Elder Fu Jin spent several days studying and assessing Qing Liao. At the end of that period she presented him with a thick manual, one easily larger than the three he'd already received combined, titled Primal Pelt Perfected Purification Practice. Despite the rather absurd title, traceable to an ancient cultivator of the old world with a terrible sense of self-promotion, it was an immensely practical treatise that described, in excruciating detail, countless methods of skinning, curing, tanning, shaping, and carving hides into endless forms and types of leather products. In addition to this central text, she plied him with an entire shelf worth of books describing tools, varieties of hide-bearing animals, salt manufacture, tanning reagents, and more. The elder made it utterly clear that she believed in a strong foundation of knowledge before advancing towards actual practice.

  She also suggested, without bothering to be gentle, that the actual production of goods was an entirely secondary result of artistry. The point of the work was to developed meditative calm and a means of opening the mind toward enlightenment through varied experiences that invoked the endless aspects of the infinite dao. Self-improvement, not manufacturing output, was the ultimate goal. “A cultivator is not a laborer, they are an artist. If ten thousand failures must be torn apart to produce one masterpiece, so be it.”

  In the fifth week of instruction the schedule changed. New material was no longer introduced, and Yu Yong's lectures reached their conclusion. The class was instead directed to spend their entire day pursuing mastery of the techniques they been taught. The Celestial Infusion Method was, they were instructed, to be their primary priority. They were ordered to focus on filling their dantians and to endlessly practice the channeling of qi through the will as they progressed towards breakthrough into the body refining realm proper. The art exhibition, and even weapon practice, it soon became very obvious, represented abilities something they were not truly ready to embrace. Instead, they had been given these choices as an incentive. They were being taught to delay the pursuit of immediate gratification, a preparation necessary for their lives to come in the pavilions, with its vast freedom and endless luxurious temptations.

  In theory, it was possible to break through to the first realm at any time once the dantian was filled to the brim. With this milestone passed additional qi would naturally flow to the first meridian, the heart meridian, if properly directed by the cultivator's will. That achievement unlocked the first layer of the body refining realm, forming the simplest possible qi circuit within. Each completed layer would further increase the size of the dantian as it worked to draw in qi to supply the growing circuit. This progress would also enhance the body, bringing it up to the peak of natural human health and physical ability by degrees.

  Elder Yu Yong, perhaps trying to encourage them, implied this was not an especially challenging achievement. “The body naturally wishes to find its ideal state. And the process of refining, though it produces some temporary discomfort, greatly improves health, energy, and stamina. You will feel better than ever each day, the first signs of the great elevation to come.”

  Everyone agreed, in silent compact, that Zhou Hua would be the first member of their class to take this step. She was as close to a genius as they possessed, and though her physical development lagged behind her spiritual, this would not hold her back in advancement at this stage. She might well leave them behind at any point during the fifth week.

  Beyond that, competition for second place was considerably fiercer, with Liao surprised to realize he might have a legitimate chance at taking the spot. This discovery incentivized him to spend even more time in meditation. Sitting on the roof for a great many dark hours, he watched the stars chart their endless motions across the sky. Progress continued to accelerate night by night. By the end of the fiftieth day, two days after Zhou Hua became the first to graduate from their class, he felt the moment within reach. His dantian felt full, a real reservoir of power swollen within his form, detectable by his nascent qi sense for the first time.

  This was not enough, however, to make him a cultivator. Qi supply was no longer the problem, he had enough. The difficulty was wielding it. The Stellar Flash Steps, intended to teach him the necessary skill, refused to yield to his efforts.

  He could not sustain the discharge of power through the interrupted path from one stance to the next. This critical first plunge continued to elude his understanding. Nothing he tried, and he engaged in one variation after another, worked. This bred frustration, especially when he inevitably compared himself to Zhou Hua, who had surpassed him despite her initial hopelessness with the movement technique.

  It was hard to ignore the differences in the mornings when the class number decreased from eighteen to seventeen.

  Day after day, Liao continued his stumbling attempts to master the foundational movement technique. More than anything else, this was the central block. Archery practice, undertaken as a break between other sessions, went far better. The methods taught by the Nine Spheres Arsenal, to draw and aim and release, differed from those he'd learned at his father's side, but adaptation was swift and easy. It helped that everything he did using the cultivator method felt better, a more effective approach even when no qi was utilized to strengthen string or arrow. Nor did already learned methodology hold him back, for the intent of the art was entirely different. Killing demons was nothing like hunting deer. Different bow, arrows, and arrowheads; everything shifted toward this alternate purpose.

  He had to learn to shoot all over again, but that was simply pure fun.

  Similar progress attended his studies of tanning and leatherwork. Though the little courtyard where the recruits practiced offered no chance to perform any physical artistry, Liao made strides reading through the technique and stack of references Elder Fu Jin had left him. His reading speed, vocabulary, and grammar, once rudimentary, expanded considerably as he puzzled out various diagrams and instructions in the carefully labeled manuals.

  His discontent at the lack of progress with the movement technique did not grow acute until, at the end of the sixth week, a second member of their class graduated to the body refining realm. Liao had no problem with matters taking their time, that was ordinary enough. He could be patient. But to be overtaken from behind, that spurred him to anger and furious frustration. He was the hunter, not the prey. Losing ground compared to the average was one thing, being surpassed was intolerable.

  Such unsettled emotions did not assist him in obtaining progress.

  Elder Yu Yong had instructed recruits for over half a century. He had a good sense of his students and the various struggles they might face. After several days of fruitless effort in which Qing Liao achieved nothing but spinning in circles as he stumbled through the postures of the Stellar Flash Steps, he walked up beside the youth.

  “It can be hard to emulate light,” the elder's words came from seemingly far away, for the advanced cultivator had not turned to look at him. Liao, shocked from his consternation by this strange neglect, later realized it had been deeply deliberate. He was meant to be unsettled, moved aside from the trap of his own mind. “We cannot see it move, no matter how we try, but we can feel it, even as you can feel my presence through I stand behind you beyond the reach of your sight.” The sudden shift in position jolted Liao so hard he practically jumped. “In this way, we often deceive ourselves. You, born to mountain trails, came here knowing how to move your body through the complexity of the wild, you do not smash about like these farmers or stumble as the city-born. Your instincts tell you where you should go, even when that is not where light must carry you, this is your obstacle.”

  The elder held out a strip of thick black cloth. “For today, bind your eyes, forget your sight and let qi alone guide you. Feel the stars without seeing them, as if on a cloudy night.”

  This advice offered little initial confidence. Liao put the blindfold on hesitantly, knowing that attempting this method would result in a truly endless series of bruises. Despite this, he could not possibly defy the elder, and he certainly had no better ideas. It could be endured for an afternoon.

  Perhaps it truly would help.

  Finding the softest patch of the earth remaining in the yard, a difficult task given the pounding the recruits regularly imposed upon it, he put the black barrier over his eyes. “A cloudy night,” a mere whisper beneath his breath. The sign to begin.

  Carefully taking up the initial, basal, position of the Stellar Flash Steps, he pulled the image of the second into his mind's eye. Feeling without sight, the strange touch of qi increased in clarity, a minor but noticeable gain compared to previous efforts. A subsonic hum along the edges of his scalp, tingling upon the skin, its presence shifted in and out of awareness, the universe pulsating. As he'd been taught, Liao extended his presence, his being, along those tendrils of energy. Gathering will and compressing muscles in readiness, he pushed.

  A streak of blinding blue light exploded across the inside of his eyes. Motion burst out through his limbs. Momentum wrapped around his body and impelled him through sudden, unbelievable, acceleration. Ten steps in one, he cascaded over the ground, landing in at another point halfway across the yard.

  Perfectly detonated qi-empowered motion.

  Quickly as it manifested, his grasp on the primordial power of the stars evaporated. Rather than accelerate to the third position or slow back into the poised readiness of the first, he completely lost control. The line of light vanished from his overwhelmed perception.

  He slammed hard into the packed earth, face full of dirt and limbs askew.

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  “Ugh,” groaning, he rolled over, clenched his teeth against the pain, and did his best to take stock of the results. Though there was damage, a quick examination suggested nothing worst than the seemingly perpetual bruising he acquired every day. Most of the students had such black-and-blue mapping across their limbs, but everyone had become used to ignoring anything less than a broken bone. That should not have been possible, normal people who suffered such battering got worse and worse as the detriments added to each other, compounding, but even as barely functional cultivators the recruits benefited from a powerful enhancement to their natural restoration rates. The act of drawing qi into their bodies offered a well of energy to empower cellular repairs.

  Liao heard snickering as he got to his knees and dusted himself off, but it was only a little and quickly faded. Mastery of the movement art had come seamlessly to only one of their number. Everyone else had ended up with a face full of earth more than once. He only wished he was the not the leader of that particular tabulation.

  To his surprise, when he raised the blindfold he found Elder Yu Yong standing beside him, face stern but patient. The instructor did not help him stand, of course, but waited contentedly until his student was upright before speaking. “Good form on the first move,” this confirmation was a great aid in dismissing embarrassment. Ridiculous as the exercise had been, there had been results. “You felt something?” It was not truly a question, merely a prompt to offer Liao a proper chance to explain things in his own words.

  “Yes, elder,” he was careful not to stare at the superior cultivator's qi-perfected form. “There was a, ah, flash, a blue streak of energy. It pulled me along somehow.”

  “A solid insight,” Yu Yong declared. He did not elaborate. “Now, repeat the process until you can control that image. That will be your first true use of qi.”

  There was nothing to do but nod in agreement. It would be pointless to ask for further advice. Liao could feel the truth in the elder's words, simply but weighty. He'd felt the exertion of his qi without truly seeing it. That was enough. Mastery depended upon repetition. Any villager ever taught their father's skills knew this intimately.

  He walked back to his starting point, pulled the blindfold back down, and prepared for a long and painful afternoon. A controlled second step, he declared that as his silent goal. Stopping without falling. That would surely represent sufficient control for now.

  It took twelve days.

  He sprawled in the dirt, pained and ragged, hundreds of times. Every speck of his skin ached. The barracks servants sent angry glances his way after swapping out his ripped and stained white robes for new ones each morning, devastated past any easy cleaning. Liao did not care. He felt the progress grow, slow though it might be. His body could push qi through muscle and bone, release it into a burst of motion, however slowly and lacking precision.

  The feeling this brought was liberating, energy moved through his body, pulled from his lungs using the Celestial Induction Method and filling his dantian till it felt ready to burst.

  Nightly meditations compressed the reservoir to the very edge of what it could contain. At the same time as he acquired control over the basics of cultivator motion he found his understanding of the essentials rose up to match it. His dantian, that inexplicable storehouse of natural energy, could take him no further on its own. He needed to join it to the rest of him, to all that was Qing Liao. The time had come to take the first step as a cultivator, to push qi out from that pool and into the heart meridian. The first and most essential of connection points.

  Liao found this revelation, and the readiness to take the next step bound up with it, while he sat on the roof and starred at the stars. Seated there in the cold, he knew he could have begun immediately. The manual, the simple and profound words of the Celestial Mother, had already taught him how. He knew, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that it was possible. Zhou Hua had conducted her breakthrough beginning in the middle of the midday meal. Nothing held him back from pushing forward beneath the wheeling starlight.

  But the mountains taught all trappers, even young ones, caution. Haunted by the possibility that he might thrash and contort his body during the advancement process – Zhou Hua had not, but the next boy had experience physical spasms sufficient to tear his cushion apart – Liao waited until he was not seated atop a roof and knew the elder's protection was watching over him before daring this critical push. It was not, perhaps, in tune with the reckless Heaven-defying spirit invoked endlessly in cultivator legend, or even the ruthless self-assurance that spoke out from within the many manuals, but he did not, try as he might, see himself that way.

  He had not sought to walk this path on the edge of maddened desperation; it, his very nature, had placed it before him. He would walk it in his own way, on his own time.

  That felt right for him, even if it meant losing strides to some. After all, those in the celestial ascendancy realm were immortal. Surely that meant the path to ascension was not a race.

  The next day began in what had become ordinary cultivator fashion. He washed, dressed, ate the provided breakfast, and then walked the short distance to the training hall. He was not the first to arrive. One of the farm boys made a point of arriving exceedingly early each morning to secure this status, but he was perfectly within the bounds of punctuality. Fifteen students remained. Three had already moved on to their pavilions.

  That was, Elder Yu Yong had made clear, considered excellent progress. Anyone who advanced in under two months was accounted swift, a gifted cultivator. Qing Liao intended to expand the group to four by the end of the day.

  As he began, taking up the usual meditative posture on his assigned cushion, he structured his breathing according to the directions of the Celestial Induction Method. After only a few carefully controlled breaths he felt qi begin to flow into him, a gentle stream of stellar essence. This energy filled his body with vitality. Morning aches and the pains of the day before vanished as he inhaled.

  Normally Liao would continue this process, drawing additional qi through his lungs and pressing it down into his dantian, but the feeling of fullness stopped him. If he did that, as he had learned the night before, compression would fail and the excess qi would simply slip away back into the ambient environment. This time he needed to add an additional step to the process.

  Finding his way to the heart meridian had been simplicity itself. It was located within the heart, and once he awakened to the ability to sense qi it was nothing more than a matter of following his own heartbeat down. Directing qi there utilized the same spiritual path, but it was slightly more complicated. Qi did not like to move from places where it rested. Simply trying to grasp and pull upon it failed completely.

  Prior training revealed the proper method. Liao imagined within himself a line of light, glowing faintly, that connected dantian to meridian. After that, it was simply a matter of drawing the droplets down that string one breath at a time, letting the vibration carry it all the way through.

  Theory, the clarion words of Orday, made it sound simple. In practice it was rather like pushing as hard as could in order to dig a hole on a lakebed while mud rushed into fill it from all sides. The effort needed was immense. Within the first three breathing cycles he was exhausted. Without meditation training and endless hours of practice to prepare the way he would have surely collapsed having barely begun. Every fragment of his focus was grasped, oriented, and directed toward this task.

  Awareness of the rest of the world vanished.

  Worse, it hurt. The heart meridian did not wish to take the qi. Unlike the dantian, it was not empty. Qi droplets did not simply fall into open space, they had to be injected, forcing open new space as they came, carve a channel through dry clay. Liao had seen medicine pressed into a man's jaw once, treating rot in the gums. Though a heavily built woodcutter, he'd howled and wailed like a baby.

  That same pressure afflicted him now, but not in the jaw, in the heart.

  His body protested this change being inflicted upon it. The closed meridian resisted, measure by measure, until qi forced open the path, an awl of liquid cutting through his very being. He could not stop, no matter how it hurt. He had to hang on until the process finished, otherwise everything would be wasted.

  Clenching his teeth, Liao pulled every part of his body tight. He could not feel the air, the cold, could not hear any sounds. Only pain and the need to keep breathing, keep forcing the power down the glowing line.

  More and more qi passed down that rippling chord of energy, plunged into the meridian. Power flushed through him, flooded his pores. Detritus lodged in the meridian, ignored and unused, was forced out.

  A circuit slowly took shape within the map of his existence.

  He did not cry out. Focus pushed him to a place beyond awareness of pain. Instead, he crumpled, his body deflating as the effort piled heavy boulders of exhaustion upon him with each intake of air. It took everything he had to catch the next gasp. Nothing remained save qi and will, the very center of cultivation laid bare in that moment of endless, exquisite tension.

  A window to the universe, if it could ever be recalled beyond the eclipse of agony.

  Until the stream of qi broke through.

  Relief flooded Liao, though his overtaxed body, slumped lifelessly on the paving, barely managed a weak grunt. Visibly, nothing had changed. On the inside, the differences were endless, profound. A circuit not streamed within him, qi carried in an endless loop from dantian to heart meridian, sturdy and sustained. As each droplet passed through this cycle he felt it refine further, compressed beyond previous limits. Tempered in his chest, strengthened, the qi returned to his dantian and cause an almost imperceptible expansion of the receptacle with every pulse of induction.

  Instinctively, he recognized that this would grow and grow, especially as each successive meridian was opened and the circuit grew in size and complexity. Layer by layer, until the origin would be barely recognizable. Already, felt in the depths of his body, he could deduce that an immense amount of qi, flushed through seven connected meridians, would be needed to progress beyond his new state.

  This was barely the beginning. The first step on a journey of millions.

  Despite such soaring realizations, this single stride's important was not lost on him. Qing Liao stood up, his pain suddenly completely forgotten, and with a simple exertion of his newly mobile qi, took the deepest lung-filling breath of his entire life. He felt as if he could run forever, and only barely held back from putting that assertion to the test.

  He was not, after all, alone. Elder Yu Yong stood before him. The stern-faced cultivator had adopted a wide smile. He held a bright red belt stretched between his hands, palms upwards. “Congratulations, Qing Liao, you are now a full-fledged initiate of the Celestial Origin Sect. Your time in my class has come to an end. You are now an honored member of the Aesthetic Society of Exquisite Threadweavers,” he used the full name of the textiles pavilion, reserved for formal occasions. There could hardly be a more suitable one.

  “I shall not see you again for some time, I expect, but it is my hope that you recall this class with fondness and that its lessons serve your well.” He passed over the belt, waiting patiently as Liao pulled free the white one and tied the new, crimson, marker in place. “Return to your room and gather your possessions. A representative of your pavilion will be along shortly to take you to your new accommodations.”

  There was nothing else. No goodbyes. The morning activities of the remaining fourteen recruits were not even paused. Several continued meditating through the entire process. No one else would follow him to the textiles pavilion, not until at least next year. It made Qing Liao glad he had not made friends, there was no one to leave behind.

  In the future, he hoped, that would change. He had come to his proper place as a cultivator at last. Though he had made his self-imposed deadline, it felt as it if it had taken too long all the same.