Earths consciousness (Cultivation)

Reincarnation feels wired, especially when you aren't reborn as the same race as in your first life.

In my case it was even weirder, I became a fucking piece of rock!

Yeah, that's about it, a grey rock the size of a car resting on a platoon on top of a mountain surrounded by deep valleys and even more mountains.

All I could do was lay there and think about stuff, but there was something unnatural which took me quite some time to notice.

I can still hear, see, smell and feel, not things that normal rocks should be able to do but for some odd reason I could anyways.

When I realized this my mood improved by a lot, being unable to move is bad but being unable to move and not possessing any kind of senses to perceive my surroundings would be so much worse.

With the looming thought of how much worse my situation could have been my time just laying around and watching the world around me became so much more enjoyable.

Day's pass and stretch into weeks and weeks into months till finally the months blur into years.

In the first decade or so I learned how to empty my mind and let time just flow while still watching attentively, somehow, I managed to not only not space out or fall asleep (if that's even possible) I even could perfectly recall each and every second of all the years that flew by me.

Over the next few years I decided to become a bit more active, well as active as a rock could be.

I started with recalling my previous life and organizing my memories before going over each moment once more with a patients completely unthinkable to the me before reincarnating.

Things I deemed difficult previously became easier and not nearly as tiring as before after I went over them for a couple of hundred times.

Bidding my time with relearning all the things I missed or discarded in my previous live I suddenly notice a figure flying through over the seemingly endless sea of mountains and valleys.

It was a young man in dressed up like those cultivators in some of the manga's I read in my past life and he was riding a blue could.

This sight dazed me quite a bit, so much that I in fact completely forgot to do anything till his figure once again disappeared in the distance having past me without noticing anything.

When I regained my senses an immense sense of regret overwhelms me, why didn't I try to make contact with this person? Why did I have to be dazed till he was gone and I'm alone again?

These thoughts flood my mind for a while before they eventually die down again.

Im a rock, how could I possibly make contact with this person, but not all was for naught.

The simple knowledge that humans exists and this world Im currently in had people akin to cultivators opened up a whole lot of possibilities to my stony existence.

From what little I know about cultivators they usually use something called Qi to attain longer life and greater powers.

I read enough stories where things like grass or herbs with this qi could grow stronger till they eventually where able to take on a human form, so what is hindering me, a sentient rock, from doing the same?

Motivated and not concerned about possibly wasting my time doing something useless as I didn't have much better things to do anyways, I start to try out different things which have the possibility to succeed.

Cultivators seem to absorb the thing they call spiritual Qi from the world around them, something about all things between heaven and earth possesses qi even if only the most miniscule amount.

But here's my thoughts, humans and beasts have things like meridians, acupuncture points, dao heart and other stuff which a simple rock doesn't have.

So "I" am currently just some Qi hold together by a soul, meaning my "Body" IS this Qi stuff.

This raises a question in my mind, can I expand my "Body" by assimilating the Qi around me?

Well? Only one way to find out.

I enter a similar state to the one I attained in my first decade of becoming a rock where I empty my mind while still paying attention, but this time I don't just watch the world around me, no, this time I let my mind stretch out of the piece of rock I though was my body and reach into the mountain underneath me.

Immediately I feel some kind of resistance, but it doesn't seem to be the physical kind of resistance instead it felt more… spiritual.

It seems like the spiritual Qi of the mountain doesn't want my own Qi to invade its home.

But what if I don't invade and instead assimilate?

With that I try to retract most of my consciousness from the edge of my spiritual body.

What Im currently trying to do is following.

In my mind Qi takes on a different property depending on what kind of physical material it resides in, my own Qi has taken on the "Color" of my soul as I am extending my influence on it while the Qi inside the mountain has the "Color" of the mountain.

If I want to push my Qi into the mountain then I will have to push the Qi already residing there away, but that isn't my goal.

By retracting my consciousness from the edge of my Qi it will lose its "Color", returning to its untainted state.

If I push this untainted Qi into the mountain, the Qi inside will try to color