Chapter 49 — Innate Qi Extraction

Armed with a hot cup of tea and an evening mostly to himself, Lin Che sat on a chair in his bedroom and placed the Boundless Intake Sutra in the centre of the table.

Lin Che turned to the first page, which was empty.

Understandable. After all, some books had redundant blank first pages for whatever reason — something to do with the printing process when batch-producing copies.

Except the second and third pages were also empty.

In fact, the entire book was empty.

Lin Che closed the book and turned it over in his hands, checking the spine in an increasingly more frantic fashion before simply staring at the blank pages and palming his face. Of course it wouldn’t be so easy, he thought to himself as he sighed.

He felt like a famous panda receiving a martial technique.

Lin Che put down the book and drank some of his tea.

All of his earlier techniques had previously been digital, be it in the form of the ever-helpful videos created by the Shen Clan for the Liuhe Breathing method, or the annotated pdf files written in what felt like simple wording. That is to say, in this day and age, cultivators adapted with technology and preferred to keep things digital.

Technological storage had its own form of protection — one could assign a password to a document or only provide access to a certain account. Circumventing this issue, whilst difficult, was not impossible if one knew how the systems worked.

It was safe to say that this tome was also ‘password-protected’, only that Lin Che had zero clue how the system worked.

If it’s for the Lin Clan, he thought to himself.

Lin Che looked at his hand for a moment, and then went to the storage cupboard and found a sewing needle kept inside an old biscuit tin. He returned to the desk, sterilised the tip with a lighter, and pricked the pad of his index finger.

A small bead of blood formed, which he pressed into the corner of the first page.

The page absorbed it immediately, the blood being drawn straight down. It wasn’t like staining paper with blood, as it soon disappeared instead of spreading outwards, and, in its place, a single line appeared.

One single line — not even a character.

Lin Che took one more look at the thickness of the tome, which was large enough that he could not bother counting the number of pages. The arithmetic was not encouraging.

Assuming a healthy number of words per page, and being very kind with the complexity of the characters, with an extra hope that it was written in simplified and not traditional Chinese, he would need to fully exsanguinate himself somewhere between four and seven times to read the whole thing. Even accounting for his accelerated recovery from cultivation practice, that was not a viable approach.

So he put the needle down.

Perhaps blood was a vector for something else — each drop may contain trace amounts of something this book required.

The Shen Clan had been trying to extract his innate Qi in order to gain access to certain Lin Clan-related things, so it stood to reason that he would be able to access this technique if he fed the book his innate Qi. The only problem with this, however, was that Lin Che did not know how to access this Qi.

If he had, he would have been able to escape the car and not drown and not have ended up in this position in the first place.

He looked inwards, hoping to gather some sense of where his innate Qi resided. Judging by its name, it was not the same as cultivated Qi, which he could move through pathways with relative control. In the cultivation novels he used to read, innate Qi was provided at birth and could not be increased, though novels were not real life.

In real life, only cultivators had Qi for whatever reason — either that or his ability to sense it was too limited to see it in mortals. Regardless, it was something entirely different to what he was used to, and, as such, he just flailed inwardly for a while hoping he would accidentally achieve enlightenment.

After the hour, he opened his eyes and accepted that he was not going to solve this through intuition and luck alone.

He needed information on innate Qi, but asking the Shen Clan directly, including via Shen Yue, would reveal that he really knew nothing. The only reason they weren’t currently married was because he supposedly detected how the contract could extract his innate Qi, so now revealing that he didn’t know how to channel his innate Qi was akin to telling them directly that he was bluffing the entire time.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

If the contract can extract innate Qi, however…

***

Shen Bowen sat in his office staring at graphs on four different monitors he had on his desk, each looking at various different stocks. As someone with significant sway on the Shen Clan finances, a large part of his job was managing its investment portfolio, and usually no one was allowed to disturb him during this time of day.

So when a knock came on his door, he presumed it was something urgent and called for the person to come inside.

He had not, however, expected it to be Lin Che.

What, thought Shen Bowen, is he doing here.

“I won’t take much of your time,” said Lin Che, closing the door and taking his seat before Shen Bowen could even offer it to him. “I just had a quick question about the wedding contract.”

Of course you do.