Shen used the new formation field without a rod to practice purifying water chi until midnight, reaching an understanding of water that was just slightly worse than her understanding of Wood, then went home to sleep. The pain from the body cultivation rings was starting to increase, and she knew that she would need to sleep to heal more quickly from what they were doing to her, as they were essentially giving her the effects of intense exercise without the need to actually exercise.
The next morning she woke up sore, but felt a bit stronger than normal. She was just a bit more flexible, strong, and durable than when she went to bed and suspected that she had better reaction times as well. She put on one of the five extra rings she created and ran from her house to the main gate, getting exhausted by doing so. She then did her best to run around the outside of the wall, but had to stop several times to recover. That proved that the rings were working.
As she reentered the gate, panting for breath, she saw several guards standing there, waiting for the end of their shift. “You look exhausted.” said the captain on duty, walking over to her. “How many laps did you just do? 10? 20? More?” This is what Shen was hoping would happen.
“One.” she replied between heavy breaths, “But I had to stop several times while doing so.”
“But you are Peak Gathering, and don’t look out of shape.” he said confused.
Shen lifted her left hand, putting a lot of effort into doing so because of her exhaustion. “This ring uses Restrict on me. As long as I wear it, I get no benefit from my cultivation, so I’m basically a mortal while exercising.”
“So that you can get more out of your workout, yes? I admit that I ask my men to use Restrict when we do training, but it hasn’t had much of an effect.”
“That’s because they are cheating.” said Shen, sitting down so that it was easier to catch her breath. “Not that they are necessarily doing it on purpose. They just instinctively loosen the Restriction when they start to get tired, making it do less. I designed these rings to make sure that wasn’t an option. Without the cheating, only their own body can help them, not their chi.”
The captain nodded. “So you’re a relic crafter?”
Shen nodded and told him where she worked. “I also made these rings, which automatically cultivate your body as you wear them, they cover Muscles, Bones, Tendons, Skin, and Nerves.” She pointed to each one as she named it. “You just need to wear the rings for Bones, Muscles, and Tendons together or you risk injuring yourself if you get too strong. I haven’t done much testing with them, but if you want to try them out, you can. I’ll come by tomorrow morning to retrieve them.”
The Captain thought for a few seconds before agreeing, at which point Shen took off her six rings and handed him the extra four, so that he could test the rings using many of his men at once. After receiving them he put the Body cultivation rings on and felt that they were doing something. A few minutes later, just as Shen was getting up to bathe and eat before work the replacement captain showed up and Shen also gave him the sales pitch. He asked for the five Restrict rings and would give them to the first five of his men to show up, to use in their morning run. That way he would be able to tell how much his men were cheating. By the time they all arrived Shen had already left, but the Captain lead them on a few laps around the outside wall. It quickly became obvious which ones were using the rings because, while all of the town guards were in much better shape than Shen, they were already breathing heavily by the end of the first lap, while the ones that didn’t have the ring were barely feeling anything from the run. The Captain knew that he needed to buy at least enough rings so that every member of his team could use them during morning exercise.
As none of the field painting team from yesterday had made any mistakes with yesterday’s formation, Shen sent the four of them out to do the next two fields by themselves. Shen would adjust the purity of the first one tonight after work and the purity of the second one tomorrow morning before coming in. The shop had received several more orders for Field Formations since the first one, so she was certain that even at two per day they would be busy for at least the next five days.
That day she managed to complete five sets of armor and, with the last thirty minutes, Shen made a Recovery ring which simply circulated wood chi through the main meridians, numbing pain and helping people recover from minor injuries. She was certain there were much better healing techniques out there, but she didn’t know any. She told Master Chen about the rings she had taken and loaned to the town guard, and explained that she thought they might be a new in-demand product before leaving and heading to the field. They had made no mistakes on it, so she adjusted the purity of all of the Refinement formations. The others had made the poles as well, and Shen saw sixteen of them propped against the field office. After testing one of the feeder formations to make sure that everything worked properly, Shen went home.
Once home she brought her bracelet out of the drawer and carefully added the balancing formation before going to eat, and the Feeder formations after she was done. The purity was only 12.1%, as she hadn’t known that much about the various elements when she was making it before, so she added purification arrays to the beginning to get them up to a better purity before they were further purified by feeding them into each other. She took extra time making sure that the initial stage was all the same purity, as any mismatch here would greatly lower the performance.
When she was done she sensed the chi inside of it. 23.1% purity. This was more than double what the last bracelet could do, and almost double what it would eventually reach when she wore it. Unsure if she could stand to wear it by itself, she left the other one on as she slipped it over her arm. She was immediately filled with multiple weird sensations. She was both too hot and too cold, while being stiff but also flexible. She tried to circulate some of the chi, but every time she tried to grip the chi with her mind only the smallest amount obeyed her will.
She removed the bracelet and saw that the purity of the chi inside her dantian had increased by several percent. She removed the first bracelet as well and cycled the chi inside her, adjusting her meridians to it. Once she was out of chi she wore the first one while only wearing the second one for a few seconds. This way she controlled the purity of the chi inside her. She slowly increased the purity of her internal chi while wearing the Recovery ring to help adjust faster, and when the sun rose the next morning she could constantly wear both of them, her internal chi purity at around 17%, as the new bracelet was much faster at feeding chi. Tonight she would fully acclimate herself to the new bracelet, but for now she would let the Recovery ring work, as her meridians were extremely stressed from her efforts last night, like a muscle that burned from too much exercise.
Shen got up before sunrise and, after quickly eating and bathing went to the training field to adjust the purification arrays. It was harder than the day before, as she now had to be careful not to make the chi in the array too pure. Whereas yesterday she could just put the chi from her dantian directly into it and make some minor adjustments, today she had to purposefully lessen the purity of the chi she injected so that she could inject it without overpowering what was there, as she wasn’t good at working with tiny trickles of chi. When making relics she usually just let the relic take as much as it wanted. It only took her a few minutes to finish the work, so she was a bit earlier to the gate than yesterday.
Both Captains were already there, though, and they thanked her for allowing them to test the rings. The Restrict rings had been the most useful ones, as they men could switch who was wearing them after every lap and all of them got a decent amount of exercise from it, but they wanted to get as many as possible so that they at least had one for every training guard to use during the training. The Body Cultivation rings had gathered some interest, but they seemed to work too slowly, as the Captain didn’t even start to feel the effects until he had worn them for four hours. Still, when they asked for the price and was told that the rings would only cost five stones each, the guard captains put in an order for 100 of the Restrict rings, paying for twenty of them in advance. Shen wrote down the order and thanked them, allowing them to keep the first five as part of the order and hold onto the Body Cultivation rings for now.
Rings came in seven different sizes, Child, Small Women’s, Small Men’s, Medium Women’s, Medium Men’s, Large Women’s, and Large Men’s. All of the rings Shen had provided them were Medium Women’s, as that was what fit her, so they were all wearing the rings on their smallest finger. This was fine for a single restrict ring, but not for the Body Cultivation rings. The Captain actually had the Muscle, Tendon, and Bone rings on his right hand and the Skin and Nerve rings on his left for that exact reason. She would need to make a replacement set for him so that he could ignore the rings. Maybe she could even add a Recovery ring to the set so that he could wear them continuously?
Before going to work she went to the jewelry store and bought every blank jade ring in green or blue that they had that was at least Medium Women’s in size. They had 78 green jade and 29 blue jade. The green ones cost one stone each and the blue ones two stones each, bringing the total to 136 stones. Shen used the one hundred stones they got as an advance and thirty six of her own, but pocketed 18 of the blue ones so that the shop got exactly as many as they had paid for so far. She would probably end up keeping some of the Medium Women’s and Men’s rings, but would give the store the rest of them once they were needed.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
She went to work and found out that the others had already left for the next field, then told Master Chen about selling the rings. After making two sets of armor, which made the oldest order only five days old, she started working on rings, making fifteen before it was time to close. After leaving she swung by the guard house to give them the last of the rings that they prepaid for, then ate and went home.
That night she kept the newest bracelet on, removing the older bracelet occasionally to increase her chi purity above the average. Every time it had a slight increase she would cycle the chi through her meridians until she had become accustomed to it, then would increase the purity a bit more. By sunrise, though, she had only increased the purity of the chi in her dantian to around 20%.
At work she adjusted the two formations from yesterday, completed two sets of armor, then made another twenty Restrict rings before heading home.
That night she barely managed to reach the 23.1% purity of her bracelet, though she couldn’t wear it on its own, as doing so would cause it to increase the purity of her internal chi to above that point. It took her the last two days of work to adjust to where she could wear it by itself and not remove it, but knew that she was hitting a bottleneck in her cultivation. She guessed that the now 24.5% purity of her chi when it fully purified her internal chi was almost her limit, and that she wouldn’t be able to go much beyond 26% before she couldn’t adapt to the purity any further.
As she had the next five days off, she spent twenty minutes turning one of the blue rings in her storage into a Restrict ring and another twenty making a blue Recovery ring. With both rings on she skipped the bath and ran to the warehouse. Thanks to the two Recovery rings she was wearing she managed to make it there without wearing herself out. She loaded her cart and followed them up the mountain. She was pretty tired from the journey, but only needed a minute or so to rest to fully recover. Once she was there she pulled Ponma to the side.
“Listen, I’ll be a bit limited in what I can do for the next few days.” she said. “In fact, I might even take tomorrow off.”
“Are you finally going to break through to Foundation?” he asked. “You seem to have been ready for a while now.”
“Actually, the exact opposite. I am going to break my cultivation and try to expand my minor meridians. I hit a bottleneck in my progress at Gathering phase, so I figure I might as well try to optimize my cultivation at Cleansing before I return to Gathering and work my way back up to where I can break through to Foundation. I figure that it shouldn’t take more than a few days to do that, but it will make me a lot stronger.”
“Well, I should be fine for the next few days.” Ponma said. “I know you’ve been working two jobs for a while now, so taking a few days off should be fine. You just won’t get paid for your time here.”
Shen nodded her head. “Thanks.” she said, then thought of something. “Oh, now that I have a new bracelet, how about I let you borrow this?” She pulled out her old chi gathering bracelet and handed it to him.
“I’m not much for accessories.” he responded, looking at it.
“Oh, it’s not just for looks. It should feed you about 10% pure chi of every element, then improve your internal chi until it’s around 12%.”
Ponma looked like he was in shock. “Are you sure about those percentages? That’s around Nascent to Immortal levels of purity.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m sure.” she showed him the one on her arm. “This one gets me up to about 24.5%, and I’ve adapted to it. The problem is that I’m pretty sure that I won’t be able to adapt to anything above 26%, except maybe fire, as it’s always faster to adapt to. You just need to make sure you cycle the chi enough that you adapt to it. If it gets too pure, remove the bracelet and mix in some less pure stuff from the environment. You could also try the new Formation Fields the shop is making, but I hear they are usually busy. They go from around 5% to 10.5% in all the elements.”
“That’s…” Ponma paused for a few seconds to think over what he was going to say. “That’s both amazing and a little terrifying, that you could make something so amazing.”
Shen nodded. “Yeah. They aren’t available to the public yet, though, so make sure you don’t lose it or advertise what it can do. I doubt many people in the sect would try to steal it, but there are plenty of outsiders in town these days.”
Ponma nodded and they went back to work. Shen took out the boat and after two trips returned with a cart load of Late and Peak Gathering blossoms. Once she was finished she helped move jars onto the other carts so that everyone else can preserve as many as possible. She even took back both extra loads of carts herself.
That night she went by Formation Fields for today. The second one wasn’t quite dry yet, so she would have to adjust it tomorrow morning if she could, but even without it the outer ring now had eleven Formation Fields, including the first one which didn’t purify the chi and the second which only had low purity chi. While they were extremely popular at first, having lines of people waiting to use them, there were now enough fields that only ten to twelve spots were in use most of the time, and no more than five or six at night.
After eating, Shen returned to her room, removed her bracelet and rings, as she didn’t know how they would affect someone at Cleansing phase, and sat on her bed, meditating. She looked at the layer she had built around her dantian’s lowest level to advance to Gathering several years ago, and saw many flaws in how she had done it. It should look like a perfect ball of string, even smoothing out its own surface with time, but this one was was lopsided, had gaps in it, and several of the strings seemed frayed. All of those flaws would make her cultivation less stable. It was obvious that she had made many mistakes thanks to her own inexperience. Thankfully, this would give her an opportunity to correct that issue.
So slowly started to break the strings and unravel the ball. After only five minutes she could tell that it was starting to unravel on its own, and after another five it was collapsing faster than she could dismantle it, so she let it finish on its own. As it collapsed, all of the elemental chi in her outer layer was released, but because it mixed with the strings from the shell its purity was low enough that it didn’t damage anything in her room badly enough that it wouldn’t recover once the chi dissipated. She would have to careful in the future, as she could have burned and/or frozen the room from the release of Fire and Water chi.
Once the shell had finished collapsing Shen looked at the chi inside her, her vision seeming a bit less clear than it was. Everything there was perfectly neutral. She slipped on her bracelet to see what would happen and watched as all of the high-purity chi that entered her was completely neutralized within seconds. As her dantian was full of chi, she removed it, as it wasn’t needed, then put on the Recovery rings. They seemed to work like normal and in only a few seconds all of the stiffness of sitting in one place disappeared. She removed them and tried the last ring. As soon as it was on her hand she felt all of the chi leave her body and go back into her dantian, where it started to slowly expand from the natural chi generation within her.
Rather than let it build up and expand her chi capacity, she spent the rest of the night pushing chi into special locations along her main meridians. They were like the segments in some vine plants or earth worms, or like the eye on a potato. If one could find them and push chi against the wall in those points it would start to grow a minor meridian in that location. They would slowly expand as long as you pushed chi into the end of the minor meridian and they hadn’t hit their own maximum length, though that length was a type of bottleneck for Cleansing phase cultivators.
By the time the sun started to rise she had grown out all of the minor meridians she could find, though she was certain that she had missed many of them, if not most of them, judging by the descriptions she had read in the Dragon Guide, as it mentioned that humans should have thousands, whereas she had only grown around one hundred and fifty. Maybe when she reached Gathering again her senses would be enhanced again and she could start all of the ones she found, then break her cultivation again and finish them.
She came out of meditation she smelled like the worst body odor she had ever smelled and was extremely greasy. Unlike when she cleared her main meridians, the toxins weren’t a black, sticky goo, but if anything this smelled worse. She collected her sheets and took them to the laundry area, where other outer disciples would come to take them for cleaning, and then went to the bath house. While one had to wash their own clothing, things like curtains, sheets, and rugs could be put in the laundry area to be cleaned, though there was no guarantee that the replacement you received would be your own, just the same.
Once she was done bathing and dressed, she ate something and returned to her room, where she put more sheets on her bed. She thought about sitting on the bed again, as it was more comfortable, but decided against it. There was no use making things harder on the outer disciples that were working on laundry duty.
She sat in the middle of the stone floor and started again. This time she created much stronger and higher quality strings out of her chi than last time and started wrapping it. About half way through, though, she realized that her dantian was starting to hurt, and removed the Restrict ring, immediately relieving the pain. Apparently it wasn’t good to use Restrict while breaking through. She wrapped the string of chi around her dantian for the next thirty minutes or so before it started drawing in the neutral chi on its own to fill in the gaps in the layers. Another ten minutes later the layer stabilized and Shen’s senses returned to their superior form as she was once again at Gathering phase.
Shen quickly started searching through her main meridians and found more than ten times the number of branch points that she had seen before. She pushed a little of the neutral chi from her lowest level into the wall in every one of those spots, making it an indent that would be easy to see, then took a break for Middle Meal. She had started to get a bit greasy and smelly, but she didn’t immediately take a bath, instead breaking her cultivation once more so that she could work on those points. She was easily able to find all of them now that they were made obvious, and expanded about half of them before Mae returned and complained about the smell. She was sitting in a puddle of stinky grease, so she cleaned it up and they went to the bathhouse together. After returning, however, Shen sat down in the same spot, throwing her dirty clothes in the laundry box and closing the lid to limit the smell, then started clearing even more.
Mae woke up around midnight complaining about the smell, and Shen went to take one more bath and cleaned up one more stinking puddle before returning and finishing the job by three in the morning. She put on the bracelet so that her dantian would rapidly refill, then once again built the barrier around her dantian. This time her performance was the best of all. With over two thousand cleared meridians she had extremely fine control over her own chi, and it only took her five minutes to build a near-perfect shell and advance to Gathering once more.
Out of curiosity she looked at her main meridians again and saw several hundred more branch points. She briefly considered marking them and repeating the cycle, but she had only told Ponma that she needed a day off, so she didn’t want to take two days off. She had increased her control of chi at least ten-fold during this day, anyway, so that would be good enough for now.
She put her bracelet back on and immediately felt burning, freezing, hardening, and other sensations she couldn’t really describe in her minor meridians, the last two belonging to Wood and Metal chi. She knew that this was because she hadn’t adapted them to the purer energy, so she went to the training field and started using it at its lowest setting, increasing the purity as she adapted to the chi. Once she reached the 10.5% maximum of the field she started briefly putting on her bracelet to improve the quality of her internal chi, then removing it, slowly improving the purity. By the time the sun was rising she was able to wear the bracelet most of the time, so she spent the next few hours fully adapting before setting out for the warehouse.
