingkong's body, the particle was smaller than one of his cells. Sensing a structure so tiny was genuinely difficult.
"The most important thing in sensing Spiritual Qi is consciousness," the system continued.
"Once Spiritual Qi has been created, it affects a person's consciousness. Of course, this particle was made for you, so it will be one hundred percent compatible with your consciousness. You need to calm your mind and enter a meditative state, then use your consciousness to connect with it. Imagine your consciousness as a net and use it to sift through your body. If your consciousness is focused enough, you should be able to sense it."
Under the system's guidance, Li Xingkong sat down, closed his eyes, and began sending his consciousness through his body.
In his perception, his consciousness seemed to weave itself into a great net, sifting downward from the top of his head.
Controlling his own consciousness was a prerequisite for controlling his entire body, and Li Xingkong had been capable of that for a long time.
He controlled his consciousness as it sifted downward from his head. As it traveled through every nerve and every organ, he could sense the state of each corresponding part of his body. It continued downward until it reached his chest, where Li Xingkong sensed something amiss.
A strange object seemed to appear before his consciousness, blocking its path.
The sensation wasn't imaginary. To his consciousness, there really was something like a stone occupying his chest, yet physically, it had no effect on his body whatsoever.
Li Xingkong found it strange. He swept his consciousness through his body again, this time from bottom to top, but it still got stuck in the same place.
"Could this be the Spiritual Qi?"
Li Xingkong was skeptical. His consciousness circled the area several times, but it couldn't enter.
"When you sense an area of your body that you can't perceive, that's the Spiritual Qi."
The system's explanation came at just the right time. "You can activate Spiritual Qi with a specific consciousness wave. Simply put, the Spiritual Qi is locked right now, and you need a key to unlock it."
"And since I handcrafted this particle of Spiritual Qi, you only need to form the two characters for 'system' with your consciousness to unlock it."
After hearing the system's words, Li Xingkong formed a clear image of the two characters for "system" in his consciousness, then pressed it against the area containing the Spiritual Qi.
This time, Li Xingkong wasn't blocked. His consciousness passed through the previous barrier and directly sensed the Spiritual Qi's presence.
He couldn't quite describe the feeling. It was as though he had gained an extra natural organ, like his hands and feet, something he had possessed since birth. He felt that he had gained complete control over the particle of Spiritual Qi.
Under the control of his consciousness, the Spiritual Qi began traveling throughout his body. Because it was so tiny, the gaps between cells were as vast to it as the distance between Earth and the moon. A cell membrane was nothing more than an enormous mesh structure to it, with enough room for it to pass through.
After Li Xingkong opened his eyes, the Spiritual Qi moved directly to wherever he looked. It wasn't limited to the inside of his body.
The sensation of having gained a strange new organ was extraordinary. The Spiritual Qi had clearly reached the roof he was looking at, yet Li Xingkong could still sense its presence. This was a very unusual sensation for a human: human perception depended entirely on signals transmitted through the nervous system, and sensing an organ from a distance like this was definitely not something a human could do.
But the Spiritual Qi had done it.
Li Xingkong understood how important Spiritual Qi was to cultivation. It was like giving himself an extremely convenient hand-it could easily reach and manipulate places he couldn't otherwise, and it even gave him a way to observe himself on an extremely microscopic scale.
Even without the path of immortal cultivation provided by the system, Li Xingkong could think of many uses for Spiritual Qi: using it to create bone marrow stem cells within his body, directly achieving a physical form of pseudo-immortality; using it to stitch wounds and reconstruct his torso; and even regrowing severed limbs.
And for immortal cultivation, Spiritual Qi's most important function was that it could adjust the body to achieve the effects of Qi Refining.
As Li Xingkong played tirelessly with the Spiritual Qi, the system grew a little impatient watching him.
Although getting Spiritual Qi for the first time was like receiving a new toy, if Li Xingkong kept playing with it like this, the whole day would probably be gone.