Chapter 28: The Manual Is Useless

Chapter 28: The Manual Is Useless

Transient Shield Formation was a fairly simple art. It was the single-technique art that Paike had received from the library. The reward had come from his achievement of being one of the top ten times in climbing the stairs when he first joined the sect. It had been hard to find an art that he could learn, but he was lucky enough to find one that he felt was just within his capabilities.

The technique only required one meridian, which he had long been preparing to open. That there was only one technique was for sure a strike against the quality of the art. If it didn’t have more to offer, it wouldn’t even be a proper art. Instead, it would have been just a simple trick. Those weren’t usually passed along, and as it was, the Transient Shield Formation barely had enough to be kept in even the outer sect’s library.

The art was paired with a full-on fighting style, focusing on how to use transient shields that could be quickly generated and put in place to stop a single blow. They could also be moved to intercept, but that required a decent amount of concentration and continuous physical contact. Still, it seemed to be the most straightforward art for him to learn. Anyone else would have had to learn a lot of surrounding skills to make use of such a basic art when they could just learn something better. Paike was confident in his martial arts background, and he was suspicious that his rather unique qi behavior wouldn’t let the technique work as fully as intended.

The author of the book clearly tried to cast the art in a more favorable light, but it was apparent that its one technique was nothing special in the grand scheme of things. However, it fit Paike’s needs almost perfectly. He wasn’t exactly sure how the nature of his qi was going to change the art—maybe making it unusable, maybe making it better. Or even more mysteriously, how the odd attunement of his physical cultivation would affect it.

That was not for lack of trying, though. Unfortunately, he had spent several hours simply meditating, studying his body and dantian, trying to figure out exactly what was happening.

He could sense the taint in his physical cultivation for sure. However, he still had no idea what it actually did or how that combat trance had affected him, let alone how he had even entered it. But it was something he was figuring out, and he was running out of tools. There was only so much of staring at a brick wall and trying to smash his head through it that he could take. Eventually, he would need to do something else to get more data points, and opening a simple, unattuned meridian should be a good example.

That raised another question. Could he even open unattuned meridians anymore, or had the aspect of that ancient spirit sunk so deep into him that he couldn’t? He was pretty sure that he had managed to purge it from his spiritual cultivation, and it was only affecting his physical cultivation. But, well, the meridian bridged the gap between the physical and the spiritual.

So, maybe he wasn’t entirely confident in the results he would get. Perhaps it would work. Maybe it would make this art useless, and he would never be able to learn a proper art again, forcing him to develop all of his techniques from scratch. That would be as good as a life-ending injury to most cultivators.

However, it wasn’t any more dangerous than adapting arts to fit his crippling lack of talent. It might be slower, but he’d had to get pretty inventive with his own brief stint of cultivating, and he was maybe unfairly confident that he could figure it out. But that was an absolute last resort. Technique creation wasn’t something that he knew anything about. It wasn’t until the fifth realm that his family encouraged it, maybe for some geniuses in the fourth. It was better to work from the near-endless selection of tried and true arts.

Slowly, he began to bore the hole between his spirit and the world. Carving the channel through his soul into the physical world from his spirit was rough. He knew it would be, and the first several times he had tried to do it, he hadn’t made much progress. But now, he had the time and the motivation. Guan Li still wasn’t back yet, and there was no class to attend, for the rest of the day.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

He was now in the advanced physical cultivation class with Elder Ji’s direct lessons, though the elder hadn’t said when they were meeting again. He had just assumed it would be the next day at the same time. Paike pushed that thought away, not letting it distract him any further as he refocused on carving his meridian. He would trust his friend to make sure he wasn’t late to the first class.

It was excruciating. Not at first—at first, it was just uncomfortable, kind of like dragging his nails along a chalkboard, with a weird screeching sound that echoed through his body. But then it got worse, like taking a file and running it along his teeth. Even the comparison in his head made him wince.