Chapter 5: Stage 1 Qi and Beginning body Cultivation...

-Three years later-

It's finally time, it has taken me 4 years since I started cultivating Qi to get to this point but it is finally here. I have collected 100 Qi Particles in my dantian. It has not been an easy process I have spent long hours meditating trying to gather as much Qi as I can but I have finally succeeded. Now there is only one last step before I can advance to the first stage of Qi cultivation, the condensing.

As I sit in a lotus pose on my desk I start to pressure and squeeze my Qi into as small an area as possible. According to the manual once I get the Qi into a solid sphere with no space left to fit any more Qi I can start to transform the air like Qi into a liquid that will flow through my dantian and body allowing me to use the gravity that will be so advantages to my training. As I'm squeezing the Qi for what feels like hours but really has only been a few moments I feel the Qi change on a fundamental level, it becomes more substantial feeling like it has more mass but takes up a lot less space. It seems like I finally succeeded and broke through to the first stage!

"GG EZ YOU DUMBASS QI YOU CAN'T HOLD ME BACK I AM TOO STRONG."

as I'm yelling this and flexing in the mirror I take in my, what some may say, amazing good looks (for a 4-year-old). I have the blue eyes that I asked for, dark brown hair that I (my parents) keep short, with a skin tone somewhere between my mom's super pale and my fathers' tan skin. when it comes to the face you can tell that once I lose my super cute(according to my mother) baby fat that I will be a very handsome guy. when it comes to height and weight I'm already 4 feet tall and weigh about 50 pounds. It seems I'm at the average of a 7-year-old at the age of 4 so it seems I will be taking after my dad when it comes to size. as my father is around 6'6" 350 pounds all muscle. speaking of my father it seems he heard me yell and decided to come to my room to check on me.

"Hey, son whats all the yelling about?"

"oh ahhhh nothing I was just excited, anyways dad I have a question?"

"what is it? do you want to know how to strike a proper flexing superhero pose? because of I'm really good at those and I see you are practicing in the mirror."

"Well first of all, OF COURSE, I WANT TO LEARN HOW TO STRIKE A PROPER POSE! But that wasn't my question I wanted to know if I could start training with you, I feel like its about time I start to train to become THE BEST SUPERHERO EVER!"

*HAHAHA* "THAT'S MA BOY! but first, let me teach you the right way to pose!"

As my father and I are striking spectacular poses in the mirror my mother walks in the room, looks at both of our sighs and walks back out of the room. after that, my father tells me to meet him in the underground training room in 30 minutes as he goes to get everything I might need ready. thinking back on when I first arrived at this house I would have never expected how much bigger the house is in comparison to how it looks from the curb. on the inside, what you might think of as the normal portions of the house consists of a kitchen, large living room, 5 bedrooms, and 3 bathrooms. I have a bathroom and a room for myself and my parents share the master bedroom. the other two rooms are used for my parents' offices. now what makes this house really spectacular is the, what I like to call the "Batcave" of the house. on the first floor, there is an elevator that leads down to a basement area that has everything from a workout room to a gun range, to a fighting pit with robots that can be used to train. there are also tunnels leading to different parts of the city that my parents use when responding to emergencies so that they cant be followed home. it's an amazing system that was apparently set up by the "the company" to assist heroes with keeping their identities concealed.

Anyways now that my dad is gone I can try to use my gravity power, and honestly its really easy. I thought that it would take a lot of focus but it works like an on/off switch in my brain or maybe more like a dial but since I can only increase the gravity by 0.5x its more like a switch. after "turning the gravity up" I felt like I had a 25-pound vest just thrown on my body out of nowhere. Thinking this would help with my training a lot I go ahead and try to open the body cultivation technique again. I have been trying to open it for the past 4 years but wasn't able to. It seems there was some type of restriction on the technique that I just hadn't reached yet. trying again the "scroll" in my head opens like it was never locked in the first place and what I see leaves me both excited and scared for the future road ahead.

"Eight trigram body cultivation"

Must endure the pain of your body refining itself making every aspect stronger faster and much more durable.

The gates are split by the percent the body has been refined. please note the user that the body will be refined as a whole, not individual parts. please also be aware that the last gate will not be opened until your body is perfect, an existence that should not exist on the mortal plane, but somehow does.

1st gate – gate of healing- increases users' endurance and recovery, allows the body to continuously pass the limits of what a human can do. (takes several hours of training to adapt and overcome current limit) (0-12.5%)

2nd gate – gate of limit – increases balance and coordinated force (think of how a dancer moves always in control and perfectly balanced)(12.5-25%)

3rd gate – gate of wonder – increases speed, agility, and acceleration(25-37.5%)

4th gate – gate of pain – increases users striking power (pure explosive force)(37.5-50%)

5th gate – gate of opening – increases all senses including sixth sense(perceived danger and special awareness in an area around user)(50-62.5%)

6th gate – gate of view – makes user impervious to damage (not pain, will need to train pain tolerance)(62.5-75%)

7th gate – gate of life – can burn life force to temperately increase strength & speed by 50x (3-month minimum cooldown)(75-99.99%)

8th gate – gate of death – the user becomes an entity that is on the level of the gods (planetary defender or destroyer)(100%)

[authors note: I know this system isn't perfect but it is the best I could come up with, I don't want our MC being super overpowered in the beginning and I want him to work hard, gain his strength gradually and not be looked at like some freak of nature. let's be honest here if you were playing a sport and some guy walks up and is the same age as you but plays and performs like a hall of fame professional player you would look at him as some kind of monster. now saying that he is still going to be a badass but not to a godly level right off the bat.]

After reading the technique my body immediately starts using the Qi that I have gathered to upgrade my body. I can feel my skin become a little lighter more firm, and my muscles and body feel like it wants to run to lift weights, to become better than what it is. I smile like an idiot as I can tell that just my Qi was what I needed to unlock the technique and that I immediately opened the first gate upon reading the technique. after further reading the technique and thinking about it I came to the conclusion that the refining of the "Eight trigram body cultivation" and the cleansing of the "Qi Cultivation for the lazy and dumb stages" are two different things. it seems the refining is more like upgrading, so thinking about it. it would be like upgrading the engine of your car to a v8 from a v6, it's still your car but it's going to be more powerful. while the cleansing would be like if you had a car for 200,000 miles and you took it into a shop and had them completely clean out the engine and restore it too new. the engine would be the same but it would perform a lot better and more efficient because it isn't clogged up with a lot of gunk.

As I adapt to the changes in my body I start to head down to the Batcave to train with my dad and as I do I can't help but think (this is going to be so easy I'm going to be strutting around as a greek god in no time. ezpz!)

if my future self could time travel he would slap me in the face and beat me for having such ignorant thoughts about the hell I would soon be pushing myself through.