Chapter 53 — Holy Land Preparations (2)

Another twenty minutes later, the meeting had concluded and Lin Che was already being escorted onto a jet in the direction of the farm which contained the Holy Land. He was to be given accommodation for a week, which he had been told was ‘plenty of time’ for someone of his stage to understand the principles of innate Qi manipulation, before he would be expected to enter the holy land.

Thankfully, as he had packed spare clothing and his incense when meeting Xu Fang and Guo Mingzhe, he had most of his belongings already on him for this trip. Shen Yue would visit within four days to provide him with anything else he’d left at home.

The plane journey with Elder Mao was not as awkward as he had expected it to be, as the man was full of genuine kindness and looked at him like an old man would a child. They shared a short conversation about music, where Elder Mao revealed that he had been to some concerts from rock musicians Lin Che loved listening to but stopped touring before he was even born.

Afterwards, Elder Mao excused himself from the conversation to deal with some important documents, which left Lin Che twiddling his thumbs. Eventually, however, the boredom got to him, so he decided to open the link Shen Yue had provided him during the meeting.

Lin Che double checked Shen Yue had sent him the correct thing — this was a scientific paper with graphs and contributors! It made sense that there were researchers trying to figure out certain things about the properties of Qi, and that things had modernised enough for there to be video tutorials and pdf guides to cultivation techniques, but a scientific paper was just too much!

Innate Qi behaved like an invariant attractor of the body’s dynamical system, persisting regardless of how the system was perturbed. Cultivated Qi, in contrast, was path-dependent, evolving along trajectories that could amplify or reshape it depending on how and where energy was introduced.

In other words: innate Qi simply remained itself.

Therefore, the technique was built around this property: rather than trying to move innate Qi the way you moved cultivated Qi, you identified its invariant signature and then created conditions in which it would naturally concentrate.

There were a couple of graphs and data points provided on the next page, which Lin Che would indubitably have to go through at a later time. Right now, however, the plane was getting ready for landing.

***

Elder Mao led Lin Che through a field of wheat much shorter than Lin Che had recognised, which was to be expected as he had only seen the farm in a future state from now. After a short journey on a tractor, the accommodation — a converted farmhouse — came into view.

A Shen Clan member he didn’t recognise had shown him around and confirmed that someone would bring meals three times a day.

“Do you require any assistance unpacking?” asked Elder Mao, once they had entered Lin Che’s room.

“No thank you, Elder Mao,” he replied. “You’ve done a lot for me today already. I couldn’t possibly ask for anything further.”

“Well, anything for our Shen Clan’s son-in-law,” he laughed, before giving Lin Che a hug and leaving.

Once the door shut, Lin Che unpacked his incense and the notebook he’d been using to track his progress through the Boundless Intake Sutra. He sat on the bed and looked out the window at the field.

***

Day two was when it started to get a bit problematic.

The technique was clear about the initial step: locate the innate Qi signature by finding the invariant under internal circulation. You ran your cultivated Qi through the standard pathways, and observed what changed and what didn’t. What didn’t change was the innate Qi.

Lin Che ran the circulation and watched for invariants, but he found nothing consistent.

He tried it over and over again, each time more slowly than before whilst paying close attention to the methodology. The text had a worked example on page four with a diagram showing expected variance patterns.

The main issue with this, however, was that his internal landscape didn’t match the diagram. The shaded region in the graph was, in his case, occupied by something in between variance and invariance, which usually felt more like interference than anything else. The signature he was looking for was there, maybe, but it was obscured.

Page seven had a brief section on common reasons a practitioner might fail to locate their innate Qi signature, but most of them were structural issues dealing with the anatomy of the cultivator themselves — for example if they had been born with a specific constitution or used an incompatible foundation technique. He wasn’t sure if either of these applied for him.

The last one on the list was far more general: external interferences from accumulated impurities may mask the innate signature. We recommend purification before attempting initial location.

Lin Che sighed in defeat.

He had been using the Boundless Intake Sutra intensively in the past twenty four hours, and the technique absorbed everything indiscriminately. In a Qi-dense environment, what it could take in was extraordinary. What it took in, however, was not refined, and the Returning Mirror Refinement Art existed precisely because the Boundless Intake Sutra generated a purification problem.

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Only, the art he needed was an entire loop away.

And, instead, he had used fourteen sticks of high-grade incense in combination with his own Hollow Bell Resonance, which had multiplied the effective intake by a significant factor.

It wasn’t contamination, per se, as the Hollow Bell itself had been filtering incoming Qi and discarding anything actively hostile, which meant he wasn’t carrying foreign energy so much as he was carrying a great quantity of his own Qi in an unrefined state. He thought back to the term ‘grain’ which was mentioned in the description of the Returning Mirror Refinement Art.

The Hollow Bell had kept things from being harmful, but had not kept the grain from being dense enough to sit like a fog over the deeper layer where his innate Qi lived.

He was, in a sense, too full.

The obvious solution therefore was to purge the cultivated Qi, but that would undo progress in order to test a theory. Sure, he could theoretically do it again, but Lin Che intended on learning everything he could in one life before starting another loop, so this would still be a setback. What he could do, maybe, was navigate around it.

If he managed to find a point deep enough in the constitutional layer where the cultivated Qi interference was thinner, there may be a chance for some innate Qi to escape. And if it escaped for long enough, he could analyse its properties and determine the conditions required to allow it to flow.

Lin Che spent the rest of the evening looking inwards for this thin layer, but the expanse of his internal domain was now so large that an evening was not long enough to fully work his way through it and determine the thickness of the layers.