Refining Qi into Essence

A wave of exhaustion washed over him. He needed to sleep first.

It had rained last night, and he had gone forty hours without sleep. With the rain stopped, he could catch a brief respite.

He closed his eyes. He didn't know how long had passed when Lu Zhao's consciousness plunged into the spiritual world as if in free fall.

Endless darkness stretched before him. It felt as though he stood in a mud pit, and a constant stream of noise crowded into his ears.

Lu Zhao walked forward. He could just make out land ahead, but he had been walking for over a decade and had never reached the other shore.

He simply couldn't stop. If he did, he would hear even more muttering and become trapped in the unconscious thoughts all living beings emitted in their sleep.

Or he would become trapped in the lingering memories of the Fate Bone's previous owners.

Tap!

Lu Zhao suddenly felt the mud vanish beneath his feet, replaced by the solid sensation of stepping onto a stone floor of some kind.

He seemed to have crossed the spiritual quagmire and reached the far shore he had gazed at for over a decade.

His surroundings fell silent. For the first time in twelve years, his ears knew peace.

Behind him, the resonant sound of a great bell suddenly drifted through the air.

Clang! Clang! Clang!

Lu Zhao spun around. The dark spiritual quagmire was gone, replaced by a magnificent palace with carved beams and painted rafters.

Courtiers in ceremonial robes and headdresses knelt outside the hall. Inside, white gauze and vermilion jade hung in curtains inscribed with three thousand Daoist scriptures.

A figure sat indistinctly upon the high throne, with a bristling beard, long eyebrows, and the features of a dragon.

"The three flowers gathered at the crown are but an illusion; the clouds beneath one's feet are no more real."

Chapter 5: Refining Qi into Essence

Clouds and mist swept past, and everything dissolved into nothingness once more.

Only an old Daoist priest with white eyebrows remained. He turned back and fixed his gaze on Lu Zhao, smiling warmly as he said, "Without gathering the three flowers, how could one know they are an illusion? Without riding the clouds, how could one know they are not real?"

"I am Shao Yuanjie. Greetings, layman."

A Daoist priest?

Lu Zhao's consciousness gradually cleared. Beneath his feet was a clear, deep ink-black expanse, and the surroundings were empty. An old Daoist priest with an immortal bearing stood at the center.

He asked, "Where is this?"

The old priest answered, "Buddhists call it the other shore; Daoists call it Primordial Unity. In the past five hundred years, you are the only one to have come here."

Lu Zhao asked in return, "Then what does that make you?"

The old priest counted on his fingers and stroked his long beard as he answered, "I lived during the Jiajing reign of the Great Ming. I cultivated Refining Qi into Spirit and came here in search of immortality. Five hundred years have passed since then. I was the only one to come before, five hundred years ago, and you are the only one to come after, five hundred years later."

He then pointed behind Lu Zhao. Following his gesture, Lu Zhao saw starlight flickering in and out of view across a pitch-black expanse.

"In this world, few cultivate the spirit, and fewer still can enter the world of the Inner Landscape. You alone have stepped into Primordial Unity."

Lu Zhao understood. This was still the spiritual world.

He had sought out many spiritual-type instructors and asked them about it. A case like his was relatively rare, and there was currently no solution. He could only continue developing his vitality and raising his realm.

At the first rank, a spiritual-type transcendent condensed a consciousness body, taking on their real appearance in the spiritual world. This was called the Outer Form.

At the second rank, they could build on that foundation and simulate their internal organs in the spiritual world. This was called the Inner Form.

A third-rank spiritual transcendent could construct an Inner Landscape and use it to resist external spiritual contamination.

But he made no further move and asked no questions. He simply stood there, quietly watching the old priest.

Everyone and everything in the spiritual world was illusory.

Spiritual-type transcendents who explored the spiritual world too deeply would eventually go mad, because they became completely immersed in a world of their own making, their perceptions utterly distorted.

This could be the old priest's Inner Landscape, or it could be a hallucination generated from his own perceptions.

Lu Zhao leaned toward the latter.

He had once been affected by Li Shaoqing. Lu Zhao knew everything Li Dongxue liked and disliked and could predict her every move. After he turned sixteen, it became one-sided mind reading.

At its worst, Lu Zhao would have the same dreams as her.

It was a kind of spiritual overflow. The side effect for Lu Zhao was that he became irritable whenever he couldn't sense Li Dongxue's presence.

His spiritual power also kept leaking away like air from a ball.

After Lu Zhao was admitted to the Imperial Capital, he took his instructor's advice and deliberately cut off contact. It was good for both of them: Li Dongxue retained her right to privacy, while Lu Zhao's mental state would also become more stable.

Around the summer after his second year, Lu Zhao finally broke free of the spiritual overflow. His progress in the spiritual field then advanced by leaps and bounds, and he succeeded in becoming the top student in his department.

The most effective way to deal with a hallucination was not to deny it, but to watch it quietly.

A person could not prove their own existence, and the mind could not prove itself to a hallucination either. A hallucination was ultimately false, and the more it made up, the more likely it was to reveal a flaw.

Seeing that Lu Zhao had not reacted for a long time, the old priest asked, "Layman, you don't seem surprised at all?"

Lu Zhao shook his head.

"Nothing you wish to ask, either?"

Lu Zhao shook his head again.

"You're right to be wary, layman. I was being presumptuous."

Still wearing a kindly smile, the old priest took a blue-green book from his sleeve and offered it to Lu Zhao.

[Refining Essence into Qi: Breathing Chapter]

Lu Zhao didn't take it. The scene before him began to blur until he was plunged into darkness. Rain reached his ears, and the stench of cigarette butts filled his nose.

His consciousness returned to his body. It was raining outside again.

Lu Zhao glanced at the alarm clock beside his bed. It was 5:10.

"Five hours of sleep. Pretty good."

Normally, he could sleep only two and a half hours a day. If not for a transcendent's physical constitution and the inhuman willpower of a spiritual type, Lu Zhao might have died suddenly long ago.

He sat halfway up and lit a cigarette, recalling the hallucination in the spiritual world.

"Mind and breath depend on one another, spirit returns to the void, and form returns to nature."

A memory that was not his suddenly surfaced. It concerned Refining Qi into Essence, and Lu Zhao instinctively recited the formula.

His body also began to move as if some mechanism had been activated, and a stream of qi circulated through his meridians.

He focused his mind on his dantian, breathing softly as mind and breath merged.

He visualized qi pouring into his dantian like white light, then becoming white qi that traveled throughout his body.

Lu Zhao's breathing abruptly changed. With every breath, he could feel a stream of qi circulating through his body before finally gathering in his abdomen.

Only when his head spun and a fierce hunger surged through him did Lu Zhao stop.

He braced himself against the table to keep from falling, then opened the refrigerator, grabbed the vitality supplement with three hundred milliliters left in it, and gulped it down.

That still wasn't enough, so Lu Zhao had to open a new bottle. At first he took only a hundred milliliters, but then he simply drained the whole bottle.

Normally, if he didn't exercise, a hundred milliliters was enough for a day. Now, even after five hundred milliliters, his stomach didn't feel full.

Only after drinking three bottles in a row did the hunger in his body begin to fade, and his brain could finally start thinking again.

Lu Zhao pinched himself. Pain was the hardest sensation to hallucinate.

There were also tangible changes to his body, and the increase in vitality was beyond what a hallucination could simulate. In this respect, at least, Lu Zhao could still tell illusion from reality.

Yet this was beyond his understanding. An old Daoist priest who had lived for hundreds of years in the spiritual world was unheard of.

Lu Zhao's thoughts raced. No longer dwelling on the old priest's existence, he began examining the changes in himself. "I drank three bottles and took in at least thirty thousand kilocalories without feeling full. This cultivation method is real, and that old priest might be real too."

"But I never even read the cultivation method. Did the old priest use an empowerment on me?"

The essence of life was eating, digestion, and excretion.

There were two important factors in vitality development: the calorie conversion rate and how many kilocalories were needed for one point of vitality. With every point of vitality gained, the conversion rate dropped and the total calorie requirement rose.

The first rank was 10-50 points, the second was 50-200, and the third was 200-600.

Life Development

Lu Zhao's thirty-five points of vitality placed him at the first rank. Ordinary food could no longer be used for Life Development; it could only sustain his metabolism.

At that thought, Lu Zhao rummaged through a drawer and pulled out a palm-sized blood analyzer.

It was similar to a blood glucose meter. He used a needle to draw a drop of blood, then waited five minutes to obtain his vitality reading.

[Vitality: 35.5]

"It went up by 0.1."

Lu Zhao's eyes widened, and even his breathing grew heavy.

Maintaining daily metabolism was simple. In particular, with modern material abundance, simply replenishing calories was easy.

But developing vitality depended on the conversion rate-the rate at which energy was converted.

Lu Zhao was considered exceptionally talented, but resources limited him. Taking only low-grade vitality supplements, he needed a hundred days to gain one point.

Now that he had a cultivation method, he was no longer limited by meager resources.

As long as he gained 0.1 every day, he could reach forty points of vitality in just over a month, and another hundred days would bring him to fifty.

Once he entered the second rank of transcendence, he would have the right to take a job elsewhere, leaving the Chen family's sphere of influence with his credentials and accomplishments.

There was nothing in the world that Life Development couldn't solve. If there was, it could only be something that needed to be overthrown with transcendent power.

The fastest genius at Life Development in the Yan Federation's recorded history had gained 0.1 points a day when he was at thirty points of vitality.

That man was Wang Shouzheng. He had graduated from the Imperial Capital thirty years ago, taken charge of the Hall of Martial Virtue as its chief five years ago, and been granted the title of Heavenly Marquis.

And my rate while taking low-grade vitality supplements is the same as the chief's.

Lu Zhao lit another cigarette and took a moment to calm down. The hand holding it trembled slightly without his noticing.

Windfalls didn't fall from the sky, but he had already run out of options.