Chapter 1:

  I woke up to a loud knocking on my bedroom door. Looking at the clock I noticed that it was a few minutes after nine, but, as this was my day off, I had hoped to sleep for a bit longer. “What is it, Dave?” I asked. The one knocking could only be my roommate. He knocked again and I got up to put on my pants from yesterday, then answered the door. “What?” I asked, jerking open the door.

  Dave shoved a flier of some sort in my face, and I took it from him. “Another group is having a Formation Social at the park. It starts at 10 AM, so I wanted to see if you wanted to come along.”

  I sighed and read the flier. Unfortunately the piece of paper didn’t include many details. “Any idea what formation they are doing this time?” I asked. In the last few years people had taken to throwing gatherings in public places in order to try and get enough people to use complex formations. Everyone that showed up would get a copy of the formation, even going so far as to buy licenses for all of the copies if it wasn’t a freely available formation. That, however, was only so useful to someone like me who didn’t really study formations despite working at a Device store that sold items based on them.

  “Not sure. The flier didn’t say.” Dave responded. For the last few years Dave had been obsessed with everything related to cultivation and qi, so it probably didn’t matter to him. He was even attending a few college classes in order to learn more about them. To me, however, I didn’t feel like wasting time just to get a second copy of the same formation I already had. If they were teaching techniques I might go, but formations could barely be used on ones own body, usually causing pain or health problems if you did so, and only having slight effects even when you managed to pull it off by adding it onto something solid within you, like your bones. Non solid objects distorted them too much to function at all.

  I looked over the flier one more time. It didn’t list a minimum cultivation level either. The good formations would at least require someone in the Qi Gathering realm, if not the Qi Condensation realm. Without requiring a minimum level, it would likely draw in hundreds of Cleansing level people that hadn’t even went through their first breakthrough and were merely relying on their bracelets to gather or use qi. I sighed. “Fine. Let me get a shower.” If nothing else, I might meet a woman there. That would make the boredom worth it.

  After getting dressed and grabbing my cell phone, the design almost identical to the one I bought 15 years ago when I turned 16, I met Dave in the living room and we left together. The door lock used biometric security, so I didn’t need to carry a key. Everyone’s qi had a slightly different fingerprint, and could be used the same way one would use a fingerprint, though it was harder to duplicate.

  After stepping onto the sidewalk I realized that, as busy as the sidewalk was, we would be late if we walked, so I lifted off of the ground and flew over three blocks to the subway station. I didn’t have a proper flight technique, but I could levitate well enough that I could skip the crowd. Dave had purchased a device with a similar formation on it, though he didn’t buy it from the store I worked at, so he was able to easily follow.

  We got to the park at 10:01 AM, with Dave being slightly annoyed that we were late, but it didn’t seem like they had started yet. We went to the welcome desk, a plastic folding table with a sign on the front, and, after saying that Dave and I were late and peak qi gathering respectively, were given a number and a sheet of paper with the formation listed on it. Just as I suspected, it was a basic barrier formation. Protective formations had been popular lately. Even at the store I worked at, wearable barrier devices were fairly popular. This barrier was at least at the Gathering level, so it was better than the last one we had been given. They hadn’t listed the level of the formation on the flier because they were planning on having the weakest people who showed up stand on the outside ring where qi control and strength wasn’t as important and feed qi into the formation instead of giving them a critical role.

  After I talked to a few people the event coordinators got everyone’s attention and lead us to the grassy area they had prepared for the formation. There were small flags in the ground with numbers on them, and they started calling numbers and assigning them to specific flag numbers based on their level. As the fifth strongest person there, I got one of the positions near the center of the formation where power and skill was most critical. Dave got a position in the next ring out, as he was slightly weaker than me. The formation wasn’t an elemental one, as was popular in Asia at the moment, so the five innermost roles were based on a pentagram instead of wuxing.

  Once we were all set up, they triggered the start of the formation and everyone started manipulating the qi as the instructions told them to. After roughly ten seconds everyone aimed their hand at the specific area they were told to and shot out their qi. Though we weren’t the best coordinated, after five seconds a transparent layer started to appear around ten meters from the center of the formation, and after twenty seconds it fully stabilized.

  One of the event coordinators walked over to the barrier, drew back his fist, and punched it as hard as he could. As his strength level was around three times that of a heavyweight boxer before the discovery of qi, several people winced from the feedback, and a few of the outer ring Cleansing people lost concentration, but I only felt a slight spark of pain in my arm. He punched it several more times, with the people doing a little bit worse each time, then signaled for us to let the barrier fall.

  My arm was sore, like I had strained it from working out too hard, but I knew I would recover over the next minute or so. “Ok, that was good,” he said, “but I want to see if we can speed it up. Maybe get it down to ten seconds in total.”

  We were able to raise the barrier three more times before too many people had exhausted their qi or were too sick from the feedback to continue. By that time we had gotten the activation time down to fifteen seconds. It wasn’t as fast as they wanted, but it was much better than when we started.

  Afterwords, as I walked away rubbing my arms, having switched arms after the second time, a woman walked over to me. “Hey, I’m Liza.” she said, and held out her hand.

  “Kevin.” I said, raising a sore arm.

  “That went pretty well, I think.” she commented, and I nodded.

  “I just wish the formations were a bit higher level.” I responded.

  She shrugged. “Well, it’s kind of hard to get people if the level is too high. Today we got 163 people, and that was when there wasn’t a minimum requirement. If we went with a Condensation level formation, not only would we most likely need to pay for it, which could get expensive, but we might not be able to find enough people of the right level to use it. We only had four Condensation level people today, including me and another guy that were part of the coordinators, and this type of barrier needs five people at the level of the formation at a minimum. If it wasn’t for the two dozen or so Gathering people that also showed up, like you, we wouldn’t have been able to pull it off more than once, as we would have had to stack Cleansing folks on some of the points to brute force it.” Usually events like this had a QR code you could scan to download the formation if you needed to pay for it, and the coordinator would have to cover the cost. Even at five dollars each for a professionally designed formation, that could be too high of a cost for a small group to cover.

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  “That’s fair.” I said. “Though if you do another one of these I won’t be Gathering anymore. I had the day off, so I was planning on breaking through today, but my roommate decided to wake me up and drag me here.”

  “That’s good. We could use another Condensing cultivator when we try this again in a month. Just remember not to try and force it.” I nodded. “My cousin forced his breakthrough to Condensing, and got a tribulation that put him in the hospital for a week while he recovered. And, of course, it damaged his cultivation too. If you think it’s a bit too tough, just back out and work on your qi manipulation skills a bit more.” I nodded again.

  “Good advise.” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind. Might need to buy another technique if I need more practice, though. I’ve pretty much mastered the few I have.” I actually had hundreds of techniques on my cell phone, but non that were meant for training qi control.

  “Well if you do, call me.” she said, pulling out her phone. I pulled out mine as well and we traded contacts. “I work at a cultivation store, so I can help you out. Or, you can just call me if you want to get coffee or something.”

  “I don’t drink coffee.” I said instinctively, as Dave kept offering it to me despite knowing that. Then I realized that would sound like I was rejecting her. “I mean, how about we go get dinner instead.”

  She smiled and nodded. “In that case, call me once you break through and we can arrange a date. I don’t want to stop you from cultivating, and your next few days off might be taken up by that.”

  I nodded and said I would, and she excused herself so that she could talk to the other people that showed up. She was one of the event coordinators, after all, and needed to greet people so that they would be more likely to show up the next time they had one of these events.

  I told Dave I would be going home, then went to get takeout before heading home. After eating in the living room and throwing out my trash I went back to my room and sat down on my meditation cushion. It wasn’t the best model, as some of them had formations worked into them to help your concentration, but it was made out of memory foam, so it was comfortable.

  “I just need to break through to the Condensation realm.” I told myself. The procedure for this step was well known and, while there were procedures for breakthroughs that were supposed to improve your performance even more afterwords, the one I was using was one of the free versions that was available on the internet. It was developed three years ago at a university in Toronto, and had several offshoots, but it was a good neutral technique, not specializing in any element or stat. Maybe if I bought or found a better one I could lower my cultivation and redo it, but for now the roughly doubling of performance by all metrics and massively increased ability to store qi were good enough, even if I could ideally get 20% better stats across the board or 200% better in one specific stat at the expense of another stat with a different technique.

  I concentrated on the center of my chest, where the Chinese books called a dantian. It was supposed to hold a kind of battery or well which could be filled with qi, but when first starting out only your body tissue had any ability to store qi. The purpose of today’s meditation was to concentrate enough qi into one of the three locations where a dantian could form and cause your body to grow one. This would start your body growing a specialized group of tissue which could create and store a fluid which stored as much qi in one milliliter as your entire body could store without it. The other two locations would grow subordinate organs which could store small amounts of the fluid, but only gain it by absorbing the excess from the surrounding tissue.

  Much like a bladder, as the organ grew it would be able to store more of that fluid, allowing you to increase your body’s qi stores by tens or even hundreds of times. This would also tie into the meridians in your body, nerve-like pathways which could transfer qi like wires, which you grew to enter Qi Gathering. The connection would allow the dantian to act as a battery to power all of the enhancement effects and other active techniques automatically, letting you concentrate on things other than transferring the qi.

  I started by sending the qi inside my body towards my chest. I could feel a sensation like my limbs falling asleep as they were depleted of a substance which they had grown used to, but I ignored it. If I succeeded they would never have to feel that again unless I overused my abilities, and if I failed I could just let them reabsorb it, as the process likely wouldn’t use the majority of it. Once it was all in my chest, I started decreasing the area the qi could take up and it slowly concentrated on the center of my chest, near the middle dantian point, the most common location for one to be formed. Different people required different concentrations of qi on that point to trigger the growth, so I wasn’t sure when it would start, but I estimated that I had fifty percent more qi in my body than was strictly necessary for one to grow. Unless I had very poor talent in the Condensation level it should grow.

  I kept compressing the qi to a smaller point, and eventually it was the size of a golf ball. With this level of concentration over 70% of people would have already started to form one, but I couldn’t feel the pain in my chest which accompanied such a thing, so I must not have good talent, at least in this step.

  I heard Dave outside along with a woman talking, then the sounds of bumping into things which were moving towards his bedroom. Of course he brought a woman home. Why would I think he was going to those socials just to learn about cultivation? This happened roughly 90% of the time. Of course I also got a woman’s number, but I wasn’t letting it distract from my cultivation. Even if she was at least a seven out of ten. What was her name again?

  I felt the qi slip out of my grasp and quickly grabbed onto it again, returning most of it to the main mass. I then searched for the rest of the qi that had returned to my body tissue, using my will like a net to gather it up and force it back together. I ignored the sounds coming from the room beside mine and compressed the ball of qi even further. If I was so unskilled in this area, I would just have to try harder.

  Paying close attention to the procedure so that I didn’t end up sending my body into the negative with qi and thereby triggering a tribulation, I kept shrinking the orb of qi. The human body technically had a certain small amount of qi inside of it which would balance with the environment, even without ever gathering it. With enough effort one could tap into that energy, dropping the level in themselves to below the background level. This would cause qi to rush into them from the environment, and if the qi became too dense from entering too quickly and facing resistance at the surface of the skin, it would ionize the air and create electrical discharges, like lightning. This was commonly known as ‘tribulation’ or ‘calamity’, and was one of the first things one learned of when they started learning to break through, with every break through technique warning about this fact, as it could theoretically kill the cultivator.

  When the orb of qi in my chest was the size of a marble, about ten millimeters across, I felt a sudden pain in my chest where a dantian should grow. The pain got slightly worse, about the level of hitting your elbow wrong, then started to go away as the qi was absorbed by something. Once all of the qi was gone I stopped concentrating and felt the area. To my inner eye, there was a tiny mass there with a few drops of glowing liquid inside. Most of the qi had been used to grow the mass.

  I also checked just below my navel and in the center of my forehead. Both locations had groups of a few cells which seemed to glow dimly. I knew that, in time, all three locations would absorb qi from my body to grow, and continue to do so until they had reached their maximum size. While, thanks to the Qi 2 on my arm, I didn’t need to do anything to reach the maximum size, if I didn’t help direct qi to them it would take at least ten years to reach that point. With a new model of bracelet I could probably cut that down to one or two years, but I didn’t have the money to spare. So every night until they reached that size I would take what qi was left in my body and push it into one of them, as I wasn’t going to use it in my sleep anyway.

  I knew that for the next few days I would start craving foods high in protein and iron, as the initial growth uses large amounts of those nutrients, and over the next few weeks I would need to eat more in general, as the liquid qi which now flowed through my meridians would start enhancing my body, extending my lifespan and fixing many flaws which I couldn’t name because I wasn’t a biologist nor did I have a medical degree. I did know that once the process was finished it would be next to impossible for me to get cancer, but only because my grandma had to rush to reach this point five years ago when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Once she succeeded, the stage 4 tumor which had spread to several other systems started shrinking and within a month the doctors had pronounced her cured.

  I was quite exhausted from the meditation, but knew that I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep with the moans and occasional screams of pleasure coming from next door, so I grabbed my things and left. Maybe I would go buy some pizza. I could try giving Liza a call and see if she wanted to go out, but it was 15:30. If I called her now, it would be at least 19:00 before we got to eat, and I was too hungry to wait, as I had skipped lunch. I resolved to call her tonight to see if she wanted to meet up tomorrow night, then stepped into the pizzeria.