CaTastrophy427

This is an optional chapter (though I would highly recommend reading at least the first 3~6 paragraphs), I chose to rewrite a fair bit of chapter 1 to remove a large chunk of infodumping, but figured some people might still want the information. Almost everything here will be gone over around the time it becomes relevant, the few that aren't will be expanded upon soon after

Cultivation 101:

There are ten greater stages of cultivation, and each one has ten smaller stages within them. The greater stages have their own names, but are often called the first tier, second tier, and so on, while the total tier and stage is taken as a number, called the level, so the second stage of the third tier is level 22, as the tier count starts from zero. The process to get to the first stage of the first tier, or level 1, is also known as foundation building. Each stage, you have to form a different reservoir of condensed spiritual strength¹often shortened to spirit, it's been known by many names in ancient languages, including qi, mana, ether, aura, vital energy, and so on, like a body of water, within your spiritual realm.

The first tier is the ten-puddle tier, which forms your first pond. Then comes the streams, the lakes, the rivers, the seas, the waves, the maelstroms, the storms, the cyclones, and finally the world ocean at the peak of tier ten. Each tier, your strength goes up drastically, you get a unique special ability, and starting from the lake at tier 3, your lifespan goes up as well. 

Everyone, be they humans, humanoids, plants, or animals, though not spirit beasts and spirit seeds, have a spirit realm, and everyone has a spirit companion within said realm. It can take the form of a bird, a fox, or a tree. Anything living, plant or animal, or even spirit beings and spirit artifacts, can be born within a spirit realm. It can be summoned to aid you with tasks, or just for comfort and cuteness, like a pet. It also requires you to give it its own care, lest it dislike you and not answer your summons. If a spirit companion were to die, it just has to be reborn from the spirit realm, which takes about a month, but nobody likes dying, myself included.

However, it is a needed existence to progress, as you need to have it condense your spirit from ten of one kind to another for the first time, be it from ten puddles to a pond, or ten waves to a maelstrom. In other words, if you don’t have one or it dislikes you, you can’t progress from one tier to another. Note the “if you don’t have one” part, as there are exceptions to the part about everyone having a spirit companion. I am the rare one in ten million who was born without one, instead having what’s known as a void spirit realm. How unlucky.

Even so, the strength one gets from reaching level ten is massive compared to someone at level zero, the ordinary person, so I decided I’d continue cultivating until I reached that point. I had all the time in the world, after all. And when - not if, it was all but guaranteed for an immortal like myself - I got to be that strong, I would be able pull a cart more easily than a horse (ignoring how hard cat-cart attachment harnesses are to find), despite my being the size of a normal cat. However, that seemed to be a pretty big “if”, at least at first. Each puddle takes progressively more spirit, and though each one increases the amount you have, without a spirit companion to help control your spiritual strength, it’s likely to “leak” if your own control isn’t perfect... and control is something hard to train before you obtain your first stream.

When I met him, Master was at level 66, meaning he could live for about ten thousand years (it'd be longer, close to thirty thousand, if he had progressed faster, but as he was a third of the way through his normal lifespan before he reached level 30, he'd permanently lost a third of his lifespan. No advancement will make you younger, until your lifespan becomes infinite at tier 9), so spending a decade or two on training me is nothing to him, as there’s always a chance I could find a way past the roadblock that is the tenth stage in my immortality. Speaking of... there are two more requirements to go up a tier. 

The first is that you have to raise your spirit companion with spirit patterns absorbed from spirit beasts for animal-type spirit companions, and ones obtained from spirit seeds for plant-type. Both can pretty much only be found in the most dangerous parts of the world: Spirit Sanctuaries. To get a spirit pattern from a spirit beast or seed, you have to either kill the spirit yourself or find it within an hour of its death, before someone or something else takes its pattern for its own or the pattern fades away. Each pattern gained is like a level for your spirit companion, but you need ten of the same type per tier for maximum effect. The closer to one another the ten are, the stronger the spirit ring that is condensed becomes.

Nobility and those in high positions in their sects import large numbers of beasts and seeds that were captured and bred to provide strong rings. Others have to make do with trying to get mostly the same kind, such as a few kinds of rodent or all insects... or feline-type beasts. The same goes for spirit seeds, which are really just the cores of spirit plants, plants that have gained the ability to move around and think. A classic example might be the ent or treant, but there are also things like bramblebees, walking woods, marchshrooms, and the so-called thousand year bamboo, which hardly ever lives past a century or two.

The second requirement only applies to getting to the tenth tier, and it is to have your own unique method of comprehending life and death. Once you get to the tenth tier, you have no lifespan (that's true from tier nine), and you can only be slain for good by those at the same level or higher in the tenth tier. As such, you need to find a path to immortality yourself. Once you’re gone, someone else can use your path to gain access to the tenth tier, however, it’s rare for someone in the tenth tier to truly be slain. The fall of an immortal can be felt by anyone of sufficient strength or proximity, and yet Master only felt it twice in his almost ten thousand year life.

For me, that path seems to have been the immortal salve. There are some records of it that Master found when he went to the imperial city and looked in the imperial library, and the result is that it gives the same immortality as someone at level 91. It’s a major cheat, even despite the fact that it slows cultivation by a factor of ten. Yeah, it does that. I have it hard. Kinda. It doesn’t slow cultivation speed so much as increase the requirement to condense a puddle or any other spirit body tenfold, which does have the upside of making them several times as powerful as they’d normally be.

The good news is, no tenth tier expert is going to just kill a random cat for no reason, so if I can avoid pissing one off, I’m basically perfectly immortal. And they’d have to intend to kill me specifically to keep me dead, getting caught up in an explosion they cause, even one intended to wipe out an entire city, wouldn't do it. In addition, the more often I recover from a specific injury or death, like stab wounds or asphyxiation, the more of a resistance to that kind of injury I, and most other regenerative immortals, gain.

Therefore, even if you drowned me in the ocean and I sank to the bottom, after a few hundred deaths, I’d become able to breathe underwater or something. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but I’d be able to make it back to shore at some point. I also would stop needing food and water, and become immune to being crushed by the pressure... though cultivation would toughen my body to the point that I wouldn’t have to worry about that particular bit in any case.

How surreal would it be to see an ordinary domesticated black cat walking nonchalantly on the ocean floor without breathing out any air? Pouncing at the little shafts of light that make it down to the bottom sometimes, jumping after fish that pass by. Floating, asleep, in a sunbeam, kicking at the water to move back into it when starting to drift out of it? I want to see some art of that. I want a whole manga about a cat that lives on the ocean floor.²AN:Seriously, I'd love to see what people could come up with for that

One such thing I gained an immunity to, by the way, is milk. I, like most cats, had had a substantial intolerance of milk and other dairy products, but it was just so good... so, over a few hundred years spent with at least a mild stomach ache for some portion of each day, I eventually adapted and started digesting it properly. It was worth feeling like dying several dozen times so I could eat grilled fish with lemon butter. I would assume poisons work the same way, but the only actual poisons I've had to deal with more than once or twice were non-lethal in the first place. 

Once you have enough control over your spirit, you can select an element to focus on, and condense an elemental seed of that element. There are five main elements, water, fire, metal, wood, and earth. There are other elements, such as light, dark, time, space, ice, lightning, wind, star, and even ones more like concepts and even objects, such as devour, sword, death, obliteration, genesis, song, life, terminus, knowledge, illusion, and slaughter.

There're also more specific elements that fall under other elements, such as tide falling under the larger category of water elements. A waterseed will let you control the tide, but not as well as a tideseed. However, a tideseed won't let you control the rain, ice, or any other manifestations of water.

Most of the others are rare to varying degrees, as anything other than the five main elements require specific and hard to meet conditions if you want to condense one of their elemental seeds. Some families and individuals are blessed with innate elemental seeds, including Master. He was born with an innate elemental woodseed, and so he later condensed an elemental fireseed to complement it and be complemented by it when it comes to alchemy. I was born with... nothing. 

I’m really quite average, save for my void spirit realm, which is below average, and my immortality, which would've been better spent on someone like Master. One can make use of elements you don’t have an elemental seed for, but it consumes several times as much spirit for the same effect, and is harder to train in or be precise with. You also need to fulfill the same requirements as you would to condense the seed for the element if you want to use that element at all.

However, in most cases, one can only ever condense one non-innate elemental seed in their lifetime, unless you obtain a really fortuitous encounter, or you can figure out a way to turn the element into a companionseed for your main element, which is basically one that’s slightly weaker, and requires you to have comprehended the relationship between the main element and the companion element. And when I say “enough control over your spirit”, I mean "most people only manage to do so when they’re around level 30". Spirit quantity is also important.

Spirit beasts and spirit seeds are like their own spirit companion. They don’t cultivate like us, they grow stronger by absorbing spirit patterns and condensing spirit rings over centuries and millennia. Every ring changes their bodies drastically, usually in size, and sometimes other ways as well, such as giving a horse spirit beast wings or a tiger a flaming tail, that sort of thing. 

People can sense the number of spirit patterns and rings on a spirit beast, seed, or companion, which is how one can tell what level someone else is at, since they can’t sense the level directly, and you can’t add spirit patterns to a spirit companion if they have as many or more patterns than you have levels. Therefore, I would show up as level 0 to just about everyone.

That’s about it for how cultivation works, I think. I mean, there’s more, but it’s either stuff I don’t know, or more or less irrelevant minutiae, or stuff you'll learn about soon enough. Back to my life... trust me, it gets more interesting quite soon. There’re even assassins and court intrigue, though I wasn’t particularly involved with the latter.