An hour later I returned to the apartment to see a sweat covered woman laying on the couch in her undergarments while smoking a vape pen. “So, I take it you are the woman Dave brought over?” I said, laying half of a pizza on the table in front of her.
“Yep. Maria.” she said, sitting up and holding out her hand. “Hey, Dave. Roommate brought Pizza!” she called.
“Kevin.” I said and Dave walked out of the kitchen naked. Anyone that saw him like that and swung the right way would love the view of his twelve pack abs, but I didn’t swing that way. Maria, however seemed to really like the view.
“Nice.” Dave said, coming over to open the box. “Oh, a Meatza.” he said, seeing the flavor.
“I do like a nice sausage.” Maria responded, reaching for a slice.
I sighed. A woman that made dirty jokes? She really was Dave’s type. I then realized the state of dress Dave was in. “How many times do I have to tell you not to walk around the house naked? I don’t want your sweaty ass on the furniture.”
“Sorry, Kev. We were just taking a break and came to get something to eat.”
“Don’t worry.” said Maria. “Once we finish this, we’ll go back for round two.”
“Three.” corrected Dave, and Maria seemed to realize something.
The introduction of cultivation had fixed almost all infertility issues, increasing the birth rate temporarily. There was even a popular case twenty years ago which caused that fact to force itself into the public consciousness. There were two elderly people in a nursing home, a 92 year old woman and a 103 year old man. Though he was extremely frail and she was starting to get dementia, they fell in love and decided to start a relationship. The old man had been a fairly successful business man until he retired in his mid seventies, so he asked his grandson to purchase a cultivation bracelet for every patient and staff member at the nursing home. Despite the fact that his grandson had bought cheap, off brand bracelets, by a week after they arrived the man was able to walk and even exercise, and the woman had completely recovered her mental faculties and was starting to look younger. Within a month the nursing home was more of a retirement community, as almost all of the patients looked and felt much younger and all but the most serious medical conditions had been cured.
The man and woman, now looking to be in their early sixties and late fifties respectively, decided to move out of the home and into a beach vacation property the man owned and ran as a source of income. Three months later, the woman discovered that she was pregnant. Apparently, the infusion of qi into her body had reversed her menopause and restarted her reproductive capabilities.
This story’s popularity encouraged the invention of birth control techniques, and within a few years these techniques could allow cultivators to control their fertility. Male versions of the technique could theoretically decrease sperm count to zero, and female versions could prevent fertilized eggs from attaching to the uterus, or even prevent the ovaries from releasing eggs in the first place. That, coupled with the fact that almost all STIs couldn’t survive in the bodies of cultivators, meant that even though there was a corresponding increase in sexual activity, the birth rate had sharply dropped after that, as people only had children if they wanted to. That lead to a situation where modern people were far more sexually active than people of twenty five years ago. Even with the decreased birth rate, however, the death rate had fallen far faster than the birth rate and people now lived much longer on average, so the population still increased at a similar rate.
“Whatever. Just make sure you clean up after you are done. I don’t want to live in an apartment that smells like a seedy hotel room.”
I went to my room and sat down on my meditation cushion again. I had a few more hours before I would call Liza, so I started gathering qi using a fairly common technique. I extended my senses to a large area around me, making sure to avoid any rooms that people were in, and, after reaching my limit at around 100 cubic meters, sent what little qi was in my body out as a cloud. That qi was modified to attract the ambient qi to it, and then returned to me. This qi was then cycled through my body a few times to make it my own and sent out again. After repeating this cycle four more times, the energy that returned was more than my body would hold, so the excess was cycled through my dantian and its two subordinate organs, causing them to slightly grow.
While doing this my mind started to wander a bit. I started day dreaming and before long I was actually dreaming. I could feel the technique repeating itself in the background and, other than a few times when I detected Dave or Maria and had to move my consciousness, I no longer needed to focus on it. This was likely the result of the dantian feeding energy into the technique automatically.
In my lucid dream I was on a boat on a river. There were three animals following the raft, a dolphin and her two children. As I watched, fish flew into the mouth of the dolphin and sometimes she spit them to one of her two children, which quickly ate them. I soon noticed that the raft itself was drawing in the fish, and that the dolphins were simply gathering some of those fish.
The vision was pretty obvious. The mother was my dantian and the children its sub nodes. The fish were qi and the raft represented me. I was sure my mind was trying to figure something out, but no matter how long I watched them or the area around me, I couldn’t tell what my mind was trying to tell me. The three dolphins slowly grew as they ate, another obvious version of my dantian and its sub nodes growing, but after they had roughly tripled in size I gave up on trying to figure out what they represented other than that.
Eventually I willed myself out of the meditation and ended the technique. Not hearing Dave or Maria, I risked sensing their location. I quickly realized that they were in Dave’s room, asleep. ‘Did they get too tired to continue?’ I thought. It couldn’t be that late, after all, so that must be the case. I picked up my cell phone and checked the time. It was 3:17. How could I have spent that much time meditating?
I texted Liza, telling her that I had succeeded in breaking through and had even grown my dantian and sub nodes a bit, and asked if she wanted to go out to eat somewhere tomorrow. She would be asleep right now, but I could speak with her via text message tomorrow.
After that, I got undressed and climbed into bed. No devices needed to be charged anymore, as they had 25 years ago, thanks to the invention of qi gathering formations, so I didn’t need to plug anything in. I simply had to check to make sure that the alarm would go off at 6:30, and then went to sleep.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The next morning I took a shower and flew to work. I had approximately three times the qi I had when I woke up yesterday, so I was able to maintain the technique long enough to reach work without having to take the subway. I got a return text from Liza just before I arrived and responded, verifying that I would be available at 19:00. All she would need to do is tell me where she wanted to go. I landed and walked inside the device store, clocking in a few minutes early.
Inside the store were dozens of different devices made by six or seven different brands. We had qi bracelets, cell phones, flying devices, barrier devices, non-lethal attack devices (for those 16 and older), and dozens of similar useful devices. The franchise specifically didn’t carry anything which couldn’t be sold to people under eighteen, though such devices were available in other stores. In fact, this rule had caused some debate over whether we should sell self defense devices.
For the rest of the day I helped people find the devices they were looking for, matching the devices for their price range and features they required. By the time we started to close I had to have helped at least thirty people.
After clocking out I checked my texts. Liza had responded and suggested an Asian place near her place, so I agreed to meet her there and went home. I opened the door and immediately saw two people in a compromising position.
“Damn it, Dave.” I said before covering my eyes. “You’ve got a room for a reason.” Dave tried to explain why that wasn’t an option but I ignored him. I didn’t come here to watch my roommate perform, I came to take a shower. Their antics had also occurred in the bathroom, but thankfully I could spray down the shower with cleaning supplies so that I didn’t have to deal with it.
By the time I had gotten out of the shower they had decided that his room wasn’t a bad option so I didn’t have to cover my eyes again. I put on a new change of clothes, something a bit nicer than I had worn to work, and left.
I got there just after 19:00. “Sorry for being late.” I said, apologizing.
She asked what had delayed me, and I tried to avoid telling her exactly, but she got the basics of what had happened. “I used to have a roommate like that too. Basically made the place unlivable and I used to have to avoid going home earlier than 20:00 so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Eventually she decided to move in with her boyfriend, and I decided not to get a replacement roommate.”
We spent the next several hours talking while eating. Or, at least while I ate. Knowing that I had broken through the night before she had chosen an all-you-can-eat buffet so that I could deal with my protein cravings. After stuffing myself until I was sick, though, I decided to pay. She, of course, didn’t have the cravings, and, in fact, was practicing a technique to decrease the needed calories, so between the two of us we only ate as much as two normal people would.
After that we went for a flight. She had a better flight technique than me, as I only had the most common Levitation technique. Mine simply told the qi around me to come towards me but not enter me, with the collision pushing me away from it. It was a free technique anyone could download off of the internet in a dozen different variations. Hers, on the other hand, used her internal qi to push off of the air, propelling her forward. It was also freely available in some forms, but was a Condensation level ability, as it was difficult to do without large supplies of qi, so I hadn’t yet learned it. She spent thirty minutes of our date teaching me the technique before I could use it well enough to move faster than the two or so meters per second of the levitation technique.
After that we visited a few of the more scenic areas of the city before flying to her apartment. “Well, thanks for tonight,” she said, “I had a great time.” She then bent over and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll call you tomorrow, ok?” she said, then said goodbye and went inside.
I checked my phone. It was 23:51. Almost midnight. Clearly I had been having fun too, as I had completely lost track of time. I thought about flying home, as I lived several subway stops away, but then realized that I was completely out of qi. I might be able to manage a basic levitation at this time, but the new technique wouldn’t even last a minute. Now that I thought about it, for the last half hour or so I had been slowly getting worse with the technique. She had likely realized that and known that I was almost out of qi, and decided to end the date before I passed out.
I entered the nearest subway station and rode the train home. It was after 0:30 when I arrived, so I carefully extended my senses into the apartment before entering just in case he was in the living room again, essentially listening really carefully. He and Maria were in his bed and, while I was unsure if they were asleep or not, at least I wouldn’t disturb them or see something disturbing because of them.
I spent an hour expanding my dantian, careful not to go over that time, then used the Mental Rest technique that was widely available to essentially sleep while conscious. Without it I would start having problems from a lack of proper sleep, but with an hour of performing that technique only a few hours of sleep would be needed to be perfectly rested.
The next morning I got up and took a shower. When I came out I noticed that Maria was sitting on the couch, checking her back pack. Dave wasn’t up yet, as he didn’t have to go to a physical class until 14:30. I didn’t have to leave for work quite yet, so I greeted her.
She greeted me in return, then spoke up. “So, Dave told me you were also in college. Dave’s doing a Formation Engineering course, and I’m doing Cultivation Medicine, but I was wondering what you were studying.”
“Technique design. All online classes this semester.” I answered, and she looked confused. “Basically, I study how to turn what I know about different phenomenon into techniques which can be performed using qi. At first I took a few courses about the Theory of Qi, how techniques can encode scientific knowledge and the like, but now I’m just taking a lot of classes in a variety of areas while also having labs where we design more and more complex techniques. I need to know how lightning works to make a quality Lightning technique, after all.”
“So, does that mean if I give you an idea for a technique, you can make it for me?”
I shrugged. “Maybe, if I understand the principles behind it well enough. What did you have in mind?”
“I want to be able to control my own sexual arousal, including orgasm.” She answered immediately, not even embarrassed by what she had said.
I was, however. “Well, there are Gathering level techniques that will allow you to consciously control autonomic reactions, but I’m sure that technique already exists. Besides, to work properly, it would need to be designed by a female, so they can properly troubleshoot it. If I were to make it and started asking questions about how to fix issues, I would get called a pervert.” Sure, most people were okay with you manually controlling it with any fellow consenting adult you chose, but creating a technique for that would be like trying to design a pleasure robot. “Any specific reason why you are asking? Dave not doing a proper job?” I didn’t really want to know about my roommate’s performance, but if I treated it as a medical question, I could get through this.
Maria sighed. “I can’t keep up with him.” she said. “He is Late Gathering, which means his stamina is so much greater than mine. Sure, it’s fine for me, but I know it isn’t how he wants our relationship to be. If only I could perform for as long. I figured if I could just turn myself off for a while, I could last longer, but now that I think about it, that would just make him think I was bored.”
I understood her issue now. While I didn’t know Dave’s view on this question, she actually liked him, and didn’t want this to just be a temporary thing. She was Peak Cleansing, never having properly cultivated. Dave, on the other hand, was Late Gathering. The difference in stamina between those two was like the difference between a toddler learning to walk and a person that ran marathons. Of course it would cause issues when your relationship was as physical as theirs. “You know, there is a simple solution for you to get more stamina.” I said.
“Are you going to tell me to exercise?” she jokingly asked.
“I’m going to tell you to cultivate. If you reach Gathering your stamina will almost instantly double or triple. And once you do, you can further increase it by cultivating even more.” Growing meridians would allow qi to go wherever it was needed, letting you recover faster and the meridians themselves could store some qi, increasing the overall amount your body contained.
Maria nodded. “In that case, could you make me a cultivation technique?”
I shrugged. “Maybe, but there are plenty of them out there already. Do you prefer Technique Cultivation or Body Cultivation?”
Maria looked confused. “What’s the difference?”
“Technique cultivation turns your nervous system into meridians. This mostly boosts your mental faculties, like creativity, memory, concentration, IQ, and perception. Body cultivation turns you blood vessels into meridians. This mostly enhances your physical abilities, like durability, strength, endurance and healing speed. The blood can also hold a good bit more qi than the nervous system, as there’s a lot more blood than spinal fluid, so when it gets turned into qi fluid there’s more qi in it.”
“Can’t I just do both?” she asked.
“Sure. I did both myself. But finishing one first, then working on the other, will make it a lot faster. When I did it, I did the technique route first, then the body, and the bonus qi from the first let me do the second in only a year, where the first took me five.”
Maria nodded. “Body, then. I’ll get to the Techniques route once I’ve finished.”
I nodded. “It will be really painful. Rearranging your body isn’t exactly the easiest thing you can do.”
Maria nodded. “I understand.”
“In that case, give me your phone number. I’ll text you the PDF of a few different Body cultivation techniques I gathered. Each one is a bit different in their effects, difficulty, and performance, and you’ll have to choose which one you’ll do first.” She gave me her number and I texted the files, as I kept a folder with hundreds of techniques on my phone in case I needed to reference one.
