Prologue (2)

Yang Qing finally awoke in this process, yet his drowsiness only seem to worsen after such a long slumber. Perhaps drowsiness was not the correct term, for he was wide awake, plummeted by new information that he could vaguely understand as the world but could not recognize. He saw a city, not as big as the capital city, Yang, in the Yang Dominion, but big nonetheless. The city had canals filled with water rather than streets, boats rather than carriages, and only a few people flying in the sky. While the land was densely filled with water, the air was neither dry nor humid. At the center of the city, a giant pond was especially concentrated in the water element.

His soul stopped briefly by it, absorbing some of the qi, before quickly moving towards its final destination: a woman with silver hair and silver eyes. For some reason, he could only make the general outline of things, but specific things beyond that was hard for him. He entered the woman, what he assumed to be a fetus, and took his nest there. The child within was no match for him, despite however little strength his soul had from his journey. It took but a moment for the child to be assimilated into Yang Qing's soul and his body obtaining a new owner.

Yang Qing once again fell into slumber as his soul began to fuse more deeply into the body. Massive amounts of qi within the woman's body began to converge around his body, circling it and purifying itself into primordial qi as it fed his body bit by bit. His soul relished this feast as it gorged itself, spending no small amount of qi refining the body and meridians to improve the qi flow.

The world Yang Qing knew was no more than some odd inches of the placenta that fed him. While he slept the woes and worries of the world away, his spirit, outside of his will, went hard at work. Each meridian and part of his body was handcrafted by his soul to fit his cultivation technique, the Nine Revolution Spirit Body technique. Unlike his previous body - where countless generations of incorporating the strongest bloodlines throughout the continent and the inbreeding to strengthen the Yang bloodline created various meridians, blood vessels and appendages that his ancestors may have needed once upon a time but Yang Qing never used - this new body had only the meridians required for his technique and was nourished not by the impure foods of the earth, but the primordial qi of the world, qi that could be digested for the seven elements within.

His consciousness waxed and waned as both his spirit and body got stronger - his body nourished through the guidance of his soul and by the qi, his spirit by finally finding a resting place it could call home - yet he never truly would wake up during the entire pregnancy, only opening his eyes occasionally in a haze and moving to find a more comfortable position.

As his body grew more and more complex, his spirit no longer crafted each part of his body, it let nature do its work, only interfering when it deemed it necessary. And, soon, the promised day came. The amount of primordial qi continued to increase during the period, but towards the end, it was barely enough to make ends meet and his body sought to leave this haven before it starved itself.

Yang Qing was by no means awake during the childbirth, so he knew not of the suffering nor the process of even leaving the womb, but the first thing he heard when he opened his eyes was possibly the worst shrill shout he had ever heard. Like an acoustic bombardment exclusively reserved to him, Louis felt the cacophony shake the very essence of his soul shake and rupture his ears.

It was a baby no more than a few yards away from him screamed and cried for a few moments before it was mouth was filled and satiated. Yang Qing aimed to turn his head and face that little monstority, but, alas, his body, despite his pure and clean meridians, lacked the fundamental strength to twist his head, or, even if he could, focus his sight. He could not make out the face of the woman holding him, but he could see the relief and smile clear as day. Unconsciously, he smiled back.

As if life itself was worried that he may have recovered from his initial shock, his head throbbed once, twice, thrice and he was unconscious. His soul was summoned, like a boat into a whirlpool, into his upper dantian, located right between the brows. What greeted him, however, was not the world within his upper dantian, but his spirit threshold, a great bedrock that kept his soul within his body but also acted as a barrier preventing his soul from entering his upper dantian.

His soul rammed itself into the spirit threshold, boosted by the summonings of the upper dantian, but to no avail. His soul shook, but the spirit threshold stood proud. The first breath of qi within his meridians - perhaps the most precious qi he would ever contact - slowly gathered around the upper dantian, drawing back a bit before the soul commanded it like a general and smashed into the upper dantian. This time, his spirit threshold shook as his soul bounced back and most of the qi dissipating.

Fearing not the repercussions, his spirit once again gathered more qi before ramming once more into the spirit threshold, cracking it but not enough for it to squeeze through. On the third try, when Yang Qing began panting from his lack of qi, a warm yet delicious liquid poured into his mouth and he swallowed it like the heavenly feasts his wife always prepared for celebrations. The spirit threshold cracked, then crumbled, leaving a giant hole for his soul to enter his upper dantian.

The situation in his upper dantian was worse than the pain he experienced smashing through his spirit threshold. Violent tides of pure elements ravished each other, forming a murky sea of black qi with the occasional spark of color as an element escaped the sea's grip and flew into the sky, before disappearing a bit. The skies were no better, for it was completely dark itself and only the sparkling elements just before they fizzed out provided any light.

His soul gradually grew warmer and warmer as he approached the center of the tempest, yet a small field of white qi covered himself and protected him from any damages. The tempest changed too, sensing the new intruder in its midst. Although its rage and energy never stopped, it became more organized, swirling around in an direction, forming a typhoon around him. The Nine Revolution Spirit Body technique began to revolve within his body, warming both his actual body and the same parts of his soul. He could see the meridians within his body replicated onto his soul and as the paltry amount of qi within it began to revolve, the sea of black qi began to split first into a murky brown then into a seven color stripped typhoon, with the silver colored qi revolving around him.

Once he completed the first revolution and his qi was exhausted, the silver qi poured towards him, piercing through what little protection the field of qi provided him and flooded his meridians. His now elementless soul, with all of its elemental affinity stripped away, turned into a wind elemental spirit body. He felt his soul become purer and purer as the flooded in. Within his meridians, pure elemental qi revolved throughout his bodies and completed the first revolution, creating two layers: an elementless outer layer of qi and a pure, condensed inner layer of wind elemental qi. Before he could even appreciate the ease of this breakthrough, the qi flooding into his body turned the elementless outer layer of qi into a pure layer of wind qi and once again began to churn and revolve throughout his body, completing the second revolution. The inner layer of wind elemental qi decreased ten percent in diameter, but as the wind elemental qi flooded his meridians, his qi never stopped and he completed the nine revolutions for the first layer, broke into the second layer, then completed those nine revolutions, continued this process until he reached the fifth layer of the first realm.

Once the silver qi within his upper dantian had completely disappeared, there were six colors left in the typhoon. When he revolved the Nine Revolution Spirit Body technique, the stripes of pure elemental qi moved away from him and formed six giant orbs: fire, water, earth, lightning, light, dark. Five hair thin strands of wind elemental qi were in his meridians, marking the great completion of the fifth layer. He would need to get four more to reach the pinnacle of the first realm, then fuse all nine of them into a single hair thing strand of wind elemental qi in order to reach the second realm. Doing this nine times got the name nine revolutions spirit body technique, for nine strands of qi would be in the meridians at the end of the nine realms, in theory anyway. The highest anyone got was the eighth realm, and only a few layers within that realm, before they died.