14 Shining Bright
The pain from his arm woke Jack up a few times through the night. He finally gave up near dawn and tried to cultivate once more. After trying and failing for a long time he heard the others getting up and going out of their houses.
He got up too and got himself ready for the day before following the group to the town.
On the way down the mountain, Kuang Bindun slowed down to walk next to Jack and quietly asked "What happened?" as he nodded towards his bandaged arm.
Jack gave him a pale-faced smile as he answered "Nothing serious, just fell and cut my arm."
Kuang Bindun rose one eyebrow up in doubt, snorted, and walked ahead.
When Du Angliang left them to their work Jack went to the back door to grab a body that had the clothes of a servant and looked even more malnourished than the rest of them. He wrapped its legs under his armpits, gritted his teeth, and dragged it to a free table.
With some effort, he managed to pull it up to the table and strip it of its clothes. He wiped the dripping sweat from his brows as he went to the table where the Gravediggers held all of their equipment. From there he grabbed a sharp looking knife and went back to his table where he stripped down to his underwear.
By now a few people looked at him, but most of them had disinterested eyes. Some of them even looked like they anticipated the show that would come from his escapades.
When he got ready to make his first cut a large hand grabbed his right arm as he heard the voice of Kuang Bindun hiss in his ear "What the f*ck are you doing?!"
Jack looked over his shoulder at the glowering eyes of Kuang Bindun and calmly said "I have to figure out how everything looks in there. Those sketches in the scroll look like a four-year-old child with poor artistic talent drew them. I don't have time to imagine this s*hit."
Kuang Bindun looked at him for a few seconds, then released his hand and turned to walk back to his work.
Jack refocused his gaze on the corpse and started cutting near the fingertips.
When he got to the shoulder he could visualize the meridians in his arms.
When he stripped the chest he saw how the lungs were intertwined with the main meridian for taking in spirit energy.
When he got to the fingertips of the other arm he figured out how the two arms made a cycle between themselves and the rest of the body.
When he opened the stomach he had to dig through it for a bit before he found a golf ball sized lump of flesh fully enclosed in the white threads that made up meridians.
With that, he gave a sigh of relief and almost slumped to the ground from exhaustion. Sweat poured down his back as he looked up at the sun and judged that he still had a bit of time until Du Angliang returned.
Jack looked around the other tables and saw astonishment in the eyes of the few people that met his eyes. He ignored them and watched what they did when they ended their ministrations.
For the most part, they cleaned the bodies from all the blood and dressed them back into their old clothes, and then called someone over to drag them over to the cart.
Jack went to grab a water bucket and a dirty rag from where the carriers placed them every morning. In the water's reflection, he saw a dirty little child with streaks of blood running down his face like tears and sighed.
He first used the water to clean himself, and then cleaned as much of the dead body as he could before he put its and his clothes back on.
When he finished with the cleanup he looked around for a second in an attempt to find someone to carry the body to the cart, but everyone avoided his eyes so he shrugged his shoulders and dragged the remains on his own.
After that, he went back to the back door to wait for new corpses with the rest. No one spoke to him for the rest of the day.
Later, when they finished with their daily grave digging, Du Angliang called Kuang Bindun's name out when they lined up. Jack had to watch as the slightly shaking Kuang Bindun followed after their Elder Brother to the back of the estate.
For the hundredth time, Jack wondered what they did every night that so scared all of these half-dead men. But he couldn't do anything to help so he focused on his goal for the night and walked faster.
As soon as he returned to his home he closed the door and took out the glowing orb out of the pillowcase. He sat in the position Kuang Bindun taught him, closed his eyes, regulated his breathing, and started reciting the cultivation chant in his head.
With each breath, Jack imagined the spirit energy he collected through his breathing flowing through a web of meridians similar to the one he saw that morning.
For the first hour, he felt the same as he did the previous times he tried cultivating.
He didn't let that distract him, and as he sank deeper and deeper into the imagined picture of the connected meridians forming an uninterrupted flow in his body he suddenly felt… something.
With a deep breath, he felt like he swallowed a gulp of a cold beverage during a blazing hot day. The sensation of the 'liquid' felt so abrupt that it broke his entire concentration making him lose the feeling immediately.
Even so, a huge smile spread across Jack's face as he thought 'Ha, got you now!' with joy, and refocused his efforts.
Half an hour later he managed to feel the same refreshing feeling once more. This time he didn't allow himself to lose it and imagined the energy going through the pathways that the scroll said it should take.
For the first few tries he lost the feeling almost as soon as he tried to guide it, but with each try, it felt easier to send the energy through the pathways it went through earlier. Until finally it went all the way through his body and found the cluster of meridians located in his stomach that coiled around the dantian.
There he found a barrier. No matter how hard he tried to push the energy against the dantian wall he couldn't make it go through. The scroll described that all he had to do is to push the energy into the dantian and he would finish his first full cycle of cultivation.
He kept forcing the ever increasing energy to bang against the dantian wall but had no success.
When it started to hurt like someone kicked him in the stomach every time he tried to push the energy in he stopped all of his efforts and wiped the sweat off of his brow.
'This isn't right. Why isn't the energy going in? Neither the scroll nor Kuang Bindun mentioned anything about an obstruction in the dantian.' Jack thought as he sat in contemplation.
He went over all of the steps he needed to take 'Breathe, recite the chant, imagine the process, draw in the energy, cycle it to the… Wait. It can't be that simple.' he thought with a furrowed brow as he went back into his position for cultivation.
He did everything as before, only this time he imagined the whole dantian and the spirit energy going into it. Last time he only imagined up to the point of the cluster of meridians around the dantian.
This time he didn't feel anything. Like no obstruction existed in the first place. The guided energy just went through the walls of the dantian and gathered there.
Jack felt like a butterfly moved into his stomach, a nice cooling butterfly, but still a fluttering little bastard nonetheless.
For a second he just sat there in wonder at the feeling, but then he awkwardly rose up from his cramped position and started jumping around the house from joy.
He didn't dare yell from the fear of alerting the rest of what happened, but in his mind, he shouted 'Yes! Finally! Now I can start paying these sociopaths back!' as he picked the glowing orb up from the table and stared at it.
It still shone brightly, but even with his limited experience, he could see that it shone brighter last night. He went back to his cot and returned to his cultivating position, this time with the orb in his hand.
What he tried next wasn't to pull in more spirit energy, this time he tried to pull the energy that he stored into his dantian through his meridians and into the orb.
When he saw Du Angliang pull it out and light it, Jack didn't see him do anything special. Only pour his spirit energy into it. So decided to give it a shot.
Drawing the energy out of the dantian felt weirder than filling it up. The first time he emptied it Jack felt like he lost something vital and quickly lost the control over the energy that he guided towards his right hand.
Quickly he focused on drawing more energy back into the dantian and could only let out a small sigh of relief when he felt it filling up.
On his next attempt, he only took a portion of the energy out and sent it towards his right hand. It felt the same as when he first opened the path towards his dantian. He had to take in and then release the energy constantly to make the path more stable.
When he finally guided the energy to the tips of the fingers of his right hand he hit another barrier. For some time he tried to force the energy through and even tried to pour it through the pores on his palms, but nothing seemed to work.
He stopped for a second and almost smacked himself on the head as he guided another strand of spirit energy, this time imagining the glowing orb as a part of the natural circulation of the energy.
This time Jack felt the strand leave him and pour into the orb. He snapped his eyes open and looked at the orb. It still glowed with the same intensity as before.
Jack halted for a second in surprise, but then he closed his eyes and kept sending strands of energy into the orb. After 15 minutes of this, he opened his eyes once more and saw a slight increase in brightness from the orb.
A smile spread across his face as he closed his eyes and kept pouring his spirit energy into the orb. He only stopped when the noise from the others waking up interrupted his cultivation.
By now the orb shined almost as brightly as when Jack got it. With a sly smile, he stood up and stored it in his pillowcase.
He stretched his body and did a few exercises to limber himself up before leaving the house to join the others. As he did he thought 'I'll have to continue my studies today.' with a grim little smirk on his face.
