Mage's Cultivation Journey 32

I knew that the show at the training field had impressed them, but knowing that didn’t prepare me for the surprise waiting for me. One of the rooms in the guest house was a small library, but I suspected most of the books and scrolls on the shelves had been added recently.

Particularly, some of the more valuable-looking martial arts manuals. While I suspected nothing they had put was truly a secret, most likely they were far more valuable than anything I could fund by selling medicinal plants anytime soon.

Good. There was a reason I had gone through all that trouble. Curious, I went through the lines. About half of the manuals were on martial arts. Amusingly, a decent number of them had been carrying the mark of the Azure Blade union, with some battle damage, signaling they had been either stolen or acquired after a deadly fight.

I wouldn’t dare to teach them directly, but using them to draw conclusions was much different.

As I continued going through the manuals, I found another surprising book, this time on Furious Wind Style. At first glance, it seemed complete until the peak of Skin Refinement, but that was where it ended. Considering the suspicious presence of the remnants of the Furious Wind school, maybe it wasn’t too much of a surprise.

The books were not limited to that. There were several other books, covering many subjects, from medicine to blacksmithing. They really didn’t hold back. There were even a few styles, fragmented as they might be, based on needles.

I assumed the biggest reward was either Furious Wind Style manuals, or the needle techniques, when I discovered a small booklet. A diary, one that had been included toward the end, where more esoteric yet useless stuff had been included.

The writing inside was sparse, more a logbook than a traditional diary. No dates, no named entries. Just paragraphs of half-formed thoughts and scattered reflections, written in a careless hand, mostly containing rambled, confused transcripts of half-remembered discussions. No wonder they had dismissed it.

What made it special was the identities. A record of conversations between a martial artist and a cultivator, both nameless.

Most of the talks were rambling about the distinction between mortal and immortal, and cursing the heavens for not giving him something called an Immortal Root, which seemed to be pretty important for cultivators.

Far too angsty for my taste. If it wasn’t for my burning curiosity about cultivators, I wouldn’t have bothered to read it. From that direction, I learned precious little. There was almost no insight about cultivators themselves, at least not when discounting the long descriptions of the cultivator, who, for some reason, used his sword as a tool for flying.

But, while I didn’t find anything related to the society of the cultivators, I found several different talks about the nature of the world, which inevitably drifted to the nature of the elements. They felt like idle ramblings, but carried an interesting perspective.

As usual, it was a poetic perspective, focusing more on feeling than knowing, but it was still valuable.

Wood was described as the energy of growth, persistence, and intent. Not merely the energy of trees and vines, but of life itself, nurturing and assisting. It also mentioned some stories on how the nameless cultivator discovered the meaning, which included sitting in a forest without moving for a full decade, which seemed rather far-fetched.

Fire was easier to understand. It was energy made manifest, destroying and renewing together. It was also the spirit that turned insight into a breakthrough, but also the flame that consumed unchecked. The cultivator called it the element of rebirth and trial, linking it with clarity. A little too much overlap in my taste. Comparatively, his method of understanding it was simpler, though the truth of it was even more doubtful than sitting in a forest for a decade.

Taking a dip in a volcano…

Water was flowing and concealing, or so they claimed, covering everything related to the mind from fear to memory. It was also strongly linked to memory, as well as physical preservation … and for some reasons, dragons. And an interesting link, especially, I had no idea if the dragons they mentioned were metaphorical or real.

Were there dragons in the cultivation world, and if so, did they talk about the same giant, fire-breathing wyrms that destroyed whole planes of wizards when angered?

I hoped not.

Earth represented stability and absorption. A lack of mobility that represented a neutral position, but no less treasured for it. There was no mention of how the cultivator understood it. I suspected his understanding was biased, as it was mostly framed as something to stabilize the other elements.

His understanding of Metal, on the contrary, was far too long, but no less contradictory. He linked to clarity and discipline, but also bravery and standing for the truth, even the enlightenment from the art. Combined with the cultivator’s long vexation about how the path of the sword was the superior path, linking it to justice, freedom, triumph of good over evil, and all kinds of other aspects. It was difficult to distinguish where his opinion ended and where the factual knowledge began.

Still, even from a biased source, it was very valuable, allowing me to put my observations in a new frame. For a while, I meditated on that broken understanding, comparing it with everything I had observed on my own.

Watching the transformation of internal energy helped, giving me an objective basis to compare.

“They are not complete,” I muttered with a sudden understanding. The transformation of internal energy, driven by the martial arts, was not a complete representation of the elements. Some, like wind, weren't a part of the fundamental elemental cycle, more like supplementary existence.

While the others, like the first one Yu Xing fought, which had felt like water, actually represented a far more limited understanding. I had a feeling that, if I went back and asked, the name of the style would have something to do with rain, rather than just water.

A guess, but one that I would be willing to take a big bet on.

With that inspiration, I opened the manual of Furious Wind Style, and started to go through the material, trying to delve deeper into the concept … unfortunately, I had limited success deciphering directly. I decided to change my perspective.

Instead of trying to decipher the elemental mystery behind it, I started reading up on the method to break through the next realm for Furious Wind Style. The explanation itself was opaque, hidden behind several tricky lines that would be nearly impossible to discover without someone already an expert pointing the way.

Well, it's nearly impossible for a martial artist like the kid. I was a mage, who had resolved mysteries far more complicated. It took merely an hour to decipher the truth hidden in the text. I didn’t even have to rely on crossing it with the other texts.

The breakthrough technique was ultimately proved to be simple, with three critical aspects. The body needed to adapt the transformed energy enough to handle the stress, which was critical, because a Skin Refinement fighter handled far more internal energy than a Muscle Reinforcement one.

Then, the martial artist needed to be aware of the exact acupuncture points and the meridians that needed to be targeted to channel the transformed energy to his skin without destroying it. Unlike the first transformation, which used the lungs despite the style, Skin Refinement required a more deliberate path.

And, the last part, a decent control of the internal energy, enough to regulate the flow.

That seemed to be the biggest difference between Muscle Reinforcement and Skin Refinement. The former, the martial artist just needed to channel the necessary energy to his muscles, and the rest of it was handled by the move. A vague awareness was all that was needed.

The skin, on the other hand, was far more fragile, and it required a rudimentary control over the energy to not overwhelm the capabilities of the body.

Luckily, the kid fulfilled all three conditions. He was already strong before his injury, and with constant medical assistance, he had been able to improve greatly in terms of body resistance. The path, we could always heal the damage from the mistakes.

And, the supposed hardest part, the awareness of the energy, we had solved before our first visit to Dongxi as a way to bypass his injuries.

Still, I spent the rest of the day, and all night, reading the other martial arts books, validating the perspective he had written; which had the added benefit of expanding my knowledge on internal energy greatly. No single technique manual was responsible for it, but each technique had a different way of describing how to feel and channel internal energy, enough to inspire me in better ways to compress and contain the energy, even though I had no meridians.

When morning arrived, I stood up.

It was time to help kids through a breakthrough.