Ken jolted awake with a surge of raw adrenaline. He immediately leaped to his feet and surveyed his surroundings as the events of the previous day flooded back to him.

  Commencing training cycle period 2: 20 hours of Qi Cultivation

  Use your Qi Sense and intent to draw the surrounding Qi into your three Apertures. Fill your three reservoirs and allow Qi to overflow, and cleanse your being.

  Be Advised. As a practitioner of Meditation you will undoubtedly find it easier to use your Qi sense and intent, while adhering to your preferred meditation practices.

  Ken frowned. His preferred meditation practice was shooting a bow. He looked around the white room about the size of his cabin. Yeah not happening here. Ken also realized he was naked. He didn't really know what to feel about that. Ken wore a lot of clothes usually because he lived in the middle of the woods and clothes protected his body. Well there’s no one here and I assume I'm supposed to be perfectly safe here. Normal introspective meditation sounded like a great idea. He needed to process yesterday's events and have his head stop spinning. He sat on the ground and closed his eyes, stilling himself.

  The world is undergoing transformation by Qi. I and every other conscious being of Earth is in some kind of different closed off space learning to cultivate before we are introduced to the new world. When I leave this pce I will probably have to rebuild the house. Uhg, but I can progress again! Hmm, after I get out of here I definitely want to try to interact with other cultivators of my level and see how it goes. There are other humans out there with healthy flourishing souls. I felt them on the pyramid, and there were many pyramids in the distance. I gave up on humanity too early. I didn’t look hard enough.

  Ken found himself longing for social connection in a deeper way than he ever had. Ever since he was two years old and gained his Insight, he had almost instinctively kept himself from interacting with other humans especially in person. He had had a period of time when he was 18 and finally a legal adult, where he sought out areas with huge amounts of people, and tried to sense as many people as he could before he just couldn't go on. He was hoping to find a healthy soul like him, but never did. That experience of stretching his Insight in both his duration and complexity is what allowed him to reach what EIS called the third level of soul cultivation.

  At the first level, which he gained at the age of two, the range of his Insight was about 3 meters. When he reached the second level at age nine, the range expanded to about 10 meters. A month or so after his 18th birthday, He was walking through a mall “scouting”. As the mall started getting progressively more and more crowded Ken began to feel overwhelmed, and decided to call it, but as he headed for the exit he started to feel strangely euphoric. The souls of others around him began to quiet, and for a moment, he felt as if he was the only being that existed. He broke third to the third level, and the range of his Insight expanded rapidly. When it reached fifty meters, Ken started having seizures, and it quickly grew to twice even that size. Seized by a raw survival instinct Ken did something he had never done before in his entire life, he withdrew his Insight.

  As Ken stopped seizing he assessed himself. He had a pounding headache, and his heart was pounding. He felt blind scared and alone, but otherwise his body and mind seemed fine. Ken scrambled to his feet and bolted for the fire exit ignoring all the people around him. He ran out of the building and out of the parking lot in a panic. His Insight was now somewhere around 100 meters and it had grown noticeably more sensitive than the previous level. Holding it in felt oppressive. Ken kept it suppressed and ran. He realized that he would now have to live in a way where he could spend the majority of his time in a space in which there were no other people in a 100 meter circle around him. Ken ran away from the mall and kept running. He recognized that even with his Insight suppressed he could feel the directions around him that had the highest concentration of souls. Ken ran in the opposite direction until nightfall. When had reached a wooded area outside the city limits of his hometown, he colpsed in exhaustion and finally released his insight. The relief he felt, when there were no souls in range, was palpable, and he broke down weeping.

  Ken wiped his tears on his naked forearm. He sighed and opened his eyes to stare at the blurry white room. He remembered the day he had given up on interacting with humanity; the day he had given up finding other people like him. Ken thought about how he would remember this moment and the events of yesterday. He had a chance to at least live into old age, he could advance, and one of his greatest fears had been proven to be baseless. Life was looking up.

  Ken quieted his mind and stilled his body as much as possible, which meant lying face up on the floor with his hands by his side. When he felt he had reached an adequate state of calm, he did as EIS instructed and tried to sense the qi around him. It wasn’t hard. Once he started trying it was like a switch was flipped in his mind and his awareness of the dense cloud of qi he was sitting in went from subconscious to conscious. Ken could sense qi both internally and externally, however no matter how much he tried he couldn’t do both at once. He immediately wanted to experiment with this new sense, however he knew he had a propensity to go off on tangents, so he reigned his mind back into focus on sensing his apertures which, he guessed, were internal.

  Ken examined his entire being in as much detail as he could using his qi sense. He had to go over himself three times before he had a clear picture of what was going on, and it was a lot more complicated than he thought. Ken’s first observation was that his qi density in his body was at least one hundred times lower than the cloud outside of his body, which made sensing the little qi that was there next to impossible for him, but that dense qi outside was flowing into him without any direction at all. It was this “flow” that he could sense. Qi was invading his body from every avenue avaible, not just the three apertures, although they were the most obvious. The greatest flow of qi was coming in at three clearly identifiable points, each at different rates. The first point was dead center of mass, about four inches directly below his sternum, and it was guzzling qi at a markedly higher rate than the others. The second point was in the center of his forehead, and the third was his heart. The first two points seemed retively straightforward in their operation, as Qi from outside funneled into them. In his external qi sense he could barely make out small vortices hovering directly atop these two points.

  His heart aperture was not so simple. At first the only thing Ken could sense was that the qi in the vicinity of his heart was much denser, but after several rounds of observation, he came to the conclusion that his entire respiratory and circutory systems as well as multiple other organs were working in sync to bring qi to his heart aperture. Qi seemed to be flowing into his body through his skin and gradually shifting to conglomerate at his heart. Ken also observed distinct waves of qi bathing him internally that originated from his lungs. It appeared he was simply breathing in rge amounts of qi and Ken observed the air exiting his lungs had its qi density approximately halved.

  Now that he had at least a basic understanding of what was happening around his apertures, Ken turned his perception external, and willed the surrounding qi to flow into his body. This only increased the flow rate marginally so he started to get creative. Ken's previous meditation experience guided him towards visualization as a means to improve the effects of this exercise. Ken tried out different visualizations and observed the qi flows, trying everything he could think of that would mimic a substance (qi) draining into a container (him). His first thought was of a toilet flushing: a luxury he had not had access to in a long time, but it proved a poor meditation technique. Eventually he settled on a gravity well. Although they were technically invisible, their effects were not, so he visualized them. It worked great, at least for his stomach aperture, which he was certain should be called a dantain. He wasn’t quite ready to start beling things based off of some cultivation novels he’d read, but stomach aperture just sounded wrong. While the gravity well visualization considerably improved the amount of qi that was entering his dantain, when Ken tried to apply it to his other apertures, there were obvious issues.

  Visualization didn't seem to improve the flow of qi to his heart no matter what he imagined. Even when willing the qi to flow away from him, his will only marginally moved the qi just like his very first observations. His skin and lungs continued to push qi towards his heart whether he liked it or not. Ken realized he needed a new approach and it wasn’t hard to come up with one that worked, as it was a common enough facet of meditation and many physical activities. Ken needed a breathing technique. Ken decided to temporarily ignore the qi coming in through his skin. When compared to the qi being absorbed through his lungs his skin was introducing a noticeable but still marginal amount, not to mention the fact that moduting his breathing was infinitely easier than his pore dition. Ken knew his biology, so he understood that breathing was almost always going to be the fastest and most efficient option of bringing a substance into the bloodstream if it was feasible. Ken disregarded direct injection as he was pretty sure that wasn’t on the table, although maybe it would be if he got out of here, who knows?

  Ken’s mind aperture was a different story. Gravity well visualization worked, sort of. It markedly increased the qi flowing towards the aperture, but not into it. It seemed that his mind aperture was bottlenecked internally and once the flow rate had been maxed out, excess qi merely washed over his face and head. Interesting. Ken decided to grab the low hanging fruit that was his breathing technique before he started looking for internal bottlenecks. Since the qi he had observed behaved simirly to an aerosol, Ken theorized that hyperventition followed by a period of holding his breath before exhaling, should work to increase the qi flow to his heart. Lying perfectly still on the floor, Ken visualized a gravity well around his dantain, and breathed according to his theorized pattern, which worked like a charm. There were definitely optimizations he could make to the ratio and duration of his hyperventition and holding of breath, but the theory was solid. It was also impossible to experiment with variations on the breathing technique while also concentrating his visualization properly, so he dropped the mental image and tweaked it until he was satisfied.

  Ken thought about his mental bottleneck. He wondered if it was even realistic to consider adding more onto what already was a difficult meditation practice. Although he was experienced in simultaneous breathing techniques and visualization as well as simultaneous visualization and actions such as archery, he was skeptical of his ability to do three things at once. With enough familiarity, a breathing technique could be used almost subconsciously, opening up brainpower for something else, but 2 conscious actions was pushing into almost superhuman territory. I’ll probably be able to do it at higher levels of cultivation.

  Ken decided that his techniques were probably as good as they were going to get, at least for today, and began to cultivate in earnest. It was… boring. The reason Ken enjoyed archery more than some standard meditation practices was that he found it far more engaging to be focused while moving his body as opposed to staying still. Ken tried performing his technique while running around in circles but he couldn’t maintain enough focus to avoid occasionally running into one of the walls, which were stupidly hard to see. After failing miserably with running, Ken tried the complete opposite, and went back to ying still while trying to slow his thoughts down as much as possible. He hoped to enter a more trance like state to decrease his perception of time. It was another massive dud. His breathing technique had his juiced up blood pounding through his body and he felt filled with energy. He felt too energized to just y on the ground, and felt even a bit stir-crazy. I miss Sunshine and Rain. Ken thought as he wondered about his rambunctious animal companions. He returned to reality and sighed. Lying on the ground clearly wasn't going to work so Ken tried something he thought of as a middle ground between rest and active exertion: Passive exertion aka yoga.

  Ken found he could complete his techniques in some basic poses without much issue and continued to do so until his focus was broken by a message.

  Commencing training cycle period 3: 2 hours of Body Cultivation

  Sense the surrounding qi, and mimic it to the best of your ability.

  When he turned his qi sense on the environment, Ken quickly spotted a shimmering silver and vaguely human shaped blob of qi performing a quad stretch. Ken followed along as the figure performed a full body stretching and basic calisthenics routine. After a short break, the figure began running. Ken hesitantly copied the movements and was astonished to find that despite all his senses telling him he was jogging forward, he failed to reach the wall of his room he had so easily bounced off of before. As his qi sense was a true sixth sense, and not based on vision, Ken was able to close his eyes and imagine he was on one of his normal daily runs with Sunshine and Rain. The dense mist and the silver figure didn't stop his immersions into daydreams. When the figure slowed down to a walk, and then dissipated, Ken knew what was coming next.

  Training cycle is complete.

  Cultivation realm changes: NA

  Do you intend to begin a training cycle?

  Yes

  Commencing training cycle period 1: Eight hours of sleep

  You are very sleepy.