Jiang closed his eyes, inhaling slowly and dropping into meditation for the first time since he’d ignited his dantian. To his surprise, he almost missed the feeling – despite only having been doing it for a few weeks and his previous preference for movement, there was something calming about it.

  It wasn’t that he was ‘emptying his mind’ or anything – that still seemed pointless to him – but more that he was focusing so intently on a single thing that everything else fell away. It reminded him more of hunting than anything else, the frozen moment before loosing an arrow, where his entire self consisted of only the arrow, the wind, and his target.

  Regardless of his relative enjoyment of the process, Jiang was still relatively new to this, so usually it took at least a few minutes before he could start to sense the Qi around him. Elder Lu had hinted that sensing Qi became easier as a cultivator progressed, so he was hopeful that he would get more out of it now that he had ignited his dantian.

  His focus fell inward.

  The world expanded.

  The Heavens parted and the scales fell from his eyes, revealing something vast and intricate beneath.

  The world was alive, aware, awake. Qi was the lifeblood of reality itself, moving, pulsing, twisting through unseen currents that stretched in every direction.

  Everything was connected. The walls, the floor, the air—nothing was truly still. The world had a pulse, a rhythm, and his own Qi was just a single thread in a vast, unseen tapestry. It moved differently inside him than it did outside. The Qi within him was his, bound to his body, his dantian, his will. The ambient Qi around him was untamed, a great ocean of shifting tides brushing against his skin, pressing at the edges of his awareness.

  It was unlike anything he had ever experienced—his body felt weightless, his mind unmoored, as though he had stepped beyond himself. The currents of Qi pulled at him, not violently, but with purpose, threading him into something larger than he could comprehend. He was a single drop in a vast river, his consciousness stretching, unravelling, dissolving into the threads of reality itself.

  A vastness yawned before him, boundless and unknowable, yet somehow familiar. It wasn’t sight or sound or touch—it was presence, something immense and watching, something that had been there long before him and would remain long after.

  A thread wound through the nothingness, drawing him further in. His thread.

  It was too much. He was… being un?ma?de—

  An almost familiar sound split through the void like a knife, and suddenly, violently, Jiang was yanked back.

  His breath tore into his lungs, his heart slamming against his ribs. His senses snapped into place with dizzying force, the currents of Qi gone, reality once again veiled to him.

  He was back in his room, legs crossed, hands resting against his knees, body drenched in cold sweat. The pulse of the world—the deep, all-consuming awareness—was gone, sealed behind a barrier he couldn’t reach.

  Jiang exhaled shakily. That… hadn’t felt like meditation. It felt like… like he had been following something, like he’d been accidentally shown more than he was ready for—or meant to see.

  And something had stopped it.

  Slowly, he turned his head toward the window, already knowing, somehow, what he would see.

  A raven sat perched on the sill.

  It was the same one. He knew it was the same one. The one that had followed him after he ignited his dantian.

  It tilted its head at him, sharp black eyes gleaming in the dim light.

  Jiang stared back, trying to shake the lingering weight of the experience. Already, his breath was steadying, his mind grasping at the fading sensation of being more—but it was slipping. He was already forgetting what he had seen, what he had felt. But this time, he wasn’t caught off guard, waking from a half-remembered dream. He was meditating, and meditation was focus.

  He clung to the memory, just barely holding onto it before it could vanish altogether.

  The tapestry. The Qi spiralling endlessly through the cosmos. Something pulling him back, protecting him.

  He swallowed, forcing his pulse to slow. The raven still sat there, watching him. He couldn’t explain how, but somehow its gaze felt amused. Not in a mocking way, not quite, but there was something knowing in its gaze.

  Jiang’s fingers curled against his knee. He hesitated, then, keeping his voice low, whispered, “Why are you following me?”

  The raven did not answer.

  His first instinct was to go to Elder Lu.

  The man had answers. He had helped Jiang, given him resources, guidance, a way forward. But despite that – maybe even because of it – Jiang didn’t trust the man. Real life wasn’t anything like the stories – random Sect Elders didn’t just spontaneously decide to help random peasants. Having seen his roommate’s reactions to Elder Lu coming to talk to him had helped put it in perspective – something like that just didn’t happen.

  He’d even pushed things a little by deliberately being rude, only to receive a downright shockingly light rebuke. Compared to the way Elder Yan had reacted when he’d lied about his age, jumping directly to trying to kill him? Well, it was undoubtedly a less pleasant reaction, but it also wasn’t out of the ordinary.

  The raven was still watching. Jiang met its gaze for a long moment, then sighed.

  “Fine then,” he muttered. “Don’t answer me.”

  Putting the matter out of his mind – or at least, as much as he could considering the damn raven was still staring at him, he settled back into a comfortable position. The idea of trying to meditate after what had just happened was more than a little nerve-wracking, but he needed to see if anything had changed.

  Jiang exhaled, pushing away his lingering unease, and let himself sink back into meditation.

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  To his half relief, half disappointment, his Qi senses were… normal now. Or, at least, more like what Elder Lu had told him to expect.

  No unravelling of his existence, no terrifying vastness, no being swept into currents he couldn’t comprehend. Just the steady pulse of his own Qi, cycling through his body, and the faint, shifting pressure of the ambient Qi around him.

  It was still sharper than before, that much was undeniable. If sensing Qi before had been like trying to feel his way through a pitch-black room, now it was like stepping outside at dawn. The details weren’t crisp yet, but the shapes were there, and he could make out the outlines of what had once been hidden from him.

  Cautiously, he expanded his awareness outwards, inching forward like a blind man expected to encounter a sudden ledge. As… awe-inspiring as his previous experience was, Jiang wouldn’t mind taking things a little bit slower. Just for now.

  For the first time, Jiang could feel the aspirants in the other room.

  The sensation was strange—not like hearing or seeing, but something other, like an instinct he had only just developed. They were there, not just as presences, but as distinct forces, each carrying a unique signature.

  Most of them burned, flickering candles in the dark.

  Fire-aligned. The energy of heat, movement, destruction. It clashed with his own Qi, sharp and aggressive where his was cool and ungraspable. There were at least three of them, though he couldn’t pinpoint precisely which presence belonged to which person.

  One was heavy. Steady.

  Earth-aligned. Unmoving, solid, a weight pressing against the world rather than flowing through it. If fire was the force of destruction, then earth was its opposite—the foundation that endured no matter what came against it.

  The last was… fluid.

  Water-aligned. Not solid like earth, nor consuming like fire, but something in between. It shifted, moved, adapted, slipping around obstacles rather than resisting them.

  He focused harder, trying to refine the sensation, to see them more clearly. But his senses weren’t sharp enough yet—he could tell they were there, he could feel their elements, but he couldn’t separate them further. It was like trying to listen to multiple conversations at once, knowing that distinct voices existed but unable to pick them apart.

  That, according to Elder Lu, would improve with time.

  Sensing them like this also gave him some idea of their strength. This, too, was a vague thing—not an absolute measurement, but a comparison, a rough sense of where they stood in relation to himself.

  Unsurprisingly, they were all stronger than him.

  He couldn’t tell by how much, not exactly, but the difference wasn’t insignificant. Their Qi was more refined, more stable, whereas his was still newly ignited, still fluctuating at the edges of his dantian.

  He exhaled through his nose.

  So they were at least in the second stage. Possibly higher. Probably higher, really.

  That was… not great.

  It meant that, right now, he was at the bottom. Lower than the bottom, even. He wasn’t just the only first-stage cultivator in his group—he was potentially the only first-stage cultivator in the entire exam.

  On the flip side, that meant he could theoretically advance faster than they did, at least until he caught up. Whether he could advance fast enough for it to make a difference in the exams themselves…

  Well, there was only one way to find out.

  Elder Lu had explained the steps to advancing through the Qi Condensation realm, and while it had sounded simple in theory, Jiang already knew that ‘simple’ didn’t mean ‘easy.’

  Step one was to fill his dantian.

  Jiang turned his focus to the ambient Qi around him. In comparison to the brief glimpse he got earlier, it seemed almost bland and hollow to his senses now. He could catch faint sensations of movement, of alignments in the air around him, but it was nothing like the blazing tapestry of power he knew lay just beyond his senses.

  Still, it was enough to start.

  He reached out with his mental grasp, gathering the ambient Qi around him and guiding it towards his dantian. There were two aspects of this process that slowed down cultivation – first of all, he couldn’t exactly be discerning with the alignment of the Qi he gathered. The Qi in his grasp formed a rainbow of alignments, though dominated by wind and wood – the alignment of the air and the building around him, respectively.

  This was the main reason cultivation chambers were highly prized, engraved with precise formations designed to strip the alignments from the ambient Qi until only that which was useful to the cultivator remained. Jiang’s ‘shadowy’ Qi – and wasn’t that a helpful description? – wasn’t going to be compatible with an unfortunate number of common alignments. A cultivator could use Qi that they weren’t aligned to, but it was significantly less efficient.

  It may sound cool to have a rare alignment, but the reality of the situation was that his path was going to be more difficult than most.

  The second thing that slowed cultivators of this realm down was that the Qi resisted.

  Not aggressively, not like it was rejecting him, but it didn’t want to be controlled. The Qi around him had its own motion, its own rhythm, and trying to force it into himself felt like swimming against a current.

  Jiang exhaled, adjusting his approach. He couldn’t just pull it in—he had to guide it, align with it. He shifted his focus, not fighting the flow but moving with it, catching hold of the drifting Qi and leading it inward.

  His dantian drank it in.

  The sensation was strange, like filling an empty reservoir with something that wasn’t entirely liquid, something that carried weight but no substance. It pooled at his core, cool and heavy, swirling with his own Qi, but it wasn’t enough. It bled away almost as quickly as he could pull it in.

  Part of that was inevitable – the alignments he’d drawn in that were incompatible with his Qi naturally slipped away. Still, that only accounted for a portion – the rest was simply his lacking control.

  This was the problem Elder Lu had warned him about; his body wasn’t used to holding Qi yet. It leaked out, slipping from his dantian and dispersing before it could truly settle.

  That meant he needed to keep cycling it.

  Jiang focused, drawing in more, feeding the reservoir faster than it could empty. His dantian slowly began to stabilize, holding more, letting it settle deeper. It was like trying to trap smoke in a sealed jar—frustrating at first, but the more he practised, the easier it became.

  Step two in the process was clearing his channels.

  Elder Lu had explained that his channels were something like veins, but for Qi instead of blood. The channels formed a network around his body, connecting his dantian to his meridians and infusing him with the Qi he cultivated.

  A mortal’s pathways and meridians weren’t meant to carry Qi—they were closed, filled with impurities, resistant to the flow of energy. Clearing them was the first true hurdle of cultivation.

  And the only way to clear them was to force Qi through.

  Jiang inhaled sharply, gathering more Qi, compressing it slightly, and then focused his mental grasp and pushed.

  The pressure was immediate. His own body fought back against him, the blockage holding firm. A dull ache flared deep in his chest at the effort, like trying to push a river through a solid wall.

  He grit his teeth.

  Again.

  The Qi crashed against the barrier, pressing harder, slipping through the smallest cracks. It wasn’t much, but it was something. He focused. Pushed.

  The ache sharpened into pain.

  His vision blurred slightly, sweat beading on his brow. His breathing was steady, but his muscles were tense, his body straining against something that wasn’t entirely physical.

  For a long moment, nothing changed.

  Then, just as he was starting to think he was doing something wrong, a tiny thread of Qi slipped through the blockage. Much like removing a clog in a pipe, once a little bit of Qi got through, the blockage seemed to melt away, carving a path and unravelling the first layers of resistance.

  It felt…

  Well, it would probably horrify any cultivators if they heard him say it, but it felt like finally going to the toilet after holding it for a long time. Something deep inside him unclenched, like a muscle finally relaxing.

  Jiang exhaled shakily.

  That was just the first channel, the simplest part of the process. His real goal was the meridians—the true barriers to progress. There were nine, each one a gate he had to break through, each one representing a stage of Qi Condensation.

  Jiang grimaced. He had barely cleared the first channel, and it had already felt like he was pushing against solid stone. He could only imagine what forcing Qi through a full meridian would feel like.

  Still.

  He turned his mental focus towards his dantian and the energy still swirling there. As uncomfortable as the process was, it wasn’t quite as inefficient as he’d feared. Provided he could take the pain, even just the energy he’d gathered in the last few minutes was probably enough to clear another channel or two.

  It was progress.

  Slow, painful, but real.

  Jiang inhaled again, gathering Qi once more.

  He had work to do.

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