Fire in the Scroll
For the next half month, Long Tian poured all his spare time into the copied scroll.
During classes in the daytime, he listened and committed things to memory, concentrating harder than ever. At lunch and after evening classes, he locked his door and spread the copy out on the desk, working through the densely packed, fly-head-sized characters word by word, sentence by sentence. Chen Hao dealt with Zhao Xiaopang's visits a few times, saying that Long Tian was in secluded cultivation and couldn't be disturbed. Zhao Xiaopang believed him and slipped two pieces of candy through the crack in the door every other day.
The copy was more detailed than Long Tian had expected. The first half contained a list of names and a timeline of places and dates; he skimmed it and set it aside. The second half contained experimental records and a detailed breakdown of the Fusion Technique, densely filling dozens of pages. The signature of the person in charge of the experiments had been blotted out with ink, but the descriptions between the lines gave Long Tian an increasingly clear picture of the method.
The core of the Fusion Technique was actually quite simple: forcibly implant the origin light core of an external Martial Soul into the recipient's dantian, then use external force to splice the Soul Power circuits of the two Martial Souls into a new circulatory system. The problem was that everyone's meridians ran differently, and their Martial Soul attributes differed as well, causing extensive rejection during the splicing. The failure rate recorded in the experiments was close to ninety percent, and most of the ten percent who succeeded suffered various aftereffects-atrophied meridians, disordered Soul Power, and mental derangement.
But one passage in the copy made Long Tian read it more than a dozen times. It recorded a case of accidental success: while test subjects twelve and fifteen were undergoing fusion, the rejection suddenly stopped. The two Martial Souls spontaneously found a point of balance in the recipient's dantian, like two opposing currents suddenly meeting to form a swirling eddy. The person in charge of the experiment had written in the record: "Presumably related to the recipient having cultivated some kind of yin-yang balancing technique for a long time before the fusion." A note in a different hand followed: "This case cannot be replicated. The recipient's meridians differ from those of ordinary people. Abandon."
Long Tian closed the copy, leaned back in his chair, and went over the passage again from beginning to end. It said that the direction he had taken was right-cultivating yin-yang balance was itself the foundation for the Fusion Technique's success. He hadn't taken the wrong road; he just hadn't gone far enough along it.
He spread the copy open again and turned to the back, where several meridian diagrams showed the flow of Soul Power and the connection points during fusion. He compared them with his father's incomplete scroll of drawings. The area his father had circled in vermilion was clearly labeled "dantian confluence" in the copy's diagrams, and it was precisely there that the two streams of Soul Power had found a balanced vortex center.
Long Tian laid the two scrolls together and traced a complete meridian diagram by lamplight. He memorized the location of the confluence, then closed his eyes, sank into his dantian, and activated all three Soul Rings. The gates of the first, second, and Third Soul Rings opened at once-light and dark Qi surged like a tide toward the marked point at the center of his dantian. For the first time, he tried to channel all three streams of Qi undergoing refinement into the same confluence point at once. The three streams circled and collided at the confluence, sending out violent, chaotic vibrations.
Pain. The walls of his meridians were stretched almost to splitting. But Long Tian gritted his teeth and held steady, focusing his mind on the vortex center at the heart of the confluence-like a whirlpool in water, as long as he kept it spinning, incoming currents would be swept into the same rotating force. He tried to create a miniature center of rotation deep in his dantian, letting the three streams of refined light and dark Qi slowly circle around it.
One revolution, two... On the third, the vortex began to stabilize. The light and dark Qi no longer crashed wildly into each other, instead forming a slowly revolving Chaos Halo around the vortex center. Gold and black intertwined along its edges, while its center was a faint grayish white, like the sky before dawn. After about ten breaths, the Chaos Halo slowly dispersed, but Long Tian could feel that it faded more slowly than any previous result of his refining—it remained in his dantian for nearly twice as long.
He opened his eyes, his palms slightly damp with sweat, but the corners of his mouth curved.
Progress.
After that, he practiced this every night. The vortex center gradually lasted longer, from the initial ten breaths to half the time it took to drink a cup of tea, then a full cup, and the fusion of light and dark grew more stable by the day. The Chaos Halo in his dantian lasted longer and longer, and even the lingering traces it left behind began to circulate on their own instead of dissipating at once. On the tenth night, Long Tian happened to discover something while meditating—after the Chaos Halo had completely dispersed, a tiny trace of lingering chaos in his dantian had, at some point, condensed into an exceedingly small gray point of light beside the confluence, floating there quietly.
He reached out and probed the point of light with his Soul Power. It felt mild, neither cold nor hot, like a shell shed after light and dark Qi had fused completely. It floated there, consuming almost no Soul Power, steady as a speck of dust settled in a corner of his dantian.
Long Tian didn't know what it was, but he couldn't help feeling it had something to do with the "Return to Origin" step later in the Fusion Technique, which had been washed away by water. He kept the gray point of light in place and continued cultivating the vortex center, letting more lingering traces of chaos settle and gather around it.
After half a month, the point of light had nearly doubled in size, growing from a speck of dust into a gray bead the size of a grain of rice. It floated beneath the confluence at the very center of his dantian. Three Soul Rings slowly revolved around it, and the Chaos Halo occasionally spilled out from the confluence, some of its lingering traces silently absorbed by the bead.
On the very night Long Tian committed all the meridian diagrams in the copy to memory, he felt a familiar pulse in his dantian-the limit for the fourth Soul Ring had arrived.
He sat on the edge of his bed, quietly sensing the pulse. All three Soul Rings in his dantian lit up at once, the Chaos Halo revolved steadily, and the gray bead hung quietly in the center. He was only one final step away from breaking through to four rings, but he had no suitable Soul Beast at hand. For the time being, he suppressed his eagerness and continued devoting himself to refining and honing the vortex center.
He reckoned he had nearly a year before he turned fourteen. Before reaching five rings, he had to make a trip to the foundation level beneath the old well. Even if he couldn't open the iron door, he had to at least locate it, get a clear look at the terrain, and determine where the passage led. He had already memorized the address included in the copy: the southern section of the old city's foundation level was about the time it took to drink a cup of tea on foot from the fork in the passage from the well, to the southwest.
He rolled the copy up again and put it under the bed, then put out the lamp and lay down. In the darkness, he felt for the gray bead in his dantian. It hung there quietly, cool yet gentle, like a newly formed core, waiting to be wrapped and nourished by more refined power until it grew into what it was meant to become.
He turned over to face the wall and closed his eyes.
Outside the window, the autumn moon hung above the tip of an old cypress, casting the tree's shadow against the gray wall of the old archives building. Behind that gray wall, the iron door was locked and the restrictions were still in operation. The wooden box had left an empty space in the cabinet-and no one had noticed. At least so far, no one had come to fill that gap.