Book 3: Chapter 34: The Burden of Time
As relentless as Sen had been during his years training on the mountain, there had been also quiet moments. Moments of reflection, on his part, and on the part of his teachers. Master Feng, Auntie Caihong, and Uncle Kho had all spoken to him at different points about what it meant to live as long as they had lived. They spoke of the benefits, but they also spoke about the costs. Master Feng had summed it up in one brief phrase. He called it the burden of time. Sen had listened attentively, recognizing that he might one day face the same kind of pressures, even if he didn’t grasp what those pressures truly meant. It wasn’t until he found himself ceaselessly kicking a door that wouldn’t move, isolated from every living thing save an old man he neither liked nor trusted, that he began to understand what Master Feng had meant about the burden of time. Master Feng had couched in it different terms than those Sen understood, but there was a common thread. Master Feng spoke of the mountain of losses that weigh you down as friends who reached bottlenecks withered and eventually died. He spoke of the way that nations and cultures change and take with them all the things that were once familiar. As new things rose up to replace them, you become burdened by the persistence of change that time brings.
While Sen lacked firsthand experience with those burdens, he had finally begun to understand the deeper truth behind those words. The true burden of time was isolation. The longer you lived, the more powerful you became, the more isolated you were. It was no longer mysterious to him why, despite their differences, Auntie Caihong and Master Feng tolerated each other. They were rare, steady islands of familiarity on the ocean of time that they sailed. Trapped in his cell, Sen hadn’t had even the comfort of one island of familiarity. There had only been an enemy. So, he cast himself into a cultivation trance and subsumed himself in his inner world. Yet, even there, he found the burden of time waiting for him.
It wasn’t as bad when he inhabited his inner world. He had his mindscape to explore. It was a place of limitless possibility where anything he could imagine could become real. There was his dantian, his core, and those strange ribbons of energy. For the first time, he was deep enough inside to truly examine them up close, rather than from the bird’s eye perspective he normally used. There was the potential for insight, for understanding, for growth in the situation he had created for himself. And there was work to do. But the isolation remained. While he could imagine other people, he could not give them life. They could not say things he didn’t expect, because they were just mirrors of himself. He pretended for a time but soon recognized that such behaviors could threaten his sanity. In the end, there was only him inside that world, no matter how badly he yearned for the company of his teachers, Lifen, Lo Meifeng, and Falling Leaf most of all. He wallowed in that loneliness for days or weeks or months, or perhaps it was only a few seconds. Those measurements of time meant little within the confines of that inner space.
There were moments, or years, where he railed against the situation, furious at himself for leading them all into this imprisonment. He was even more furious at the simple unfairness of it. If they had walked up to the front gate and demanded entry, that would have been one thing. That damnable old man had stolen Sen’s choice from him after he’d made it. A spark of hatred was born in Sen over that injustice. It was a spark he fanned into a flame. He knew that he lacked the strength to do anything about it now, but perhaps “fate” had a bitter end in mind for that old man. If not, Sen might see what he could do to arrange for that bitter end anyway. Eventually, though, he ran out of things to be sad about. He ran out of things to be angry about. He ran out of distractions and excuses. When that happened, the work still needed to be done. So, Sen turned his focus and his energy to doing the work.
The first order of business was building a new cultivation technique. He wouldn’t have dared to try what he was about to try before core formation and before advancing his body cultivation. Those two advancements had strengthened and reinforced his qi channels, which was a critical element in what he meant to do. Beyond that, though, he didn’t think he would have had the mental dexterity for that what came next. In fact, he was pretty sure he still didn’t, but he did think he could train himself to it. He started with shadow, as it was both a qi type for which he had a very strong affinity, and it was central to the nature of his core. He’d spent those months kicking the door testing out different patterns of drawing in and refining qi, which had let him narrow down options by not only comfort but their overall efficiency. He started pulling in shadow qi and cycling it along the most efficient path. When that was moving along smoothly, he started drawing in and cycling flame qi, again choosing the most efficient path.
One by one, he added parallel flows of qi with each following its own pattern. When he got to four types of Ii, it was hard. When he added a fifth, it was all but impossible to maintain. While his channels could take the strain of the process, the mental effort it called for was nearly beyond his limits. He held it for as long as he could. Then, the process collapsed. When that happened, he moved the mental projection or avatar or whatever he was operating as down into his dantian. He sat cross-legged in the pool of liquid qi that sat in the bottom of his dantian. It covered his legs almost completely and soaked him up to his stomach. He sat there, bathing in the light and warmth of that liquid qi, and meditated. He felt the liquid qi try to press into his avatar as he meditated and, after a moment of initial, instinctual resistance to the unfamiliar, he let the worries go. The liquid qi passed into him, through him, reinforcing things he couldn’t even name and didn’t try to perceive. He simply meditated and let himself recover.
Then, he started over again. Repetition after repetition, he failed to maintain five parallel flows. Yet, with each repetition, his endurance grew. With every attempt, he felt himself crawl a hair closer to ultimate success. The effort required grew less and less until he could maintain five flows as easily as he’d once maintained two. He let himself bask in the joy of that moment and appreciate that success for the triumph over self that it was. It had been so hard to keep going, to keep making himself try, but he had done it. He had burned some tiny bit of weakness out of himself and achieved his goal. Yet, as success tends to do, it reminded him so keenly of the burden of time and how desperately he missed the others. He once more lowered himself into the pool of liquid qi and meditated until his mind was as still and empty as the void. Only then did he start again and try to add a sixth flow.
There was no sleep in his inner world. It was night or day as he wished it, but there was no escaping the facts. He was aware at all times, even if he didn’t know how much time was passing in the outside world. The meditation helped, serving as a means of maintaining equilibrium, but what he wouldn’t have given for a simple dream. It was a forlorn hope. Dreams had abandoned him. So, he worked. He drove himself harder and harder, unwilling to accept modest success. Only perfection would do. The moment finally came when he was actively drawing in and cycling a dozen different types of qi on a dozen different paths. In another time, another life, he would have considered this a monumental achievement. Perhaps it even was. It was a viable cultivation method for him. He thought he could even keep it up if he were awake and interacting with the world. Yet, he could feel that it wasn’t the best solution. He’d substituted pure will, concentration, and a mountain of effort for a more elegant, less cripplingly demanding approach.
So, he settled himself in the pool of liquid qi and meditated. He sat and watched as that double helix of ribbons compressed environmental qi into liquid qi. The longer he watched, the more certain he became that the answer was floating there in front of him. Like everyone else, he had brute forced his way through liquid qi creation, but those ribbons took him all but out of the equation. It stood to reason that a similar, or at least similarly simple, solution existed for his current problem. He floated up and examined those ribbons up close. He didn’t learn anything new. The strange qi remained what it has always been, a fused combination of the five main types of qi. The heavenly qi ribbon was just that, heavenly qi pressed into a specific form. Yet, together, they did something Sen could never have anticipated. He looked closer and truly observed what was happening from the moment that environment qi was dragged into the center of that double helix. It wasn’t just pressure. The qi was twisting in on itself, over and over until it couldn’t keep itself apart and fused.
“How can I use this?” he asked.
He couldn’t see a way to use it directly. He didn’t need additional force. He needed a way to regulate, differentiate, and refine the environmental qi he drew in. He closed his eyes and let himself relax. If he was going to perform a task like that in the real world, how would he do it? He’d use a formation. It would be an unbelievably complicated formation to handle so many different types of qi, but that wasn’t as big of a problem. In here, he could imagine anything he wanted and, within a few practical limits, make it happen. He imagined that it was akin to what it must feel like to be a god. He started imagining the formation. He imagined it with flags because that was what he was used to, but he supposed it could be anything. He might use something a bit more interesting instead, such as dragon’s breath flowers. It was his inner world, and he felt like there was no good reason to make it drab when he could add something that was nice to look at, like those flowers.
Halfway through the process, he realized that it wouldn’t work the way he wanted it to. The formation could regulate and differentiate the qi, but it couldn’t do the work of refining it. It took cycling through the specific qi paths to accomplish that. Even after recognizing the problem, Sen still took the time to finish imagining the formation. Just because it wasn’t a complete solution, it didn’t mean the formation had no merit. In fact, now that he considered it, he could likely set up a lot of formations in his inner world to protect vital areas like his dantian, his mind, and his soul from attacks. While the formation didn’t do everything he wanted, it did take enough pressure off of him that he could cycle that qi and do other things. So, he pushed the problem of an easier solution to the back of his mind and went about setting up those protections for his most vital areas. It was trickier than he imagined it would be. He also suspected that there were more elegant solutions to the problems he was trying to solve. But an imperfect fix was better than no fix at all when it came to preserving his mind, soul, and dantian. If better solutions presented themselves later, he’d use them.
Focusing on other problems also let that part of him that came up with crazy, stupid, and occasionally brilliant ideas poke and prod at the problem of qi refinement. It didn’t happen quickly. He spent what felt like weeks soaking and meditating in that pool of liquid qi before anything came to him. In the end, it was a simple question. Why does every type of qi need to follow the most efficient path? Sen sat and pondered that question for a long time. Efficiency maximized the value he got from each type of qi, but his approach aimed for perfect balance between the qi types. In most cases, perfect balance was preferable where qi was concerned, but was it necessary? More importantly, was it necessary for him? His affinities weren’t in perfect balance, so did his qi need to be in perfect balance? If anything, perfectly balanced qi might actually work against him.
So began a new round of testing. With the formation he’d imagined into a kind of pseudo-reality, qi was being drawn into him without much interference on his part. He just needed to direct it. So he started pairing off types of qi that were closely related to each other and sending them on the same paths through his qi channels. He did lose some efficiency, but not nearly as much as he imagined. Soon, he had his cultivation approach down to six paths. Then, he got it back down to four paths. It wasn’t perfect. The farther away from the ideal qi type for each path, the higher the efficiency loss. Sending three types of qi through the right set of channels wasn’t as easy as sending one, but the total mental investment was so much lower that he didn’t care. He watched in pure awe as refined qi of the right types and in the approximately right proportions poured into his dantian. That misty-looking qi he’d come to associate with his dantian began swirling around his core. The steady dripping of liquid qi became a steady rain.
He stood there beneath that golden rain and let it wash over him and through him. Then, he felt a pulsing thrum from his core as it started drawing in the refined qi and began the true process of creating core-level qi. A new kind of strength bled into him as that qi accumulated in his core. In that moment, it all became worth it as he was lit from within by pure joy. He had suffered beneath the burden of time and bent that suffering to his own advantage. Sen had become a core cultivator in more than just name. Now, he was a core cultivator in truth. It might not be enough to escape, but he also knew in every fiber of his being that he had done all he could in his inner world for now. It was time to wake up.
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