Chapter 62 — Closed Door Cultivation

The house was a large detached building on the outskirts of town, chosen purely because price was of no concern to Lin Che, and because it was available same-day up until the end of the week. He’d booked it under a name that wasn’t his to avoid any tracking, and walked there instead of taking a car to help clear his mind and gather his thoughts a bit more.

The Returning Mirror Refinement Art sat in his bag, wrapped in the same cloth Old Wen had used to wrap the Boundless Intake Sutra last time he had met her, but he didn’t open it until he was inside with the doors locked and the curtains drawn. He sat cross-legged on the wooden floor of this house which had a faint musty smell.

The book, of course, was blank.

He rested his palm flat against the first page and let his innate Qi flow into it, and the words slowly revealed themselves on the page. It was not a draining process, he found, as the book was not absorbing his innate Qi whatsoever, and instead simply reacted with its existence, which also explained why the marriage certificate trick worked for the Boundless Intake Sutra.

Only, it felt like there was one more barrier to overcome that had been placed within the book. Lin Che channeled the Boundless Intake Sutra — the only other Lin Clan technique he knew — whilst increasing the throughput of his innate Qi, and the book absorbed into his palms and embedded itself within his mind.

It didn’t provide him with the precise memories of how to run the technique, but it was something very similar. He could peer into the book and access concepts which he had never read about nor experienced, and could project scenes into his mind of himself repeating the Returning Mirror Refinement Art.

It was akin to the recollection of a memory, which admittedly was not a very helpful description. After all, all memories are simply the memory of you remembering something, Lin Che bemused.

***

The first three days were unglamorous.

He sat in the front room of the rented house with his eyes closed and ran his Qi through the recursive cycle the way the memory told him to, and thought he was accomplishing nothing more than wasting his time.

That isn’t to say the Returning Mirror Refinement Art didn’t work — it’s simply that its current efficacy was nothing compared with Elder Wong’s pill’s slow, spinning work. In fact, Lin Che suspected that the pill may be the reason his proficiency in the Returning Mirror was not improving as quickly as it could have.

He had no incense currently, as he had stupidly spent all of his savings on renting the biggest house he could find at a last-minute notice — there were a lot of fees involved in that. Lin Che told himself that the incense would not be that useful, as this was a refinement technique that worked on his internal grain rather than a technique which required external stimulation, but a few more moments of thinking shot this theory down.

The Boundless Intake Sutra and incense combination provided him with plenty of grain, and, if he provided his body with more grain, he would probably have been able to feel more of an effect from the technique and would have almost certainly trounced Elder Wong’s pill in efficacy.

The pill, as it turned out, was working a bit too well, having been fully taken in by Lin Che’s body and worked out a substantial portion of grain which could have instead been used as practice for the Returning Mirror Refinement Art.

By the fourth day, he’d stopped bothering to eat on any kind of schedule, instead cycling the Returning Mirror through the entire daylight cycle and well past it into the evening. He only stopped when his body simply refused to hold a lotus position any longer, or when the bones in his backside had had enough of digging into wooden floorboards. Even then, he’d lie for a while to recover, before getting back up and starting again.

By the sixth day, the nausea and hunger pangs were entirely gone. Lin Che joked that it was because his body was persisting purely off Qi, but he knew the real reason was simply that he was getting used to not only the feeling of being hungry, but also the ability to cut off entire sensations from his mind when focussing on cultivation.

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On the seventh day, the pill inside his body finally slowed and stopped. It hadn’t been entirely spent, simply because it didn’t need to — the amount of grain remaining in his body had decreased significantly, to levels which he assumed were normal. Most of the grain was gone, and, as per the memory he received from the book, continuing further with the Returning Mirror Refinement Art would have diminishing returns.

After all, you could only scrub a plate so clean before nothing really came of it. The plate would get dirty again, and he would regain grain from the Boundless Intake Sutra the next few times he used it.

He was still in the elementary stages of the Returning Mirror — in fact, some of the memories had been blocked off, and he could only assume that he would unlock further details the more he progressed in the technique.

Lin Che opened his eyes, internally clean, but externally greasy and sweaty.

A few days prior, he had cut off his sense of smell to focus even more on his cultivation, and hadn’t noticed the black goop seeping out of his pores. Now that the entire room was filthy and the house presumably reeked, Lin Che decided to go to the bathroom.

***

The bathroom had great acoustics, and there was only one thing a broke, stinky Lin Che could do to end this situation. He sat down on the edge of the bathtub and calmly looked upwards.