Book 3: Chapter 24: Core
While Sen hadn’t expected to reach core formation as fast as he did, he had done a little preparation. He’d quizzed Lo Meifeng about her experience with it. While she had added a ton of disclaimers about how everyone’s core advancement was different, there were some features that held true. While the process would start on its own, Sen couldn’t expect it to finish on its own. Much like forming liquid qi, he needed to do his part to condense the liquid qi until it solidified. Of course, he’d never been expecting to contend with liquified heavenly qi or the mind-numbing amount of shadow qi that was inundating his dantian. Still, the prospect of utter failure helped to keep his mind focused on the task at hand. Reaching out with his will, he seized all of the liquid qi and the shadow in his dantian, and he bore down on it.
It was so much more difficult than working with environmental qi. The liquid qi sought any fissure, any crack in his attention, and sprayed out of his grasp, forcing him to start over and gather the qi again. Sen did everything in his power to narrow his attention and make the pressure he exerted a sphere of perfect force. As he slowly increased the pressure, he could see that strange things were happening. Strange things were at the very bottom of his list of desirable outcomes during core formation. While the environmental liquid qi compressed smoothly, the liquid heavenly qi rose to the surface, like a shimmering sphere of liquid around the slowly condensing environmental liquid qi. On top of that, the shadow qi was swirling around the core like some of thick, smoky ghost. It was unnerving to witness and to feel. That haze of shadow qi made everything inside of it feel oddly insubstantial and spongy. On the one hand, Sen knew that the core forming beneath that haze wasn’t actually spongy, but the very idea of it frightened him. A spongy core was an invitation to disaster because it would never protect the nascent soul that would develop inside of it.
While those thoughts flitted across the surface of his mind, the rest of his attention was bent toward the almost impossible task of compressing that liquid qi into a core. Sen didn’t know how much time was passing in the outside world. There had been a couple of moments when he thought he sensed surges of qi from outside of him somewhere, but he simply didn’t have the mental space to deal with that information. He had to stay focused on the task at hand. Even as he had that thought, though, he knew it wasn’t enough. Forming a core wasn’t just a mechanical process. If it was, more people would succeed at it.
Core formation was when a cultivator made hard choices about just who they intended to become. Sen had thought that he knew who he meant to become, but reality had fractured that self-image into a million pieces. He wanted to mourn that imaginary person he’d meant to become, but that was a person who couldn’t have survived in the world as he found it. In some other world, some kinder world, that person might have thrived. In a world with the Jianghu, with demonic cultivators, with sects that treated wandering cultivators as training dummies for the outer sect members, with spirit beast tides that emptied entire towns of life, Sen needed to be something else. Sometimes, that meant being someone harder and more ruthless. But, sometimes, it meant exercising this strength and power to the benefit of those with neither. He supposed that his wish for balance hadn’t been misguided, but misaligned. He hadn’t understood what things needed to be balanced.
He’d imagined that he could balance the occasional killing with the periods of pacifism or, barring that, passivity. That had been a doomed project from the start because he hadn’t understood his own nature. He wasn’t skilled at being passive, and pacifism ran counter to his sense of justice. He’d seen enough now, done enough now, to recognize that his sense of justice wasn’t particularly sophisticated. In fact, it was exactly the kind of brutal, eye-for-eye justice that one might expect from someone who took their most primal lessons from living on the street. He’d fought against that, tried to hide from it, but it showed through time and again. He supposed that there was something vaguely noble in trying to elevate oneself, but there was no benefit in lying to oneself. He had been lying to himself. But, if there was ever a time when honesty mattered, it was when he was forming his core.
He recalled the conversation that he’d had with Lifen on the beach. She had asked him what the world told him. He could hear his own words echoing back to him from that beach.
“That I can be more than one thing without betraying myself. That the same hands can give and take. That simplicity can breed certainty, but it doesn’t necessarily breed truth.”
He had been right then, even if he’d missed the full import of his own words. He could be more than one thing. He supposed that there might be saints or divine beings out there who were only one thing, but he wasn’t one of them. He was someone who could be kind, who could help, who could bestow largesse on those he deemed worthy. He was also someone who could calmly drag a rapist into the deep wilds and watch him die for his sins without losing sleep. He’d struggled to reconcile those people, to make them one thing, but the struggle was false. It had always been false. He didn’t need to be one thing. For that matter, he didn’t particularly want to be just one thing. He could be the killer, or the healer, and neither of those things were false. Hadn’t his entire cultivation journey been a lesson in that? He cultivated more than one type of qi. He followed paths of spirit cultivation and body cultivation. He hadn’t found the balance between all of those things yet, but there could be balance. He felt it, sensed it, knew it in a way that transcended normal human understanding. Of course, it wasn’t enough to just think it. Thoughts were quicksilver, here and gone. He needed to declare his understanding.
“I can be more than one thing,” he said out loud, imprinting his will on the earth around him, the air before him, on the universe at large, and on himself.
Inside his dantian, those words rang like the voice of heaven itself. Everything inside of him paused for just a moment. Then, the layer of shimmering, liquid heavenly qi launched itself off of the quickly hardening core of environmental qi. The heavenly qi was caught in the shadow qi, or caught by it, Sen was sure, and the two merged. Sen couldn’t adequately describe the process he witnessed in his own dantian. It was as though the smoky shadow qi was absorbed into that liquid heavenly qi. Except, it was more than that. It wasn’t that shadow qi vanished, but rather that the purpose and intent of the shadow qi became part of the heavenly qi, transforming it, transmuting it, making it into something that Sen could use or would use. What remained was neither the hazy smoke nor the shimmering liquid, but something in between. It was a hundred, a thousand, an infinite variety of shades of liquid gray, some of them so dark they might as well have been void black and some of them so close to white that they almost gleamed.
Then, that swirling mass of liquid gray succumbed to the pressure that Sen was exerting and descended on his still-forming core. The new qi didn’t quite mix with the hardening environmental qi, but it did change it. Sen felt that much, felt some kind of fundamental shift in the nature of his core, but he didn’t have the chance to fully understand it before the liquid coated the core. He could tell it still wasn’t quite done. He gathered everything left inside him, every bit of mental strength, every scrap of emotion, everything he dredged up from every corner of his being, and he squeezed that developing core one last time. The core trembled, shivered, and compressed one last time. Then, that coating of liquid gray solidified into a shell that Sen knew would be profoundly difficult to damage. Oddly enough, it still looked to his inner eye like it was made of liquid. Two words came unbidden to his mind when he looked at that gray coating.
“Heavenly shadow,” he said aloud as if to affirm to the world at large that he had recognized the existence of some truth, even if he had yet to parse its meaning.
Then, it was done. His dantian, which had seemed so full and overstuffed, now felt vast and empty. He pulled hard on the environmental qi around him and felt it rush in to fill that empty void. Yet, even when he felt as though he’d all but exhausted the qi around him, it had barely put more than the thinnest mist of qi in his dantian. Well, there was always more work. Taking a deep breath, he opened his eyes. After a startled moment when he couldn’t really believe what he was seeing, Sen shot to his feet. Then, he promptly fell over as exhaustion clubbed him over the head.
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