4 The Very First Step

Before the first ray of dawn had even broke out, Yang Qing got up and started crawling out of bed. The bed used to have a bed frame, but his sister, Amelia, would often want to crawl into bed with them, so the bed frame was removed. It made it easier for all of them. His mother so she wouldn't have to fret that he or his sister would roll off the bed at the middle of the night; and her sister, so she could easier crawl in at any point of the night.

He sat beside his sister's bed, since he didn't have his own room. Her sister's room looked just like his mother, the bed frame removed for the same reasons, but her room had many more pillows and plushies. His mother thought that since his sister's place had an equal amount of water and wind elemental qi, it would be therapeutic for him if he spent some time there each day. Or, at the very least, give him a fighting chance to survive the water dominant world outside.

Amelia was only four - an aggressive learner, curious about the world and used her mother and hands to experience things, much to their mother's horror. Of her many talents and curiosities, however, cultivating was not one of them. At least, not yet. He didn't want to imagine the day this little tyrant would surpass in him cultivation and rub it in his face. He could already see it and it only made him cultivate faster. Instead, she obtained a wind and water elemental refining orb, which would purify her elemental qi and return it, so she could slowly feel it. Preparation his mother called it, but he felt it's effect too short lasting and weak to amount to much. Still, he couldn't help and something was better than nothing, especially when my mother needed a short nap or time for herself.

Normally, Yang Qing would spend nearly thirty minutes thinking about his new life and what he would do with it when he grew up. He had been here a year now, but due to the deathly atmosphere, he hadn't travelled much, spending much of his time around the cottage. It took a while, but he had learned the language, but history wasn't a topic normally discussed and many of the books in the house were either musical or picture book, though there was the occasional religious text, filled with obscure passages and words he couldn't yet comprehend. He was no closer than a year ago to finding out what had happened to him, where his family were, or even if they were alive.

Today, he skipped all of that. He was far too excited. All of the meridians in his body were finally strong enough for him to start cultivating and he finally had all the meridians required to cultivate the Nine Revolution Spirit-Body technique. He had rest the entire day yesterday, only slowly filling his meridians with qi, so they would be brimming with qi today. He took a deep breath, bringing his spirit into his middle dantian and started to push the qi within through the pathway to his head; then right part of his body; to some of the organs on the right half of his body; to his legs, before coming through the remaining organs then arm, before finally returning to his middle dantian.

Once the last bit of qi completed the first revolution, all of his original gaseous qi was gone. All that was left was two layers of qi: an inner and outer layer. The outer layer had a clear gaseous qi, stripped of its element and low in its energy. The diameter of the inner layer was eighty percent of the diameter of the meridian and was a deep silver and contained all of the energy and wind element the outer layer once had. He had finally taken the first step in his cultivation journey.

His pores opened and it was like he took a breath for the very first time. With each inhale, qi swarmed into his lungs and flooded his meridians with qi, bringing the energy and his body - and his flame of life within his middle dantian - to grow. Qi also poured into his pores,seeping into his muscles, veins and bones. With each exhale, his lungs would expel the qi carrying out the ashes from his middle dantian, clearing up space and allowing the flame of life to grow slightly bigger. The qi from his pores poured out a black sludge.

By the time this enlightenment from stepping on the path of cultivation ended, he was covered in the black sludge, save for his eyes, noses and mouth. He smelled like rotting fish and felt cladded in dried clay. He had forgotten this would happen naturally - he cleansed his body with pills before he broke through with the help of an elder in the Yang ancestral land. By the time he had broken through, there were no impurities he could cleanse he hadn't already. In his mind, he apologized to his sister. If he had known, he would have chosen to breakthrough in the bathroom.

As his body was being cleansed, his spirit threshold rapidly began expanding, nearly increasing by a quarter of its size before slowing down; it would double in size by the time it stopped, but that would be at the peak of the first realm, Martial Apprentice. His upper dantian began to throb again, summoning into it. For an entire year, he tried countless times to access his upper dantian to no avail. He could never imagine that simply breaking through would have achieved what a year's worth of sweat and tears couldn't. It almost made him cry on the spot, before he remembered that he almost died here last time. Then he immediately wished this opportunity would have waited until he was a bit stronger.

The silver seal of wind was gone without a trace, and its qi with it. A colossal blue, watery planet appeared before him and, without his consent, flooded into his body, disappearing without a trace. His spirit shuddered at the new intruder and its immense weight, knocking him out.

He woke up some time later and he could now see the water elemental qi dancing before him. He smiled, crawling to the edge of the room before looking at where he had been sitting, the quilt was wrinkled, with some flakes of the sludge, but the dryness of the sludge made it stick his body rather than the quilt. With a sigh of relief, he crawled to the bathroom. He would remove the rest of the flakes when he returned.

The bathroom was big, almost the size of a bedroom itself and a bath took up three-quarters of it. The bath and floor was made of stone, unlike the rest of the cottage, so it hurt before when he crawled in the bathroom, but not anymore. He crawled to the wooden bucket that always a bucket of cold water and leaned against it. He summoned some of his qi, most of it being the water qi within the meridians that weren't refined but replaced the clear, weak qi from before. He used the qi to gather water within the bucket, that was as tall as he was when he stood up, and poured it onto himself. He continued to pour water onto himself as he began to scrap off the sludge on himself.

The first ten minutes of removing the flakes were hard, it was like a dried land receiving heavy rainfall for the first time in a long time. The water simply slid right off of it, taking very few flakes with it. But slowly, the first few layers of come off, then the rest came off in patches.

Amelia was awake when he got back, both surprised and ready to tear her quilts asunder because of their smell. Yang Qing quickly summoned his qi to gather the flakes and threw them into the bathroom, where they would all drain into the sewer in a different sector of the city to be dealt with. He brought in new, clean air from the windows and pushed the air currently within the room out of the bathroom window.

However, this was jumping out of the pan and into the fire. As ignorant she may be, she was highly sensitive to qi. Not to mention that she could feel the breeze brush past her and the flakes on her quilt carried out of sight. She had that look in her eyes whenever she found something new, interesting, and her hands and feet weren't far behind. She could run on her two legs while he could only woefully crawl his way back to his room with little avail. He had only just moved past the curtain, where he sat, before his sister caught him. The younger maid, who was more sensitive to the wind element, had stopped cleaning by this point and wandered into the hallway, checking up. He looked up at her, with tears in his eyes, while she came to his rescue, carrying him back to his mother's embrace, who had woken up from all the ruckus. His sister didn't know enough words to put her ideas together and Yang Qing closed his eyes and used the greatest excuse any one-year-old could: sleeping.