Ch 7: Again?

Waking up after a fretful night of confusing dreams, it’s clear the mischievous god is not done playing with me. At least I finally have all my memories straight. I’m now Menriche Han, a “trash” fourth son of a noble house. I’m already 8 years old, and my mixed up memories were half the reason I was considered trash. The other half is being born with penta veins. All five basic elements: fire, water, air, earth, and wood. Don’t ask me why wood is an element, I don’t know, this world is weird. 

In this world, the more veins a person has the harder cultivation is. The main issue is in trying to find ki in the right balance. Single vein cultivators have it the easiest because finding a place where the ki is almost all one type isn’t too hard. Such places tend to be famous and well known. Additionally, artificially creating such a place isn’t hard either if one has wealth.

To my understanding, it should be possible to create an environment in which it is easy to cultivate with the common five veins, but I am unclear on how that would be done. I can’t be the only one to think of this though, so there should be some books on the matter. 

So, I went to the clan library and met with the librarian there.

“Sorry, there is a method, but it is forbidden. It involves blood sacrifice.”

Oh. I see. The best material for making a place to cultivate all five elements in the right ratio, is five element people. That’s why so little study has been done; it’s become a forbidden topic due to the atrocities of the past. There should be other methods, but all I can think of are way too expensive.

Maybe instead of trying to be clever, I should just be stupid. I have an idea that might work, but it’s gonna hurt a lot and requires my previous life’s mastery of water ki. Just need to force my body to accept pure water ki. Normally this would kill me, but with my skill at healing it should be possible to survive. It won’t be the same as a natural pure water vein, leaving me weaker than normal, but once complete, I should be able to cultivate more easily, especially since I’m already experienced in water cultivation.

---

“He ate a water pearl?! That’s suicide!”

“I’m sorry sir, he was reading some old legends, and I guess he was more desperate than I’d realized. I didn’t think he’d really try it.”

Ch 8: Becoming Water

According to legend, the Water Pearl can be used to forcibly remake a person’s veins into pure water veins. It is said that the great immortal Johnson used this trick to change the veins of his son’s fiance, before ascending to the next realm.

What’s not mentioned is that this was not done for the sake of the fiance, but for his son’s sake. While men with pure water veins may do well, women are often treated as nothing more than consumables to be used up and discarded. The human cauldron technique is a despicable one, and should be included in the list of banned techniques, but since it doesn’t work on men, it seems the men in power didn’t see a need to ban it. 

The only explanation I was ever given about why it’s not banned, is that it doesn’t kill. It takes away their cultivation though. For a cultivator, that’s not much different. It’s like crippling a person after stealing all their money and leaving them to starve on the streets, while claiming to be kind because they aren’t dead yet. The victim will still die, it just takes longer.

Ordinarily, this plan of mine really would be a stupid plan. Even if I succeeded, I’d just become a male pure water vein, which isn’t very impressive. I might be considered better than a penta vein trash, but there’s other options to improve my power that are both far less dangerous, and have much better potential in the eyes of the people in this world. Water is after all, considered a weak element. 

In truth, the only reason I considered this plan, and carried it out, is because of my past experience with water ki. I had only begun to fully explore what could be done with water ki, having mastered just a few basic things. If strength was my only goal, figuring out how to cultivate penta veins properly would be a far smarter and safer choice. However, I really wanted to cultivate water ki again. I believe water ki has a lot of hidden potential that people in this world haven’t figured out.

Water ki can be good for a lot of things, and one I’d put a lot of time and effort into in my previous life, was creating a formation inside my own body, to ensure I’d not need to be awake to save myself if attacked or harmed. This is why I was confident no one could safely steal my cultivation: I’d deliberately cultivated in a way that made my self-protection and healing formation necessary for survival, due to my own ki becoming deadly.

Using a similar trick, I can make sure I survive swallowing the Water Pearl, and just need to sleep until it’s over. When I wake, my body will have been remade, and I’ll be a pure water vein instead of penta vein. However, it seems god is still playing tricks on me. When I woke, I saw Tessa.

Ch 9: Waking up

“Tessa? What’s going on?” Waking up to find I’m being carried on Tessa’s back was very confusing.

“When I told your father that I wanted to take you as my disciple, he agreed immediately. Your family doesn’t seem to care much for you, so I took you away. I never thought I’d see you again, Alice.”

“Wait, the father who doesn’t like me is the father of Menriche Han, not Alice. Alice’s family was nice… and Alice died. I’m Menriche Han now.”

“It doesn’t matter what name your foolish parents gave you in this life. They have abandoned you. You are no longer a Han, and I think Alice suits your new appearance better.” Tessa held up a small mirror for me to see my face in as she said this.

With a pale face, blue eyes and hair that seemed like it changed between dark and light blue in the light as if I was looking at the sea, I felt like I was looking at a being of fantasy. “So pretty!”

“I examined you carefully, and you should be even stronger now than you were when you died. It’s as if you are destined to become a legendary goddess of water.”

“Goddess?” … yup. I’m a girl again. “Why did it change me into a girl?”

“Probably due to the formation you used, it’s Alice’s personal formation, so I recognized it immediately. It seems to have guided your transformation some. When I checked your meridians, I discovered the formation is fused fully into your body and a part of the ki circulation of your body. It’ll be impossible to remove without destroying your meridians in the process, which would cripple you.”

“I had no intention of removing it, since it’s a defensive measure to protect me even when I am not conscious, but this may make it harder to modify. Hmmm… I’m still young.”

“Yeah, I’ve been carrying you around for almost a year, but that just means you are nine years old. It’s been about 10 years since you died before. I may actually be stronger than you now. Though I’m still not sure I could beat you in a fight.”

“If you’ve mastered the basic techniques I taught you, then my tricks shouldn’t work well against you, and you should be able to win with brute force.”

Ch 10: Inquiring minds

“What happened to the Sect after I died?” I asked because I had no idea what had happened in the past 10 years. I remember little of the news that came in while I was growing up, and as a mere child, I didn’t hear much news to begin with.

“Oh, I left them immediately once I learned of your death. From the rumors, it seems they’ve not won a youth tournament since.” Tessa’s answer put a smile on my face.

“Good. Wrongdoing should lead to bad outcomes. It’s because that so rarely happens that people keep doing so many bad things.”

“Most people aren’t willing to give up their own lives for such a thing. They’ll suffer any hardship if it means they can live.”

“I’m not most people.” 

“Indeed. If you were, I’d not have fallen for you.”

“Eh?” Did she just say she’s in love with me? That phrase she used isn’t just an expression of familial love. 

“...” She didn’t respond to my confused utterance. I also didn’t know what to say, so we just traveled in silence for a while.

---

“Have you learned how to do any metal working?” I asked, curious to know if she’d taken a step on the path of forging. With fire and earth veins, she should be well suited to such work.

“Only basic stuff. What I can make currently, is no more impressive than the work of ordinary blacksmiths.”

“Perhaps we can make something to help these children then.” 

Some time later…

“This is a water pump?” Tessa was curious.

“Yup. Makes it easier to draw water from the well.”

Ch 11: Out of order

With time to properly study myself and begin cultivating again, I’ve concluded that my old theories are right. Cultivation is not a linear path.

I already knew from manuals on cultivation and my own past fiction readings, that ki collection and the physical body were both important. While this is common knowledge, people often misunderstand it. To explain, I suppose I should start with the known progression in cultivation.

The first step of cultivation is ki Collection. This is broken up into 10 ranks, but  that’s not important. The second step of cultivation Body Refinement. This is also broken up into 10 pieces. The big misunderstanding, is that most people think the Body Refinement has an end. It doesn’t. Reaching the end of Body Refinement, just means that one’s body is good enough to advance to the next step. It’s not the maximum the body can be improved to, and even more important: the stronger the body is, the more ki can be gathered before moving on to the next step.

My current body is well past the normal end of Body Refinement. If I go back to focusing on ki Collection, I should be able to gather a very large amount of ki before I move on to Foundation Building. The more ki used to build my foundation, the stronger the result. There’s just one problem: how can I collect enough ki?

“The most obvious solution is to go to the ocean.” Tessa suggested.

“Yeah, you are right about that. There’s an abundance of water ki there. What about your own training though?”

“Do you think I need to worry about that? I’m already far past you in cultivation, and by studying the basics as you’ve always told me, I’ve learned many tricks for improving cultivation speed even in places that seem useless. All I need is a forge.”

“Did you find a way to extract ki from the forging process?”

“Indeed. It is a bit expensive, since it ruins the materials used, but it makes it feasible to gather fire and earth ki anywhere.”

“Hmmm… I wonder if there’s something like that for water ki.”

“There are plenty of ways to create wood ki, or fire ki, but I don’t know of any for water. That’s one of the reasons people are so keen on stealing it from pure water practitioners.”

Ch 12: Fame

Tessa’s View

If Alice were to write a story about her life, she’d probably forget to write about most of it. As we travel, we’ve gained quite a lot of fame. Not just for Alice’s strange appearance, but also because she’s been healing anyone in need that we come across as naturally as one might pick up a coin off the ground. 

I’m also pretty sure Alice has been doing more than just healing them. From what I can decypher of her mutterings, she’s fixing and improving meridians and ki channels too. The rumors all seem to report that those she’s healed end up stronger and healthier than they were before. People have already begun to refer to her as a deity. If the real deities learned of this, they’d probably laugh. Alice hasn’t even completed the Foundation Building stage yet.

Alice also taught me to craft something she called a water pump. We left a few in some of the towns we visited, and when we stayed in one town a while, I taught a smith there how to make them. It’s not a very complicated device, and there’s no special materials needed. It really seems like a strange thing for a cultivator to have any interest in, but Alice has always been strange.

---

Guard’s view

I’ve been a guard in the town of Trifel for over 10 years, and I’ve never seen something like this. Two young ladies showed up one day, pulling a wagon. While I could easily understand the merchant’s story about how they’d run into bandits and been saved by the two travelling cultivators, I couldn’t understand why the cultivators would bother with pulling the wagon. Since when did cultivators bother with mortals? Heck, why are cultivators with enough strength to pull a wagon full of cargo like it weighs nothing, traveling on foot? Shouldn’t they be flying?

Ch 13: A new sect

It seems we’ve joined a sect. I wasn’t too keen on the idea until Tessa reminded me that large sects have large libraries. Reading lots of books is how I was able to figure out what I currently know about cultivation, so gaining access to more books is probably a good idea. This new sect is called the Divine Sea sect.

Tessa reassured me this is one of the few sects known to treat women with pure water veins well. It seems the sect master is a single water vein woman herself. 

Teacher’s view:

I feel like this new student, named Alice, is teaching me more about water ki than I’m teaching her. She understands the books I tell her to read without even needing to ask me questions, and when I test her comprehension with my own questions she often surprises me with insights or ideas I’d not even thought of. 

It was already a great surprise when I learned that she had a healing formation carved inside her body in such a manner that her natural ki flow went through it and powered it. I’d never seen such a thing before, and only read about such in old legends. When she described to me how she did it, I was flabbergasted. It’s not just a simple matter of getting it right or not, a healing formation of that kind involves so much detail that one must have intimate knowledge of the body it is being used on, in addition to mastery of both formations and water ki.

What stunned me most was something else though. I could attribute her first formation as a lucky break. A high risk, high reward venture that paid off. Many of the greatest cultivators have something similar in their histories. Most who try to follow in their footsteps die. No, what stunned me is when she modified her formation to add another effect to it. 

Within just a few months, she’d gone from knowing nothing about ki gathering formations, to having added ki gathering to her own formation. A formation that can power itself with gathered ki is a very advanced technique. She not only managed to modify her existing formation to include that effect, but did so in such a way that it actually adds ki to her own supply when she’s not in need of healing.

People normally have to spend great sums of money to obtain items that will allow them to gather ki at all times without needing to focus on it. Yet she’s somehow managed to make it so she can do the same with just her own ki and body.

I’m very tempted to try doing what she did, but I know I can’t afford to be reckless. I’ve seen the pain she goes through when she makes a mistake, so I know that even she doesn’t find it easy, and unlike her, I don’t have a persistent healing formation to protect me. Starting with something simpler would be better.

Another impressive advancement she made that I knew of, but not the details about, was mixing multiple types of ki gathering formations into one that separates the ki types. Used properly, it’s one of the best techniques for speeding up cultivation. However, the formation I know of is too complex for me to do yet. Her version is much simpler, yet achieves a similar result. 

Instead of combining multiple formations into one, she actually makes five separate formations and one big one surrounding them all, to gather ki, and then split it. It’s less efficient than the proper version, but it’s so much simpler to make that I’m left wondering: why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t anyone else think of that? Are we just so accustomed to following the teachings of our predecessors that we’ve forgotten how to develop our own ideas?

Ch 14: Purity?

After much study, I think I figured out why my body has changed so much. The ki in the water pearl I consumed was very pure, and the modifications I’d originally made to protect me from my past life’s poisonous ki ended up amplifying the effect of the water ki. I’m probably explaining this badly, but the elemental ki types are really not the full description of ki types. They are more like ideals people think ki should follow. 

Most cultivation techniques rely upon people getting ki of specific types and then purifying it to ensure it’s only that type. Thus people refer to any ki that isn’t exactly the type they want, as impure. One of the reasons water ki is both valued and seen as weak, is because it’s easily altered. There are known techniques for converting water ki into other ki types, but keeping water ki pure is actually tricky. 

In theory, any ki can be cultivated and used, but if there’s no existing technique for it, one would have to develop it themselves, which is why it’s very rare for someone to cultivate a non-standard ki type. One of the reasons my cultivation lagged behind others, was due to developing my own cultivation method designed to create and maintain a poisonous ki. Obviously, this ki isn’t well suited to healing, so when I created my formation, I needed a way to ignore impurities and treat the poisonous ki as if it was pure water ki. 

Turns out the trick I used for healing myself and others with poisonous ki actually amplifies the water ideal. Again, this is a bad explanation, but I don’t know a term for it. It’s not simply a matter of presence or absence of impurities, but how closely the ki matches the required concept. Instead of ignoring the impurity, I amplified the concept of strong water without realizing that’s what I’d done. I now want to know how far this can go. Purity is almost certainly the wrong word. It’s not technically possible to have better than 100% purity. There’s no real limit to how strongly ki can embody a concept though.

The water pearl body reformation trick was supposed to result in mediocre water affinity. Due to my formation I ended up with higher water affinity than I’ve ever heard of in anyone below the immortal stage. Now I want to know if it’s possible to go even higher. If I do it right, I should be able to modify the formation in my body to gather ki, filter ki, and reforge my body with that ki all at the same time, steadily increasing both my cultivation and affinity for water ki, and even strengthening my body.

I just wish it didn’t hurt so much every time I make a change. Even when I get things right, it often hurts due to impurities getting expelled in a painful way, or changes being done too quickly. I don’t know enough to fix that. Someday… someday I’ll get it right. Someday I’ll figure out how to do this without all the pain.

Ch 15: Whoops.

Tessa’s view

Alice managed to make it a whole two decades this time, before doing something colossally stupid and exploding magnificently (it was seriously a beautiful explosion of ki, rainbows covered the sect for a week!). Even her formation can’t save her from having her entire body explode. I wish she’d be less reckless, but I can’t blame her for it. If I’d died and come back, and knew a god was watching me for entertainment, I’d probably be reckless too.

If only Alice would pay more attention to things other than her experiments. I know she’s not foolish enough to have missed my hints, and from her reactions I can tell she knows how I feel about her. Her letting me forge a soul bond with her is proof of that. However, I can also tell that she doesn’t know how she feels about me, and has been deliberately avoiding the topic. It makes me worry about what will happen when she finally reaches the soul refinement stage. There’s a lot of things she’s going to have to deal with when she gets there, because she’s so stubbornly focused entirely on her studies and not spared a thought for herself.

Now for a review of her time in the sect: if I were to leave such explanations to Alice, she’d leave out way too many details. For example: If she were to talk about her time in this sect, I’m sure all she’d talk about is her research. Something about formations and ki purity I think. I have a hard time following all her thoughts, but I understood enough to find my own personal ki source: molten metal. It’s why I spend so much time in my forge. I craft items to sell, and melt metal to harvest ki (which ruins the metal, sadly).

The details Alice readily forgets about, are all the things she just doesn’t pay much attention to. Such as the duels and tournaments she won. Or the fact that sect teachers began consulting her on using formations inside the body. I’m pretty sure she never noticed how much influence she had on the sect. The entire sect has begun using formations she developed, and since she made no effort to keep her discoveries a secret people will actively debate whether she’s just a naive fool, or a saint. The fool believers seem to see her death as a strong point of evidence in favor of her being a fool, while the saint believers see her not forcing the experiment on someone else, as a sign that she must be a saint. Personally, I think she’s both.

I’ve already let the sect leaders know of my plan to leave. They’ve been quite understanding, though I imagine it’s related to the fact that this sect is really dedicated to water ki, and I don’t have any talent for it. While there are tricks for converting water ki to other types, I’ve done enough study with Alice to realize it’s a shortcut that doesn’t pay off in the long run. The end result is too impure.

Our soul bond lets me feel that Alice is still in this world, but the sensation is so weak, I’m guessing she’s not even born again yet. I’ll probably wait a year before leaving, unless something changes. I don’t have a clear sense of what direction I need to go in yet, so leaving early is unlikely to help. I wonder what sort of crazy situation I’ll find her in this time.

God’s View

I wasn’t even able to get that story started. It took a long while to get her into a sect, and then she somehow made the sect stronger all by herself, without making the sect dependent upon her. In another century or two, that sect will go from minor sect to major sect due to what she’s taught them. 

The plan was to get her into a minor sect that she would like, then destroy the sect to give her a drive for power to get revenge. Except when she elevated that sect, it ceased to be an unimportant sect I could casually discard. If I destroy it now, too much knowledge would be lost. For the sake of my world, I need that sect to grow and prosper, so Alice’s discoveries can spread. Except her self-destruction means she can’t rise to become a new leader who leads the sect to dominance, so it will take a long while for her teachings to propagate from there. She disrupted my original plan and my backup plan without even knowing what they were this time.