Entering the gate

The next several days were miserable. It took a long time for me to recover from the forbidden technique. As if to taunt my pain, the forbidden technique officially became an ability in my system.

FORBIDDEN REALM UPGRADE (CURSED GRADE): Forcefully upgrade your cultivation level by one major realm by consuming your life-force. Qi will rush in from the environment to temporarily support the false cultivation level.

COST: 1 year of life-force per minute of use

COOLDOWN: 12 Sols

This technique was downright devious. It wasn't even a true realm upgrade. It may have not been completely apparent at my low level, but I wasn't as strong as I would be as a true qi-gatherer. And the cost was my life. Not all at once thankfully, but a year per minute was a steep cost. Any battle where this technique would be necessary for me to use would last a lot longer than a minute. I hoped I would never have to use it again.

Fred somehow survived the battle too. He came limping over just after Rosie woke up. I gave him the last of my restoration fluid to help him recover. We had all sustained a lot of injuries, except Li Kai. I was somewhat mad at him. It would be one thing if he were only stalking me, at least that resulted in him saving our lives. The reason he was so late to the battle was that he had stayed as far away as possible from me while keeping me in range of his spiritual sense. He wasn't even in the city when we got attacked. Normally Li Kai could cross the distance in a moment, but he was stopped at the gates by the guards who found his urgency suspicious. On top of that, he failed to recruit the aid of the guards, resulting in our assailant getting away. We did get Andy and turn him over to the guards, but he would only get a slap on the wrist, his influence was no less than the Seekers. Trying to kill a young girl and steal her fox was only a minor thing. The girl may be a Seeker, but I hadn't proven my worth yet.

If it were my choice, I would've laid on pillows for the entire journey back to Market Town. Alas, Li Kai decided to join us on the return trip. As we began pulling out pillows, he told us to put them away. He said it wouldn't be proper for a future inner or core disciple of his sect to conduct herself in such a manner. Both Nikol and I glared daggers into him. Rosie was happy though, she was saved from being my pillow as well. For the entire return journey, we had to sit up proper. My butt has never been so sore or my legs so numb.

I also wasn't allowed to rest and recuperate, as I thought I would be able to. Even while I was still recovering from the backlash of using the forbidden technique he had me train. I couldn't even skip my daily exercises. I began wondering if Li Kai really wanted me to recover or not.

Prior to this, while living in the wilderness, I had gotten my Swimming, Climbing, Acrobatics, Footwork, Beastmaster, and Weaponmaster skills to level 3. I had also trained my Basic Martial Arts and Swordsmanship to level 4. I also gained a couple of new skills. Survival just appeared in my skill list one day while I was in the forest and I raised it to level 2. Li Kai had started to train me in Advanced Martial Arts and Swordsmanship as well and I trained those to level 2.

While we were traveling home, Li Kai had me train in my existing skills and also began training me in Expert Martial Arts and Swordsmanship. Li Kai did not let up on the training when we got back to the villa either. He took up residence in one of our guest rooms. I no longer had rest days. I still had tutoring, but every spare hour outside of tutoring was training. Li Kai was now dedicated one hundred percent to my training. I thought he had other potential disciples he was mentoring. It wasn't time for the sect to test new disciples. Either the other potential disciples disappointed him or I impressed him somehow. Either way, I felt bad for the dropouts.

Vivian saw Rosie's ragged ear as soon as we got home and immediately chastised me for it. She said Rosie was my responsibility and I needed to take better care of her. Eventually, she noticed I was wincing with every point she made and she stopped. I was already feeling guilty enough. Later Vivian found out from Fred that it was an attempted theft and murder and apologized for yelling at me. I told her there was no need to apologize, she was right, it was my fault Rosie was injured. Vivian couldn't figure out how I was responsible for other people's actions. She wanted to comfort me and I didn't want to be comforted. It was the first serious disagreement we had. Soon I was too tired to feel any more guilt though.

Every minute of my waking life became training or schooling. I was never able to recover from the feeling of my backlash. I always felt tired, always felt ill, always felt pain. If I had attempted anything like this in my past life or even in my current life, without Li Kai's help, the over-exertion would be more harmful than good. Li Kai kept me going with pills, every day after training I'd get another restoration pill. I couldn't figure out Li Kai's reasoning. Wouldn't it be more beneficial to allow me to recover and then proceed with training? What I didn't know was that Li Kai was pursuing a longer-term goal than simply preparing me for his sect's entry test. Cultivation was a long and arduous journey. It was often filled with pain and suffering. If I gave up later, his efforts would be wasted. He wanted me to remember this pain and suffering and persevere through it so that when I encountered it again it would not stop me. My gains during this period may be slightly less than they would have been if I had trained healthily and I was going to eventually pay for consuming so many restoration pills, but this would prepare me better for the cultivation journey.

The next eight years proceeded in this manner. I was given the most solid foundation imaginable. Li Kai would train me in new martial and sword arts and correct my form in my existing ones. Although I wasn't sent to live in the forest again, he did set up obstacle courses in the nearby woods, continuously raising their difficulty. He also added more and more mortal beasts for me to fight. By the end of the eight years, I was fighting nine dozen beasts at once with only Rosie to aid me.

Li Kai trained me in the Master and Grandmaster forms of Martial Arts and Swordsmanship, for a total of six levels. This also corresponded to the maximum level of a skill. I had been curious about that. When I had trained several skills to the maximum I found I could merge them. The first set of skills I could combine were Climbing, Swimming, and Acrobatics. They merged into Athletics. Later I could combine all the Martial Arts plus Beastmaster into Foundational Martial Arts and all of my Swordsmanship skills plus Footwork and Weaponmaster into Foundational Swordsmanship. This was more than simply decluttering my skills list, after combining them I found that I could chain skills together more simply. For example, I could chain a basic martial arts stance into an advanced martial arts strike with ease. Just because I had learned Grandmaster Martial Arts, didn't mean all the previous martial arts I had learned were useless. They still were among the most common forms and strikes I used. I had reached the peak of what a mortal martial artist could accomplish and was at the beginning of my journey into cultivation. Survival and Anatomy also reached the level max.

I wasn't just a musclehead for the last eight years either. My tutors grilled my brain just as thoroughly as Li Kai tortured my muscles. They made me a master linguist, not just in Eternian and Centaurian, but almost every language and dialect was learned by me. Fortunately, there weren't many. Just like my martial arts, once I reached the level max in several language skills they combined into Centaurian Linguist. I no longer knew which language my thoughts were in. Vivi sometimes caught me using a bizarre dialect for casual conversation. She went through the same crazy tutors as I did, so she knew what I was saying, but the first time I accidentally spoke to Fred in a little-used dialect he thought I was cursing him. My Eternian Geography had also reached the max level. I was taught the rest of the known world to supplement it, combining them into Centaurian cartography. I wouldn't ever be completely lost in Alpha Centauri, but with the number of hidden realms and unexplored territories, there was still plenty of room for adventure. I only learned Diplomacy up to level 3, the tutor refused to teach me anymore after I catfished him using the same diplomacy skills he taught me via letter. Poor bloke was so mad when he found out the girl he was writing wasn't real. That little stunt got my mischief up to level 3 as well.

I thought that would be the end of my gains, but after I turned eleven, my parents began tutoring me in their respective disciplines themselves after I had shown an interest. This was also the only way for them to have any time with me anymore after Li Kai took over my entire schedule. Through Phineas, I learned alchemy. This had an odd synergy with the Chemistry I learned in my previous life, not only restoring the skill to level 4 for me but also bringing it to the level max right alongside the Foundational Alchemy Phineas tutored me in. Nikol taught me Logic, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering. This didn't quite have the same synergy, but it did remind me of the Physics I had learned to level 4 in my past life. Both Phineas and Nikol tutored me in Arithmetic. Arithmetic, Logic, Electrical Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering combined into Engineering once they reached the level max. I had a feeling Chemistry, Physics, and Geology could also be combined into Science, but I hadn't stumbled upon any book or tutor here that could teach my Physics or Geology.

Li Kai gave me six more purification pills over the years. Each was just as miserable as the last and gave me the same +2 bonus to my stats each time. Except the very last purification pill gave a +4 bonus to my stats. After taking the last purification pill it felt as if every impurity had been removed from my body. If it weren't for Li Kai's brutal training, I would've felt light and free, almost unbound by the earth.

Finally, the eve of my thirteenth birthday approached. In a move uncharacteristic of Li Kai, I was given relief from the brutal training regime a week before my birthday. I was given one full day of recovery, and then I only had to do my basic exercise routine, but only until then. After I started cultivating, basic exercises would no longer be necessary. From then on I would only train in my martial arts and cultivate. This too, I had long reached a bottleneck in my martial arts, I only needed to complete one rotation of my forms each day to preserve them. What I needed now, was to learn new techniques, techniques fit for a cultivator.

On the eve of my birthday, I watched the system carefully. Waiting for the exact moment my age changed from 12 to 13. I wanted to cultivate the second I could. I was tempted to read my technique manual in advance to be fully prepared, but I heeded Nathan's warning and waited. A short time after midnight, when all four moons rose in the sky, I saw the 12 change to a 13. I excitedly pulled my cultivation manual out of the system while jumping out of bed and turning on a lantern. Both Vivian and Rosie grumbled but settled back down after a few minutes.

The first page of the manual was not the start of the technique proper. It was a supplementary qi-sensing technique. This was extremely uncommon to be found in cultivation manuals and useful to every cultivator. Normally I and other cultivators could only just barely sense the surrounding qi. Even our own qi was hard to detect. Gradually a cultivator would hone this barely perceptible sense to a greater degree. This technique directly skipped all that. I would be able to see, hear, smell, taste, feel, and otherwise sense qi as if it were tangible. It was essentially an array that was written directly on the mind with the body's qi. This would be extremely dangerous if it weren't for the very detailed instructions in the technique. Still, I was performing something akin to brain surgery, so I read the technique several times until I had it memorized before beginning. I was eager to cultivate, but I wasn't careless.

I pulled a pillow from my ring and sat on it in a cross-legged meditative pose. Ever since the carriage ride with Li Kai, I had an extreme aversion to sitting on hard surfaces. I concentrated on my mind. As the technique directed, I etched qi paths into my brain connecting the visual, auditory, and olfactory cortexes of the brain to the meridian in my mind. The etching gave an itchy feeling, like nails on a chalkboard. As I completed the final etching, qi flooded my sensory contexts from the meridian. This was exactly what the technique said would happen, but it was still nerve-wracking. If I made a mistake, I was about to become a vegetable. My worries did not come to pass, the qi integrated with my brain flawlessly.

For a moment my vision went white and a high-pitched whine sounded in my ears. When they cleared I could clearly see the qi surrounding me like a multi-colored dust cloud. The colors here were mostly blue, gold, brown, glacial blue, and gray. I could also smell and taste the qi. It smelled of iron and petrichor. It had a minty taste. These senses corresponded to earth, water, metal, and yin qi. The gray qi was normal qi, it was the most abundant. If I focused, I could choose to not sense the qi anymore, so it wouldn't impact my normal activities. Perhaps even better than being able to tangibly sense qi, was the improvement to my sixth sense. Before I could only sense qi that was a part of me or touching me, now I could sense qi in a radius around me. It wasn't a very large radius, perhaps only five meters or so, but it was this that would help me cultivate the most.

After playing around with my qi sense a bit, I turned to the cultivation technique. This was the majority of the manual and it was not thin. The introduction quickly cleared up my concern regarding the yang qi that I did not possess. Yin and yang were two sides of the same coin. You couldn't have one without the other. If I had tried to cultivate yin only, I would've likely frozen to death. My root was in fact a yin-yang root, but it was yin-dominant. It could not express yang features, but it still needed yang to nourish it.

The technique was very complex. Fortunately, I only needed to learn the part pertaining to qi-gathering for the moment. A lesser technique would have you draw the entirety of your qi in through a special breathing technique. The better the breathing technique, the better the effect. Supreme techniques already exceeded breathing alone. My technique also had the user circulate their qi in such a manner that it generated an attractive force as well, drawing qi in through the pores.

Once qi was in the body, it was guided to the spiritual roots and then forced through the elemental branches changing it from the qi of heaven and earth to my own personal qi. This was the step where it was critical to have a technique matching my roots. If I only had a technique with half my roots, it would only be half as efficient. Because the qi of heaven and earth was only barely influenceable, the journey from exterior to root is entirely guided by the breathing technique and internal qi circulation. It's only after it passes through the root that I would be able to control the qi myself.

From my root, I would guide the new qi to where it was needed. The Qi-gathering realm was about opening and gathering qi into the meridians, filling as many meridians as the cultivator could open. Those who could open less than 9 meridians were considered to have limited potential though and no one wasted time on them. Those with the ability to open more than 9 more meridians were considered geniuses. Major realms were broken into the early, mid, late, and peak minor realms. For qi-gathering, 1-3 open meridians was early, 4-6 was mid, 7-9 was late, and anyone with more than 9 open meridians was a peak stage qi-gatherer. The first and most important meridian to open was the lung meridian, followed shortly by the heart meridian. Opening both of these would make it easier to take in and circulate qi.

I walked out onto the balcony to bask in the moonlight to aid in my cultivation. I placed my comfy pillow back down and resumed my meditative stance. By now, it was easy for me to enter a meditative trance. I inhaled and exhaled and exhaled according to the technique. A deep breath through the nose, filled my lungs with wintery air until my lungs were 7/8th filled, approximately when the lungs began to fill tight, but no further. Hold for 2 seconds and exhale slowly through clenched teeth. Inhale through the nose again this time until the lungs are completely stretched taut, hold 5 seconds, and exhale slowly through an open mouth. Repeat. Simultaneously I cycled my qi rotationally through the mainline meridians, attracting qi towards me and drawing it in through my pores. I could feel the qi being pushed through my roots and becoming my qi. I sent this qi into my lung meridian to force it open. Finally 8 years after I transmigrated, I was entering the gate of immortals.