Chapter 6 | Scaffolding and Crutches

Calid reached for the Qi, gently.

The way you’d coax a skittish animal. He didn’t try to pull it inside, the shattered core made that impossible, the fragments acting as jagged obstructions in the dantian space that would tear any incoming Qi flow to shreds. Instead, he guided it along the outside of his body, tracing the meridian paths from the surface, letting the energy flow parallel to the channels without entering them.

It was like running warm water over frozen pipes.

The Qi moved sluggishly as it resisted the artificial pathways he was suggesting, preferring its own currents and eddies. He adjusted, widened, softened, let it loop, and flow when it wanted. Made the paths less like channels and more like gentle slopes that the energy could trickle down if it felt like it.

It felt like it, barely.

A thin film of ambient Qi settled over his skin, following the meridian map like a second nervous system drawn in light too faint to see. It wasn’t cultivation. It wasn’t reinforcement in any way a local practitioner would recognise. It was more like… scaffolding. External support for a structure that couldn’t support itself.

Leg, back, neck, and arm braces that wrapped around his body.

The effect was minimal. His arms felt slightly less like they were made of wet paper and legs stopped trembling. The grey edges of his vision retreated by a fraction, and the constant grinding pain in his chest dulled from ‘catastrophic’ to merely ‘very bad,’ which was, relatively speaking, an improvement worth celebrating.

He opened his eyes and flexed his fingers.

They moved without trembling.

That’s a good sign.

He stood up, slowly. Testing the scaffolding under load. His knees held and spine straightened without the alarming creaking sounds it had been producing for the last hour.

He took a step, then another.

He was barely functional, in the way that a car with a flat wheel was functional, but functional nevertheless.

Liang Hao was watching him from his corner. The boy’s knees were still drawn up and arms still wrapped around his shins, but his head was tilted at an angle that Calid recognised from five centuries of teaching as ‘I have a question but I’m afraid the answer will be terrifying or require me to do work I don’t want to do.’

“Ask,” Calid said.

Liang Hao’s mouth worked for a moment. “Elder… are you… are we going to be alright?”

It was the kind of question that deserved a kind answer, and Calid considered giving one. A reassuring platitude about strength and perseverance and the indomitable spirit of the White Clover Flame Sect that Shao Wen had given a hundred times before. The sort of thing elders said to disciples in stories, right before everything worked out.

But Calid Asigoth had never lied to a student in five hundred and seventy-four years, and he wasn’t going to start now just because the student was fourteen and the situation was apocalyptic.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I intend to find out.”

Liang Hao stared at him for a long moment. Then, very slowly, the boy’s grip on his own shins loosened. His shoulders dropped by perhaps a couple inches and his breathing, which had been shallow and fast, deepened.

Calid turned his attention back to the problem at hand.

The Qi scaffolding was a stopgap.

A crutch, and a flimsy one.

It would keep him upright and mobile, but it wouldn’t make him fast, strong, powerful, or durable enough to survive another fight similar to the one in the clearing. The demonic cultivators he’d faced had been Qi Condensation stage, the lowest rung of the cultivation ladder, and they had been fast. Genuinely, startlingly fast, moving with a speed and fluidity that came from Qi-reinforced muscles and tendons, from bodies that had been enhanced by years of internal energy circulation that was focused on explosiveness at the cost of everything else including sanity and lifespan.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author’s work.

His body had none of that.

His body was a late-stage Core Formation vessel running on empty, and the difference between what it had been and what it was now was the difference between a warship and a rowboat with a hole in it.

Calid Asigoth needed armour.

The thought arrived with clarity, and once it was there, it refused to leave.

He needed a way to compensate for the body’s weakness that didn’t rely on the body itself. External reinforcement made in the form of matrix of shaped Qi that would wrap around him like a second skin, absorbing impacts, augmenting movement, and bridging the gap between what this broken vessel could do and what the world was going to demand of it.

He had seen the Patriarch die.

The memory was still raw and carrying the psychic weight of Shao Wen’s grief and his own horrified awe.

A mountain-presence, ancient and immovable, snuffed out by something darker and hungrier.

The greatest cultivator Shao Wen had ever known, destroyed.

Power alone hadn’t saved him.

A core alone hadn’t saved him.

Calid sat back down, cross-legged this time, and began sketching matrices in the air with his fingers. The Qi responded to his movements, tracing faint lines that hung for a moment before dissolving. He wasn’t building anything yet, he was designing, the way an architect sketched before laying foundations.