Chapter 23- The Vast Darknorth Sea Art

“Listen carefully, small human child of indeterminate age. There are two vast oceans at either end of the world.”

“Really? I’ve never seen an ocean.”

“Irrelevant, and the oceans I’m referring to possibly aren’t real. The world is impossibly huge, and you live in a very, very, tiny corner of it. Neither I nor anyone I know of have personally seen the oceans at either end of the world. If the teaching parable attached to this art has even the least shred of truth, anything that lives in those oceans would kill me thousands of miles before I was even aware of its existence. Now, shush and listen.”

Voidcatcher cleared his throat. Even as a human, his adams apple protruded quite a way when he did.

“In the great Northern Darkness, also known as the Northern Ocean, also known as the Darknorth Sea, there lives a great fish. I’d suggest you think of a whale, but you don’t know what that is. So, big fish. Imagine the biggest fish you have ever seen. Got it? Good. This big fish that I’m talking about is thousands of miles long. We don’t know how many. It is entirely possible that this is a fictional fish, but given some of the things I’ve seen, I wouldn’t bet a single mosquito on it.”

Tian silently agreed. Once you saw a man in a shabby diviner’s outfit grind an entire region larger than your home country through ritual magic, you stopped using words like “impossible.”

“So this huge fish swims around in the Darknorth sea, doing its usual fish things. Eating, mostly. The point to remember is that it can exist there, which means the Darknorth Sea must be of a certain scale, a certain width and depth, filled with enough good things to keep such an insanely huge organism alive.”

Tian nodded obediently along.

“A very magical creature too, because it migrates to the Southern Ocean, at the complete opposite end of the world. And here is how. It transforms into a giant bird called the Peng- you have a question?”

“Phoenixes are big fish?!”

“Peng, not Feng. Written with a different character, but the similarity is not coincidental. It turns into a giant bird. The bird has a wingspan not much smaller than the fish, if it’s smaller at all. Thousands of miles across. When it flies, it stirs windstorms for ninety thousand miles in every direction, and it goes south on the monsoon winds. It might even cause the monsoon winds, or be the monsoon winds. It’s that big.”

Tian’s eyes bulged, trying to imagine such a thing.

“Here is the thing. In order to support the wingspan of such an enormous bird, like the kun, the peng requires a certain depth of air below it. It flies some ninety thousand miles in the air, so high, you could stand at the peak of the mountain and not catch even a hint of a speck of it. And it’s thousands of miles across!”

Tian’s mouth slowly fell open. How could such a thing even exist? But he was standing on a giant magic mountain talking to a giant magic toad that was stronger than his whole sect, probably, so it might be very stupid indeed to make assumptions about what was and was not possible.

“Now, like the kun, the peng might be mythical. But it might not, because there is a reason this parable accompanies the Vast Darknorth Art. It takes the cultivator as the kunpeng (that’s what the combined animal is called, by the way, the kunpeng), and their qi sea as the Darknorth Sea. And without getting into too much in the way of details, the sky over the Darknorth Sea is your shen. See where I am going with this?”

Tian had a certain suspicion, but wasn’t ready to gamble on a metaphor. “Your student is too stupid-”

“None of that!” Voidcatcher barked. “The only one who is allowed to call my students stupid is me! You don’t understand. Simple as that.”

“As teacher says.” Tian felt a sudden flicker of warmth.

“You impossible idiot. Pond scum could get that metaphor. Every day you don’t choke to death on air is further proof that some are too stupid to die.”

The sudden flicker was crushed under a webbed foot.

“Obviously, or at least obvious to anyone with enough sense to pour piss out of a boot before putting it on, to say nothing of those of us with enough wit not to piss in our boots in the first place, the parable indicates the scope of the “water” and “air” the art accumulates. It also describes how you should approach cultivating them, the mentality of it. The kun is heavier than the peng, so the qi sea must be dense, broad and deep. It’s doing all the eating too, so the qi must be rich with nourishing things. That means it can accept things brought in by other cultivation arts, natural treasures, all the usual good stuff. It can accept a huge variety of things, which is not usual.”

Tian felt like he was out of his depth, at the very least. All this talk about qi seas and skies, what on earth was that about? Qi was gathered in the middle dantian, the most yang spot on the body. Surely something dark and wet couldn’t form there, could it?

“I can see you overthinking it. Juniors always get hung up on yin and yang and the five elements and all that. Look, it matters, it’s foundational, but there is the whole rest of the universe you know? And that, too, is the dao. Yes, the heart is associated with the element of fire. Yes, it is yang. Yes, the whole meridian system and the dantians are considered yang. But if there was no yin or water qi in you, you would just die. Remind me again what you are training to be? Is it a pig feces eater? Sub-imbicile grade assistant to the third junior moron in the Pavilion of Losers in your fleabitten, lice-ridden, vole infested backwater sect?”

“I miss when he was negligent and condescending. It was a restful time.”

Tian cupped his fist and bowed apologetically. Again.

“I’m going to provide you a copy of the art with some notes, just so you don’t kill yourself over nothing. Drowning, as it were, in an inch of water. Sit down and still your breathing. I’m going to help you cycle the art a few times, just so you get a feel for it.”

Tian was stabbed with the memory of Brother Fu, showing him how to use Advent of Spring. He suddenly, desperately, missed the old man. But he also knew Brother Fu would tell him to be obedient for his teacher, so he sat down in lotus and steadied his breathing. Voidcatcher put a hand on his back, just behind his heart, and let his qi flow into Tian.

Who suddenly had to redefine what he had previously understood “Qi control” to mean. The ancient toad’s qi was almost undetectable. Tian found his qi cycling through the paths described in the book perfectly, seemingly without any intervention from him. On the one hand, he shouldn’t have expected any less. On the other hand, seeing it actually done with a casual thought…

He really had found an incredible teacher.

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Tian inhaled, drawing in the undifferentiated qi of the world. His lungs filtered it, ordering it. Tian noticed it felt “wetter.” Not all wet or all cold, but more so than before. The air fell down through him into his lower dantian. It was transformed into vital energy, though Tian noticed the amount of vital energy was only moderately more than it had been before his evolution to the Heavenly realm.

Before he had time to investigate further, his attention was pulled upwards as the vital energy reached his middle Dantian. The dense vital energy seemed to boil in the fires of the Crimson Palace, rising like steam to his upper dantian. He couldn’t follow what happened there, but Qi flowed in a cycle. It fell back down into his middle dantian, where some of it stayed. He could feel the rain forming a little damp patch in his heart, and knew that it would one day become a vast ocean. One that could support a fish a thousand miles long.

“We will run through it a few times, as the subtleties may… will… elude you. Ah, if only you had one percent of my dear disciple’s wit. Still. You have a good heart, and that is worth nourishing.”

Voidcatcher was right about the little details eluding him, had he been left to practice on his own. It wasn’t just about the route the qi took through the body. It started in the lungs with a very subtle manipulation of the vital energy within them to filter the incoming qi to bias in favor of water qi. It took his full attention to control. It seemed that qi cultivation would see him sitting in quiet meditation like everyone else. Then there was the transformation in the middle and upper dantians. Even if he couldn’t directly control shen, he had to control how the qi rose and fell.

The Sect Master really hadn’t lied. This could absolutely cripple or kill you if you didn’t know what you were doing. If the qi didn’t flow properly, or overloaded at a particular point, you could go into qi deviation, which might result in illness, madness or death. The float from the middle dantian to the upper, then the rain back down again, was especially ticklish, as there was a certain lack of control at the peak of the cycle.

“You have the hang of it now. I’m going to let you cultivate here for a bit longer, a week let’s say, or two, just so I can keep an eye on you and make sure you and young hero Hong aren’t in any danger as you start your journey through… what I am culturally constrained into calling the Heavenly Realm.”