I thought the void in my dantian was only a benefit, but it had produced this fearsome little devil that might put me into an early grave. Then again, could I blame the worm for looting a burning house?

  I coughed blood a dozen times as I fought to regain control against the spreading poison. My flesh blackened and rotted in its wake, my physique not powerful enough to resist.

  A tiny corner of my mind was trying to keep watch over the strange worm now crawling out of my broken dantian. I wondered if the damage was permanent—that all my struggles would amount to nothing in the face of this tiny creature.

  However, the dantian was a sturdy thing. Like a towering elm tree standing tall against a storm, it was not going to break from a single wound.

  Strands of medicinal energy refined in my stomach and lungs split off to patch the hole. My qi worked from within, the energy from the outside.

  It was excruciatingly slow, but I didn’t mind. As long as I had not been crippled and barred from cultivating… again.

  I wasn’t sure how much time had actually passed. To me, every instant of agonising pain stretched into infinity. For all I knew, only a few breaths had passed outside.

  To make matters worse, I had no idea if Gao Shan was the type to ensure I was dead or simply leave his poison to do its work. Time was not on my side.

  Not knowing whether my technique had been effective on him was also a worry. However, worrying about these things was like watching rice cook—a waste of time.

  What would be would be. All I could do was try to purge the poison from my body and heal myself.

  If I could make a connection to the worm that would also be miraculous. Currently, it seemed intent on becoming another enemy to me. That would not do, but given its origin in the void in my dantian I had hope that it was simply a wayward ally.

  Inhale. Exhale.

  Focusing on my breathing, trying to refine as much of the poison as I could with every breath, kept me conscious. Even staying awake was a battle.

  As time passed, the fraction of my mind that was keeping watch on the worm grew. I wasn’t sure if it could even be done, but it seemed I was succeeding nonetheless.

  When I realised that losing focus on the poison would be lethal, I’d tried to figure out a way to maintain watch on the worm inside my body. Without qi, I’d been left with a single method—to separate a strand of my consciousness from the whole.

  It had proven impossible, at first. Trying to tear a piece of one’s mind away was insanity—to a mortal, at least.

  As a cultivator I had continually broken and bent my limits as I climbed closer to the peak. I had no idea what I might be capable of, so it couldn’t hurt to try.

  The scientist in me thrived on these experiments, seeing what new doors opened with every breakthrough, even as others shut behind me. Until now I hadn’t succeeded in my original goal—a true separation of a sliver of consciousness.

  What I had managed to accomplish however, was sectioning off a portion of my mind to focus on the task of managing the worm. It was not enough to make a connection or form a bond with the creature, but I could at least keep an eye on its activities.

  Currently, it was crawling away from my dantian, making a beeline—perhaps wormline would be more accurate—for my stomach. Rows of sharp needle teeth chewed through my flesh and sinew like silken tofu as it wriggled onwards.

  I wondered what it was searching for with such determination. Since it had fallen into my dantian it had not stopped moving once, except to chew a hole through it and enter my physical body.

  Was the worm made of energy or physical matter? That was an interesting question. While the dantian occupied a space in a cultivator’s body, it was also something far greater, the core of their cultivation where spiritual energy was refined into qi.

  Did that make this strange worm a spirit beast? Could it cultivate too? Was that what it hoped to achieve by devouring my flesh?

  Part of my senses probed it, searching for signs of cultivation. Spirit beasts all possessed cores, so that was what I searched for.

  However, I wasn’t able to find anything. In fact, I couldn’t sense the familiar signs of cultivation on the worm whatsoever. It was like a bowl of soup without dumplings or noodles.

  Yet it still possessed the strength and tenacity to chew through the flesh and dantian of a five-star Qi Gathering cultivator. I shivered, giving the worm a new appreciation.

  Even if I could survive Gao Shan’s poison, was I doomed to fall at the hands—or jaws—of this fearsome little grub? That was a worry I couldn’t afford to let poison my mind.

  Clouded trickles of information and knowledge had begun to stream into my mind. Each droplet of poison that I refined brought me a sliver of understanding, but they were fragmented and difficult to understand.

  It was as though I was collecting tiny fragments of a gigantic painting, unable to truly appreciate what they depicted without piecing together the whole. I suddenly coughed blood once more, crying out in pain.

  I felt as though I’d been stabbed in the gut with a flaming spear. It reminded me of Huo Ze Qiang—though he would never cultivate again, after I’d crippled him.

  Clenching my jaw through the agony, I realised the worm had made another hole in an essential part of my body. This time, it had chewed through my refined stomach as though it were paper.

  I feared the worst as it crawled through the hole and began wriggling along the lining of my stomach. A drop of poison dripped down and fell onto the worm.

  Instead of the poison infecting and corroding the small, fragile body of the worm, something unexpected happened. The poison splashed against its head and it shivered—or more accurately, wriggled.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  It leaned its head forwards, making the drop of poison roll off of it, before suddenly flicking it back and opening its maw wide. The poison fell inside its mouth and it swallowed the drop whole.

  The next moment, it froze on the spot. This was the first time I’d seen it stop moving other than when it was chewing through my vital organs.

  Then it began to vibrate and wriggle. That was an odd sensation. The rest of my body was burning as though set aflame, locked in a struggle against the deadly poison, while my stomach was vibrating and itchy.

  It was a strange duality of sensations. As I was wondering what was going on with the worm, it began to compress and decompress in pulses, like a wave travelling along its body.

  I watched this happening for a few breaths until I realised what it was doing. This damned worm wasn’t… He pooped in my stomach.

  Suppressing the urge to vomit, I took a closer look at the glowing green excrement that had come out of the backside of the worm. The worm itself had continued crawling along my stomach lining, heading towards the highest concentration of poison.

  That cleared up the mystery of what its goal had been. All along it had been sniffing out the poison in my body and trying to devour it.

  I wondered if the void in my dantian had a connection to my Fivefold Medicine Forge Physique, and hence the worm too. We shared the same ability of being able to purify toxins, although I had never seen the material that it produced emerging from my own organs.

  Now that I knew the worm wasn’t an immediate threat, I instead focused on the material it had produced. In fact, the worm might actually help me to survive Gao Shan’s poison if it continued to devour it, assisting my own efforts.

  The small pile of glowing green… I hesitated to say poop, because it wasn’t, but I couldn’t shake the image of the worm expelling the pile from its backside. Whatever it was, it reminded me of my own medicinal energy.

  Making that comparison was a little gross, but the similarities were undeniable. And I’d seen far more disgusting things in my time as a doctor. This was only made worse by the fact it had happened inside my stomach.

  Unfortunately for me, my physique was providing no information about this mystery material in the way it often did with poisons, herbs, or other medicinal ingredients. I would need to figure it out myself.

  Luckily, it being inside my body gave me a great deal of control over the substance. The worm also seemed uninterested in its excrement after it had left its body. The little guy was happily drinking more poison as he wriggled through my stomach.

  Everything went black.

  I snapped back to awareness, noticing that the poison had almost taken complete hold of my mind. That was less than ideal. How could I devise a method to refine and cleanse it if I died?

  Then again, I had known this was a losing battle from the moment Gao Shan arrived. The fact I had held on this long was testament to the power of the Fivefold Medicine Forge Physique.

  That the man himself hadn’t struck me with another technique spoke to the lethality of my own cancerous technique. Either he was the kind of sadist who enjoyed watching his victims suffer, or he was struggling to deal with the tumours ravaging his body and unable to attack me again.

  Both scenarios worked in my favour, though the latter only meant that my death was a matter of time, rather than in my own hands. For now though I could only continue fighting the poison while refining my heart.

  The worm was on my side for now. The more poison it devoured and transformed into the strange glowing substance, the less I had to cleanse myself. I wasn’t sure what the substance was yet, but it was not harmful to me in the way the poison was.

  The rate at which I was able to refine my heart was astonishing. Until being inflicted with this poison I had managed to refine it around ten percent of the way through all my alchemy experiments. Since Gao Shan poisoned me, it had gone from there to almost three quarters of the way to being completely refined.

  If I was able to hold on a little longer I might be able to fully refine it, completing the third of five organs refined for the first layer of the physique. I wasn’t sure what the function of my refined heart would be, but I had to hope it would improve my chances against the poison.

  Darkness struck me once more.

  I continued to struggle on, knowing nothing but the constants of my breathing and the swirling in my stomach. It was producing something from the poison it refined, but what that would be was yet another mystery.

  I felt as though too much that happened to me these past few days was in the realm of the unknown. I’d felt confident since my success with refining my healing pills, but I once again felt like a child looking up at an infinite cosmos, my knowledge far greater than it had ever been and yet a mere fraction of what was out there to discover.

  The first pellet that the worm excreted suddenly fell from my stomach lining, falling into the swirling mix of my qi and Gao Shan’s poison below. The moment it made contact with a drop of my qi it burst into a shower of green light.

  I instantly recognised what it was—medicinal energy! Not quite identical to the energy produced by my body, but something adjacent. The worm, as I suspected, devoured poison and the heavens’ knew what else, refining it into crystallised medicinal energy.

  When that pellet touched my qi, something happened that caused it to instantly sublimate from solid crystal to energy. The energy from the burst washed over my body in a wave, healing my blackened flesh in its wake.

  Compared to the vicious onslaught of the poison it had little effect, but the worm was constantly munching on the poison and pooping out the pellets of medicinal energy. Every small counter measure added onto the whole, giving me a greater chance of survival. I felt a sense of fondness and connection with the strange little worm, our abilities remarkably similar. We fought the same battle right now—we were brothers.

  I blacked out again.

  At the moment I returned to consciousness, I felt a wrenching sensation as my mind was split in two.

  The majority of my mind returned to the battle against the poison—an endless struggle to maintain the integrity of my vessel against the corrosion of the vile toxins. A small part of it however, went somewhere else entirely.

  My consciousness was tugged towards that small sliver. I resisted the pull at first, fearing that if I let my focus slip for even a single breath my body would succumb to the poison.

  However, even as I was pulled further away from my mind, I felt no sense of danger. If anything, my consciousness seemed to work even more efficiently without my irrational human hand guiding it.

  Everything went black. It wasn’t the darkness of unconsciousness this time, but the infinite darkness of the void.

  I wondered what this was—a vision of some kind? That would be plausible if I was asleep, but I was occupying a portion of my consciousness.

  If anything, this endless space reminded me of the void that resided within my dantian. Was there a connection between the two?

  Why had I been taken here after waking up? All questions that I could not find the answers to on my own, so I simply watched and waited.

  I heard a deep hiss, echoing with bass and subsonic tones that made my entire body rumble. The void filled with mist, a deep, lush green in colour. It reminded me of my own qi but far richer and infinitely more condensed.

  I suspected that even a single droplet of that mist had enough energy to fill my dantian a million times over. And everywhere the void spread, the mist filled.

  The scale of it boggled my mind. I was an ant before this vision. Despite being just a sliver of consciousness, my vision was locked to what was in front of me. I attempted to turn around, but instead of my vision shifting it simply expanded.

  The sensation was a little nauseating. If I was inside my body right now I suspected I might throw up or collapse given how intense it was. I felt like the frog at the bottom of a well, realising that the small sky it believed to encompass the world was but a miniscule fraction of true reality.

  As my vision expanded to reach a full three-hundred-sixty degrees around me, I came face-to-face with the source of the endless mist. If I had eyes they would be bursting from my head in surprise and confusion.

  I thought confronting the endless void and the mist of boundless energy was an eldritch experience, but what I saw now made it seem tame in comparison.