By the time she arrived at the warehouse they had already left for Fisher. Shen didn’t have a copy of the key, so she drew her wooden sword and flew to there. It took far less concentration than the last time she did that, and by the time she arrived there she had forgotten that she was using chi. She floated over to Ponma and greeted him while wondering why Ponma was so short. She was about to ask him when he spoke up.

  “So, are you planning on heading out to the lake on that or are you going to take the boat like normal?”

  Shen looked down and realized that she was, in fact, standing on a flying sword. “Oh, sorry. Forgot I was flying.” She landed and returned the sword to her belt. Normally she would have realized that she was using chi, even if it didn’t take much concentration, but as her bracelet was refilling her chi faster than she was using it, she never felt the loss.

  The Late and Peak quality blossoms were starting to run out due to how many they had gathered, so Ponma wasn’t gathering them during the days she wasn’t here. Before long he would need to limit the gathering to once or twice per five days, only increasing the amount when the spring arrived. While the temperature wasn’t an issue on the lake, due to the volcanic activity at its bottom, the lack of sunlight meant that the plants couldn’t grow as quickly during the winter. During the summer they might be able to harvest the plants every day or every other day depending on the quality, as the quality depended on the age of the plant, not the age of the flower, but for now once every five days was about the limit.

  After filling a wagon with the better blossoms she borrowed the key from Ponma and returned the special flowers to warehouse, then returned for a load of normal blossoms. No one complained about her hauling carts of flowers all day, so she continued to do so, and when the day ended they only had a single cart of flowers left to bring back, the last one that was loaded for the day. Ponma paid everyone, and they returned the wagons to the warehouse, where Shen returned the key to Ponma.

  When Shen returned home she realized that, despite using the Restrict ring to limit her strength all day, the Recovery rings had allowed her to keep going. She felt her arms and stomach and realized that they were much stronger than they were yesterday. She should now be at about where a Guard recruit needed to be to join the Town Guard, though she could do better. All she needed to do to improve further was a bit of body cultivation.

  She ate and returned home, then spent twenty minutes each making rings for the cultivation of Skin, Nerves, Muscles, Tendons, Bones, and Brains. She considered making more for each of her senses, but those would increase when she increased in cultivation realms, so it wasn’t critical. She put on the six rings and her fingers were almost full, but she would try this out for a day before she considered advancing.

  As there wasn’t much more she could do to improve her chi purity, having neared her bottleneck and returned to Peak Foundation by adapting all of her meridians to the energy, she should probably go ahead and break through to Foundation. She had also learned just about all of the effects she wanted to use at this level, and once she advanced she could start learning the many interesting techniques for Foundation realm.

  Thinking about it, she went to sleep. Before sunrise, however, she woke up screaming in intense pain. At first she thought that maybe she had worn the Body Cultivation rings too much, and they had started to harm her. While she was hurting across her whole body, this pain felt like someone had driven a spike through her forehead, chest, and abdomen. More accurately, it felt like her dantians were about to rupture. She quickly fought through the pain to remove the Restrict ring from her finger. She then removed her bracelet and formed several balls of various elements before ordering them to dissipate into the air in order to relieve the pressure.

  A few seconds later the pain started to subside and a few seconds after that she returned to her senses enough to realize that Mae was standing over her, trying to get her attention. “Sorry.” she said, still gritting her teeth from the pain. “I forgot that I had a Restrict ring on and an item that restored my chi. My dantian couldn’t release the energy the bracelet was feeding me, so it kept building up pressure. Not sure why, though. The bracelet is supposed to stop feeding when I’m full.”

  “If your dantian was expanding, it wouldn’t ever get full, though, would it?” Mae asked. “After all, expanding by one percent would mean that you were only 99% full, and it would refill that extra amount.”

  Shen thought about it and nodded. “Does that mean that my dantian is at its maximum size?” She didn’t want to start trying to expand it again until she was sure she had recovered, but now that she thought about it, she didn’t want to advance without maximizing the size of this level of her dantian. After all, the larger it got, the more capacity future layers would have to store chi. Continuing to expand now would likely lead to dantian rupture which not only would remove all cultivation progress while putting enough toxins in her body to drop her back to the middle of the Cleansing realm, but would require weeks of treatment, then possibly months of meditation to recover from. It would also be excruciatingly painful, and that would likely mean that she was unconscious for most of the weeks long treatment if not longer.

  “Most likely. You can probably try again once you recover, just in case you aren’t at your limit, but for now I’m taking the ring.” Mae grabbed the Restrict ring and gathering bracelet from the table and put them in her pocket.

  “Wait, why are you taking them?” Shen asked while gritting her teeth from the pain. “If you want to use them while I recover, that’s fine, but I don’t think you’ll be able to handle the bracelet without a good bit of practice. You’ll need to go to one of the Formation Fields and adapt to the full purity of the chi at the very least before you put that on, or you could end up worse off than me.”

  “I’m not taking them to use them, though they do sound useful. I’m taking them so that you aren’t tempted to use them again before I verify that you have fully recovered. Even then I’m going to make sure you take them off every night, at least the Restrict ring.”

  “Oh,” Shen said, the worst of the pain now gone. “Thanks. In that case, I loaned Ponma my other recharge bracelet, but I’ll make one for you once I get better so that you can train as well.”

  Mae smiled. “You don’t need to repay me. I’m just helping out a friend. But if you really want to, something in between the two purities would be good, so I can adapt more easily. After all, higher purity elemental chi means I can make purer pills.” Shen nodded and Mae continued. “Now, let’s talk about those other rings.”

  Shen explained what the other rings did to Mae, and she nodded. “Well, it looks like the recovery rings are keeping up with it for now, but I’d prefer if you used something better just in case.” Mae pulled a book out of a drawer on her side of the desk and handed it to Shen. “This lists several other healing techniques, including some Gathering phase ones, which should be better than the Cleansing phase one you are using. While you are recovering, you should learn these as best you can, and once you’re better you should make one of them into a ring so that you don’t risk seriously hurting yourself with body cultivation.” Because the Recovery rings needed to do so much work to repair her dantian, Mae had Shen remove the Body Cultivation rings. She didn’t take them, however, as they didn’t seem as dangerous. Shen went to sleep an hour later, after the pain lessened enough from the two rings dedicating their entire effect on fixing the issue to allow her to sleep.

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  When Mae left the house Shen was still asleep, so she left a note on the desk and told Ponma at First Meal that Shen might not be in today, then returned to work. Shen woke up hungry and realized that it was two hours past when she needed to be at work. She was about the get dressed and head to Fisher when she saw the note from Mae, telling her that she would notify Ponma of what had happened and that she should take the day off to recover.

  Shen’s dantians were still hurting, but she thought she would be able to function as long as she didn’t need to use chi. For now, she just wanted to rest so that she would recover more quickly, and there wasn’t a better place to do so than the bath.

  She gathered her things and headed over. After scrubbing herself clean and rinsing off she slid into the water and closed her eyes. While she wasn’t going to cultivate, in case that aggravated the injury, she could look at the damage. Her dantian looked like one of those fruits that had gotten overripe and started to tear, only the damage looked more like stretch marks than tears. If she had kept the ring on for another few minutes, she knew it would have torn and she would have crippled herself.

  She felt someone else slip into the water beside herself. She wasn’t going to talk to the person until the woman spoke to her. “Mo Shen, is that you?” the woman asked.

  Shen opened her eyes and realized that she knew the woman there. It was the woman who tested her for physiques and bloodlines. “Sister Wuxan?” she asked. She noticed that the woman had fine white hair on her skin and had brushed her hair back to reveal her pointed white furred cat ears. “I haven’t seen you in years.”

  “Most of the children don’t, since my job is just to test them and register them with the sect. Or they don’t remember me when they do, since I only see them once. I haven’t seen you in the bath before, and I come here around this time most days. Just decide to sleep in?”

  Shen shook her head. “Not really. I actually hurt myself from a stupid training mistake, so I had to take a day off to recover.”

  Wuxan looked at her confused. “You don’t look injured.” she said. “Torn muscle or something like that?”

  “Kind of.” said Shen. “I almost burst my dantian.” Wuxan looked surprised at that and Shen explained how the two relics had worked together to cause the pressure to build up and how she had been awakened by the pain just before it ruptured.

  “It’s good that you caught it in time.” said Wuxan. “I knew someone that tore her dantian when I was a teenager. She took three months to recover and lost a good bit of chi capacity, as she wasn’t able to expand it afterwards.

  “Wait? I could have lost chi capacity?” asked Shen in surprise. “I didn’t know that. Is there any way I can tell if I lost any?”

  Wuxan nodded. “I can tell you, if you don’t mind me probing your dantian. I’ll need to touch near it for the best results, though.”

  Shen nodded, remembering the rumors about Wuxan’s actions with several Inner Sect members, both men and women. She didn have medical training, though. “As long as it’s a medical thing and not something inappropriate.” she said.

  Wuxan giggled. “Relax. I’m that much of a pervert, so you are way too young for my tastes.” She reached out and put her hand in the middle of Shen’s chest before extending her divine sense into Shen’s body.

  Shen felt something moving inside of her and squirmed a bit from how uncomfortable it was. Normally you wouldn’t be able to sense someone else’s divine sense when still in the Gathering realm, but because Wuxan was touching her meridians and dantian Shen was able to tell where Wuxan touched, if not get any details. “That feels really weird.” Shen said.

  Wuxan nodded and opened her eyes, withdrawing her divine sense and hand. “I apologize for the discomfort.” she said before taking a breath and continuing. “Well, the good news is that it will heal fine. It only had some minor tears, and they should heal fully. Bad news is that with that much damage, you’ll need to recondition it after you recover. You could be at the Initial Gathering stage when it finishes healing itself, though I’m guessing you’ll be Early, maybe Middle. As for your capacity, you currently have over 500 units in there, and it’s leaking, so you can likely hold far more.”

  “Five hundred units? Chi has a unit associated with it?” Shen had never heard of this.

  “Oh, most people don’t bother studying it. You know how, when you were evaluated, they also said a number? Do you remember what it was?”

  Shen closed her eyes and thought about it for a little while. “Nascent 17, I think. Why?”

  Wuxan looked impressed for some reason. “Seventeen is really high for a recruit, and Nascent potential on top of that? Interesting.” She thought for a few seconds, then remembered she was talking to someone. “Oh, sorry about that. People with your stats are just rare. As for why I asked, I assume you know that the ‘nascent’ part of that means that you have the potential to reach Nascent Soul before facing a serious bottleneck or tribulation?” Shen nodded. “Well, the seventeen was something called your ‘chi multiplier’. It’s basically how much chi you can store in each layer of a dantian when it’s full. Training it increases that number, but that is where each new layer starts.”

  “Then shouldn’t I have fifty chi in my dantian after expanding it, not five hundred?” Shen asked, confused.

  “It’s multiplicative, not additive. Basically, you multiply the size of the layers together and that’s the maximum you can hold. No idea why.”

  Shen remembered something else from that day. “Wait. I have a friend that received a rating of ‘Foundation 3’. Does that mean that he’ll only have nine points now that he’s at Late Gathering? I guess it explains why he rarely uses chi and runs out quickly.”

  “It just means that he starts out there. He can always train it to be higher, though, which he should probably do. Most humans have a maximum of around 17 to 23, so they tend to have around 400 at most during Gathering. My max is 27, as spirit beasts have higher limits, and I inherited a bit of that. And due to your unique circumstances you might have a higher limit too.”

  “You mean my Dragon blood?” Shen asked, and Wuxan looked around to see that the other women that were there seemed to either not hear or not care.

  “Yes.” said Wuxan. “Though I’m not allowed to bring it up in public due to privacy concerns, the fact that you are okay with me doing so means that I can verify that. Dragons tend to have much higher limits than humans. According to some people, some dragons have a limit of over 100, or even no limit. I suspect that you are in the high twenties like me or the low thirties. Your bloodline is a lot weaker than mine, so you probably won’t get as much of a bonus from it. But seventeen natural level means that that when you reach Foundation Initial you’ll have a limit of seventeen times as much chi as you do now.”

  “Wait.” said Shen, sitting up a bit in the water. “I have a relic that can refill my chi in about three hours. Does that mean it will take closer to two and a half days to refill my chi?”

  Wuxan shrugged. “Technically, but if you stick to the same techniques it will still refill at the same rate, so you won’t notice it. It will only come up if you learn techniques that use a lot more chi, though there are several of those at Foundation. It’s like a large storage jar verses a drinking gourd. As long as you drink the same amount of water every day, you don’t notice the size as much, but if you start watering your garden with it, it becomes noticeable.”

  Shen nodded and changed the topic, as she had learned all she could on that one. An hour later she was ready to leave the bath, and Wuxan advised that she read a specific book on bloodlines and bloodline cultivation. Shen thanked her, dried off, got dressed, and headed for the cafeteria, as it was now open for Middle Meal.

  After eating she went back to her room and started reading the book Mae loaned her. Inside were several healing techniques in both the Cleansing and Gathering stages. Shen studied the techniques for the next several hours, testing the ones that seemed the most useful, before realizing that the pain in her dantian was completely gone.

  She looked inside herself to find that all of the damage had gone away, though there were several darker spots on the walls of her dantian where the damage had been. She could also tell that her pressure had lowered to the Early level of Gathering, and assumed that the weird dark spots had something to do with it.

  She used a bit of her chi to scrub the dark spot but only a tiny bit of the toxin dissolved. Still, she worked at it for two hours, but when she was finished she realized that she had made little progress. Compared to the first time she conditioned the wall of her dantian, it was like the difference between washing dirt from your hair versus washing tree sap from your hair. While the procedure was the same, the sap took much more work to get out.

  She knew that she would need as much control of her chi as she could get, so she marked all of the minor meridians in her body and started lowering her cultivation once more. This time she had even found a few branch points within the minor meridians, so she marked those as well. Mae reentered the room a few hours later and felt Shen’s shell finish collapsing.

  “So you’re re-cultivating again?” Mae asked. “So soon after the injury?”

  “The injury is fixed, thanks to the rings. I just need to recondition my meridian, so I figured I’d do the best I could.” She had to split her concentration to talk, but thankfully she hadn’t used so much concentration to talk that she had lost control of the meridian expansion technique, just slowed it’s effect.

  “Well, I’m going to go eat, if you want to join me.” said Mae. “Just make sure you clean up that weird gunk before going to bed. I don’t want the room to stink.”

  Shen nodded and climbed off of her bed to the floor, then continued her cultivation. Mae returned her items and left a little while later, and they didn’t talk for the rest of the night. Shen, however, put on the two items and continued, skipping her nighttime meal. After all, the lowest layer of her dantian wasn’t fully expanded, so she could still advance there.